Matt Stoller: Progressives on the Verge of Total Party Takeover

[babylonsister]

Progressives on the Verge of Total Party Takeover
by: Matt Stoller
Wed Aug 08, 2007 at 22:17:06 PM EDT



There's a tremendous amount of despair about how badly the Democratic leadership screwed up on the FISA vote, which parallels a lot of the anger around the supplemental and other poor choices Democratic representatives have made. As an anecdotal example, I went out to dinner with a Congressional candidate at Yearlykos, and our cool punk waiter overheard our conversation and randomly told us that he's a hardcore anti-Republican. He then followed on that he doesn't think that 2006 made any difference.

After hearing this from a variety of quarters, I decided to go over the numbers and candidates and see whether that election really mattered, and how much our involvement specifically mattered. First I began poking around, to see how the freshmen we elected in 2006 voted. Most of them did pretty well, but 11 new members voted poorly in the House, and 4 freshmen voted poorly in the Senate. Of those, only Tim Walz and Chris Carney in the House and Jim Webb in the Senate drew support from the internet, which I'm using as a proxy for the progressive movement's newest and freshest piece. Mostly, our newly elected people voted correctly, and those that didn't were DCCC, DSCC, and single issue group creations (like those three reactionaries in Indiana). But in looking at these numbers, I discovered something quite stunning. To my surprise, the power of progressives in the House and Senate has risen dramatically since 2002, and the reason is not because of the change in partisan balance in 2006 but because of a gradual conversion of conservative Democrats to progressive Democrats.

The shift that Chris noted - the Democratic base mattering more than independents and Republicans in 2006 - has had HUGE effects within the party that equal or exceed those effects in the partisan balance at large.

To understand where we were as a party prior to 2006, I started my examination by trying to find an equivalent vote to the FISA vote that happened last week from a previous Congress. I wanted a vote where national security was key, where pressure was high, and where Democrats would have a strong incentive to crumple. I went back to the nadir of the Democratic Party's history, the October 2002 war vote. While the vote was a black mark on our party's history, the majority of Democrats actually voted against authorizing the use of force. In the Senate, the vote was 77-23, in the House, the vote was 296-133. 29 Democratic Senators voted yes, 22 voted no, while House 81 Democrats voted yes and 126 voted no. In all honestly, back then it was a pretty awful party, with almost no progressive power base whatsoever.

So where are we today? Well, Kos has a list of all the members who voted to grant Bush expanded wiretapping powers, which is roughly equivalent in both political optics and ideological meaning to the war vote. The passage in the House was 227-183, and 60-28 in the Senate. While it was a horrible vote and leadership was playing procedural games, as a vote-counter, that's a significant shift from earlier Congressional caucuses.

more...

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=4F392327509372C274262FD9186B2A95?diaryId=654

[w4rma]

1. I had a gut feeling that this was the case. It's nice to see hard evidence of it. (nt)