Say what you want about DiFi, but she was the occasional voice of reason in the Dem party. But...
In a sharp rebuke to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the California Democratic Party has declined to endorse the state’s own senior senator in her bid for reelection.
Riven by conflict between progressive and more moderate forces at the state party’s annual convention here, delegates favored Feinstein’s progressive rival, state Senate leader Kevin de León, over Feinstein by a vote of 54 percent to 37 percent, according to results announced Sunday.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/...in-leon-423452
No one should be a Senate lifer, IMHO. But the way that this one played out for Feinstein is, IMHO, more evidence that the Dem party is swinging more left, and has been for years.
Now, anticipating some responses that a post like this will get, is the Repub party swinging further right? Well, a
study published a couple years ago - and I think I posted it here back then - does indicate that while both parties are experiencing polarization, the Dems are moving to further to the left than the Repubs are moving to the right.
I'd also suggest that Trump befuddles the Repub base. He's non-ideological, and while he appears to have "conservative instincts" on economic issues, he also appears more liberal on social issues. Also, since he's non-ideological, his positions on issues are harder to nail down. That may blunt any significant ideological shifts in the party's politics during the remainder of Trump's tenure.
The real question is: where are the voters. Are more voters conservative or liberal in their views? And what about the views of younger Americans?
Some of the answer depends on who you ask. Interestingly,
Politico ran this piece in 2015, a little more than a year before election, finding that Americans are not moving to the left as some folks believed. While holding some positions that might have been identified as "liberal", surveys found that:
The real defect in the theory that America is moving left is that the polling evidence does not back it up. The country might not like the GOP, but it is generally not abandoning conservative views.
Also, this:
But on many other issues, even as the country’s demographics are changing, our core beliefs are not. It’s instructive to compare today’s polls on a range of other issues with those from 1999-2000, the last time we were nearing the end of a two-term Democratic presidency. Look at issues through a conventional left-right prism, and you see a public that has either not changed its views or has even shifted in a more conservative direction.
CNN also ran
this piece on Millennials just before the election. While some assumed that millennials were more liberal, that piece's author didn't find supporting evidence of that in his studies. In fact, the study suggested a trend toward individuals identifying as "independent" rather than Democrat or Republican. However, younger voters tended to lean more to the right than the previous generations of voters.
On a final note - I happened to watch ABC's This Week show yesterday. Kasich and Hickenlooper were being interviewed together and were apparently trying to present themselves as alternatives to the polarized Dem and Repub parties. "Two moderates that were willing to work together to get things done", I guess, was their message. Ultimately, I thought they both ended up looking like idiots. However, Kasich did say one thing that I agreed with: I have no idea what the Democrat party stands for." I've asked the question here here on this forum any number of times. I've never gotten a sincere response to the question, so I've assumed that none of you are clear on what the party stands for either. According to a recent
WaPo poll, a majority think that the only thing that the party stands for is being against Trump. WaPo, in their usual feckless style, seems to suggest that this is a good thing for Dems, suggesting that the Dems "don't need to be anything more than the anti-Trump party right now".... Well, maybe that was true a year ago, but we're now only months away from casting ballots in the 2018 mid-terms, and its still the case that the Dems have no unifying message other than "Trump sucks". Voters tend to want to vote "for" something rather than "against" something, so I suspect "Trump sucks" might resonate with the base, but it will also likely repel moderates.