The following article stub for “Can Democrats Escape the Vise Grip of Progressive Primary Voters?” by Henry Olsen, is cross-posted from The Liberal Patriot:

Most establishment Democrats believe the party’s 2028 nominee needs to tack to the center, especially on social issues, to maximize the party’s chance to win. That looks sound on paper, but implementing it faces a serious obstacle: the party’s primary voters.

Democratic Party primary voters are significantly more progressive and left-leaning than they were even in 2008. That fact was driven home in two high-profile mayoral races, in New York City and Seattle, where little-known progressive challengers easily defeated well-known establishment figures.

Those contests are especially significant when one applies those results to the method by which Democrats traditionally apportion convention delegates. Extrapolating from those victories—and other high-profile progressive versus establishment races—suggests there’s a real chance the party could nominate someone who leans into, not away from, the hard progressive zeitgeist.

The Democrats’ intra-party shift leftward remains underappreciated. In the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton won the primaries in large part because only 47 percent of the voters were liberal; her margin came from the 53 percent who said they were moderate or conservative. (She lost the nomination because Barack Obama crushed her in the party’s progressive-dominated caucuses, winning 13 of 14 from Super Tuesday on.)

By 2020, however, a supermajority of Democratic primary voters were either liberal or very liberal. Exit polls for most states showed between 60 and 65 percent of voters were some variety of liberal. Only a few Southern states, such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, were as centrist in their ideological orientation as the national party had been just twelve years earlier.

Democrats since then have moved even further to the left. Gallup polling has found that the share of Democrats calling themselves either liberal or very liberal hit record highs in 2024. This is particularly the case on social issues. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats said they are liberal on social issues in 2024, up dramatically from 48 percent just ten years earlier.

Neither Zohran Mamdani’s nor Seattle’s Katie Wilson’s victories should have surprised people in light of these facts. New York and Seattle are overwhelmingly Democratic. Given that, one should expect that an angry party that wants nothing more than for its officeholders to fight against Trump would choose the most radical alternative.

Democrats might say that this sentiment can be confined to the party’s left wing and that a candidate more acceptable to swing voters can emerge during a national contest. But the party’s delegate allocation rules suggest that view is naïve.

More here.