The 2020 Democratic primary has already been underway for months, with the likely candidates jockeying for email sign-ups and positioning themselves against the 800-pound gorilla in the White House: Donald Trump. Prominent Democrats have taken whatever opportunities available to them given their limited legislative power, whether through viral moments in Senate hearings, attention-grabbing tweets, or campaign-trail cameos for vulnerable allies in swing states. But a quieter campaign has been happening largely in the shadows—a battle for the hearts and minds of both the policy mavens who set the parameters of conventional wisdom on the left, and an activated Democratic base hungry to see those parameters expand. Call it the wonk primary.
It looks something like this: Most of the big-name Senate Democrats rumored to be eyeing 2020 presidential bids—among them Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders—have introduced at least one bold, progressive policy initiative as a legislative proposal over the past year. Their efforts are doomed to failure under a Republican-controlled Congress, but the initiatives are useful in shoring up that base’s morale, and, perhaps more important, planting a flag in what’s likely to be a crowded Democratic field.
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“It’s like a race to the great idea,” said Ann O’Leary, lawyer and former policy adviser to the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. “Who’s going to adopt what first, between guaranteed jobs, bold cash ideas and other policies … they’re recognizing, ‘OK, the election starts the day after the midterms,’ so you put a marker down the month before and really hook on.”
Top Democrats have drawn on progressive pipe dreams both new and old such as universal basic income and single-payer health care, as well as more relatively modest, proven initiatives like Kirsten Gillibrand’s Postal Banking Act, which would allow the U.S. Postal Service to establish basic checking and savings accounts and offer small-dollar loans, effectively putting payday lenders out of business. Harris’ LIFT the Middle Class Act would give a basic monthly income to Americans within a certain income bracket, an idea in vogue in Silicon Valley and pushed heavily in its universal form by ex-Facebooker Chris Hughes’ Economic Security Project. From a policy standpoint, the mood on the left is freewheeling, collaborative and ambitious—the product of a nothing-to-lose Democratic Party at its lowest ebb of power since the 1920s.
The 2016 primary was a bitter two-person contest, in which the policy was decidedly secondary to the clash of ideologies between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, whose finely tuned policy apparatus was overshadowed by the Vermont senator’s characterization of her as an establishment hack beholden to corporate dollars, and in turn how Clinton painted her opponent as an impractical dreamer.
The next Democratic primary will be different. The 2020 contenders, however many they number, all know they want to remedy wealth inequality, and they know they want to “resist” Trump by whatever means necessary. The combination could lead to the Democrats’ most ambitious slate of legislation since the New Deal—and the competition to attach one’s name to FDR-style progressivism is already well underway.
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The 2016 primary birthed what was perhaps a surprising result given its bitterness—a fledgling new consensus on the left. Ideas that had once been the domain of the activist fringe, like a national $15 minimum wage or tuition-free college, now took pride of place in the party’s platform. In 2018, that has emboldened Democrats to promise voters a more robust program of economic reforms heading into both the midterms and eventual presidential election.
Today, boutique research groups on the progressive end of the policy spectrum, like the Roosevelt Institute, are gaining new influence amid the explosion of interest in worker-friendly economic ideas. “It’s not one or two representatives or senators, it’s people all across the spectrum, from center-left to far left,” said Nell Abernathy, the Roosevelt Institute’s VP of research and policy.
The Democrats’ leftward lurch is simply following their voters, who despite emerging from the 2007-08 recession were left behind in many ways by the recovery, liberal strategists say.
“We knew the middle class, while they were more stable, had not improved their lot—the cost of being in the middle class was worse than ever, housing prices were rising, college costs, child care,” said O’Leary of her experience with Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “Bernie Sanders really captured something that was part of that problem with the cost of college, and that got to the hearts of a bunch of voters.”
Now, Sanders’ blue-sky policy thinking has infused the Democratic Party—long dominated by veterans of the Bill Clinton administration better known for shrinking welfare rolls than expanding them—with a newfound economic progressivism. Bills like Harris’ LIFT (Livable Incomes for Families Today) Act, with its direct monthly cash infusion, or Booker’s American Opportunity Accounts Act, which would establish “baby bonds” for all American children that would be funded by the government every year before maturing at age 18, would have been unthinkable under the previous status quo. Warren’s ambitious housing plan would, in a similar manner, provide direct financial assistance to first-time homebuyers in areas that were previously redlined, or segregated by race.
Sanders, in his typically bold fashion, has prioritized what might be the biggest rallying point in Democratic politics that doesn’t come with a long red tie and fake tan: The ongoing fight to improve America’s health care. Sanders, who has criticized former President Barack Obama for not going far enough in increasing access to care, wasted little time in the Trump era before introducing his “Medicare for All” bill in September 2017. In doing so, he staked a claim as the leading champion of one of the Democratic base’s most passionate causes.
Sanders also may be helping himself with a constituency he struggled with in 2016: African-Americans. “When you start to look at who is more likely to have medical debt in collections, it’s African-Americans and also the young—the share of millennials and Generation X with medical debt is actually greater than the silent generation and baby boomers,” said Signe-Mary McKernan, economist and co-director of the Opportunity and Ownership Initiative at the Urban Institute.
Warren, Sanders’ main progressive rival, has recently taken a swing at another cause célèbre of the left: a crisis of affordable housing that’s left many Americans spending nearly half their monthly income on rent. Warren’s American Housing and Mobility Act takes a two-pronged approach, using subsidies and regulatory changes to increase the supply of affordable housing while subsidizing down payments for new homebuyers.
Harris and Booker’s signature policy efforts have been less of a bank shot: They aim to put money directly in people’s wallets. Booker’s program would give children a $1,000 savings account at birth, which would then be boosted each year by an amount determined by their family’s income (the lower-income the household, the larger the deposits). When the fund matures, that child would then be free to use it for life costs like college tuition or a down payment for a home.
According to a Booker aide, it was developed closely with Sandy Darity and Darrick Hamilton, economists who have been developing similar ideas for “baby bonds” for the better part of the past decade. (Darity and Hamilton were also consulted in the development of Harris’ LIFT program, and have done extensive work on the jobs guarantee programs in vogue with many Democrats, highlighting their position as in-demand policy tribunes on the left.)
Hamilton described Democrats’ growing interest in such policies as a reflection of the base’s desire for bolder economic action. “Sandy and I have been talking about this for well over a decade,” Hamilton said of the “baby bonds” plan. “When you talk about the appetite to consider these policies, we go in a little bit wary to make sure [politicians are] serious and not wasting our time, or worse, are going to take the policy and turn it into something it wasn’t intended to be. The Booker team … it was clear to me they were serious.”
Harris’ program would provide even more direct cash assistance, providing families with up to $500 per month and individuals with up to $250 per month through a tax program that would essentially invert the unpopular Trump tax cuts. The program excludes the poor with no income, which may hurt its popularity with critics on the left, but The Atlantic reported the calculation of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (who were consulted during the development of the bill, according to a Harris aide) that it would lift 9 million Americans out of poverty, making it an undeniably powerful tool were it to be enacted.
The LIFT Act resembles in many ways with its overall effect the Earned Income Tax Credit, the benefit to working taxpayers that enjoys bipartisan popularity and which Democrats see as ripe for expansion, including Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Congressman Ro Khanna of California, who introduced legislation last year that would do so.
“I’ve never seen an issue take off so quickly to get to a place where it’s already poised to be one of the big ideas in the 2020 race, and certainly in the 2020 Democratic primary,” said Adam Ruben of the Economic Security Project, who has already consulted with Harris, Brown and Khanna’s congressional policy teams.
Ann O’Leary described Harris’ plan as exactly the kind of bold idea that could help with what might be the most important part of the 2020 primary—finding a way to steer the national conversation, instead of having it dictated by the president. Citing Trump’s recent announcement of his mysterious new tax cuts, O’Leary said, “She got him to pay attention, and he didn’t say ‘You’re a crazy spending lefty.’ He said, ‘You’re right, and I’m gonna do it better.’”
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Of course, Trump’s attention can be a currency in its own right among top Democrats, regardless of the content of his message. Riding the fine line between harnessing that attention and letting the president dictate the terms of engagement will be a crucial part of any campaign against him; with their bold new plans for the economy and the social safety net, Democrats are clearly hoping they can hold that engagement on what they see as their natural turf.
It remains to be seen, however, whether economic grist alone can empower Democrats to take down Trump. It certainly didn’t work for Hillary Clinton. With his ability to command entire news cycles in his pajamas, Trump undeniably has the upper hand in driving the conversation, and Democrats will have to respond effectively to him no matter where he takes it.
Connie Razza, vice president of policy and research at progressive think tank Demos, argues that Democrats need to use policy ideas to directly counter the president’s identity-based appeal.
“If progressives are silent on race, then the other side gets to try and reframe it so that they can take what is clearly not in the interest of working and middle-class white folks and make it palatable because they’re vilifying people of color,” Razza said.
That will be no small feat for a party already dealing with its own world of internal conflict on identity politics. And as the primary draws nearer, new fault lines are likely to emerge.
“In a primary the incentive is to distinguish yourself and not necessarily be unified,” said Abernathy of the Roosevelt Institute.
And policy wonks are wary of the possibility that Democrats’ newfound appetite for redistribution may not last—or that the heat of electoral politics will see earnest, research-backed ideas watered down into something entirely different on the campaign trail.
“One thing we have to be careful in going forward with these bold ideas is to watch for the risk that they get watered down or turned into something else,” said Hamilton, the economist. “Someone could take a job guarantee and turn it into a welfare-to-work program, and we certainly don’t want that.”
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