Ideological diversity among Dems a pipe dream
The headline is hardly surprising: “Political Polarization in the American Public: Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines — and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive — than at any point in the last two decades,” Pew Research reports.
What might be surprising, however, is that this is a headline from June 2014.
Before the GOP took the U.S. Senate, before Trump’s trash-talk campaign, before Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” and the Kavanaugh debate, before all that, we were a nation split down the middle. Does anyone honestly believe the politics of the past four years have left us less divided?
They haven’t. Pew Research has been tracking the partisan divide since 1994, using issues like immigration, poverty programs and foreign policy. In 2017, they concluded that “the average partisan gap has increased from 15 percentage points to 36 points.”
In fact, the single most accurate predictor of an individual’s attitudes or political positions isn’t race or sex: It’s partisanship. A poor, black female Republican and a wealthy, gay white conservative have more in common politically than two black (or white) Americans divided only by party.
While 70 percent of the GOP has self-identified as “conservative” for decades, NBC News reports polling that, for the first time in recent years, there are more self-identified liberals in the Democratic Party than moderates and conservatives combined.
In short, the center is dead. But don’t tell that to Mara Dolan of Cambridge.
Dolan, a longtime Democratic activist and media personality, has joined with state party vice-chair Deb Lozilowski to launch the Left of Center PAC, with the stated goal of promoting ideological diversity inside the Democratic Party.
“We’re reaching out to the large unheralded center that longs for stability but doesn’t have a voice,” Dolan told me yesterday. “They’re very real, they just don’t make a big fuss.”
Dolan points to a recent poll showing 55 percent of Massachusetts voters “want a candidate who will hold the center and stabilize our democracy.” And that’s conSen.) sistent with Left of Center’s mission.
Rather than an ideological civil war inside the party that’s likely to drive it ever leftward, Dolan supports “Democrats who can win in their districts. That means Democrats won’t agree on every issue, because they represent districts that are very different. But we’ve got to stop losing races to Republicans because Democrats won’t vote for candidates who they agree with just 90 percent of the time.”
Dolan points in frustration to the case of Tennessee former governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat who has a shot at flipping a U.S. Senate seat from red to blue. “When he said that he would have voted for (Supreme Court nominee Brett) Kavanaugh, liberal supporters abandoned his campaign. Look, I don’t like Kavanaugh, either. But in Tennessee you’re either going to have a pro-Kavanaugh Democrat who’s with you on most of the issues, or a pro-Kavanaugh Republican who’s against you on everything.”
(Before the Kavanaugh story, by the way, Bredesen was tied with his Republican opponent, Rep. Marsha Blackburn. Today she’s up by about seven points.)
Dolan believes the progressive, activist wing of her party needs to make room for fellow Democrats closer to the center. “I’m not saying I agree with (West Virginia Joe Manchin. I’m in Massachusetts with Liz Warren. I’m saying there should be room in our party for both.
“I don’t just want a big tent, I want a big, strong tent,” Dolan says.
The question is whether the rest of her party — which is currently pushing for abolishing ICE, socializing medicine and impeaching the president — agrees. For example, Dolan believes Democrats should accept the fact that in some districts the pro-life Democrat is the strongest candidate. However, her party erupted into a virtual civil war over that issue just last year.
Meanwhile, the total number of pro-life Democrats currently in the U.S. Senate is zero.
Dolan is clearly enthusiastic about the Left of Center PAC and its mission of bridging political gaps and bringing people together. So who was the headliner at their launch in Boston?
Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti. Motto? “When they go low, we hit harder.”
Good luck, Mara.