The Democratic Party Has Begun to Look More Like Its Voters
A lot of people, including me, called this putt a little bit early.
There are so many great things about Ayanna Pressley's massive upset win over Michael Capuano in Massachusetts's Seventh Congressional District Tuesday night that we should stop for a second and pay a little bit of an homage to Capuano, as good a progressive as there was in the House, but apparently, to everyone's surprise, including his own, he'd passed a kind of sell-by date. His proudest moment was voting against the Iraq War, something that a lot of higher profile Democratic politicians couldn't muster up the gumption to do, and he was a consistently dubious voice against whatever the hell we're trying to accomplish in Afghanistan.
Pressley's pitch was that they were almost the same on every issue but that she would lead in "a different way." Which, I suspect, is going to be the sub rosa slogan for every Democratic candidate this fall. People want people who lead in a different way. And, if there's a disagreement about what that different way is, then they'll figure that out after the election. Conor Lamb has a different way to lead. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes has a different way to lead, and so does Ayanna Pressley. Take it all and all, it's not a bad pitch to make. Certainly, the country's hungering for someone to lead in a way that's different from what it sees in Camp Runamuck.
From the pure numbers, Pressley won because she piled up a huge margin in Boston, in excess of 60 percent of the vote, where she's a city councillor, while Capuano barely hung on in Somerville, where he was the mayor 20 years ago when he was first elected to Congress. Back then, he won because he had a reliable base of support. But Somerville has changed, too, and people there want someone to lead in a different way. On Tuesday, he beat Pressley in Somerville by a little more than 100 votes. That's how 20-year incumbents lose.
Moreover, in the free-for-all in the Massachusetts Third District, Lori Trahan, a former congressional aide who was ranked fourth in the late polls, came blowing through the field to get a virtual tie (at the moment) with Dan Koh. Trahan is not an AOC/Pressley progressive; she is dubious on any form of single-payer healthcare system. If Trahan wins, and she should, then Massachusetts will have two women in the House and, of course, SPW in the Senate.
Pressley's victory was a big win for the state's popular attorney general, Maura Healey, who went against the party current and endorsed Pressley early on. Right now, Healey may be as most powerful a Massachusetts Democrat as Elizabeth Warren is. This is not the Massachusetts politics in which I grew up. I remember when every Democrat had a conniption fit when Shannon O'Brien ran against Mitt Romney, and let's not even get into that whole Martha Coakley business again. And, nationally, the Democratic Party has steadily begun to look more and more like its base, and that is a good thing, not a bad thing. I just wish there still was a place in Congress for more Mike Capuanos, too. I'm greedy.
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