As Revere Representative Katherine Clark stepped up to address a room of roughly four dozen volunteers in one of Pennsylvania’s purplest suburbs one week before Election Day, she opened with a question: “Are you ready to win?”
It’s hard to believe Clark or any of the cheering supporters could fathom in that moment the magnitude of the victory that indeed came to pass on Tuesday.
Riding into January on a blue wave of historic proportions, Clark is widely expected to be the majority leader in a new Democratic majority so large that any talk of factional strife has been swept away along with dozens of Republican members of Congress. But after their celebrations, Democrats will face a stark reality: the hard part of their jobs is just beginning.
Polling this year, which turned out to be fairly accurate, made clear that although voters were supporting Democrats, they still had misgivings about the party and were placing only tentative trust in their leadership. Clark and her fellow Democratic leaders will have two years under Trump’s White House to prove to voters that the trust wasn’t misplaced, as the party eyes what many consider to be the real goal for Democrats: winning the presidency and full control of Congress in 2028.
Clark has been the House whip alongside minority leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York and the third-ranking Democrat Pete Aguilar of California, since they were chosen by peers in 2022. Come January they’ll be promoted to the majority for the first time, with Jeffries expected to become the first Black speaker, Clark the first woman majority leader, and Aguilar the first Latino majority whip. With that newly minted majority, they will have to navigate an ideologically diverse new caucus.
Along with a swath of battleground candidates who flipped dozens of seats, Democrats will welcome a new crop of progressives who ran unabashedly to the left. Many of those lawmakers successfully defeated incumbent Democrats in primaries by adopting positions that have proven divisive flashpoints for Democrats, including pledging to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and being sharply critical of Israel in support of Palestinians.
The leadership team will have a comfortable enough majority that a small group of defections won’t matter for many votes, but they will still have to navigate the existential question of which ideological vision would best serve the mandate they received from voters. Clark, who will hand off whip duties to Aguilar, will control the floor schedule and manage which legislation gets a vote. And they’ll have to do it under the reality that delivering tangible results could be elusive — Trump has already telegraphed he’ll freely exercise his veto power and ignore congressional investigations.
At that campaign event in Pennsylvania’s politically purple Bucks County last week, a race in which the Democrats’ recruit Bob Harvie managed to topple a five-term moderate Republican, Clark brushed aside “ideological labels” and told the Globe that the leadership team is preparing by focusing on delivering on their pledges to be “affordability Democrats.”
“We are going to have, I hope, a very big coalition to bring together,” Clark said. “But I think we have shown in the minority that those core values of fighting for the people in our communities are the ones that draw Democrats together, and I think that’s going to be our source of strength.”
That has been the message of the leadership team post-election, an insistence that they are ready to make life better for Americans.
“This is a change election and we understand as House Democrats that we need to deliver dramatic change,” Jeffries said in his victory speech. At a news conference Wednesday, Jeffries and Clark delivered the same message, saying affordability would be their number one focus.
“The agenda, we cannot wait to get this big caucus together and help set that,” Clark said. “Every week when we come to the floor, it is going to be the people of this country who are going to be the focus of the work we do, and the campaign promises made are going to be promises kept.”
But there were few specifics. The leaders pledged to pass legislation rolling back Republicans’ Medicaid cuts and to reinstate subsidies for insurance plans through Obamacare. Beyond that, Jeffries pledged the caucus would come up with more plans through five “working groups,”on health care (which he noted would be co-led by leading progressive New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), on housing, gas and groceries, goods and utilities, and caregiving.
In many ways, progressives and moderates were echoing the same refrain this election cycle. Melat Kiros, one of the newly elected lawmakers who associates with the far-left Democratic Socialists of America and defeated a longtime incumbent Democrat in a primary, declared in her victory speech that voters had delivered a mandate to take on entrenched Washington interests and money in politics.
“No one knows better how fragile this system they’ve created is than the billionaires,” Kiros said. “This campaign proved that we know our collective power and we are coming to fight back.”
The message echoed almost identically even for Senate candidates who flipped deep red states, including South Carolina’s Annie Andrews and Texas’s James Talarico.
“We just proved that all the money in the world is no match for the people of Texas,” Talarico said in his victory speech. “And we just sent a message to every billionaire megadonor, every trillionaire megadonor, every corrupt defender of this broken political system — in this state, in this country, power belongs to the people.”
“South Carolina . . . you have shown the nation that in this era of partisan divides, of vitriol and name calling, in a politics dominated by billionaires and special interest groups and insiders in Washington. D.C., that we will not bow down,” Andrews said.
In many ways, the commonality between the swing candidates and the progressives was a villainization of Washington insiders who take corporate donations, a criticism Democratic leadership (who have to fill the party coffers) will itself have to face.
As Harvie went door knocking in middle- and working-class Levittown after Clark’s appearance at his campaign headquarters, he made a similar pitch. After pledging to end the war in Iran, fight tariffs, and bring down costs, Harvie told the voters who opened their doors that he refused corporate PAC money and wanted to ban members of Congress from trading stocks — a comment that had more than one voter nodding along.
At a breakfast meeting the next morning of a local Yardley-Morrisville chapter of Indivisible, a left-leaning grass-roots organization that at times wars with Democratic leaders, the potential signs that Democrats could actually be the big tent they strive to be were there.
Jennifer Marsh, one of the group’s organizers who developed a social media campaign in support of Harvie, said she was a longtime supporter of staunch progressive Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who perhaps on policy wouldn’t line up neatly with Harvie. But she saw no daylight with him because his background spoke volumes to her.
“When I look at the parties, I see one represented by billionaires and one represented by teachers and social workers, like Bob Harvie was a teacher,” said Marsh, a 63-year-old retired art director from Lower Makefield. “I believe the Democratic Party has to swing back toward that, and I believe Bob Harvie does too.”
Marsh was working alongside another local activist, Doug Moyer, a 65-year-old retired Education Testing Services employee and former longtime Republican who became a Democrat in 2015. But despite his close friendship and activism work with Marsh, Moyer said he feared the party will be “swayed by the allure of the progressive” and “lose twice as many moderate centrist independents.”
He said the key to keeping the coalition will be appearing steady to voters.
“Both parties make mistakes, but it’s very clear to me if you’re reasonable, objective, not living in a bubble, which party is insane, or which party is more reasonable,” Moyer said. “Yes, we have extremists in our party, the far progressive left, but they’re a tiny percentage compared to the number of crazy extremists in the other party.”
—
Original article HERE.
