Democrats Trade in Blue-Dogs For Progressives

Democrats are claiming Jon Ossoff appeals to moderate voters but there’s little truth in that statement.

With Ossoff’s positions and values aligning more with far-left costal elites than GA-06 voters, this narrative is just another sign of the liberal shift of the Democratic party.

If Ossoff is a moderate Democrat, the national party is trading in the days of Blue-Dogs for the progressive left.

Via Vox:

Ossoff’s campaign doesn’t look like Bernie Sanders’s, but it doesn’t look like those Blue Dog Southern Democrats’ campaigns either. What Ossoff’s message mostly reminds me of is Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, during which he would frequently talk about his desire to go “line by line through the federal budget” to cut wasteful spending — in order to reinvest the money in more useful things, of course.

Ossoff’s message is more moderate than what you hear in more liberal parts of the country, but it’s a lot more liberal than what you heard recently in Georgia. Taking an Obama-style campaign to the Atlanta suburbs is a sign of the same leftward shift of the Democratic Party’s message that’s making free college and a $15-an-hour minimum wage a baseline for Democrats in California and the Northeast.

If Ossoff wins, establishment Democrats will take it as vindication of their approach versus the notion that democratic socialism is poised to sweep the country. And it is that, to an extent, but the fact that he has a shot in the Georgia Sixth is more broadly a sign that the whole political spectrum has shifted quite a bit leftward from where it was a decade ago.