Democrats fear getting 'caught with our pants down' in 2022
Both centrist and liberal Democrats are concerned that if Speaker Nancy Pelosi drags the party too far left, it will be doomed to defeat.
“You know, 2022 is already looking like a pretty formidable challenge for reelection,” said California Rep. Scott Peters, the vice chairman for policy for the New Democrat Coalition.
In a discussion about party politics with Simon Rosenberg of the liberal think tank NDN, Peters echoed other top Democrats who said that the GOP had their number in the 2020 election when they should have gained, not lost, seats on President Biden’s coattails. Democrats have just 10 more seats than Republicans.
“We were defined by Republicans in ways that were pretty effective around a couple of issues,” he said, citing open borders, socialism, and defunding police.
His group is urging the party to deal with those issues, especially socialism, which was a hot topic in races in the West and South. Peters said Democrats “want to concentrate on this attack that we’re socialists, and I think it’s on us to show how markets, capitalism can be put to work for everybody.”
But, he added, at a minimum, Democrats can’t “get caught with our pants down again.”
In thoughtful comments, Peters also said that unity and healing after the Jan. 6 Capitol protests is still coming, and he pushed back on those who would blackball Trump's supporters in Congress.
"There's still talk about whether, effectively, there's a blacklist of the people who voted for the objections to the election. You know, it's not my preference. I guess I sort of think that, in terms of redemption, it's hard. Some of the people who actually got up there and incited the violence, I wasn't working with them anyway. But, you know, some of them, they represent over 100 million Americans, these people, and it's hard for me to see how we write them off. So, but I think that that has not healed," said Peters.
That stalls cooperation right now, he added. "We should acknowledge that, and it makes it really hard to build bridges when there's so much fire," said the lawmaker.
But, he still has hope for bipartisanship. "I think Democrats have to lead, particularly in the vacuum of Republican political theory that's existing right now. I think we also are in a place where we could take things across the aisle and maybe develop some support that will outlast political division," he concluded.
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