ATLANTA — Pennsylvania’s Conor Lamb and Alabama Sen. Doug Jones, the new miracle men of the Democratic Party, offer a clear model for how to run in Republican territory: Focus on economics, not guns, immigration or President Donald Trump.
But that won’t be easy when much of the party is whipped into a fervor over those topics.
As the party barrels into primary season, its biggest success stories star Democratic moderates who’ve run strong in Trump country. But much of the energy in the party is on the left, where an active base is calling for everything from single-payer health care and a $15-an-hour minimum wage to bans on certain weapons and ammunition. Finding the balance between the base’s demands and winning general elections is Democrats’ new dilemma as they look to toward to the November midterms.
The challenge will greet Democratic candidates across 75 targeted GOP-held districts that Trump won in 2016, as well as the 10 Democratic senators facing re-election challenges in states Trump won.
To be sure, most of those districts are friendlier to Democrats than Jones’ Alabama, which Trump won by nearly 30 percentage points, and Lamb’s southwest Pennsylvania House district, where Trump won by nearly 20 percentage points and Lamb maintains a lead of fewer than 700 votes. That race has not been called.
The questions of tone, emphasis and policy nonetheless hang over Democrats’ mission to flip the 24 GOP-held seats they need for a House majority and their path to reverse Republicans’ 51-49 Senate advantage.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is in line for a second stint as speaker if her party is victorious in November, says the dangers of competing — and sometimes unhappy — factions are overblown