These Democrats Need Primary Challenges

Donald Trump is flailing, the path forward is clear, and these people just don't get it.

Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.

First, I just put out this short documentary on the downhill slide of the ski industry, which is run by a corporate duopoly that represents so much that’s wrong with modern American business. Watch it?

OK, now that that’s out of the way, tonight we’ve got a deep dive into Trump’s falling approval ratings, the attacks on Medicaid, and why Democrats are screwing up this moment and how they can get back on track.

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I want to extend my sincere gratitude to the Democrats who voted to censure Rep. Al Green for yelling in defense of Medicaid during Donald Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night. Targeting and planning out primary challenges has to start somewhere, and the ten Democrats who chose decorum over democracy are the kind of self-interested politicians who have abdicated the right to represent the people.

It’s important to establish, before anybody argues that moderates in swing districts have to take tough votes, that this censure was not a “gotcha” trap sprung by Republicans. House Speaker Mike Johnson wouldn’t have even brought it to the floor had there not been a critical mass of Democrats complaining to Beltway tip sheet reporters about the gumption of colleagues who dared to do more than hold up some ping pong paddles during Trump’s speech.

House leadership may not like it, but poll after poll has found that Democratic voters are unhappy with the party’s flaccid response to Donald Trump’s ascension to quasi-dictator. Instead of respecting the base and reflecting on their strategy, the ten Democrats — no doubt encouraged by leadership, which disciplined other members for speaking out — did the opposite, formally rebuking Green and authoring a sentence that I really never thought I’d have to write:

These ten Democrats voted to publicly discipline a highly regarded Black Democrat for calling out the GOP plan to throw millions of working class Americans off of an overwhelmingly popular health insurance program.

Here are their names and their 2024 election margin of victory.

• Rep. Ami Bera (CA-6); 57-42%

• Rep. Ed Case (HI-2); 72-28%

• Rep. Jim Costa (CA-21); 52.5-47.5%

• Rep. Laura Gillen (NY-4); 51-48.8%

• Rep. Jim Himes (CT-4); 61-37%

• Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (PA-6); 56-43%

• Rep. Marcy Kaptur (OH-9); 48.3-47.6%

• Rep. Jared Moskowitz (FL-23); 52.4-47.6%

• Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA-3); 51.7-47.9%

• Rep. Tom Suozzi (NY-3); 51.7-48.1%

You can also add NY Rep. George Latimer, who criticized Green to Axios but was too much of a coward to vote. Latimer, a moderate with a long history of retrograde racial policies, tax evasion, and car accidents, rode millions of dollars in AIPAC donations to a primary victory over Rep. Jamaal Bowman as House leadership looked on. Fair to say that they got what they wanted.

“When they go low, we go high” totally works. Totally.

Like Ed Case, Latimer won his district by an enormous 72-28% margin, making this vote particularly egregious. It’s impossible to argue that Bera, Himes, Houlahan, and Moskowitz (who underperformed the national ticket) had any reason to vote for the censure, and frankly, neither Kaptur (78-years-old) nor Costa (72-years-old) should really be running for re-election.

As a New Yorker, I’m also convinced that Gillen and Suozzi would have been just fine had they voted against censuring Green, especially with Trump not on the ticket in 2026.

An unnecessary distraction

It’s a pain when Democrats vote to oppose college debt forgiveness and drug price negotiations; when they vote to legitimize a runaway fascist, it’s outrageous and unacceptable.

In this case, it’s also very stupid politics.

Green’s outburst forced the media to discuss Republicans’ plan to cut Medicaid, something that Trump avoided in his speech. By enabling and participating in this public shaming, Democrats gave Trump a reprieve and turned the narrative into several days of “Democrats in disarray” stories.

It’s a missed opportunity, because there are few policies that would be more unpopular than cutting Medicaid, a program that has a 77% approval rating. According to a new KFF tracking poll, a mere 17% of registered voters saying that they want funding cut from the program. Moreover, just 33% of registered Republicans want to see reduced spending on Medicaid. Instead, a plurality of voters (42%) want the government to increase funding to the program, while nearly as many (40%) want to see the funding stay the same.

These crosstabs are even more telling:

More than half of the public say either they themselves have ever been covered by Medicaid (18%) or that a family member has ever been covered (35%). An additional 13% say that they have a close friend who has ever been covered by the program.

Substantial shares of Democrats (52%), independents (57%), and Republicans (44%) say they or a family member has ever been covered by Medicaid, as do substantial shares of those who voted for President Trump (44%) and former Vice President Harris (51%), and those who live in rural areas (54%).

Perhaps relatedly, nearly three-quarters (73%) of the public say that Medicaid is “very important” to their local community. This includes a similar share of rural residents (75%), as well as majorities of Republicans (61%), Trump voters (61%), and rural Trump voters (66%).

These numbers are not the result of some fluke study; even the deepest of red states have voted in recent years to expand Medicaid. Whatever one thinks of Green’s conduct, the decision to take the onus off Trump’s threats to Medicaid and send instead send the message that some Democrat is a kook was a total own goal.

Democrats have spoken out for Medicaid, of course, but mostly in things like official letters that get small mentions in Politico, as if that matters at all these days. They need to be far more aggressive, because retaining public support is not guaranteed. The KFF poll also found that many people are ignorant about Medicaid recipients and liable to support conservative restrictions if they don’t receive the right information:

Overall support for work requirements drops from 62% to 32% when those who initially support the proposal hear that most people on Medicaid are already working and many would risk losing coverage because of the burden of proving eligibility through paperwork. Overall support also drops to 40% after supporters hear that there would be an increase in state administrative costs to oversee the work requirement.

On the other hand, when opponents of work requirements hear the argument made by supporters that imposing such requirements could allow Medicaid to be reserved for groups like the elderly, people with disabilities, and low-income children, support for work requirements increases from 62% to 77%.

It’s also important to note that this wasn’t just about Medicaid. Hakeem Jeffries was said to have instructed his members to not make themselves the story during Trump’s speech, then disciplined a handful of progressives who lightly heckled the president instead. Such proactive cowardice suggests that Democrats are seriously overestimating Trump’s popularity right now.

The honeymoon is over

It was hard to believe that he could turn in a more catastrophic performance than he did during the pandemic, but the first two months of Trump’s second term have been more deliberately destructive: canceling the government services that people rely on, sending tens of thousands of federal workers into unemployment and promising exponentially more firings, roiling markets with tariffs, and sending communities into chaos.

The poll numbers are dropping precipitously for Trump: February’s Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 39% of Americans approve of his handling of the economy, while 47% disapprove. Strikingly, 67% of Americans think that the economy is rigged to help the rich and powerful, and 75% of Americans believe that the economic elite have too much influence at the White House.

They have a chance to grab the mantle of change and transform the perception of the party, which is at a historic nadir. It’s not happening, so Blueprint, a centrist polling firm, is out with a new series of surveys that confirm the public’s impatience with Trump, hunger for economic solutions, and need for a cohesive message from Democrats.

First, here’s how the public viewed Trump’s performance on a number of different issues — note that the survey left the field in mid-February, before several rounds of mass firings, tariff screwups, and market declines, so these numbers are probably best case scenario for the White House and likely even worse now:

And here’s how the public rates specific Trump policies and decisions:

Note: I cropped the second graphic because each email can only be so large, so I’ll note here that the only Trump policies to receive high marks are ones related to immigration, which is in line with the first graph’s numbers.

What’s clear is that the public is losing confidence in Trump’s ability to handle the economy and hates corruption, both the ramped up self-dealing as well as the favors that the administration is performing for banks and donors. When it comes to Democrats, voters are pretty uniform in what they want to see:

These things aren’t difficult.

The idea that the same Americans who voted to return Donald Trump — a convicted felon, insurrectionist, and serial philanderer who was found liable for sexual assault — to the White House actually care about decorum in a speech is the most absurd thing you could possibly suggest. To choose the rules of the House chamber over an opportunity to push the Trump administration on its proposed cuts to Medicaid is the most absurd decision that you could possibly make.

I say these things not to hate on Democrats, but to try and save them from themselves. Making a national story out of showing respect to Donald Trump as he burns the government and wrecks the economy is something that can only be explained by wanting to keep Democrats in the minority. And that’s why primaries need to happen. They may not win the election, but pushing Democrats to be better is a victory in and of itself.

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