The Establishment Still Has Its Claws on the Democratic Party

At least we can all be happy that No Labels has a zero percent success rate so far.538/ABC News

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Is there a red tide taking over the Democratic Party? 538 did the tedious work of actually finding out. The key statistic is not how many centrists have won their primaries or how many firebrand progressives have won theirs. The key statistic is: what happens when one of them runs against the other?

The organization with the best endorsement record in Democratic primaries remains the Democratic Party itself….In races where a party-endorsed candidate ran against a progressive-group-endorsed candidate (excluding any races where a candidate was endorsed by both sides), the party-endorsed candidate won 89 percent of the time.

I’d be curious about how this compares to past election cycles. I’d also be cautious about making too much of this. Almost by definition, party-endorsed candidates tend to have more money and more experience, while progressive challengers are new to the game and have fewer supporters. You’d hardly expect them to do as well as mainstream candidates.

That said, 538 also reports that quite a few #Resistance-endorsed candidates have won their primaries, though in some cases they’re just the same candidates endorsed by the establishment. (Or sometimes they’ve “won” hopeless races where the establishment didn’t even put up a primary candidate.) So the ultimate test for the #Resistance—the general election—is still very much up for grabs.

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