How to Measure the “Secret Leftist Majority” Theory
Let's set up the goal posts
A key part of the DSA narrative is that the masses yearn for far-left candidates, but the Democratic establishment denies them those candidates. To me, this is an insane theory, along the lines of “dogs can talk but only want to talk about the ‘90s sitcom Boy Meets World” or “JFK was killed by nobody — he’s 109 and loving life!” Even so, this theory is an article of faith among leftist figures like Ken Klippenstein and Krystal Ball — Hasan Piker recently put it succinctly:
I think this theory is obviously untrue; I think there are mountains of evidence suggesting that the opposite is true. But I’m willing to let results speak for themselves! The theory will be tested if DSA-backed candidates Abdul El-Sayed or Francesca Hong win primaries for Michigan Senate and Wisconsin governor, respectively; those would be the first examples of DSA candidates trying to win outside of deep blue enclaves where the media voter is basically Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from One Battle After Another.
Of course, El-Sayed and/or Hong win in the general election wouldn’t prove much — many “neoliberal” Democrats will win on the same day. A typical Democrat this cycle will probably have a roughly six or eight point advantage over a typical Republican, so a lot of Democrats will win. An El-Sayed or Hong victory might actually prove the strength of Democrats, not socialists. In fact, to me, the dynamic looks like this: The Democratic brand might be strong enough to drag a DSA candidate over the line even though the Democratic brand is greatly harmed by the DSA, so you basically have socialists jabbing knives into the people carrying them on their backs, but if normie Dems succeed in dragging socialists to victory, the socialists will yell “We did it!” It’s a somehow-even-more-obnoxious version of this:
So: What metrics can we look at that tell us which candidates are popular and which ones aren’t? We should establish this now, before the election. I think there are two key measures to watch:
A candidate’s performance relative to Harris in 2024. 2024 is our most recent baseline, and an advantage of the Electoral College — maybe the only advantage of the Electoral College — is that we have good state-by-state data. That gives us a baseline to measure against. Of course, most candidates will outperform Harris, because this is likely to be a good cycle for Democrats, but beating Harris’ number by ten is obviously a better performance that beating Harris’ number by two. It also doesn’t matter whether you think Harris is a neoliberal, a progressive, a lizard candidate, or something else — this is a test of candidates relative to Harris, not a test of Harris.
A candidate’s performance relative to other statewide candidates. 2024 is not 2026, states can change a bit in two years, and political climates can change a lot. So, it helps to also measure a candidate relative to other candidates running in the same state at the same time.
There are always anomalies that make these measures good-but-not-perfect. Opponent quality matters a lot; Amy Klobuchar looked like the second coming of FDR in 2024 because she was running against an obvious lunatic. Still, these are useful measures that compliment each other, and looking at many results helps control for things like candidate quality and quality of campaign. A scientifically perfect experiment would be to have a million DSA candidates and a million normie candidates run against two million clones of the exact same person, but that’s exactly the type of political science experiment that rarely gets past an ethics board.
My goal here is to establish the rules of the game before the game is played. I know that if Hong or El-Sayed win — even if they greatly underperform — socialists will claim that the win proves the existence of a Secret Leftist Majority. But underperformance compared to regular Dems actually proves that voters don’t like what socialists bring to the party. And, to be fair, overperformance would prove that people do like socialism, and if that happens, I give socialists permission to wave this column in my face with all the obnoxiousness that I would if the shoe was on the other foot.
But my prediction is that socialists will underperform, maybe enough to blow winnable seats. And when that happens, I also expect socialists to learn nothing. It’s tempting to think that if socialists’ theory of politics is publicly proven wrong, they’ll show humility and change course. But I have no expectation that that will happen, because part of my theory of politics is that the DSA are a bunch of selfish idiots. They’ll brush aside evidence and cling to crackpot theories because that’s the sort of behavior that draws a person to the DSA in the first place. So…we’ll see how it goes! But at least we’ll know what to look at when the results start rolling in.
Gather 'Round Children, and I Shall Tell You the Tale of Jeremy Corbyn
The DSA is largely a movement of Youngs. That gives it an aura, since Olds gravitate towards things liked by the Youngs because we’re reluctant to admit that we’re now an unfuckable pile of bones. The Youngs have energy, optimism, and the ability to drink three cocktails without having to spend a week in traction. All us Olds have is wisdom and — eventually — discount coffee at McDonald’s.
There’s a Simple but Subtle Point in the Latest Analysis of Left-Wing Dysfunction
Democrats continue to soul search after losing a popularity contest to perhaps the worst person in the entire country. This soul searching has led many people to a recent analysis by the Financial Times, which found that — just as you thought — much of the left has turned into a cesspool of cultural weirdness that makes Jonestown look like a model of Enlightenment thought. Here’s a graph — you can almost hear an audible “whhoooooaaaaaa!” as the blue line lurches left.
split-ticket.org has done this analysis for a few cycles now, and candidates with DSA affiliation have pretty consistently performed worse than expected. I’m sure they’ll do the analysis again this year.
Ah, but you see, if the DSA underperforms it is because of *false consciousness.*
There IS a secret love of socialism that even the general voters themselves don’t know they have. They will only realize it once we’ve heightened all the contradictions and imminentized all the eschatons.