Stott: The ‘New’ Left
By Patrick Stott
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ve heard that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took a page out of the Brat playbook by defeating the Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley in New York’s 14th District. She did this by staking out a claim on his left flank.
But Ocasio-Cortez’s rising stardom in politics does not only stem from the fact that she is a young, Hispanic woman. At only 28 years old, some may say she’s changing the Democratic Party’s ideology and landscape. However, her self-described socialist platform mirrors that of most mainstream Democrats.
Universal healthcare, guaranteed federal employment, unabated access to abortion, and free community college are just a few of her “new” ideas for the nation.
Throughout college, professors would repeatedly say that the Republican Party had been creeping further to the right than the Democrats were to the left. They would sell the Democratic Party as the party of moderation.
However, this could not be further from the truth.
Yes, the Republican Party trended to the right harder than the Democratic Party trended to the left throughout the 80s and 90s. However, in the past decade there has been an immediate turn to the far left by the Democratic Party as never before seen in history.
We can see it right here in Virginia.
In 2017, we saw the complete and total rebranding of Tom Perriello and Ralph Northam. In 2008, Perriello won the Fifth District of Virginia running as a moderate, populistic Democrat. He notably received the NRA’s endorsement in his failed 2010 re-election bid. Ralph Northam has long been known as a moderate “Virginia Way” Democrat. However, the Democratic gubernatorial primary became a race to satisfy the new left.
Virginia’s 2017 elections ended with 16 freshman Democratic legislators to the Virginia House who flipped Republican seats. Driven by far-left organizations like Indivisible and Win-VA, the freshman members are not only the youngest delegates in the Virginia House, but the most extreme in their caucus.
In fact, the Virginia Progressive Legislative Alert Network (VAPLAN) recently published their inaugural scorecard for the 2018 General Assembly. I took the liberty of diving deeper into their scoring of Democrats in the House, particularly the freshmen.
The results are certainly not what my old college professors would like me to know.
In this scorecard, “1” is the highest amount of progressivism provided by their votes on multiple pieces of legislation. I took the legislators’ scores and multiplied them by 100 to get a clean whole number percentage. To compare the delegates, I broke them up into even quartiles (the parameters being 0-24.4, 24.5-49.4, 49.5-74.4, and 74.5-100).
A 50 or 75 may not seem like a particularly high score; however, the scorecard is based on only ten of the most extremely controversial and progressive votes. Any legislator that scores above 50 is solidly silon the left.
Of the 49 Democrats in the House, 29 members scored a 50 or above. All but one of the freshmen were part of those 29.
What’s most shocking is the fourth quartile (those who scored 74.5 and up). Over a quarter of the Democratic caucus scored in this quartile with 13 Delegates. Over half of those 13 were part of the freshman Democratic class with seven coming from those elected in 2017. I looked to see if age could have had any correlation in their scores. The fourth percentile’s average age was 41 and they averaged less than two terms of service in the legislature, or 3.58 years. That makes them the youngest and most inexperienced in the entire House.
Not only are they the youngest members of the House Democratic Caucus and the most inexperienced but they are also amongst the least effective. Less than 10 percent of the bills they introduced became law — 8.9 percent to be exact. The entire House had an average of 34 percent with Democrats passing only 22 percent of their bills. The seven freshmen that are part of the fourth quartile passed just 6.3 percent of their bills. Their rhetoric isn’t translating into effectiveness. Virginia isn’t D.C., and cordiality is still a virtue in the Virginia House.
The new freshman Democrats can brag about their margins of victory and fundraising, but their governance is impractical and shakes hands with extremism. Freshman Delegate Lee Carter sponsored a bill that would have required a taxpayer-funded commission to study the economic viability of universal health care in Virginia. (Hint: it’s not.)
While their governance is currently ineffective, we must be wary of the new normal in the Democratic Party. When a party believes that Dianne Feinstein isn’t liberal enough, and calls to abolish ICE (the nation’s agency that leads the way in fighting human trafficking), moderation is not the name of the game.
Patrick Stott was born and raised in Richmond where he started working on Republican campaigns before he could vote. Originally an aspiring teacher, he found he could make the biggest impact by changing government. Patrick graduated from James Madison University in 2017 while working for multiple successful Republican campaigns throughout the Shenandoah Valley.
