The word “could” in this title carries a tremendous amount of weight. If a structural engineer examined my use of the word “could”, she would probably run outside waving her arms and screaming for everyone to clear the area. It would be fair to argue that I’m “could”-flogging so severely that I should be recording it and putting it on OnlyFans for sickos who want to see a word lashed to within an inch of its life.
But consider some facts. Roy Cooper is a popular two-term governor in a purple state. At a moment when leftist favorite Abdul El-Sayed is down one point in a state that leans eight points towards Democrats (Michigan), and left-populist Troy Jackson is up by only three in D+16 Maine, Cooper is up by ten in D+5 North Carolina.1 So: Cooper is over-performing (+5) while leftists are under-performing (-9 for El-Sayed, -13 for Jackson). Other over-performers include moderates Mary Peltola (four points above Alaska baseline) and Josh Turek (two points above in Iowa), as well as basically-down-the-middle Democrats James Talarico (+6 points in Texas) and Jon Ossoff (+4 in Georgia).
Talarico’s secret to success is clearly “run against an obvious criminal scumbag” — I’m not sure how much we can learn from that race. Ossoff has strengths that I’ll talk about some other day. But I find it notable that three moderates are putting up strong numbers while being mentioned exactly zero times in “future of the party” conversations. Meanwhile, weak numbers from left-leaning candidates don’t seem to have dented the conventional wisdom that Democrats will move left in 2028.
The purpose of my could-flogging is to challenge the conventional wisdom that the future of the Democratic Party lies to the left. My argument is less about the actual Roy Cooper than the royal Roy Cooper; if you want to mentally substitute some other moderate — Peltola, for example, or Kentucky governor Andy Beshear — go right ahead. The individual matters less than the context, which is fortunate for my argument, because the phrase “rock star charisma” is unlikely to feature on Roy Cooper’s Taboo card. But the context is that that I think there’s a 10-20 percent chance that the chattering class is wildly misreading the Democratic electorate, and that it might be possible for a no-bones-about-it moderate to capture the Democratic nomination in 2028.
