Democrats say it would be premature to suggest any kind of revolt is under way. | AP Photos Liberals take on Wall Street Dems

Wall Street-bashing Democrats are on a hot streak.

In a string of late-summer confrontations between the Democratic Party’s progressive base and its finance-friendly establishment, the party’s populist wing has recorded some of its most significant victories since Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s election last November.


In New York City, Democrat Bill de Blasio won his party’s mayoral nomination — and now looks overwhelmingly favored to win City Hall — with a “tale of two cities” message channeling frustration with outgoing Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Manhattan’s upper crust. In Illinois, former White House chief of staff Bill Daley pulled the plug on a primary challenge to incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn amid a flurry of attacks on his background as a JPMorgan executive and corporate fixer.

And in Washington, a small group of liberals in the Senate — including Warren and Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon — effectively blocked Larry Summers from gaining the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve, signaling with their early opposition that the former Clinton Treasury secretary would face a tough confirmation process thanks to his past support for market deregulation.

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“I don’t think it’s any secret that Larry was not my first choice,” Warren, who rode her record as a consumer advocate and a wave of liberal anger at banks into the Senate, told MSNBC.

Each of those episodes — which unfolded in isolation from one another — had its own complicated internal politics, and Democrats say it would be premature to suggest any kind of revolt is under way.

But leaders on the more liberal end of the Democratic coalition say there’s a sense of momentum among progressives, who have been urged since the 1990s to hold back their hostility to corporate power or risk losing middle-of-the-road voters and donors. While Republicans vented anger over the country’s economic meltdown in part by electing tea party conservatives in the 2010 midterms, Democrats have largely stifled their rebellious impulses out of deference to President Barack Obama.

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In an interview with POLITICO, de Blasio said it stands to reason that Democrats, irked by the slow pace of economic recovery and still unsatisfied by the government’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, would start to express those feelings more assertively.

“This is a moment in history where economic issues come to the fore, when the question of income inequality is very much on the mind of the voters,” de Blasio said. “As the crisis has deepened and government has in many ways failed to address it, there’s a growing anger, a growing frustration.”

He continued: “It’s absolutely right that elections this year, and I think next year, will be very much about these issues, because it’s most pressing to people.”

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De Blasio built his insurgent mayoral bid around a sharp contrast with Bloomberg, an almost cartoonishly perfect plutocrat who mused in an interview on the eve of the Democratic primary that it would be great if “all the Russian billionaires” moved to the city and expanded its tax base.

Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart, writing in The Daily Beast, called de Blasio’s campaign a harbinger of “new new left” — a generational shift toward progressivism among young people burned by the financial crisis and concerned about “economic inequality and corporate power.”

Half a continent away, Quinn, who has struggled with perilously low approval ratings amid a state pension crisis, wielded a similar set of attacks against his own well-tailored opponent.

Daley, a former federal commerce secretary, entered his home state’s gubernatorial primary promising to bring effective management and private-sector smarts to the dysfunctional capital in Springfield. (Bloomberg endorsed his campaign.) Quinn, a populist brawler who scarcely held onto his office in the 2010 GOP wave, moved quickly to rally the state political machine around his campaign, winning support from the powerful Cook County Democratic organization and other county operations statewide.

And he unleashed a withering series of broadsides against Daley, savaging him as a banker more at ease with lobbyists and corporate board members than with ordinary people. Quinn called himself a champion of Americans who “don’t have lobbyists” or “big-shot friends”; he and his team lumped Daley with the “millionaire bankers” who “helped create the recession.”

Daley pulled out of the campaign earlier this week, citing a lack of enthusiasm for the race and sighing to the Chicago Tribune that he is “maybe more of a moderate, pro-business Democrat than some.”

“Bill Daley found out the hard way that Pat Quinn is a winner,” said Ben Nuckels, a senior Quinn strategist who managed the governor’s 2010 race. Nuckels warned the Republican field, which includes deep-pocketed private equity investor Bruce Rauner: “If Illinois Republicans nominate one of their Springfield legislators or a private equity job-killer, they’re going to meet the same fate as Bill Daley next November.”

Daley did not respond to an email seeking comment.

If rhetorical attacks on financial power have worked for a handful of Democrats so far in 2013, operatives caution that it’s still something less than a partywide strategy or a good-in-all-time-zones method for upending wealthy opponents. Perhaps the two most prominent Democratic candidates of 2013, Virginia gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe and New Jersey Senate nominee Cory Booker, have been far from hostile to big business; if anything, they have drawn complaints from their fellow Democrats for their overly accommodating view of the so-called 1 percent.

But more centrist Democrats have plainly taken note of their pitchfork-wielding colleagues. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, the veteran Clinton booster who warned the Obama campaign in 2012 about the dangers of bashing business, said he’s neither surprised nor particularly troubled by his party’s renewed flirtation with hard-edged populism.

Given the country’s ongoing economic malaise, Rendell said, “Someone who comes along and says, ‘We’re going to right the wrongs, we’re going to make it fair’ – that’s a message that resonates. It’s a message that I don’t have a problem with.”

“If this is sort of a streak, it’s not disconcerting because bad people won — Mr. de Blasio is not a hater or a divider. I think some of his policies miss the mark,” Rendell said. “It’s only a problem if we develop a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude.”