patrick.net

Pelosi is trying to lead a party that has already gone off the deep end, and she is fighting a losing battle. The leftward race to the bottom will continue despite her lip service to moderate Democrats. Her past efforts to resist the activists, after all, have resulted in resounding defeats. When Ocasio-Cortez launched the Green New Deal, for example, Pelosi simply laughed it off as the “green dream or whatever they call it.”

Democrats are more beholden to their activist class than to the majority of the American people. Whether voters like it or not, extremists such as Ocasio-Cortez, not Pelosi, are in charge of setting the party agenda. The radical wing of the party has become the mainstream, and that clearly terrifies Pelosi, who understands that the majority of the American people do not support all the socialist schemes touted by the extreme liberals.

Pelosi knows that giving in to the progressive radicals will spell political suicide for her party. Pelosi is only in power because moderate Democrats were able to flip Republican seats in the 2018 midterms. However, many of those moderates ran against Pelosi in the race for House Speaker, telling voters that she was too far to the left. In the eyes of moderate Democrats, Pelosi cannot be trusted to resist the pressure coming from her caucus. As this becomes clear to voters who elected centrist Democrats last year, the chances for Democrats in the 2020 election will go from slim to none.

The war of words between Pelosi and her caucus is a troubling sign for Democrats, as Trump increasingly looks like the only person capable of advancing an agenda popular with the American public because he is delivering results and not rhetoric. This means any losses Pelosi suffers in the escalating Democratic Party civil war will result in gains for Trump.