PRINCETON, N.J. — To hear some Democratic activists tell it, 2017 is supposed to mark the dawn of the party’s new era led by a younger, more aggressively progressive generation.

So why does it look like the establishment may be striking back?


In the only two governors races of 2017, Democrats might end up nominating a longtime Goldman Sachs executive and high-level political financier in New Jersey, while in Virginia the top of the ticket could feature a former George W. Bush voter who describes himself as a fiscal conservative.

Both Phil Murphy and Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam now position themselves as progressives running on liberal platforms in states that voted for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, and both have launched scathing attacks on the president.

But the easy caricatures of their backgrounds make some national Democrats nervous about the caricatures' effect on the grass-roots fires burning through the party early in 2017 — and worried that their bruising internal battles about Democrats’ future may just intensify as a result.

“It’s not something that’s going to be solved by the 2017 primaries. We have a lot of healing to do, and my point of view is you can’t have a progressive wing and an establishment wing,” said party strategist Rebecca Katz. “We need to have a progressive establishment in order to win.”

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The elections are the party’s first statewide tests with Trump in the White House, and since they land just as Democrats debate their identity and figure out how to harness progressives’ anti-Trump intensity, they are being monitored increasingly closely — especially the neck-and-neck contest in Virginia. And as the political world looks to them for signals about the direction of the party in the Trump era, the divisions are widening.

Adding to the sudden surge in interest: the fact that the Democratic nominee is currently favored to win both races in November — in elections that stand to be framed as referendums on the president.

Murphy, a former ambassador to Germany under Barack Obama, is far more likely to win his race on Tuesday: a Stockton University poll from late May showed roughly one-third of New Jersey’s Democratic primary voters backing him, compared with just 10 percent for former Bill Clinton Treasury Department official Jim Johnson, 9 percent for Assemblyman John Wisniewski, and less for a handful of others.

That gap hasn’t stopped Murphy’s opponents from going after the likely nominee over his banking and party establishment ties, even after he’s gotten vocal support from Bernie Sanders’ son Levi and liberal groups like the Communication Workers of America, and as he reminds voters that his Democratic National Committee work was under the liberal Howard Dean.

The broadsides from Wisniewski, who served as Sanders’ New Jersey campaign chairman in 2016, have been particularly strident. And Johnson, who describes his candidacy as a potential guiding light for the national party, has warned that a Murphy win could sap energy from base voters — even after the front-runner got campaign help from former Vice President Joe Biden, who at a rally last month in Lyndhurst called the New Jersey race the “single most important” one of the next three years.

“People will take a really hard look at the party [nominating] process in New Jersey and determine if it’s truly small-d democratic or the result of the machine doing what the machine has done for a long time,” Johnson told POLITICO. “And I think some people will be dispirited by that.”

Yet it’s next week's vote in Virginia that’s captured more attention from national Democrats, largely because of the more competitive primary race between Northam and former Rep. Tom Perriello. The latter, while far from a standard progressive on hot-button issues like gun control and abortion, has sought to portray himself as the candidate of the future, tying himself not only to Obama, but also to prominent liberals like Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Perriello and Northam — the No. 2 statewide official and a pediatric neurologist who has leaned heavily on backing from state Democratic leaders including Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine — appear headed for a toss-up, according to a recent Washington Post/George Mason University poll.

Entering the contest only in January, Perriello has worked to increase attention to the race while he and Northam criss-cross Virginia, aiming to raise money and national recognition to counter the existing support and statewide familiarity with Northam.

Phil Murphy, a former ambassador to Germany under Barack Obama, is far more likely to win his race in New Jersey. | AP Photo

“This is, in some ways, less a primary than a test of what the next generation of the Democratic Party is going to look like,” Perriello told POLITICO, pointing to the level of attention he received by aggressively going after Trump early on in the race.

Nonetheless, while New Jersey's and Virginia’s off-year races often offer hints about the next year’s midterms, they are rarely direct predictors of a party’s fortunes or decision-making processes — the states are more suburban and highly educated than many others, and Clinton beat Sanders in both primaries by over 25 points. Plus, Northam launched his run in early 2015 and Murphy in mid-2016, so many contours of both campaigns were largely set even before Trump won.

And it’s not like activists who argue for the party to take a more liberal tack have lost all their fights so far this year: They've taking over a few state parties and nominated Rob Quist in last month’s congressional special election in Montana.

The last-second injection of interest into the year’s two largest races, which have largely been overshadowed by day-to-day news from the White House, has still provided an opportunity for the party’s leaders to take stock.

“Democrats, as voters, are not in a place now where they’re only going to elect the farthest left of candidates. A lot of Democrats are taking positions that are far more progressive than they have in the past, and I think that’s a good thing. But we don’t want to cross the Rubicon where you have to be considered the left-most of the candidates to win every election. That’s a strategy for losing," said longtime party operative Dave Hamrick.

“I don’t think that this party has moved to a purity test party where we can’t elect candidates who fit the district or states they’re running in. And thank God."

