As the two veteran campaigners meet supporters it is clear that the rift in the Democrats between left-liberals and centre-moderates has grown since the election

At Fellowship Chapel in west Detroit, Bernie Sanders delivered a thundering battle cry for the progressive movement before a crowd of nearly 2,000 people, squeezed into wooden pews and crowded into an overflow room.

The town hall had the feeling of a revival meeting led by Sanders, who preached with the same urgency a message he delivered repeatedly on the 2016 presidential campaign trail: the system is rigged against the American people.

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But in Detroit he punctured the bleak prophecy with a glimmer of hope.

“What this whole debate is about is what constitutes human rights: the right of freedom of speech, freedom of religion,” Sanders said. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt said we need economic rights, not just political rights. And healthcare is a human right.

“The good news is that more people agree with us.”

As Democrats feel their way out of the wilderness after sustaining one of the most stunning defeats in modern presidential history, the party’s ascendant left, emboldened by Sanders’s successes in 2016 and an energetic grassroots movement, is pressing ahead with an economic agenda that includes proposals for universal healthcare and debt-free college. And they are starting to feel that this may be their moment.

Progressive leaders such as Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the firebrand from Massachusetts, have helped steer the party toward a platform of economic populism, which they believe is a political roadmap to winning back the House of Representatives – and possibly even the Senate – in next year’s congressional elections, and stopping Donald Trump’s agenda in its tracks.

This week, Sanders and Warren, both of whom have moved to fill the leadership vacuum atop the Democratic party, hit the road to champion their progressive politics. Sanders held three events in Rust Belt states that Trump won in 2016, a trip designed to show that his progressive ideas have appeal in rural America, while Warren, who is running for re-election to the Senate in 2018, crisscrossed Massachusetts to meet with constituents.

At a town hall in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Warren mocked her own wonkish reputation, stretching out her arms to illustrate a rising GDP chart, the start of her response to a question about how to address growing economic inequality.

“OK, everyone settle in – she’s going to talk forever,” the former Harvard professor joked, before launching into a 10-minute critique of trickle-down economics.

But Warren drew raucous applause when she told the crowd: “We have set up a series of policies in Washington that work for those at the top and leave everyone else behind. And what I say is it’s time to change that.”

With polling indicating that support for a universal healthcare system in the US is growing, a number of progressive activists have declared the issue will be a “litmus test” for Democrats, threatening candidates who don’t support Sanders’s “single-payer” plan with a primary challenge.

Warren rejects that kind of aggressive approach. “I don’t believe in litmus tests for Democrats,” she told reporters after the event. “I’m not voting anybody off the island.”

Yet as the party moves leftward, centrist Democrats are finding their position on the island increasingly precarious.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Elizabeth Warren addresses the audience at the morning plenary session at the Netroots Nation conference for political progressives in Atlanta, Georgia. Photograph: Christopher Aluka Berry/Reuters

“The political energy has migrated to the polar extremes on both sides and it has left a large swath of the population feeling homeless,” said Will Marshall, one of the leading intellectual architects of the neoliberal “New Democrat” movement embraced by Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the 1990s.

Worried that pragmatism will be relegated to the past, Marshall formed New Democracy, an organization that aims to “expand the party’s appeal across middle America and make Democrats competitive everywhere”. The group is looking to fight back against progressives’ attacks on their brand of market-friendly liberalism.

“When you’re in the minority party, you can’t bet everything on one theory or voter group. You’ve got to expand in every direction,” Marshall said. “We need to win in a bunch of places and there isn’t one single message.”

The ideological rift in the party is not new, but tensions between the liberals dreaming of healthcare reform and the moderates trying to win re-election in states where Trump dominated has only grown since the election.

At a conference earlier this month, Warren declared progressives the “heart and soul of today’s Democratic party” and promised the party would not retreat to the centrist economic policies that dominated party orthodoxy for more than two decades.

In an early attempt to reconcile the competing impulses, party leadership last month unveiled an economic platform that sought to appeal to both wings. The agenda, known as “A Better Deal”, includes progressive policies like a $15 minimum wage and a campaign against corporate monopolies while also promoting areas of clear agreement, like efforts to lower prescription drug costs and boost job training opportunities.

Notably, however, the platform did not include the key progressive demand of a universal healthcare plan though leaders have not ruled out the idea.

Jim Kessler, senior vice-president of policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic research organization, agreed that Democrats should not uniformly return to Clinton-era politics. But he argued that too sharp a focus on gross economic inequality could turn off voters who live outside of the coastal states and liberal enclaves.

“In much of the country the lived experience of people – the places where Democrats aren’t winning, frankly – is the lack of opportunity to earn a good life for them and their kids, not these huge disparities in wealth,” said Kessler, who has just conducted interviews with voters in midwestern and swing states.



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Democrats like Sanders and Warren hammer corporations and big business, but Kessler said voters in these cities value the companies as “heroes, not villains” because they provide the jobs.

“It’s not that inequality doesn’t exist, it’s just not what they see,” he said.

So far the moderates have yet to find a spokesperson who can offer a rhetorical alternative to Sanders or Warren. But an economic message that includes pro-trade, business-friendly themes is likely to be met with deep suspicion from liberal activists, who are growing impatient with what they view as a reluctance among Democratic leadership to fully embrace a progressive platform.

In a New York Times editorial this summer, Sanders reasoned that Republicans control more than two-thirds of the governorships and gained nearly 1,000 legislative seats since 2008.

“If these results are not a clear manifestation of a failed political strategy, I don’t know what is,” Sanders wrote. “For the sake of our country and the world, the Democratic Party, in a very fundamental way, must change direction.”

Before the election, the Democratic congresswoman Debbie Dingell warned party leaders that Trump’s anti-trade message was resonating with blue collar voters in her state of Michigan, which had voted for the Democratic candidate in six consecutive presidential elections dating back to 1992. Trump narrowly won Michigan and went on to also clinch Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“Donald Trump is not a progressive,” Dingell told the Guardian. “Donald Trump isn’t delivering on anything he said in last year’s election. But he understood this fear and anxiety.”

Dingell, who supports a universal healthcare proposal in the House, said her party would be wise to shun the labels of progressive, populist, and moderate and focus on honing an authentic economic message.



“I know people who are working two jobs, three jobs and they’re still at the poverty line,” she said. “We’ve got to talk about what’s happening to working men and women in this country. I don’t think that’s a populist message. I don’t think it’s a progressive message. It’s a real message.”

At the town hall in Detroit, Sanders was asked by a supporter why he continues to work with Democrats rather than start a new party “separated from these elites”.



Sanders, who remains an independent despite having run for the Democratic presidential ticket in 2016, said he was resolved to trying to “transform” the party from within rather than attack it from the outside.

“I am not going to tell you that that effort is not meeting resistance, believe me,” Sanders said. “In some parts of the country, Democrats are smart enough to say: ‘We want your energy in.’ In other parts, you frighten them. But what we are seeing all over this country right now I think is a remnant – a carry-over – from my campaign is young people getting involved and running and winning seats on city councils and [state] legislatures.”

Whether that approach is the right one to carry Democrats back to power in Washington is what the party now has to decide.



