The alternative budget proposal from the Congressional Progressive Caucus has majority support from the House Democratic caucus for the first time in five years.

The alternative budget proposal from the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) has majority support from the House Democratic caucus for the first time in five years.

The CPC’s “People’s Budget” earned “yea” votes last week from 96 out of 188 House Democrats. Last year, the CPC’s “Better-Off Budget” managed just 89 out of 199 Democratic votes.

Even though the Democratic Party lost 16 seats in the 2014 midterm elections, congressional progressives managed to get both more votes and a higher percentage of Democrats supporting their budget this year than last year.

The progressive budget failed 330-96 in the House, but it was never expected to pass the GOP-dominated chamber. Backers of the People’s Budget were hoping for about 100 votes as a show of growing support for the progressive policies in the budget.

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“The fact that more than half of all Democrats voted for a proposal brought forward by a caucus whose membership accounts for less than a third of the Party is tacit approval at large of our priorities, and a recognition that progressive policies provide workable, common sense solutions to grow our middle class, increase access to quality education, and meet challenges like climate change head-on,” CPC co-chair Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) told Rewire in a statement.

The People’s Budget aims to create 8.4 million “good jobs” with fair pay and good benefits by 2018 while boosting GDP and keeping deficits at sustainable levels.

The CPC’s budget charges that the economy no longer works for people who work, given that wages have stagnated for the past 30 years while productivity, corporate profits, and economic inequality have all skyrocketed.

The progressive budget proposals have widespread support among Americans too.

The budget’s large job stimulus program would directly hire workers to rebuild infrastructure, help expand early childhood programs, and achieve other national goals. It raises taxes on the rich, allows states to transition to a single-payer health-care system, and spends $546 billion more than the current baseline on programs for low-income people like unemployment insurance, welfare, housing assistance, and food stamps.

“The People’s Budget is a statement of progressive values that the Elizabeth Warren wing of American politics can be proud of,” Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, said in a statement.

One of the Democrats who didn’t vote for the CPC’s budget was Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee and the lead sponsor of the Democratic caucus’s alternative budget.

Van Hollen is running for Barbara Mikulski’s Senate seat in 2016 against Rep. Donna Edwards (D-MD), who voted for the CPC budget. The opposing votes could be a window into the candidates’ political positioning in what promises to be a contentious battle over liberal and progressive bona fides.

Edwards has support from many national progressive and women’s groups who find her a better progressive champion than Van Hollen, and who think Mikulski, the longest serving woman in Congress, should be replaced by another woman.

Van Hollen points to his “very progressive” voting record and near-perfect ratings from liberal groups, but some activists are wary of his compromises on issues like the failed Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan, which would have effectively cut Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The Democrats’ budget has much in common with the CPC’s proposals. Both raise the minimum wage, provide paid sick leave, expand tax breaks for working people, and invest in education, jobs, and infrastructure.

The CPC’s budget also raises and invests several times the sum of what the Democrats proposed, a likely non-starter for the caucus’s moderate Democrats.

Van Hollen said he supports elements of the CPC’s budget, like a 4 percent cost-of-living pay increase for federal workers and a public option for the Affordable Care Act exchanges, that didn’t make the cut in the Democratic budget. He said the CPC budget was “far superior” to the Republican budgets.

But he disagreed with some of the ways the CPC budget spends its revenue. He points to his own “action plan” for the middle class as a better model for tax relief, and prefers his method of carbon caps that pay a dividend to every American over the progressives’ carbon price that rebates 25 percent of revenues to help low-income families.

“Like Leader Pelosi and others who share many CPC priorities, I differ on some of the details of their policy changes,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “But most of all I am very grateful to the CPC for their significant contribution in the development of the Democratic Alternative and for their vision—which I share—of a growing economy with more shared prosperity.”