Good Faith Electability Arguments are Over
To the extent arguments for moderation were ever legitimate, partisan gerrymandering renders them moot. We should start acting like it.
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This week, Chris Rabb won the Democratic nomination in PA-03 by 15 points. Rabb campaigned on what might be termed the Hannah Einbinder platform: Go Birds, Fuck ICE, Free Palestine. The district is one of the bluest in the country. Chris Rabb is going to Congress.
Predictably, immediate response to Rabb’s decisive win on an unapologetically anti-ICE, anti-imperialism, pro-working people platform was celebratory on the left and dismissive everywhere else. Commenters declared his primary unrepresentative of how his politics would fare in a general election. Some of those comments were deleted once others pointed out that there isn’t a Republican candidate running in the PA-03 general. Some didn’t. I admire their spirit.
One might argue pivoting center (i.e. pivoting right) in response to right-wing populist authoritarianism is a bad strategy even in swing districts. One might also argue centrism is a concept that exists exclusively in thinkpieces as opposed to a coherent political worldview held by everyday people. (Luckily, Katie and Caro at Diabolical Lies argued that fairly recently, so you can just listen to them.) But the Rabb discourse makes plain that arguments about pivoting center deserve no air time whatsoever. If these arguments were ever made in good faith and with real understanding, they certainly can’t be from here.
Make no mistake: many people making pro-centrism arguments fail to do basic research about specific elections before weighing in, like the commenters who failed to realize Rabb is functionally already the Congressperson-elect following his primary, and instead argue ideologically because the word socialism scares them. We know the arguments about centrism as a general election necessity don’t apply to Chris Rabb. More importantly, there’s a broader argument that stems from that realization.
As Democrats and Republicans alike race to gerrymander the country, courtesy of the Roberts Court’s racism, the kind of “swing districts” where arguments about centrism are relevant at all are vanishing. Districts across the country will look much more like Rabb’s, where the winner of the relevant primary is the de facto winner of the seat.
Party loyalists have said for years that infighting about policy should happen in primaries, a particularly galling take to hear from the same group that ensured the 2024 election lacked one. But let’s accept their premise, because we can.
If the point of centrism is nebulous electability, if we’d run on Medicare for All if only it polled well (apparently the support of 65% of Americans is insufficient for the center), if we support compromise with fascists for the sake of winning elections and no other reason, then we no longer need to engage with the concept in the growing number of districts across the country where the primary election is functionally the general. So let’s not.
Partisan gerrymandering, for all its anti-democratic flaws, renders the electability argument moot. What’s the point of drawing safely blue seats only to fill them with candidates that would be considered center-right through the rest of the Western world? Do we think Republicans are disenfranchising Black voters so that they can fill gerrymandered seats across the South with people who appeal to the mythical center? Does it seem likely that Donald Trump is successfully primarying state-level Republican elected officials who rejected partisan gerrymandering because he wants Liz Cheney and Chris Christie to run in the newly drawn Congressional seats?
The point of partisan gerrymandering is to shore up political power so that you don’t have to appeal to the center. You cannot both recognize the necessity of responsive gerrymandering and continue arguing that Democrats should compromise on policies that make people’s lives better. We’re done here. Sprint left.
The one party-insider critique of the left I tend to agree with applies even more urgently here: progressives, leftists, and socialists need to run. As they do, their supporters should stop engaging on conversations about electability in general elections. It’s always been a time-suck of an argument. The only way to win it is by winning, and the best way to win is to focus on campaigning instead of on arguing with the guys who wrote the DNC autopsy.1
If, like me, you’re energized by Chris Rabb’s win and want to build on the momentum, there are still plenty of primaries coming up in safely blue seats where truly progressive challengers have stepped up to run. Consider signing up for remote or in-person volunteering with other Justice Democrats and/or American Demands (shameless plug)-aligned candidates. Send them some cash—they need it, without corporate support. And don’t bother arguing whether they can win in the general. We don’t have to do that shit anymore.
This was of course going to get a nod today. As I’ve remarked elsewhere, perhaps my own political instincts are not quite as sharp as I’d like to believe because they are dulled by optimism. I really should’ve known that the DNC was holding off on release of the autopsy because an overpaid consultant turned it in half-finished as opposed to because it was an incisive critique of the Party’s abject failure to meet the moment.