More United Than They Appear

All the worry about fractures in the majority party may be more apparent than real. Even for the moderates, it's better for them if their president succeeds rather than to be the reason he doesn't.

One reason why Democrats have been so unified is that there are structural reasons to expect a majority caucus to be more cohesive than a minority one. For one thing, minority-party members’ “votes don’t make or break legislation a lot of the time,” Gregory Koger, a professor of political science at the University of Miami, told FiveThirtyEight, so “there is a little more leeway for them to break with their party.” For another, majority-party members (especially when the president is also of that party) have a clear electoral incentive to get things done. “All Democrats — regardless of whether they’re moderate or progressive — really need the Biden administration to succeed,” said Ruth Bloch Rubin, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. But on the other hand, the minority party has “competing incentives: They want the president to look ineffective but also want to bring things home to their district.”

The centrists really would be to blame. Do they want that?

the progressives are begging the centrists to meet them somewhere in the middle. The centrists — really, just the tiny handful of holdouts — are refusing to negotiate, threatening to torpedo the entire Biden presidency if they don’t get exactly what they want.

One thing that has enabled their tactics to succeed is the knee-jerk assumption by people with moderate inclinations to attribute reasonableness to any self-styled centrist posture. But nothing could be less reasonable than refusing to negotiate or articulate your position.