No, Dems Aren't Disarrayed, Riven, Imploding, Eating Their Young or Battling for the Soul of the Par

http://www.rollcall.com/news/opinion/no-dems-arent-disarrayed-riven-imploding-eating-their-young-or-battling-for-the-soul-of-the-party

No, Dems Aren’t Disarrayed, Riven, Imploding, Eating Their Young or Battling for the Soul of the Party
By the historical standards of Democratic warfare, today’s disputes are like 6-year-olds battling with foam swords
Posted Jul 25, 2018 5:02 AM
Walter Shapiro

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Where’s the strife?

It’s hard to identify a Senate or House seat that is being lost because of excessive Democratic activism. Even if a Democratic incumbent like North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is troubled by calls to ax ICE, there is scant evidence that this makes her more vulnerable than before in a state that Donald Trump carried by better than a two-to-one margin.

For a party supposedly riven by unbridgeable chasms, the Democrats survived the primaries without major stumbles. This year, there are no Democratic challengers in winnable seats who have been forced to go on television to explain, “I am not a witch.” And in California’s top-two “jungle primary,” the Democrats avoided squandering any potential House pickups by making sure they got a candidate onto the ballot in all contested districts.

Nor are this year’s congressional races some overwrought struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party. Presidential candidates, rather than congressional contenders, define the direction of a party. The current Republican Party is a haunted-house image of Trump rather than a reflection of the economic issues that animated GOP congressional candidates in 2014 and 2016.

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But as a reporter who witnessed the vicious Democratic fights of the last decades of the 20th century, I am impressed by the party’s current sense of unity.

No incumbent — not even Heitkamp or Joe Manchin in West Virginia — is being denounced as a DINO. According to a new Monmouth University Poll, moderate Democrat Rep. Conor Lamb, who won a high-profile special election in western Pennsylvania earlier this year, holds a hefty lead in his bid for a full term. Lamb is a prime example of a Democrat who has prospered by defying litmus-test politics in his opposition to Nancy Pelosi as House speaker.

No party is ever completely unified, not even the Republicans who are fearfully pledging their fealty to Trump. But the Democrats — for all their differences over economics and temperament — recognize the anti-Trump stakes in 2018. And so, for once in their turbulent history, they are more arrayed rather than disarrayed.