Centrist Democrats Are the Actual Traitors to Their Party

Of course, the Uncommitted campaign’s hypothesis proved incorrect—neither Biden nor Kamala Harris were ultimately swayed to make even the smallest possible effort to appeal to voters horrified by their unflagging support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocide. And, as Uncommitted predicted and tried to prevent, this led to a collapse in Harris’s support among Muslim voters (perhaps best exemplified by the eye-popping 117-point shift in the heavily Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, which flipped from 88 percent support for Biden in 2020 to just 13 percent support for Harris in 2024). And yet, despite Harris’s utter rejection of the campaign, including even its most minor and symbolic of demands, Uncommitted remained committed to defeating Trump, publicly urging supporters to vote for Harris in the general election because, as Uncommitted leader and Palestinian state representative Ruwa Romman wrote in a Rolling Stone essay addressed to her community, “people in my district and state cannot survive another Trump presidency.”

This gets to the fundamental contrast at issue here. The establishment deploys “Vote Blue No Matter Who” against progressives who try to use primary processes to influence the party’s direction, despite the fact that after those primaries—which the left loses far more often than it wins—progressives invariably assume the posture of good Democratic soldiers. Centrists, on the other hand, scold progressives who are critical of the party establishment during primaries, but on the rare occasions they lose those primaries, they can’t be counted on to reciprocate that support. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it to a NY1 reporter: “I, as a Democrat, support the Democratic nominee. It’s disappointing to see how people want the party to rally behind the nominee when that nominee is them—and then that principle gets thrown out the window when the nominee is someone they don’t like.”

It’s easy to say “Vote Blue No Matter Who” when that means voting for your own worldview, interests, and preferred Democratic candidate. It’s a lot harder when it requires supporting someone you deeply oppose on issues that are critically important to you. Progressives have spent our entire lives swallowing our feelings to do the latter, and still getting attacked by the establishment with accusations of disloyalty. But the moment the dynamic flips—as occurred with Mamdani’s victory in New York, where, it should be noted, he faces a contested general election against at least one candidate who is essentially a puppet of Donald Trump, and another who’s been practically endorsed by him—the establishment proves its loyalty is not to the Democratic Party, but to its own ironclad control of the party.

Rather than allow ourselves to be framed as an untrustworthy partner within the Democratic coalition, it’s time for progressives to reclaim our role as the most committed core of that coalition: We represent, in the words of the late Senator Paul Wellstone, the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”