Democrats can diagnose their problem, but they can’t convince the party’s progressive activists to stop making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Senate Democrats received a dose of bitter medicine this week at a special party retreat — not that they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.
“Senate Democrats have invited New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Democratic data guru David Shor to talk to senators at their annual one-day issues retreat on Wednesday,” Axios reported earlier this week. Klein, who has recently restyled himself a harsh critic of the procedural progressivism that has imposed paralyzing burdens on federal contractors, wasn’t there to fawn over left-wing pretensions. Shor has spent years cultivating a reputation as a Democratic data guru willing to tell the party hard truths about the degree to which its leftward drift had alienated the voters it needed to court if its goal was to win elections.
Senate Democrats asked for a friendly roasting, and, apparently, that’s exactly what they got. “Senate Democrats were given a blunt message in a private briefing on Wednesday about the urgent need to overhaul their immigration agenda,” a subsequent Axios report revealed.
Senate Democrats were briefed on their immigration failings by Andrea Flores, described as “a top staffer with the bipartisan FWD.us political organization.” Flores is an interesting case. She joined the Biden administration in its first year eager to dismantle the first Trump administration’s immigration policies, but she left the administration disillusioned by the degree to which so many of those policies proved sticky. A court ruling preserving the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy proved to be the last straw. “If she stayed at the White House after the court rulings, her new task would be reimplementing, rather than dismantling, a policy that she despised,” a 2022 New Yorker profile of Flores read. By the end of the Biden era, Flores had become a critic of the president’s asylum policies, which she believed would “likely push people to cross at more dangerous areas along the border.”
At the Virginia retreat, Flores reportedly “encouraged” Senate Democrats “to ditch their longtime message of ‘comprehensive immigration reform,’” Axios’s dispatch continued. “Senators were urged to focus on reducing border crossings, as well as increasing legal pathways to citizenship, reforming the asylum system, and expanding access to humanitarian aid outside of the U.S.”
To a certain extent, Flores’s advice could be construed as flattery couched as criticism. Her advice consists of convincing Democrats to double down on the immigration framework hammered out between James Lankford, Kyrsten Sinema, and Chris Murphy last year. Senate Democrats are unlikely to strenuously object to advice that amounts to “keep being yourselves.” But the briefing wasn’t bereft of bitter pills. Democrats were advised to stop valorizing illegal migrants and advocating policies that extend special status to border-crossers at the expense of more established non-citizen residents and citizens alike.
Flores wants Democrats to articulate their vision on immigration, which she would like to reflect her own. But that requires them to buck the activist class that will accept nothing less than a maximalist vision of an America in which illegal migrants are held up as though they were dissidents engaged in civil disobedience against an unjust legal covenant. Well, the activists would like a word.
In an example of the scale of the problem that the Democratic Party’s uncompromising fringes represent, one swing-district Democrat has had a target affixed to her back for the sin of supporting something as anodyne as voter ID.
“I do not support noncitizens voting in American elections, and that’s common sense to folks in Southwest Washington,” said Washington Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. That was how she justified her vote in favor of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act — a bill that would require all voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote. For that, the representative has been confronted with angry progressive crowds at town halls and is now the object of a campaign to primary her out of her seat.
In a rational world, progressives would be thrilled that Washington’s third district is occupied by a Democrat, even one who has to occasionally represent the interests of her center-right constituents. Perez succeeded Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican lawmaker who served five terms before she was defeated in a multi-party primary by Joe Kent, a MAGA favorite who lost his bid for Congress twice before Donald Trump nominated him to a consolation prize inside his administration. But the progressive activist class will brook no dissent.
Democrats can diagnose their problem. They can even resolve to address it — at least, on the margins. But what they can’t do is convince the party’s progressive activists to stop making the perfect the enemy of the good.