Haley Sweetland Edwards tackles various efforts by progressives to move Hillary Clinton to the left. After all, we don’t want to live through either of these nightmare scenarios:
Liberals have two recurring nightmares about the 2016 elections.
In the first, they wake up on Nov. 9, 2016, to find that Americans have elected a Republican who has spent the past year and a half promising to dismantle Obamacare, undo the Environmental Protection Agency’s clean air regulations and cut corporate taxes.
In the second, they wake up on Nov. 9, 2016, to find that Americans have elected Hillary Clinton, who has spent the past year and a half promising them absolutely nothing and courting independents and moderates.
The second scenario is obviously preferable to most liberals, but it’s still worrying. They’d much prefer to elect a Hillary Clinton who has made specific, concrete campaign pledges to them — especially since political science research shows that, contrary to popular belief, politicians tend to keep their promises.
The most obvious way to move Hillary to the left or to extract some campaign promises out of her is to find a progressive alternative to run against her in the primaries, although it would help if her challenger had some degree of plausibility as someone who could both steal the nomination from her and win the general election. If anyone can pass that basic sniff test, and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley has more potential on this front than Sen. Bernie Sanders, then I think they will have little difficulty making Hillary sweat. Right now, however, no one is showing even a hint of the strength they would need to rally the Clinton-doubters.
Under these circumstances, it makes sense to push Democrats in Congress to introduce progressive legislation, especially on campaign financing and banking regulation, which both poll extremely well even among rank-and-file moderates and Republicans.
Another strategy has more of a long-game flavor to it, but could be quite clever. Maybe electing another Clinton won’t do a whole lot to advance progressive causes within the Democratic Party, but what if we use her coattails to elect progressives down ticket?
National People’s Action Campaign, among others, plan to focus on recruiting and supporting progressive candidates in municipal, county and state-level elections. The idea is not only to put progressive policies in place on the local level, but also to help shape the national political landscape from the bottom up, explained George Goehl of the National People’s Action Campaign.
“If you could get thousands of people down ballot running on a similar platform and create a bottom-up swell—that would be something that both parties would have to react to,” he said. Such a groundswell could shape the Democratic Party in the same way that the Tea Party has shaped the Republican Party. “They could help energize people across the board and create a clear lime in the sand: Are you a progressive populist in this moment in time, or are you not?” he added.
There could be a bit of a mutually reinforcing strategy here, where Clinton uses her free lane to the nomination to focus on carving out more of the middle, while downticket Democrats are swept into office on the sheer size of her national electoral advantage.
This assumes that Clinton will ultimately face a very conservative Republican who is more soundly rejected than even McCain and Romney. That’s a gamble that may not come to fruition, but having the candidates in place to take advantage of an unexpectedly big presidential win is not only the best way to win back the House of Representatives and control of many state legislatures, it is a way to elect a big bench of new talent for the progressive cause.
Ultimately, what will determine how progressive Clinton is as president will be how easy or difficult it is for her to get legislation through Congress. So, winning control of Congress is the paramount concern. But the more progressive that Congress is, the better. The Clintons are probably more willing to push progressive legislation that most people realize, provided that they are rewarded for it politically. If they see a progressive agenda as a threat, they’ll oppose it. If they think that they need to cut unsavory deals with Republicans and make compromises with Big Money, well, we already lived through that once.
