Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ.”

It was one of the great belly flops in political history.

It was 1938. Two years earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt won reelection with a then-record 60.8 percent of the popular vote. But he squandered his renewed mandate on the failed crusade to pack the Supreme Court, his relationship with the conservative Democrats in Congress worsened and his push for additional New Deal reforms was stalling out. So he launched a brazen effort to get rid of the obstructionists in his party.


Roosevelt used one of his signature fireside chats, nationally broadcast over the radio waves, to throw down the gauntlet. He urged voters to choose candidates in the upcoming midterm primaries, regardless of party affiliation, who believed in the “liberal school of thought.” And he previewed his plans to directly take sides in certain Democratic primaries: “I feel that I have every right to speak in those few instances where there may be a clear issue between candidates for a Democratic nomination involving these principles, or involving a clear misuse of my own name.”

He did so with relish. At an early August event in Georgia, with the conservative Democratic incumbent Sen. Walter George sitting in the audience, Roosevelt unloaded. “If I were able to vote,” he said, “I most assuredly should cast my ballot for [liberal primary opponent] Lawrence Camp.”

Roosevelt then took a train to South Carolina, on which he threw an elbow to Sen. Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith. The senator opposed a minimum wage bill and suggested that a “man could live on 50 cents a day in South Carolina.” At a whistle stop, and without mentioning Smith’s name, FDR said to great laughter, “I don’t believe any family or man can live on 50 cents a day.”

During a news conference a few days later, Roosevelt scorched Maryland Sen. Millard Tydings by name, saying, “He wants to run with the Roosevelt prestige and the money of his conservative Republican friends, both on his side.”

It was all classic Roosevelt—jaunty, pugnacious, visionary, Machiavellian. And it didn’t work.

Fast-forward to today. Steve Bannon, the former chief White House strategist, is declaring “war on the Republican establishment,” helping to recruit about 15 challengers to sitting Republican senators if they pledge not to support Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Democrats may not face an equally broad assault, but the progressive activists at Democracy for America and Daily Kos successfully coaxed California state Senate leader Kevin de Leon into trying to get rid of incumbent Dianne Feinstein.

Let’s call these challenges for what they are: purges. Bannon and his allies want to remake the Republican Party into a vehicle of economic nationalism. Progressive activists want a Democratic Party that more closely resembles Bernie Sanders’ brand of democratic socialism.

But the urge to purge has a sorry electoral history. Sometimes winning a party primary means losing the political center, and with it, the general election. Failed primary challenges have consequences as well, severing the incumbent from the party’s ideological base and making it easier for him or her to break party ranks. Much of this history is not as old as Roosevelt’s failed purge, yet activists go to great lengths to avoid internalizing any lessons that would require a change in strategy.



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In Bannon’s recent interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, in which he declared his intra-party war, he stressed, “It’s not like 2010. Twenty-ten was the beginning of the Tea Party when things were first getting going. You are going to see real candidates [who are] fully vetted.”

He was responding to the host’s inevitable mention of Christine O’Donnell, the pagan-turned-Christian conservative who snagged the Republican nomination to succeed Joe Biden in the Senate. She did so by upsetting moderate Republican Mike Castle, a proven statewide vote-getter as the at-large House representative and former governor. Then O’Donnell comically flamed out with her cringe-worthy “I am not a witch” ad.



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But the O’Donnell debacle wasn’t a purge attempt of an incumbent Republican. That happened on the other side of the country, where Alaska’s Joe Miller defeated Sen. Lisa Murkowski in the 2010 Republican primary. But Murkowski got the last laugh. She won the general election as a write-in, proving she didn’t need the support of the far right. The import of that election became clear seven years later, when President Trump and Republican Party leaders were powerless to pressure her into voting for Obamacare repeal.

Murkowski’s story tracks what happened to Connecticut Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman in 2006. The hawkish Lieberman was defeated by an anti-war candidate in the primary, then Lieberman won in November on a hastily created “Connecticut for Lieberman” party line. Three years later, the ideologically untethered senator killed the last-ditch progressive push for a form of “public option” in the Affordable Care Act. Even though he once supported allowing people to buy into Medicare at age 55, he suddenly lost interest once his nemeses of the left clamored for it.

The consequences of the failed Lieberman purge did not dampen the progressive appetite for purification. When Lieberman announced his retirement in 2011, Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas was still celebrating 2006. “Remember when kicking Lieberman out of the Democratic Party was going to cost Democrats the support of moderates, Jewish voters and Eeyores everywhere?” he crowed, “And then the Democrats won everything for two cycles in a row.” It’s true that the worst fears of Democratic moderates did not come to pass. But it’s also true that the party’s successful tack left didn’t require a botched purge that alienated a key Senate vote.

Progressives eyed another target in 2010: Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas. She was already facing a tough reelection in the increasingly red state. But progressives made her task even harder by recruiting Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter to attack her as a Wall Street crony. He forced her into a runoff but in the end came a few thousand votes short of winning. The wounded Lincoln limped into the general election and got trounced by a Republican.

Lincoln’s progressive critics evinced no guilt. In March of that year, Moultisas declared her “toast in November,” pre-emptively absolving Halter backers of blame. She may well have been toast, primary or no primary, as Republican Party had the wind at its back in 2010. But the divisive purge attempt hardly improved her chances.

That same year, Pennsylvania Democrats chose not to welcome Senator Arlen Specter with hugs and flowers. The ornery moderate had served nearly 30 years in the Senate as a Republican. But he switched parties after voting for President Barack Obama’s stimulus package, helping Democrats attain a coveted 60-vote supermajority. He went on to support the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform.

Yet progressives were unimpressed. They held him accountable for his earlier record of conservative votes, and his belligerent interrogation of Anita Hill at Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Progressive activists at MoveOn.org and Democracy for America endorsed Rep. Joe Sestak. The outside assistance helped Sestak end Specter’s political career, but was insufficient to stop a Republican, former Club for Growth president Pat Toomey, from claiming the seat in November.

These past failures have not deterred either side. While Bannon assures there will be no more unvetted O’Donnells, progressives insist the de Leon-Feinstein battle will strengthen the Democratic Party.

The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson theorized that a de Leon candidacy—which in California’s “top two” electoral system could lead to a de Leon vs. Feinstein general election contest—could juice Latino and youth turnout to the benefit of Democratic House candidates running against vulnerable Republicans. Maybe, but perhaps recruiting good House candidates and then stumping for them would be a more straightforward strategy.



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So what happened to Roosevelt’s purge? George, Smith and Tydings all won going away. Four other conservative Senate Democrats, whom FDR didn’t favor but hadn’t targeted as personally, won their primaries as well. Only one conservative on Roosevelt’s hit list, New York Representative John O’Connor, was beaten in the primaries. FDR fared no better in the general election, as Republicans made huge gains. The “conservative coalition” of Republicans and freshly alienated conservative Democrats, in the words of one historian, “proceeded to dominate Congress for the next twenty years, until the election of 1958.”

Of course, not every individual purge attempt ends in failure. In 2014, Virginia’s Dave Brat famously knocked off the Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who was deemed soft on immigration. On the Democratic side, Maryland’s Donna Edwards defeated Rep. Albert Wynn in 2008 after accusing him of coziness with corporate interests. Both held the seat for their respective parties the following November.

These successful examples involve primary challenges in states or districts that are “safe” for the incumbent party, where purge attempts are lower-risk propositions. With that in mind, Bannon’s support of Roy Moore, who beat Sen. Luther Strange last month, could be seen as a reasonable proposition. Same for progressive support for de Leon in California.

Still, the evidence that a party can be remade via aggressive primary challenges is thin. One Daily Kos user published a comprehensive analysis of every House and Senate incumbent that lost in a primary between 1992 and 2012. In that 20-year period, only 38 incumbents failed to win renomination. Of the 31 defeated House incumbents, most didn’t involve ideological disputes. Of the seven defeated Senate incumbents, all did. But in only two cases did a more conservative challenger go on to retain a Republican seat, something that never happened for a progressive on the Democrat side.

Yet over this same time period, Republicans became more conservative and Democrats more liberal. The ideological purification process occurred organically, as many red state Democrats and blue state Republicans lost elections or switched parties. To the extent that political leaders sparked realignment, they did so more by winning arguments than by arming a circular firing squad.

For example, Democrats became the party of civil rights by Hubert Humphrey winning a platform fight at the 1948 Democratic convention, President Harry Truman desegregating the armed forces and Lyndon Johnson signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Over time, those who didn’t want to be in that party, like Strom Thurmond, became Republicans, and those who were willing to change, like Robert Byrd, remained Democrats.

“Roosevelt would surely have been pleased to see a polarized political landscape inhabited by parties with mostly coherent ideological messages,” surmised historian Susan Dunn in her book on “Roosevelt’s Purge.” But it took decades. By being impatient and trying to force rapid realignment, he caused a backlash that stymied his agenda.



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Both left and right are taking that risk today. Bannon’s indiscriminate purge strategy may well cause an intra-party civil war that damages general-election Republican turnout, handing Congress to the Democrats and burying Trump’s agenda for good. By encouraging progressives across the country to donate to de Leon, Daily Kos, Democracy for America and possibly others are directing resources away from the the swing states and districts that will determine control of Congress, toward the money pit of California. And with the 2018 map skewed against Democrats, every dollar counts.

And for what? Republicans are already scared the death of the conservative base and no one imminently facing the voters has dared cross Trump on the Senate floor. Senator Feinstein might not be a Berniecrat, but she’s a reliable Democratic vote who, at 84 years of age, is probably too old to finish another six-year term—wait a few years and the seat will likely tick leftward on its own.

The potential pitfalls and meager advantages of the purge strategy are easy to see, yet proponents choose not to look. Because in the eyes of the devoted purger, every safe seat win is a delicious triumph, and every defeat is a moral victory.