Today’s Democratic Party is divided along two separate axes: an ideological one and, for lack of a better term, a strategic one. The former is what separates, say, democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from centrist Rep. Jared Golden; the latter, what separates, say, Rep. Ro Khanna from Sen. Chuck Schumer (whose ousting as party leader Khanna has called for).
It’s important not to conflate or confuse the two, or even to exaggerate each of them. On ideology, there’s clearly a divide between Zohran Mamdani and Abigail Spanberger, yet the two ran successful campaigns focused almost entirely on the same issue: affordability. Republican economic policy incapable of addressing (or actually exacerbating) acute hard times is a great unifier, as the hugely successful New Deal Democrats of the 1930s demonstrated, overcoming the immense cultural, religious, and ethnic divisions that had kept the party as far from power as a party can be during the 1920s.
The strategic divide, of course, is all about how Democrats should grapple with Donald Trump. Nothing about it correlates with ideology, as centrist Democrats’ anger and exasperation (see, e.g., Jon Chait) at the Democrats who voted to end the shutdown makes very clear. It’s worth noting that the Democrat who has most effectively countered Trump—California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who successfully led the campaign to create five new Democratic House seats—has seized the pole position in the party’s 2028 presidential contest. For now, at least, his strategic success is such that it’s rendered him seemingly immune from any ideological profiling by his fellow Democrats. For what it’s worth, he’s clearly more on the Spanberger side than Mamdani’s, though his success at having California’s government fund the production and distribution (starting January 1) of affordable insulin is more socialistic than anything Mamdani ran on. On cultural issues, he’s literally and figuratively a San Francisco Democrat, which means he’d schlep some heavy political baggage into an election requiring 270 electoral votes.
Strategy and ideology don’t rhyme. On most issues, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is a little to the left of his fellow Virginia senator, Mark Warner, certainly on labor issues, as Warner is the one Democratic senator who’s by no means a sure vote for labor law reform. But it was Kaine who voted to end the shutdown even as Warner voted no. (Virginia, of course, was home to more laid-off federal workers than any other state.)
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