Here’s a not implausible scenario: It’s January 2020. The Iowa caucuses are just one month away. There’s still an unwieldy pack of Democratic candidates, but several have dropped out after realizing that you actually need political talents and a message to run for president. In the home stretch, only four or five Democrats have a real shot to win Iowa or New Hampshire. The candidates and the media are bouncing from town to town, stuffing their bloated campaign-trail bodies into bulky winter coats, dutifully meeting future caucusgoers in cafes and Pizza Ranches. Every reporter is searching hopelessly for an outlet to plug in their phone. After the latest packed campaign event at a brewpub in Waterloo with decent Yelp reviews, political reporters swarm one of the Democratic front-runners for a media avail, eager for a response to Donald Trump’s latest tweet about Don Lemon. Into the scrum steps a mischievous reporter from a troll-y conservative news site. He asks the candidate a cheeky question invented out of thin air: “Senator, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just tweeted that the government should add a 10 percent tax on John Deere tractors in an effort to fight carbon emissions from farms and transition into a new hybrid tractor market. What do you think of that?”
Ocasio-Cortez has not said such a thing and likely won’t. But she and her legions of online supporters have become, in a matter of months, the de facto weather vane for progressive sentiment. So what are the chances this Democratic candidate in Iowa, baited by a Breitbart bro with a fake A.O.C. policy proposal, endorses this made-up idea on the spot, in that brewpub in Waterloo? As depressing as it sounds, there’s a small but realistic chance this fiction would actually come to life. Ideas that once seemed out-of-bounds are now creeping into the mainstream of Democratic politics, with social media acting as the accelerant. Democrats, in the rush to appease the noisiest voices on the Internet and grab onto any gust of fleeting attention, so far have shown they’re willing to jump on a bandwagon of ideas that Barack Obama would never have endorsed on his way to winning two presidential elections: backing reparations, abolishing ICE, getting rid of the Electoral College, running away from the word “capitalism.” As The New York Times put it on Tuesday, “activists are leveraging the early stages of the Democratic primary, creating pseudo-litmus tests for candidates eager to respond to the energy that is driving more extreme policy proposals.”
These “extreme” litmus tests get re-tweeted online with emoji claps from activists (and journalists whose reporting often veers into activism). Many of those same people point to polls showing that progressive momentum is on their side: a survey last week from the Des Moines Register showed that “more than half of likely 2020 Democratic caucusgoers [in Iowa] say they would be satisfied with a presidential candidate who wants the U.S. to be more socialist.” Times have certainly changed since Obama ran for office. There’s great hunger among Democrats, from New Hampshire to Arizona, for bold policies designed to empower the middle class and fix a grossly distorted economy in which the richest 1 percent of American families own 40 times the average family’s wealth. Once-forbidden ideas like Medicare-for-All and a wealth tax sound both audacious and common sense. Democrats of vastly different cultural backgrounds, whether they shop at Whole Foods or Piggly Wiggly, seem united in their contempt for unaccountable billionaires and corporations. Even hedge-fund honcho Ray Dalio tweeted a video of himself this week calling the country’s wealth gap “a national emergency.” These are arguments Democrats can win, especially with President Trump proposing almost a trillion dollars in cuts to Medicare over the next decade. Conversations like these are why Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are at the forefront of the Democratic conversation.
But this Democratic primary is about to test something else: whether burgeoning public support for daring economic policies coincides with support for more hot-burning cultural issues that seem to dominate Twitter in the Trump era. In other words, Democratic voters are very down with Medicare-for-All. But do they want to be talking about reparations or socialism in a head-to-head against Trump next year? Already, at least one prominent Democrat, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, is sounding an alarm, however gently, about a presidential primary in which the current rule of the game appears to be chasing the latest shiny metal object on Twitter to win over the most plugged-in and fashionable online.
“I want our candidates to start thinking about the general election and how you’re going to win the general election,” Brown told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday. “Of course we play to the progressive base,” Brown said, “but we’ve got to talk to workers. I don’t think our candidates are thinking of the general election. I think that there is a bit of one bird flies off the telephone wire, five more birds fly off the telephone wire. There is a little bit of that. I just want candidates to think for themselves and to move the country forward and think about the general election.”
Brown—who voted against NAFTA, opposed the Iraq War, and supported marriage equality before most every Democrat in his party—is no one’s idea of a moderate. But the Ohio senator, who last week decided against a presidential bid, also won four statewide elections in a culturally conservative state by keeping a tireless focus on kitchen-table topics, not the gurgles of Twitter. “I get gun owners votes in some significant numbers in Zanesville and Mansfield and Lima, Ohio, because I talk about education, and I talk about keeping their health care, and going after the drug companies and how to send your kids to community college.”
Brown has a bias. He believes that winning back the White House means reclaiming the Midwest—including Obama voters who flipped to Trump and African-Americans who were iffy on Clinton. Put another way, he knows that it would be folly for Democrats to abandon their former Electoral College strongholds and bank everything in 2020 on winning the “rising electorates” of Arizona, Texas, and Georgia.
Brown, somewhat obliquely, was suggesting that there seems to be a rush among the Democrats to respond to whatever the Twitter hive mind is demanding on a given day, without hewing closely to a consistent message that can appeal to voters across Iowa and South Carolina and California. Playing to short-term national attention on Twitter, when it’s off-brand and reactive, is a surefire way to get in trouble. Shortly after launching her campaign “For the People,” Kamala Harris said at a CNN town hall that sure, she would get rid of private insurance companies in pursuit of Medicare-for-All—a statement she quickly modified. John Hickenlooper, who premised his entire political career on his experience as a small business owner in Denver, got himself twisted on cable television by refusing to call himself a capitalist. A host of Democrats, including Harris, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, embarrassed themselves by rushing to defend disgraced actor Jussie Smollett on Twitter after his staged hate crime in Chicago—with Harris and Booker calling it a “modern-day lynching” without any set of facts at hand.
What Brown knows is that having a set of organizing principles and a clear message can be enough to inoculate a politician against the minute-by-minute demands of professional activists and angry tweeters. Candidates who make policy-by-Twitter, the ones who chase every micro-news-cycle, risk losing sight not just of what voters care about, but also why they’re running for president in the first place. At the moment, there are five candidates who have a clear, simple answer for why they’re running for president: Sanders, who wants to upend a “rigged” capitalist economy; Warren, who wants to do the same but within the confines of capitalism; Jay Inslee, who’s running solely to fight climate change; Pete Buttigieg, a millennial who is campaigning on the idea of generational change; and Andrew Yang, a businessman running on the concept of giving everyone in the country a Universal Basic Income. These candidates are not all attracting big crowds like Sanders and Warren, or even more famous candidates like Harris or Booker, but they are doing what any good touring band does best: they’re playing the hits. At every stop, in every interview, they aren’t wasting time with gimmicks or boring fans with a new sonic journey produced by Brian Eno. They’re sticking to their messages, making an argument, and tuning out the critics.
The current reigning champs of Twitter, the ones wielding immense power over both the media and Democrats running for president, are the Democratic Socialists of New York City. While their presidential candidate is Sanders, their true leader and beating heart is Ocasio-Cortez, whose charm, media savvy, and masterful articulation of radical ideas have made her the Pied Piper not just of the dyed-in-the-wool socialists, but also of regular people who think she makes sense. Like Sanders, she has helped usher big ideas into the political mainstream, including the Green New Deal and a 70 percent top marginal income tax rate. Other ideas like Medicare-for-All, free college education, and a higher minimum wage have combined to make the idea of socialism sound pretty good to Democrats who would have chafed at the label only a few years ago. Several polls show this. The aforementioned poll of Iowa Democrats from last week is one. Another is a Harris Poll obtained by Axios this week, which shows that roughly half of millennials and Gen Z would prefer “living in a socialist country.”
But in our era of forgetting everything that happened yesterday, what doesn’t get mentioned in these conversations is that Democrats have generally had a favorable view of socialism for almost a decade, well before Sanders emerged on the national stage. In a 2010 Gallup poll, 53 percent of Democrats reported a “positive view” of socialism, a number that has since crept up only slightly, to 57 percent. What has changed are the Democratic views of capitalism: In 2010, 53 percent of Democrats had a positive view of capitalism. By 2018, that number had dropped to just 47 percent. Political leaders like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Warren have punctured our homilies about the United States as a work-hard-and-play-by-the-rules meritocracy. With specific ideas instead of veiled rhetoric, they have reorganized our thinking about how capitalism works and how it doesn’t.
But does that mean Democrats are ready for socialism? Is America yearning for a planned economy? It’s hard to tell if voters in these polls know what “socialism” or “democratic socialism” actually means or implies. Is Barb in Council Bluffs saying she’s open to socialism because she’s been up late reading Michael Harrington and scanning Twitter for red rose avatars to follow? Or is Barb saying she’s open to socialism because she likes how Sanders has presented it: as an audacious but common-sense message to fight income inequality and provide access to basic services? It seems like the latter. At the very same time socialism is claiming a moment, a Harris Poll released last month asked voters, “Which label do you most identify with as a Democrat?” Almost half of Democrats chose the labels “Obama Democrat”—anathema to the emergent socialist left!—or “moderate Democrat.” Less than 10 percent picked “Socialist.” What’s more, polls suggest ideology doesn’t matter too much to Democrats. The same Des Moines Register poll that revealed an opening for socialism in Iowa also showed Joe Biden, that hated moderate who also happens to lead most 2020 polls, named as the candidate whose “political views” most align with Democrats in the state. Almost half of Democrats in Iowa said Sanders was “too liberal.” Confused? Same here. Twitter tells us that a “moderate” cannot win the nomination. Neither can a white man. But actual conversations with voters tells us that Democrats just want to beat Trump with a candidate who generally excites them and aligns with their values. Ideology and identity aside, Democrats are eager to hear from every candidate about how to best do that.
Do not tell any of this to the Democratic Socialists of New York City, of course. Empowered by Ocasio-Cortez’s victory in a single Democratic primary in a safe House district last year, plenty of them are bathing in newfound attention from the media, mostly online. “Twitter—a medium that structurally encourages moral grandstanding, savage infighting, and collective action—is where young socialism lives,” wrote Simon van Zuylen-Wood in a withering New York magazine piece about a movement that’s surging among college-educated whites in urban centers around the country. Van Zuylen-Wood spent months profiling members of the Democratic Socialists of America—“coolheaded Obaman technocracy is out; strident left-wing moral clarity is in”—who convene in bars around Brooklyn to drink and meet members of the opposite sex. Democratic Socialist membership is now “a sixth the size of the Rotary Club,” he wrote, a brag and a neg wrapped into one delicious turn of phrase.
What became clear in the piece, though, is that like the Democrats of Iowa, even the most devoted of Brooklyn socialists have a hard time defining the term “socialist.” For some, it’s rooted in old-school Marxist dogma. For others, it’s a political halfway house for new-to-the-game millennials activated by Sanders in 2016. And for others, socialism operates as a kind of Radical Chic grab-bag for feminists and Occupy Wall Street veterans and immigration reformers: a convenient proxy for whatever brand of anti-establishment left-wing politics you subscribe to. What unites this group, other than its whiteness, is its loudness. Van Zuylen-Wood pointed out that many of these New York socialists are journalists and former journalists, reared on Gawker. They know how to get eyeballs on Twitter and throw darts accordingly, even shaming Ocasio-Cortez for tweeting something nice about John McCain after he died. But their political muscle is decidedly smaller than their attentional powers on social media. Socialism might pack a punch in some congressional districts and state house races, but its reach is decidedly more limited when exposed to a bigger Democratic electorate that doesn’t stare at smartphones all day. Case in point: socialists in New York rallied behind Cynthia Nixon’s primary challenge last year to Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, a corporate centrist fairly reviled on the left despite his progressive stances on social issues. But in spite of Nixon’s Instagram-friendly liberal politics and a gush of flattering media coverage, Cuomo clobbered her by almost 30 points, thanks in large part to African-American primary voters who lined up with the governor. In a statewide primary in the bluest of states, the unlikeable moderate guy beat Nixon with ease. Twitter, once again, was not real life.
There’s a vocal contingent on the left that wants to reclaim socialism as a term of pride, not disparagement. That’s a noble cause. But the people who have done the most to usher socialism into the mainstream—Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez—have done so not by bragging about being socialists and banging that drum on Twitter, but by offering ideas that feel palatable to people who live in both Brooklyn, New York, and Brooklyn, Iowa. They try to create their own story lines and not distract themselves with dumbed-down cultural fights that give Trump an advantage. Neither is a perfect politician by any means: Sanders has blind spots around racial injustice, and Ocasio-Cortez gifted Republicans a series of cudgels by releasing slapdash Green New Deal talking points before fleshing out actual legislation. But both politicians do seem to understand that socialist policies are broadly popular only when they are wrapped in messaging that makes voters comfortable. That may be lame and square, and it certainly won’t get you laid in Greenpoint. But Trump is already gearing up to weaponize the word socialism for a pretty obvious reason: because plenty of Americans are still frightened by it. That’s why two Democrats—Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi—were quick to their feet with applause during the State of the Union Address when Trump declared that the United States will not become a socialist country. The goal posts are moving on the left, but despite what you read about those despicable neoliberals on the Internet, they aren’t moving fast enough for a sudden political realignment.
Those loudest voices on Twitter aren’t marginal. The platform has become a petri dish for the formation of elite opinion, with outsized power in the political press, and it has provided a lane for smart and clever people who deserve a voice to have one. But the convulsions of everyday Twitter, a small club of media elites and professional opinion-havers, are plainly disconnected from the concerns of most Democratic voters. There’s a real risk that otherwise smart, promising 2020 candidates begin to self-sabotage in their haste to appease this microscopic cluster of social-media activists just because they’ve got a megaphone. Democrats won the House last November—and a bucket of governorships—not by charging to the left, but by flipping Republican seats with so-called “moderate” candidates who were attuned to the concerns of middle-class suburbanites and working-class white women, primarily health care. Socialist, capitalist, feminist, white, black: the voters of 2018 cared little for labels. And those voters offer the best sample set for Democratic politics moving into 2020.
Eastern Iowa makes for a useful guidepost. Dubuque, a former manufacturing hub that’s transitioned into a more diverse modern economy, sits on the edge of the Mississippi River. It anchors Iowa’s first congressional district, which voted for Obama twice and then went for Trump in 2016. Democrat Abby Finkenauer re-captured the seat last year for the reasons mentioned above: she talked about health care, health care, and health care some more, studiously avoiding national culture wars and whatever Trump told Fox News last night.
Tom Townsend, the president of the AFL-CIO in Dubuque, called it an uncomplicated political formula that national Democrats seemed to have lost sight of before 2016. And yet, he told me, several of the Democrats currently running for president aren’t presenting a coherent rationale for their campaigns. “There are a couple I have talked to, and I don’t have a clue why they are running,” he said. “Other than they want to run.” One candidate who does make sense for many of his fellow workers, he said, is Sanders. “He talks to average people in a language they understand. It’s been a long time since people came to Dubuque and talked about real Midwestern issues, not what donors wanted to talk about or what national people want to talk about it. What people liked about Bernie is he was genuine. No one thinks he was making crap up to get corporate donations.”
Townsend said the “socialist” tag didn’t bother him because Sanders owned it and pivoted directly to his message of inequality and economic justice. Nor did Sanders get distracted by the latest gaffe or campaign controversy consuming the national media. He rose above it. “Bernie basically owned it and said, ‘Yeah, I am a socialist and here’s what I believe in,’” Townsend told me. “Most Democrats around here think capitalism is fine but needs to be reined in and kept in check at some level. Instead of worrying about every stupid thing, this label or that, we need to concentrate on the things that will gain support among working people. The Democrats and everyone in politics have largely ignored blue-collar working-class people for a long time. No one thinks anyone in government anymore is doing anything to help them out.”
But Townsend also warned Democrats against talking too much, in Iowa at least, about the topics that flare up so frequently on Twitter: abolishing ICE, guns, abortion, marijuana, issues of race and identity. “You have to stick to the real issues that matter to average everyday people,” Townsend said. “When you get on those other social issues, that’s when you get distracted. The candidates just need to talk to normal people about normal everyday things. Talk more about issues that matter to the masses.” Of course, “everyday things” and “real issues” are quite different to a voter in Dubuque than to a voter in, say, New Orleans. Iowa, after all, is over 90 percent white. But unlike national Democrats who have left Iowa for dead in a general election, Townsend believes the state can be won again in 2020—if courted by the right messenger.
Lee Carter, a 31-year-old Democratic Socialist who won a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017, echoed Townsend. “When was last time you can remember a mainstream politician talking about how high the rent is?” he asked. “People whose primary concern is the cost of rent aren’t hearing a solution to their problems. Look what happens if you actually go out and talk about giving working people power over their lives. Or if you make sure people can see a doctor, not just give them weird tax schemes. Or making college tuition free so that everyone can go. If you talk about them in a full-throated way and you talk to people who have been ignored by politicians for a long time, they will show up. That is not specific to Virginia or Brooklyn or San Francisco. It’s everywhere. Even in my tiny hometown of North Carolina.”
What Townsend and Carter are saying—one an old-school labor Democrat and the other a young socialist—is more or less what Sherrod Brown was arguing for on MSNBC earlier this week. Having a message that speaks to middle-class fairness is the most powerful tool one can brandish in Democratic politics. It’s a boring superpower that’s been proven time and again. Economic fairness is an argument that cuts across race, demography, gender, disability, and age. Nor does a focus on “middle-class” issues have to come at the expense of fighting for racial and social injustice. Those cultural battles become easier to fight when candidates have a reason for running: they can be folded into the message and a biography, if it’s a good one. It’s the candidates who don’t have a message, a coherent purpose for seeking office, who become distracted by the always-on pressures of the information wars, easily baited by Trump and suffocated in an avalanche of little blue birdies saying “That ain’t it, chief.”
Politics on Twitter, generally, is about making you feel bad. People are shamed for going to certain schools, for practicing a certain faith, for their gender, their race, or for using the wrong words, regardless of intent. Politics at the presidential level, the successful kind, could not be more different. Winning campaigns find a way to build coalitions, to unite people with shared values under an umbrella of charisma and a succinct message that rises above the din of Washington. This is how Democrats have won the presidency in the past. Maybe, in the Trump moment, politics calls for a sharper edge. But the Democrats who are confident in their reasons for running, and who aren’t afraid of what very smart people on Twitter say about them, are the ones likely to be rewarded.
Peter Hamby is the host of Snapchat’s Good Luck America.
