The Democratic Senators Whose Defeats Hint at the Party’s Future

It’s tempting to wonder, if you are a political obsessive of a particular vintage, what former Senator Jim Webb might have made of the 2024 election results.

Though long vanished from the great American news cycle, Webb was once something of a political celebrity—the prize recruit of the Democrats’ roster of Senate freshmen in 2006. Along with fellow upstarts like Jon Tester, Sherrod Brown, and Bob Casey, the gruff former Marine captain and secretary of the Navy helped flip a half-dozen Republican-held seats, toppling the GOP’s majority in the upper chamber and making a lame duck of then-President George W. Bush.

It was the party’s most impressive showing since the Clinton presidency, especially when taken with Nancy Pelosi’s simultaneous capture of the House of Representatives. That fall’s “thumping,” to recall Bush’s memorable coinage, saw Democrats finally revenge themselves for the Swiftboating of John Kerry, the Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2000 presidential race, and seemingly every other piece of outstanding family business since the Corrupt Bargain of 1824. And they did so in the most cathartic way imaginable, piling up victories in swing states and reopening possibilities of liberal governance that had been thought entombed in the Reagan era.

Whatever that moment represented, however, it’s as much of an antique now as “Morning in America” was then. With the defeats this month of Tester, Brown, and Casey (though the latter has yet to concede, with a long-shot recount underway), the last trickles of the blue wave have flowed back to the sea. Fellow ’06-er Claire McCaskill was herself bounced from her Missouri Senate seat in 2018 by Josh Hawley, who just cruised to a second term.

And Webb? Something of an enigma to begin with, he left the Senate in 2013 and quit the Democratic Party after an abortive presidential run two years later. Just a decade after appearing on the short list of Barack Obama’s possible running mates, he was being floated as a short-term defense secretary under Donald Trump.

It’s no shock when a cohort of senators in frontline races are washed out after four highly competitive campaign cycles. But the fate of the Class of 2006, and of Webb in particular, demonstrates something about the polarization that has transformed the Democratic Party and the political environment to which it must once again adapt.

The Democrats in 2006 were mired in a much more desperate situation than they have known since. To vault to a majority from just 44 seats—their lowest total in 75 years, though they also caucused with ex-Republican Jim Jeffords of Vermont—they had to field a slate of candidates ideally situated to persuade voters in places like Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Those states, where five out of six Republican senators were ousted, ranged from purple to burgundy at the time; only the last has trended substantially leftward since.

The task of talent acquisition was famously led by Chuck Schumer, who rose to the party’s leadership in large measure thanks to his recruiting and fundraising successes while leading the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee from 2005 through 2008. In a victory-lap memoir published in early 2007, he said the single most important factor in winning the midterms was the DSCC’s decisive action to elevate prospects who could win tough statewide races.

That meant backing Casey, an opponent of abortion and the son of a popular Pennsylvania governor, rather than a pro-choice primary challenger who’d received the support of Emily’s List. In Ohio, Schumer stepped over Paul Hackett, an Iraq War veteran who’d become a cult figure among the emergent “Netroots” movement of progressive bloggers, in favor of Representative Sherrod Brown’s statewide profile and proven fundraising acumen.

These moves weren’t necessarily intended to promote moderates—Brown was more uniformly progressive than Hackett, for example—but they showed a tolerance of ideological deviation that would not be countenanced by activists today (Casey was actually one of two pro-life candidates wooed by Schumer that year). Above all, the aim was to win seats in enemy territory, and Schumer was willing to infuriate swathes of the party faithful and its commentariat if it meant achieving that goal.

In fact, a kind of alpha branding seemed as important as ideology in determining who received the party’s blessing in key Senate and House races. By the spring of 2006, a brigade of tough-guy candidates in shirtsleeves were knocking on doors across a slew of rural and suburban districts, from former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler in North Carolina to JAG attorney Patrick Murphy in Pennsylvania. No profile of Jon Tester omitted to mention his stupefying bulk, signature flattop, and three missing digits, the casualties of an unhappy incident with a meat grinder.

But no figure exemplified the lust for “Macho Dems” as much as Webb, a former Republican whose C.V. read like the exploits of a Soldier of Fortune correspondent. Did you know he went the distance against Oliver North in a Naval Academy boxing championship? Did you see his reports from the Lebanese Civil War? Did you read his paean to the martial excellence of the Scots-Irish?

It became more awkward when he applied the same two-fisted energy to national politics, though. Economic conservatives, likely hoping for more slack from a former devotee of Ronald Reagan’s, complained of his predilections toward “class struggle,” while Democrats groaned when he loudly criticized President Obama’s political judgment. Notwithstanding some productive legislating on veterans’ benefits, few were surprised when Webb stood down after six years of chafing at the constraints of his position.

Yet the most revealing episode of his political life was still to come, in the form of a far-fetched assault on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run. Doomed from the moment of its announcement, Webb’s campaign nevertheless put forward a populist appeal that could have found purchase among ancestral Democrats and curious independents alike—fixated on economic inequality, suspicious of affirmative action, hostile to further military engagement in the Middle East, and equally enthusiastic about offshore drilling and criminal justice reform. At a moment when it would be viewed as an obvious provocation, he was the only candidate in a Democratic debate to insist that all lives matter.

No points will be awarded for guessing how some of those positions went over among Democratic primary voters and pundits in 2015. The label reporters kept attaching to him, whether in reference to his sideline in fiction writing or his warnings about the growing aggression of China, was one that would be familiar to political observers in 2024: “weird.”

Flush with confidence after Obama’s reelection win in 2012, and perhaps overconfident in their ability to retain power without the support of culturally conservative whites, party actors essentially laughed Webb off the national stage. Instead, it was semi-independent Senator Bernie Sanders (another member of the Class of 2006, ironically) whose message became the dominant critique of mainstream Democratic orthodoxy, pushing its boundaries ever leftward ahead of the 2020 election.

Various ’06ers were forced to adjust as necessity dictated. Casey evolved almost continuously on issues like gay marriage and gun control, culminating this fall with a definitive break from his prior pro-life stance. Brown helped to kill Bush’s final stab at comprehensive immigration reform in his first year in office, but his measured stance on border enforcement under President Biden wasn’t enough to keep him on the right side of Ohioans. Neither could Tester overcome long-run partisan trends in Montana, where Democrats controlled every statewide office in the Obama era but now hold none.

Those in more liberal states ventured much further from the center. Tim Walz and Kirsten Gillibrand, who both flipped battleground congressional districts in 2006, shifted gradually to the left once they were elected governor and senator, respectively. And Schumer, who colorfully claimed to run his various political notions past an imaginary centrist couple from Long Island, discarded the label of moderate years ago.

In sum: What was in the late Bush period a center-left Democratic Party with an awakening progressive faction has gradually become a forthrightly progressive brand.

It is unclear whether any plan exists to address these developments, or if such a pivot is even thought necessary.

Senate Democrats elected a number of promising newcomers this cycle, including several with military and intelligence backgrounds that may make them attractive national candidates in the future. Still, the contender who came closest to unseating a Republican in a deep-red jurisdiction wasn’t a Democrat at all, but rather the independent Dan Osborn, a Nebraska steamfitter whose idiosyncratic platform sought to protect the rights of both labor organizers and gun owners.

Osborn was ultimately seen by many as the Democrats’ de facto nominee, yet he rejected their endorsement, a sign of poisoned branding in states where they’ll need to compete for control of Congress. Some have already speculated that, if the party hopes to achieve a recovery on the scale of 2006, it may need to embrace candidates who share aspects of Osborn’s profile as a veteran, union leader, and first-time office seeker with weak ties to progressive politics and activism.

It is dubious whether we will see a return to the days of Macho Dems, but lawmakers such as Washington’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Alaska’s recently ousted Mary Peltola, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, and New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have thrived in part by telegraphing their ties to labor and blue-collar constituencies. Highlighting issues of a less heated cultural valence, like the minimum wage and the right to repair machines, could help working- and middle-class voters reconceive of the party as they’ve known it since the end of the Obama era.

Strategic shifts of this kind are somewhat hard to imagine, even after Kamala Harris’s late-summer sprint to reverse course on a host of 2020-era liberal promises. But it should be remembered that the seeds of the 2006 breakthrough were laid after George W. Bush won the popular vote in 2004, denying his opponents the losers’ consolation they’d enjoyed four years earlier. President-elect Trump has repeated that feat, plunging Democrats into the same state of psychic shock that haunted them 20 years ago.

Now, as then, the country is headed into the fifth year of a historically divisive presidency. And if a second blue wave seems impossible, consider: Nobody knew who Jim Webb was at this time in 2004.