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rahm emanuel
Did Centrism Help Democrats Win in Virginia and New Jersey? Or Was It ICE's Brutality?
With the Republicans becoming ever more authoritarian, centrism moves the entire political spectrum to the right.
Nov 19, 2025
The Democratic centrists are at it again, looking to show that the road to success is paved with middle-of-the-road candidates like Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York is being written off as the fluke product of a deep blue city, while the newly elected governors are hailed as the very model of successful centrist Democratic messaging.
Rahm Emanual, former Obama staffer, Mayor of Chicago and Wall Street advisor said:
If you are trying to win national campaigns that bring in a whole slew of swing voters, is the test Park Slope, Brooklyn — or what happens in New Jersey and Virginia? I am less interested in the Upper West Side and more interested in the Upper Peninsula. That is how you win.
Others argue that in substance Mamdani’s platform is not radically different from those of the moderate governors. Ry Rivard and Madison Fernandez wrote in Politico:
For all their ideological differences, Zohran Mamdani, Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger found a shared language that aims at the heart of President Donald Trump’s populism: the high cost of everyday life.
Their wins suggest a recalibration of Democratic politics — from moral crusades to kitchen-table math.
Affordability is the new mantra, to be sure, but the moderates are not ready to take on the fundamental causes of unaffordability. Those require you to take on the Democratic donor class. To truly make America affordable again, you need to slap major controls on Wall Street-financed oligopolies and rein in the wealth extraction machines that are private equity and hedge funds. Since the Democrats are not about to bite the donors’ hands that feed them, moderation is their best and only policy.
But maybe that timid moderation isn’t the reason the Dems won in this abbreviated cycle. Maybe the moderates won for a completely different reason that has little or nothing to do with affordability, like the fact that ICE has been coming after Hispanic immigrants, often with extreme violence, often arresting citizens and jailing them without cause. This everyday cruelty is ripping people from their communities and families across the country. It’s ugly and lots of voters of all persuasions don’t like it.
If that’s the case, I would think we would see a big shift in Hispanic votes from Trump in 2024 to Sherrill and Spanberger in 2025. And as best I can tell, that’s exactly what happened.
About 16 percent of all eligible voters in New Jersey are Hispanic. The two counties with the largest concentration are Hudson and Passaic. In Hudson County, the Hispanic vote shifted away from Trump by 23 percent, while it shifted away by 18 percent in Passaic County. “Sherrill carried Latino men and women alike, and even flipped 18% of Latino Trump voters,” reported CBS News.
While only 9 percent of Virginians are Hispanic, the two counties with the highest Hispanic concentrations (over 40 percent) are Manassas and Manassas Park. Although these are small counties, in Manassas Spanberger picked up 9 percent more votes than Harris did in 2024, while also picking up 13 percent more in Manassas Park.
It’s not hard to understand why Hispanic voters might be turning against Trump and his ICE machine. Many Hispanic citizens live with some undocumented immigrants, often family members. And Hispanic citizens have friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are Hispanic, all of whom know they might get stopped by masked members of ICE based on how they speak or the way they look or during a raid of their workplaces. Trump promised to deport serious criminals, but his administration has pivoted to targeting anyone who might be in the US without papers based on how they look. That includes many hardworking immigrant citizens.
The latest Kaiser Family Fund/New York Times poll confirms these fears:
“One in five immigrants say they personally know someone who has been arrested, detained or deported since January. Four in ten worry they or a family member could face such action. Many immigrants, including naturalized citizens and those who are lawfully present, say they feel less safe, are avoiding activities outside their home, and no longer view the U.S. as a good destination for immigrants.”
The Democrats would be wise and righteous to come to the defense of these working people, rather than dance the moderate two-step (“let’s work on affordability but leave the wealthy alone”).
As we’ve noted repeatedly, a strong majority of voters want a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. Our Rust Belt survey showed that 63 percent of the voters of Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin support granting citizenship to undocumented workers who have been here three years, paid their taxes, and have not committed a felony crime. That support includes 36 percent of 2024 Trump voters.
Mamdani openly supports a path to citizenship, but do the new governors?
Instead of giving marathon speeches and shutting down the government, Democrats would make a powerful statement if they went out into the streets to protect immigrants from deportation. What would the public’s reaction be if every Democratic member of Congress got arrested standing up for due process and immigrants at ICE raids and facilities? Their mugshots would be a badge of honor, noticed by a public hungry for human solutions to real problems, not political terror. They would likely have more impact than counting on “affordability centrism” to stop Trump and his billionaire friends.
With the Republicans becoming ever more authoritarian, centrism moves the entire political spectrum to the right. It is just an excuse for ducking the hard task of taking on the monied elites who are sucking wealth away from working people.
Jim Hightower, the old-school populist columnist who served as Texas Commissioner of Agriculture for eight years, always had disdain for political centrists. As he pointed out many moons ago, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”
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The Mythical Rich Suburban Republican (White) Ladies Who The Democrats Chase But Can Never Find
Considering the origins of this destructive neoliberal mythology may help those who want to challenge it.
Jun 20, 2025
Clintonite Democrats are cooking yet another version of their long-running fantasy of the rich, suburbanite (white) ladies who are more committed to good government and rule of law than to their tax cuts and pissing on poor people as the anchor of the coalition that will defeat Trump and Trumpism.
This fantasy has been their go-to in nearly every presidential election since 1996. No doubt many readers recall what should have been its last stand—the 2016 election when both Senate leader Chuck Schumer and former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell boasted that “for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.”
Now it has taken the form of lauding reactionary Lynne Cheney as an icon of principle, to an extent that it should not surprise if her name is floated at least as the vice-presidential candidate on a 2028 Democratic ticket. But it also appeared in Rep. Ro Khanna’s reaction to Elon Musk’s apparent break with Trump. California's Khanna, a leader within the Democrats’ Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged reaching out to Musk possibly to win him back, despite the fact that he is, well... Elon Musk and that his break with the cosplay Il Duce was provoked by his outrage that Trump’s proposed budget wasn’t draconian enough.
[The mythology] does the ideological work these Democrats want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances.
Commitment to the fantasy showed up as well in the choice of conservative Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) to rebut Trump’s speech to Congress. Slotkin rose to the occasion by praising Ronald Reagan—the person most singly responsible for putting our national politics on the road to Trumpism—four different times. Now Democratic sages like James Carville and Hillary Clinton have floated the likes of Rahm Emanuel, whose approach to building a Democratic congressional majority as Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair centered on recruiting Republicans to run as Democrats, as the party’s and country’s savior in 2028.
Even more recently, flamboyant Dallas Mavericks owner and Ayn Rand fan Mark Cuban has popped up as a possible contender in a telling “it takes a billionaire” line of argument. And now it seems to have found itself a simulacrum of a social theory/manifesto to rally around in the Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson 300-page beacon to the future, Abundance, which the publisher describes as a “once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty.”
Klein has been anointed by such paragons of middle-brow ponderousness as David Brooks and Fareed Zakaria, who moreover predicts that “People will recruit [him and Thompson] to run the Democratic Party.” (Must be the little glasses.) The argument, as one might suspect from those authors and endorsers, is warmed over neoliberal bromides and bullshit—just the sort of intervention that would appeal to Clintonite Democrats whose politics has always come down to trying to sell right-wing policies as the limits of a reasonable left.
The Democrats are going to do what they are going to do. One takeaway from Trumpism’s victory—and I know this is a point I’ve made over and over for quite some time—should be that there is no organized left in the United States capable of having any impact on shaping national political debate and, therefore, the primary commitment of leftists as such should be doing the deep organizing work necessary to begin generating such an embedded left. So whether and how the Clintonites can be challenged in the struggle to define the terms of opposition to Trumpism is a matter for liberals to work out within the Democratic Party itself. It may be helpful for that struggle, though, to consider the origins of the fantasy that has for three decades justified dragging the party’s efforts to appeal to a popular constituency away from working-class concerns. (For example, in 2004, John Kerry’s feckless campaign called them “national security moms.”) We know that objective is why the fantasy persists among Democratic neoliberals; it does the ideological work they want without explicitly acknowledging their investor class allegiances and enables them to hide behind catering to a bourgeois feminism. Considering its origins, however, may help those who want to challenge it.
The mythical rich suburban (white) moderate Republican woman has a very specific source. It emerged out of the concatenation of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing in the fall of 1991 and the1992 national election. Its root is in the election for the U.S. Senate in Illinois that year. The Democratic incumbent, Alan Dixon, was also on the Senate Judiciary Committee that presided over the Thomas hearing. Dixon promised the George H. W. Bush administration his vote for Thomas in exchange for the administration’s guarantee that it would run only a weak Republican challenger against him. The Republicans kept their end of the bargain. Dixon’s GOP challenger was a relative non-entity, Rich Williamson, who had been an official in the Reagan administration and was from Kenilworth, an especially wealthy enclave within the wealthy Northshore suburbs of Chicago.
But the Democratic primary turned out to be a wild card. In addition to Carol Mosely Braun’s candidacy, Dixon was challenged as well by Al Hofeld, a maverick, self-financing multimillionaire who targeted Dixon and garnered 27% of the vote in the primary. Dixon and Mosely Braun split the remaining vote, and Mosely Braun won the primary with 38% of the total vote. In both the primary and the general election, she benefited from bourgeois feminist backlash against Thomas and Dixon, and she ran well among suburban Republican women against the relative non-entity, Williamson. That was a fluke, the product of very particular circumstances in a very particular moment. It has not been repeated, not even in Mosely Braun’s re-election bid in 1998, which she lost to Republican Peter Fitzgerald.
It has never materialized as an electoral reality. So that’s that.
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Slotkin Panned Online After Claiming That Voters Don't Know What 'Oligarchy' Means
"It's condescending to say that the median person doesn't understand what oligarchy is," said one progressive strategist. "They're living it."
Apr 25, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders' tour headlined with this word has drawn more than 107,000 Americans in blue and deep-red states alike. Former President Joe Biden's use of it in his farewell speech prompted a spike in Google searches. And one recent poll found that a majority of U.S. voters, including 54% of Democrats and more than two-thirds of Independents, know exactly what it means.
Yet Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) was among the Democratic politicians insisting this week that no one does.
The word is "oligarchy"—a government ruled by a small group of elites—and as experts have warned for years, the U.S. increasingly resembles one. As Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have told huge crowds in places like Nampa, Idaho and Greeley, Colorado in recent weeks, President Donald Trump's alliance with billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk has made the country's shift even more obvious.
But even as evidence mounts that Americans understand that the political system has been captured by corporations and the wealthiest people—and are living their day-to-day lives with the results, including higher healthcare costs and disinvestment in public services—Slotkin told Politico on Thursday that Democrats should "stop using the term 'oligarchy,' a phrase she said doesn't resonate beyond coastal institutions."
On Bluesky, The Nation writer John Nichols said that the tens of thousands people who have packed stadiums and parks in recent weeks to hear Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez speak would disagree with Slotkin.
Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin says Democrats should stop using the term "oligarchy" because, she says, no one knows what it means. These people say she’s wrong.
[image or embed]
— John Nichols (@nicholsuprising.bsky.social) April 24, 2025 at 8:00 PM
Slotkin's advice for Democrats, which she dubbed her "war plan" and gave ahead of several speeches she has planned, also included a call for the party to stop being "weak and woke," phrases she said she heard in Michigan focus groups.
Her comments echoed those of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a longtime Democratic operative who told California Gov. Gavin Newsom on his podcast last week that using terms like "oligarchs" and "special interests" makes Democrats "worse marketers"; Newsom appeared to agree that people don't "understand" what an oligarchy is.
Emanuel also appeared on the political and pop culture podcast "I've Had It," hosted by Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan, and seemed caught of guard when Welch took him to task for his suggestion that Democrats should end their advocacy for issues that affect transgender Americans.
"That is total bullshit, that is buying into the right-wing media narrative, and I'm so sick of Democrats like you selling out and saying this," said Welch. "You know who talks about trans people more than anybody? MAGA... We've got to fucking fight. They're the gender-obsessed weirdos, not us. We're the ones who fight for Social Security, we fight for Medicare, and yeah, we're not gonna bully trans people."
Semafor political reporter Dave Weigel said Emanuel's derision of the word "oligarchy" is a clear "shot at Sanders/AOC, who keep saying it."
At one stop on the Fighting Oligarchy Tour recently, Sanders told a crowd that the enthusiasm for his and Ocasio-Cortez's message is "scaring the hell out of" Trump and Musk.
But shortly after Slotkin's comments, Ocasio-Cortez remarked—without naming the senator—that "plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle feel threatened by rising class consciousness."
Angelo Greco, a progressive strategist who works with grassroots organizations including Our Revolution and One Fair Wage, told Common Dreams on Friday that establishment Democrats' dismissal of the term oligarchy is "out of touch" and "underestimates" voters.
"Tell me that farmers don't understand what the oligarchy is when there's a consolidation of the agribusiness that impacts them. Tell me that workers in Michigan don't understand what it means when trade deals that are written by multinational corporations have led to lower wages and plant closures," said Greco. "It's condescending to say that the median person doesn't understand what oligarchy is. They're living it."
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