[rubecube]

Originally Posted by nfotiu

I posted an article above about a Virginia house member who almost lost her seat, that she won rather easily in 2018. Everything she hear from her campaign was that she had to fight off being associated with defund the police and socialism, and she heard the same thing from other democratic colleagues who lost their seats.

Ah well, if a centrist congresswoman says anecdotally that's what cost her her seat, then it must be true.

Too bad that doesn't really match the reality of what Republicans were campaigning against her on, which was her own perceived corruption issues and corporate ties.

What can you offer to support that other seats that flipped red, were flipped because the democrat wasn't running on a platform that was progressive enough?

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/medic...-2020-election

With 2 percent of the votes yet to be counted, Smith is currently trailing her GOP opponent by 0.04 points, in a district described by the Cook Political Report as evenly split on partisan lines, and which had been carried by her predecessor and Medicare for All cosponsor Katie Hill by nearly 9 points in 2018.

After flipping the seat in 2018, Matt Cartwright won reelection this year by 3.4 points in Pennsylvania’s 8th district, which has been represented by a Republican for fourteen of the last twenty years, and has voted for Obama twice before voting for Trump in 2016. He did this despite not just cosponsoring Medicare for All, but going on Fox to make the case for it. Incidentally, the district is also the home of Scranton, the working-class town known as the former home of president-elect Joe Biden, who centered both his primary and general election candidacies on his opposition to the policy.

Likewise, after winning a 2018 special election for an open seat in Pennsylvania’s 7th district, Susan Wild has now won reelection to the seat for the second time, in a district whose Republican-tilting voting patterns are nearly identical to Pennsylvania’s 8th. Wild won in spite of being on the receiving end of exactly the kinds of GOP attacks that other Democratic supporters of Medicare for All have been subjected to.

Three of the bill’s cosponsors won reelection in Republican-leaning districts in California this year, too. Josh Harder (CA-10) won by nearly 11 points in a district that’s voted Republican six of the last ten years, Mike Levin (CA-49) won by 6 points in the seat that Republican Darrell Issa held from 2002 to 2018, and Katie Porter (CA-45) won reelection in an Orange County seat that she flipped in 2018 from unbroken Republican control since it was created thirty-seven years ago.

For all the claims that Democrats in swing districts were forced to fend off enraged constituents demanding their representatives deny them health care, there’s significant evidence that the opposite was in fact the case.

Abby Finkenauer (IA-01), who was unseated this year, resisted a grassroots pressure campaign pushing her to embrace Medicare for All. In New York’s 11th district, now-former Rep. Max Rose faced questioning from residents at a town hall over his refusal to back the policy, and even faced a primary challenge from a constituent who had worked to get him elected in 2018 and was now disappointed he refused to back progressive legislation.

I should note that the article's basic thesis isn't that more progressive policies would have guaranteed better results, but that applying a simplistic narrative such as "progressive policies" cost the Democrats seats isn't really borne out by the data.