Dick Durbin’s War on Progressives
Durbin thinks that Democrats should abandon progressive ideals and pander to right-wing voters in order to win elections
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who is an unpledged superdelegate at Democratic National Conventions by virtue of being a member of the Senate Democratic Caucus, thinks that Democrats should run a centrist candidate for president in 2020. In doing so, he proved that he is completely out of touch with political reality in America:
“So you could lose it by being too liberal?” asked the host (of a Chicago talk radio program).
“You can,” Durbin said. “I think you can overdo it. We have to really appeal to that sensible center. It’s a thin stripe now. It used to be a lot wider stripe, but it’s an important and determining factor in most elections.”
Durbin added that he doesn’t count Trump out and that the 2016 election showed that “if you take (Trump) for granted, he’ll beat you.”
Although the field for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 isn’t going to take shape for quite some time, there’s already several likely presidential candidates who are making concerted appeals to progressive voters and/or otherwise focusing on progressive causes, such as U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Kamala Harris (D-CA), as well as former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, who leads a group advocating for voting rights. It seems to me that a lot of the 2020 contenders aren’t trying to appeal to moderate voters at all, because we really don’t need them for a winning presidential coalition, because there are few moderate voters left in America.
The path to defeating Donald Trump runs through the Sanders/Trump voters, disaffected progressive voters, voters who voted for Obama at least once but didn’t vote in 2016, and left-leaning minor-party voters from the 2016 election, as well as first-time voters, most of whom are very likely to have strongly left-wing views. There’s a lot more voters among that cohort than any centrist voters Durbin was referring to. As a matter of fact, Trump himself has stated that he wants Hillary Clinton to run for president again, because he knows that Hillary is one of the few Democrats who would likely lose to Trump in 2020, and Hillary lost because she’s a corrupt war hawk who was completely out of touch with progressives in 2016.
People like Dick Durbin are holding back the Democratic Party as part of the establishment’s War on Progressives, and, although the DNC Unity Commission may reduce the number of superdelegates for the 2020 Democratic National Convention (you know, it would be real nice if the DNC wasn’t held in a big city like it always is nowadays), they’re probably not going to strip Democratic U.S. Senators of their superdelegate status, meaning that people like Durbin could have an outsized influence on who the Democratic presidential nominee in 2020 is, although superdelegates have never gone against the pledged delegate winner since the superdelegate system was implemented.
