WASHINGTON — Moderate Democratic candidates outperformed their liberal counterparts in key 2020 U.S. House elections, according to a new analysis from a center-left think tank, coming closer to matching President Joe Biden’s performance in swing districts as many progressive favorites lagged much further behind.
Officials from the think tank Third Way who analyzed the data said the findings should serve as a lesson for Democrats that strongly liberal candidates make for weaker nominees in the most important congressional races, and that the best option for the party in the 2022 midterm elections is to closely embrace Biden and his political agenda.
“Republicans were calling everyone a socialist. They were using the same attacks everywhere,” said Matt Bennett, Third Way’s co-founder. “But it stuck in places where it was closer to the truth for some than others.”
The group’s study adds to a glut of post-election research from Democrats that has sought to determine why many of the party’s down-ballot candidates underperformed expectations, a topic of heated debate since November. Most Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate and House failed to receive as much support from voters as Biden.
Progressives have argued that they have been unfairly scapegoated for the disappointment, arguing that their focus on police reform and health care are necessary to energize the Democrats’ base.
But the study from Third Way, whose advocacy for a more moderate Democratic approach has made it a frequent target of the left, suggested that whatever additional votes progressives received by increasing turnout were overwhelmed by defections from persuadable voters.
In the study, Third Way senior political analyst David de la Fuente compared a group of 11 non-incumbent Democratic candidates endorsed by three progressive groups — Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress — to a group of 29 challengers endorsed by the NewDem Action Fund, which is backed by moderate Democratic House members. De la Fuente tracked how much voter support each candidate received in their district compared to Biden.
In all of the districts analyzed, the study found progressive candidates underperformed Biden by a 7.1 percentage-point margin on average. But moderate candidates underperformed Biden by only 4 percentage points.
And the disparity grew in districts identified by House Democrats as the most likely to flip from Republican control. In five of those races with a progressive candidate, the Democrat underperformed Biden by an average of 10.2 percentage points.
Meanwhile, 26 moderate candidates in those districts underperformed Biden by just 3.9 percentage points on average.
Third Way’s study highlighted races like the one in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where Biden won by nearly seven points over former President Donald Trump, but the Democratic House nominee, progressive favorite Kara Eastman, lost by nearly five points. By comparison, in competitive districts like Virginia’s 5th, moderate Cameron Webb managed to outperform Biden.
In an interview, de la Fuente emphasized that in safe Democratic districts, the more liberal candidates generally do as well as their moderate counterparts. Mondaire Jones in New York’s 17th Congressional District, for instance, outran Biden.
But he said the gap grows in areas with a concentration of moderate swing voters, in the races Democrats must win if they want to control a majority.
“It’s something you wouldn’t really see in a safe Democratic district, probably in a big city. It’s not really hurting us there,” de la Fuente said. “But it’s hurting us in these swing districts, where there are massive underperformances relative to Biden.”
The results weren’t always uniform: In some areas, like in swing districts near Philadelphia and Dayton, Ohio, moderate candidates suffered losses as great as or greater than some of their liberal counterparts.
And even as Third Way officials say they believe in the study’s conclusions, Bennett emphasized that they can’t yet fully explain why moderate candidates came closer to matching Biden’s vote totals than progressives. (Third Way officials are helping conduct a post-election research project that will be released in the coming months, and Bennett emphasized that its conclusions are not yet clear.)
But he and de la Fuente agreed that the data nonetheless makes clear that Democrats running in next year’s elections should closely align with Biden, given his relative popularity. It’s the best way, Bennett argued, to win over the moderate voters Democrats will need in 2022, when turnout is even harder to generate.
“Our view is if low propensity voters didn’t show up with Donald Trump on the ticket given the impact of negative partisanship, they’re definitely not going to show up for someone they’ve never heard of in a midterm election,” Bennett said.
