‘I Don’t Want to Be the Freak Show Party’ Say Centrist Democrats

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Most Democrats who aren’t radical left fruitcakes know that their party has drifted out of the mainstream and into Cloud Cuckoo Land. 

Rhode Island Democratic National Committeeman Joseph Paolino Jr. summed up the situation as the party seeks a new national chairman.

“The progressive wing of the party has to recognize — we all have to recognize — the country’s not progressive, and not to the far left or the far right. They’re in the middle,” he said. “I’m going to look for a chair who’s going to be talking to the center and who’s going to be for the guy who drives a truck back home at the end of the day.”

Another DNC member from Florida was even blunter, telling Politico: “I don’t want to be the freak show party, like they have branded us. You know, when you’re a mom with three kids, and you live in middle America and you’re just not really into politics, and you see these ads that scare the bejesus out of you, you’re like, ‘I know Trump’s weird or whatever, but I would rather his weirdness that doesn’t affect my kids.’”

We don’t hear much about “centrist Democrats” because there are very few of them and they’ve been cowed into virtual silence. They know that deviating from the party line on gender issues or other cultural hot-button issues will lead to sanction and ostracization.

An anonymous California DNC member who refused to tell Politico his name blamed “identity politics”: “I do think there’s this whole sentiment that we just went too far out there on identity, and it allowed the Republicans to really attack us at every turn as a result, and that we just essentially did not focus on just the everyday issues of Americans,”

Several names have been bandied about to replace current chair Jaime Harrison, and it’s not surprising that all of the front-runners are from Midwestern or Southern states.

The race for chair — the party’s first real reckoning with its brutal Election Day outcome up and down the ballot — is wide open, with nearly a dozen names floated as possible successors to replace Jaime Harrison, who is not expected to run again. Potential contenders include some Democrats with formidable resumes, including Wisconsin Democratic Party leader Ben Wikler, Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin, ex-White House infrastructure czar Mitch Landrieu and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, among others.

Party officials are expected to wait until the next chair is seated, likely early next year, to decide on a formal review of Democrats’ failings in the election. But the recriminations over Harris’ loss to Donald Trump are already reverberating throughout the DNC — and influencing members’ outlook on the chair’s race, the first step the party will take to chart its post-defeat direction.

The names mentioned above are far more pragmatic, if not actually centrists, than the crew that created the agenda and pushed the Democrats over the cliff on November 5. The question that will occupy Democrats for the next few months is how far toward the center the radical left will allow the party to go.

Democrats have to face the hard fact that most of the energy, the money, and the foot soldiers come from the far left. Radical billionaires like George Soros and Melinda Gates aren’t going to give a lot of money to anyone who isn’t a bomb-throwing radical.

That’s not a recipe for electoral success.

Virgie Rollins, the DNC Black Caucus chair, said she will “wait and see if someone from the Black Caucus wants to step up” to run to lead the committee. But she added, no matter what, “my caucus is going to be very much involved in who the chair is going to be.”

In addition to Wikler, Martin, Landrieu and Emanuel, potential contenders include California Sen. Laphonza Butler, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, defeated Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, former New York Rep. Max Rose and former New York state Rep. Michael Blake.

Shasti Conrad, the Democratic Party chair for Washington state, thinks identity politics is just fine and complains about the lack of females being considered for DNC chair.

“I’m disappointed that most of the names I’m hearing are men,” she said. “I hope we get some strong female candidates, too. One of my worries is that one of the bad takes is the party thinks that we’ve tried more diverse leadership, and maybe that doesn’t work.”

A “bad take” that identity politics might have helped sink the party in 2024? Bad ideas die hard as another anonymous DNC member told Politico: “It’s White Guy Winter.”

It’s too much to expect that Democrats will change their stripes to become more competitive before the 2026 midterms. The radicals are going to defend identity politics, radical gender issues, DEI, and ESG even if they keep losing. 

The centrists may try to stand up and do battle for a non-woke Democratic Party, but they’re likely to get slapped down and told to stay in their place.