Major corporate media outlets pronounced the 2021 off-year election as a major defeat for the Democratic party, and a warning about losses to come in the 2022 mid-term election where control of Congress will be at stake. Many pundits viewed Virginia’s Democratic candidate for former Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s narrow loss to Republican Glenn Youngkin, and New Jersey’s incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy’s slim victory in a deep blue state as signs of a party in decline, with the blame often fixed on the Democrats’ bold progressive agenda.
While the loss in Virginia was disappointing to Democrats, it followed a decades-long pattern where the party in the White House consistently loses that office in the year after a presidential election. Progressive candidates, however, won significant victories on Nov. 2, with wins by mayoral candidates Michelle Wu in Boston, Justin Bibb in Cleveland and victories in other cities. And while voters in Minneapolis rejected the option to replace their police department, voters in Austin, Texas, strongly opposed a measure to increase the police presence in that city.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, a progressive political action organization born from Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Here, he assesses progressive Democrats’ wins and losses – and the need to pursue an electoral strategy to win more congressional seats for progressive candidates next November.
JOSEPH GEEVARGHESE: This year in 2021, which is an off year, at Our Revolution, we don’t think any any year is an off-year cycle when it comes to elections. Over 65 percent of our nationally-endorsed candidates won their races. And what’s to me interesting, Scott, is, you know, the mainstream media narrative was “Democrats got shellacked this election.” And that is true.
But then they pointed to a handful of examples. And I think there are incredibly powerful countervailing examples. So one instance would be that pundits looked at India Walton’s loss for mayor of Buffalo as a sign that progressive intellectual power was waning. But the story that wasn’t told is that progressives won mayoral seats in Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland and many other cities, and they ran by promising to govern and enact bold, progressive policies, whether it’s from bringing a Green New Deal to their local cities, whether it’s holding the police accountable, whether it’s raising wages on city contracts. And the other thing that’s interesting, I think, Scott, about this new generation of mayors that are rising up — Justin Bibb, Michele Woo. You know, these are young, dynamic up and coming progressive rock stars. And in some ways, you’re seeing the emergence of this bench and the bench is going to continue to graduate up. The current mayor of Cleveland will likely be the next U.S. representative or senator.
And so if you pull back the curtain, there’s a countervailing narrative, I think, that needs to be told. Progressives did very well in chief executive races. The India Walton race, I think, was an outlier.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Joseph, I did want to go to long-term planning and strategies that I know you’re thinking about all the time at Our Revolution. Joe Manchin, of course, is infamous for his, you know, kind of starring role and degrading and sabotaging a lot of what Joe Biden had, I think, courageously put in his Build Back Better plan planks that address climate change in a substantive way, health care as well as immigration.
A whole lot of good things were in that initial $3.5 trillion proposal, but between (Sens.) Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, they’ve broken it down to $1.75 trillion, and it’s not even certain that’s going to survive here in the final voting.
Joe Manchin, when he was asked about his opposition to certain planks in Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, basically talked about how the United States was really not a progressive country, but a center-right country. And he said if the folks supporting and advocating these policies want them to pass, they should elect more progressives.
And I know that spoke directly to you. How do you respond to Joe Manchin? I think he’s got it right as far as his advice.
JOSEPH GEEVARGHESE: Joe Manchin does have it right. Scott, at the end of the day, it’s about power and whether we win or lose. What we want is in direct proportion to the amount of power we will. And look at the end of the day, we elected a president who adopted a New Deal-style platform, in part because of Bernie and our movement forcing him to.
But he won that without securing a New Deal-type majority. Yeah, we have to do better. And, you know, increase the margins overall of the number of Democrats that are in the House and the Senate and to take away power from Manchin.
But I do disagree with the assertion that the country is center right. I think if you look again at all of the policies that the progressive movement has been behind, whether it’s Medicare for All, Green New Deal, all incredibly popular.
But we don’t have the political will in Congress to get it done because we don’t have the political power. Progressives do not yet have the political power. And so we’ve got to expand the number of Democrats and expand the number of bold progressives that are in Congress that are willing to draw a line in the sand.
So, you know, I take Joe Manchin’s challenge. Yes, we got to elect more people. That’s absolutely correct. I don’t take his underlying premise as correct, that this is a center-right country. I think this is a country that if given, you know, given the pandemic, given the economic disruptions in our lives, I think people want radical transformational change.
I think they see things are not working and this election was a signal that the American electorate sent to Democrats. It’s time to govern, right? It’s time to get things done.
For more information, visit Our Revolution at OurRevolution.com.
