The establishment is not invincible

With a unified vision, the people can win.

Michigan voted Tuesday, and it told us something. Abdul El-Sayed won a narrow victory over Haley Stevens with mountains of AIPAC money pouring in against him. Donovan McKinney, a Justice Democrats endorsed candidate, prevailed in Michigan 13. And Will Lawrence won in Michigan 7. He was one of the founders of the Sunrise Movement, which we worked with a lot during my time with AOC. Now that’s a swing district, so that one’s going to take careful attention, and we need to make sure this guy’s well known, well liked, and well represented.

A new kind of Democrat keeps winning primaries. So who’s gonna lead them?

At A Fight Worth Having, aside from building some systems and running ads, we’ve been doing polling. We polled Missouri 1, Cori Bush’s district. Arizona 4, where Kai Newkirk ran. New York 15, Ritchie Torres’s district. And we weren’t just polling for the horse race. Anytime we poll, we’re trying to understand the American people better, what they believe and what they think, and to go a little bit deeper.

So we asked Democratic primary voters about their party’s leadership. Favorability on Chuck Schumer. Favorability on Hakeem Jeffries. And then we dug deeper. Should Hakeem Jeffries continue as leader? If we win the House majority, should he be speaker?

The only district where a majority said yes was New York 15. His backyard. In Arizona 4 and Missouri 1 he was underwater, more voters saying pick someone else than keep him.

Then we told voters a little about who he is. What he’s been supporting, what he’s failed to fight for, how he’s done his job as leader. His connection to AIPAC and other big moneyed interests. His votes to keep funding ICE while Trump uses that funding to deport people. His failure to lead the fight for Medicare for All.

Hakeem’s support plummeted. It flipped. Even in New York, even in his backyard, voters now say no, we don’t want Hakeem Jeffries as speaker. Including Black voters, who Washington keeps insisting will stick with him no matter what. In Missouri 1, Black voters go two to one for replacing him once they learn how he’s done the job.

With Schumer it’s even more pronounced. His favorability is in the tank, and you don’t even have to tell voters anything about him. They know, and they don’t like it.

Now you might be saying, Corbin, why does it matter? It’s not a public election. You ain’t wrong. But what’s happening right now is a massive number of new Democrats going into the House. Claire Valdez. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who beat an incumbent. Melat Kiros, who’s pledged not to support anyone for leadership who takes corporate PAC money, and Jeffries takes it. Donovan McKinney. Brad Lander. Maybe Will Lawrence in that Michigan swing seat. There are more, a new kind of Democrat. Some of them have said yes, I’m going to support Hakeem. Many of them have not.

And the pressure on these new members has already started. Darializa Avila Chevalier is African American and wants to join the Congressional Black Caucus, and members of the CBC have said that if she doesn’t support Jeffries as speaker, she can’t join the caucus. That’s crazy, obviously. Standing up against power is tough, and it can be dangerous to your constituents. The establishment ain’t above holding a grudge, they’re willing to harm a member’s constituents out of spite.

Just as a little piece of insider info, as I was trying to find companies to do these polls for me, two of the top pollsters refused to do it. One of them said, “I won’t ask any questions that will bother Leader Jeffries when he’s having his morning coffee.” This is why we need a movement not only of new candidates and new ideas, but new systems, new support structures. That’s why our job at A Fight Worth Having is making sure these new members have the data. When they get told their voters demand they back the leadership, they can point at the numbers.

The New Republic covered our polling this week. The pushback in their piece amounts to this. Voters don’t pick the speaker, the caucus does, and Jeffries has the caucus. Comments are cheap talk, votes are costly signals. All true. But the caucus keeping a leader the voters have soured on is the same mistake this party keeps making, and the voters are the ones who have to show up in November.

The other thing about Jeffries is he just barely avoided a primary. Had it not been for AOC and Zohran Mamdani, I think he probably would have had a primary challenger this year. In 2022, 23,135 votes kept Hakeem Jeffries in Congress. There was a woman named Queen Johnson who filed the paperwork and, so far as I can tell from FEC documents, did not have a campaign. She got more than 12 percent as an unknown alternative to Hakeem Jeffries. So imagine if there was somebody running against him with vision.

I asked these questions because I wanted to know what voters thought. I don’t think that Hakeem Jeffries is the best leader for our party, but I wanted to know what the voters think.

We need somebody that can rally the American people. Not just the Democratic voting base, though that is important, but somebody that can speak to a vision about what America is. If you look through our polls, the things Hakeem Jeffries stands for, a Democratic Party of the 1980s, the more people find out about it, the less they like it. We’ve had too many candidates like that, especially at the top of the ticket, where the more they talk and the more they’re out there, the less people like them. We need to stop making that mistake.

Because fighting Trump isn’t just about policies and procedures and voting on this or not voting on that or investigations, though that’s certainly part of it. The other part of fighting Trump is making sure that we have better ideas and that the American people hear them and are excited about them. And I’m sorry, but they’re not excited about stuff we did ten years ago. It didn’t work. They’re still hurting.

What this polling is telling us is that support for the leadership we have right now, among the electorate, is soft, soft, and absent in some places. Go look at the data yourself. The full memo and the crosstabs are at afightworthhaving.com under polling, and if you’re a nerd and want to dig into the methodology, I hope you do.

Corbin Trent

p.s.

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