My postmortem on the House:
- less corporate dems after election
- 2 more progressive dems after election
- A small move in the right direction
Calling all Democrats in rural/suburban areas "Corporate dems" is a pointlessly divisive and wrong moniker. It's a bad take.
Democrats lost seats in Florida (2), Iowa (1), South Carolina (1), Texas (1), Michigan (1), New Mexico (1), and Oklahoma (1). So far Democrats flipped two seats in North Carolina. The votes are still being counted, though, and we don't know the final tally.
Florida, Iowa, S. Carolina, Texas, and Oklahoma are all states won two elections in a row by Donald Trump. The two seats Democrats flipped are in North Carolina suburbs which narrowly went to Trump.
These are suburban to rural conservative Trump districts. These aren't "Corporate Dems," they're rural or suburban Democrats, where the votes simply aren't there for progressive issues that win in, for instance, my progressive Massachusetts House District, or in Brooklyn. Saying that it's
good that Democrats lose these seats is suggesting that it's good for Republicans to have a house majority rather than Democrats, because there are far more center-right House districts than there are center left and progressive house districts.
If our mentality is "Good! We don't need the suburbs!" then there's a couple results of that:
- The progressive legislation that comes out of my urban Massachusetts district will never get a vote in the House. The legislation won't even be written because of the next point:
- And equally important to legislation, those progressive Democrats like, say, Ayanna Pressley or AOC, will never be on House committees because Democrats won't have the majority in those committees.
The second point is one that seems lost on a lot of people who hate suburban or working class rural Democrats. The reason AOC is on 5 important House committees is because Democrats won 43 suburban, conservative seats in 2018. When Democrats lose some of those seats in 2020 and then perhaps in 2022, then they lose those open spaces on committees and AOC gets replaced on the Environmental committee with some Republican who takes snowballs onto the House floor to say that Climate Change isn't real.
Legislation starts in committee. House investigations start in committee. AOC is also on the House finance committee, and she's a junior member so her place on that committee is most at risk. If there's financial abuse that House Finance committee Democrats want to investigate, and if you want AOC to be the one asking questions to some corrupt bankers who are fucking over working class Americans with predatory loans, when you lose those 8 "Corporate dem seats," AOC is likely to get replaced with some senior Republican who voted "No" on Dodd-Frank. The reason she's on that committee now is because Democrats flipped 43 former Republican seats in previously conservative districts. When you lose those seats, you lose the committee assignments that come with them and Republicans get to pick up Democrats from those committees.
So, no, it's never good to lose seats to Republicans. Losing to Republicans is not moving in the right direction. It's fine to look for silver linings, but losing seats means less progressive legislation, not more. It means less progressive influence in the house, not more.
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