What Centrist Democrats Really Mean When They Say "Vote Blue No Matter Who"

While corporate Democrats talk of the need to defeat Republicans, their actions reveal that they are willing to risk that victory to prevent the sort of progressive change that voters want.

Jun 03, 2026

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“Vote Blue No Matter Who!”

You’ve seen that on a bumper sticker somewhere or heard it repeated like a mantra by some Democratic operative or talking head.

Yet, it is stunning how little it means to mainstream Democrats unless their own, increasingly small, corner of the party is concerned with it.

The Democrat mainstream is not even pretending to try to get the best candidates to ensure the biggest possible defeat of Republicans in the congressional midterms. Instead, they are expending every bit of energy they haver to defeat progressives in one race after another.

They’re doing this despite polling that shows, across the board, that voters are fed up with the Democrats.

While Donald Trump’s numbers have tanked and Republicans’ approval numbers have remained steadily poor over the authoritarian, corrupt, and warmongering performance of Trumpism in its second term, there has been no concurrent rise in approval for the Democrats. On the contrary, as the graphs below show, Republican ratings have been reasonably stable, while Democrats’ have declined.

The graph shows that a majority of U.S. adults view both the Republican and Democratic parties unfavorably, according to a survey conducted in April 2026.

AI-generated content may be incorrect.

That should shock you. The favorability numbers are basically dead even. That’s despite Republican complicity in the economic and energy crises, its coverup of corruption in the administration and of connections to Jeffrey Epstein, and all the other hallmarks of this disastrous administration.

Progressives, by contrast, are campaigning on extremely popular points.

Two-thirds of Americans believe the government is responsible for ensuring that everyone has health care. A $25 national minimum wage has broad popular support among all voters.

As opposed to centrist Democrats who talk about affordability, progressives have strong ideas about how to deal with the issue, with progressive taxation of both wealthy individuals and corporations while redistributing wealth so that small businesses and working people—the entities that actually circulate spending through the economy rather than hoarding it—have more to spend.

Progressives talk about getting money out of politics. They aren’t sticking to soft language about “affordability” or failed theories like “abundance,” which is essentially trickle-down economics liberalized and prettied up. They do not stick only to safe Democratic issues like being pro-choice. They do not, in short, worry about keeping their wealthy donors happy.

That is why fellow Democrats attack them.

Consider, for instance, the words of Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts. Auchincloss is the head of Majority Democrats, an organization of mostly right-wing, but younger Democrats, trying to “rebrand” the party with a younger face on the same old conservative, middle of the road politics.

Speaking on CNN about presumptive Democratic nominee for Senate from Maine, Graham Platner, Auchincloss said, “I find Platner’s Nazi tattoo and his commentary about it personally disqualifying. If it were me, I would vote for someone else in the primary.”

Auchincloss is no political neophyte. He knows very well that Platner is going to be the Democratic nominee. His only competition, Maine Governor Janet Mills, suspended her campaign once it became clear that Platner was going to trounce her.

Auchincloss must surely also be aware that all the recent polls show Platner beating Republican Susan Collins in November. In fact, in this recent collection of polls in the New York Times, only two polls showed Collins winning. Both of those were in hypothetical races against Mills.

Auchincloss tried to walk back what he was saying, but it was a half-hearted effort. He said he hoped that Maine voters would pick someone else, but that if they didn’t, he would still oppose Collins.

That kind of non-endorsement is not a mistake. It is a statement, and it says that, despite saying he’d oppose Collins, Auchincloss, like so many other right-wing Democrats, would rather see more Republican rule than see progressives in a position to enact policy.

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A widespread phenomenon

Platner’s race is particularly high profile because it is for a Senate seat and it is a key one. Maine is a pivotal race for Democrats if they hope to win the Senate. It is an uphill battle; most forecasts have the Republicans retaining control. But it is far from conclusive, so the Maine race matters a great deal.

And the Maine race is clearly more likely to go Blue if Platner runs. But that doesn’t matter to corporate Democrats.

Look, for example, at Democratic consultant Yemisi Egbewole. She was chief of staff of Joe Biden’s press office and founded a political consultancy firm. She is the very epitome of the corporate Democrat.

Egbewole denounced Platner in the harshest terms. She said Democrats should not vote for him, making no distinction between the primary and the general. She did this on CNN, which is bad. But she also did it on FOX News, which is much worse.

A minority of FOX viewers are the types who might lean right, but also vote for antiestablishment figures, or those they perceive as being outside the system. They were the ones who responded to Barack Obama’s “change you can believe in” rhetoric ion 2008, before it was clear that, while he ran as a progressive, he was going to govern very much as a centrist.

They also supported Bernie Sanders in 2016. While Democrats should not be appealing to this cohort directly, it is stupid and self-defeating to convince them not to vote for your candidates.

But for people like Auchincloss and Egbewole, it is less important for Democrats to win than for the system that sustains them to be maintained.

Successful progressives negate, by definition, the influence of the professional class of Democratic consultants. This group conforms to the thinking that has been steering the party ever more toward the center for four decades. In the 1990s, they had success with Bill Clinton, and have consistently employed the same strategy ever since, making a comfortable living while ignoring the changes in political realities.

We are seeing this in this year’s primary races. Platner may be the most visible, but there are other examples.

Future Representative of New Jersey’s 12^th district, Dr. Adam Hamawy was viciously attacked by right wing forces, who accused the doctor—who refused to leave his patients in Gaza until there was a replacement for him despite heavy Israeli fire, and who saved the life of Senator Tammy Duckworth during his own military service—of terrorism, due to his having been in contact with Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was later convicted of plotting terrorist attacks and the assassination of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

There is no evidence linking Hamawy to any such activities, but that didn’t stop Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) from publicly calling Hamawy into question, saying, “Based on what I’ve read, I have serious questions and deep concerns about his associations with terrorist organizations and leaders who have attacked America, from the Blind Sheikh (Abdel-Rahman) to Al-Qaeda. He needs to answer these questions and explain himself to New Jersey voters.”

Hamawy had done volunteer work which included an assignment (he did not choose it) to an organization that was later accused of fronting for al-Qaeda. He also once took a van ride where he was acting as a translator for Abdel-Rahman. Hamawy was quite open about all of this.

But rather than defend him from right-wing attacks, Democrats like Gottheimer poured fuel on the fire. Yet he won his primary and, in that solid blue district, is sure to win in November.

There is also a long history of attacks in Michigan on Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. He is neck and neck with Hailey Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination. In that race, it was both El-Sayed and Hasan Piker who were getting smeared.

Platner gets a lot of attention, but he is an outlier—the attacks focusing so much on brown-skinned Muslims are not coincidental.

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Ethical double standards

Getting back to Platner for a moment, it’s worth considering the tactics being used against him, and who is employing them.

Platner makes no bones about his past. He has said some awful things online. He got a tattoo of a Totenkopf whose meaning, he says (and there is no reason to disbelieve him, as many people, including many Jewish people, share his ignorance of the symbol’s Nazi history), he was unaware of.

More recently, Platner has come under fire for past texts he sent to various women, which involved mutually consensual flirtations. Platner is a married man, so, in typical American intrusive fashion, this became a scandal.

But how did these texts become known? No one involved ever wanted them public.

Platner’s wife, Amy Gertner, confided in a friend about it, a friend who was also, at the time, on Platner’s staff. After the staffer left, she went public with the private conversations Gertner had told her as a personal confidante. According to Gertner, she and Platner have worked through this issue and have a “great marriage.”

There is no reason to doubt her word. Many people have issues in their marriage, and many others (myself included) have non-traditional marriages that are very functional, happy, and mutually supportive. It is none of anyone’s business but theirs how Platner and Gertner approach their marriage and deal with issues within it.

This has no connection whatsoever to Platner’s ability to be a Senator. Anyone who thinks that it does needs to take a long, hard look at Congress, hardly a bastion of fidelity. In any case, the idea that a member of Congress must be pristine is naïve and self-defeating. We all have flaws and we have all done terrible things in our lives that it would be unfair to judge us by in isolation.

On the other hand, what of the former Platner staffer, Genevieve McDonald, who betrayed the trust of a woman who thought she was confiding in a friend? Is that the sort of behavior we want to reinforce? Because at this point, whatever gain she sought from betraying this trust in the worst way seems hers, free and clear.

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Conservatives have an entire system to battle progressives, who are mostly on their own

Let’s look at this in purely political terms.

Take Melissa DeRosa. A former staffer for Andrew Cuomo, of all people, DeRosa has been dazzling the viewers of FOX News and other outlets with her denunciations of progressive and liberal Democrats.

DeRosa said she “would not cry” if Platner lost to Susan Collins, an event that, lest we forget, would likely cost the Democrats their chance at taking back the Senate. She also recently ripped Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on FOX.

DeRosa resigned from Andrew Curomo’s staff after a report on Cuomo’s many acts of sexual harassment revealed that DeRosa had not only helped Cuomo cover them up but also led the retaliation against the women who so bravely came out to accuse the disgraced ex-governor of New York.

Not everyone who is working so hard to defeat progressives is so brazenly criminal. Auchincloss, for instance, has not experienced such scandals yet.

But he does head the Majority Democrats, an organization that claims it wants to “change the culture of the Democratic Party.” In fact, it is stuffed with the most conservative, even reactionary of Democrats, such as Auchincloss, Abigail Spanberger, Ritchie Torres, Gottheimer, Jared Golden, and others.

They are united in economic conservatism, even if they are socially liberal, and strong pro-Israel and generally hawkish foreign policies.

Along with another conservative PAC, called the Bench, Majority Democrats has been working hard behind the scenes to undermine progressive candidates, especially those who are popular with voters.

In 2024, we saw the results of this strategy. Progressive activists were screaming at Democrats to recognize that they were alienating hordes of voters. They didn’t listen, and everything that has happened since January 2025 is the direct result of that decision.

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Blue for me, but not for you

I get “Vote Blue No Matter Who.” I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, only because I live in Maryland, so I didn’t have to. If I lived just two hours north, in Pennsylvania, I most certainly would have voted for her, despite the nausea that would have induced.

But the people leading the chants are not sincere about it. What they mean is, “Vote for our conservative wing of the party.” They have no intention of reciprocating and voting for progressives.

Why? This is not about politics; it’s about ideology and self-interest. Ideologically, many of these conservative Democrats are staunchly pro-Israel, hold hawkish foreign policy positions, and defend corporate interests, while claiming a liberalism based on opposing autocrats like Trump and focusing only on social issues.

They also thrive on a system that offers them connections they can use to enrich their families, completely legally, and ensure they make a very comfortable living without having to work hard once they’re out of office. It’s how things work in this town.

For 2026, Democrats will almost certainly retake the House. The Senate is a longer shot, but not out of the question.

But what will victory mean? We thought, in 2020, that Republicans had buried themselves. But the Democrats and the Biden/Harris White House were so thoroughly inept they managed to allow Trump—who was responsible for literally hundreds of thousands of American deaths from his Covid lies alone—to win again.

This time, Democrats are even worse off. Despite Trump’s tanking numbers, Democrats are doing no better. Why? Because people have seen what these Democrats like Jake Auchincloss, Chuck Schumer, Abigail Spanberger, Hakeem Jeffries and so many others have to offer, and they are tired of it, because they have seen that it doesn’t work. Progressive solutions will, as Zohran Mamdani has in New York City, despite the right-wing attacks from conservatives and pro-Israel forces from both parties.

The real point is not to vote “Blue No Matter Who.” That is a necessity of last resort, and it leaves us with a temporary fix that only promises more Republican rule. We can no longer afford that, given that party’s tilt toward fascism, the lessons it has learned from years of Trumpism, and, most of all, its determination to destroy this entire planet.

The point now is to build a Democratic party that helps the masses. If it succeeds in New York, California, and other Blue States, there will be those in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin who will be willing to try it. And who knows if some red states might not follow that.

I will never forget the teacher who negotiated to be gang-raped instead of her daughter. These war crimes against women must be addressed

By Hana Alkarib, The Guardian, June 2, 2026

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What Centrist Democrats Really Mean When They Say "Vote Blue No Matter Who"

While corporate Democrats talk of the need to defeat Republicans, their actions reveal that they are willing to risk that victory to prevent the sort of progressive change that voters want.

My Recent Articles and Media

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Discussion about this post

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