I was voter number 17 at my polling place yesterday. A friend joked that turnout was so low that I might have been the last voter! 

But the quiet primary turned loud when the Collingswood progressive slate for Democratic Committee scored a large upset. At the same time, progressives in Camden City and Cherry Hill saw noticeable declines in their percentages from previous challenges, and lost soundly. 

Some elections come with a clear message. Others take a while to sort out and understand. I think this is likely one of those. But a few observations and musings: 

1. Last cycle, a handful of Collingswood progressives were planning on mounting a similar challenge. Instead they cut a deal getting two progressives on the party’s slate, then wrote a controversial letter calling for “unity.” The Collingswood win shows that local party officials were 100% in considering its hold on Collingswood to be relatively weak (and also shows local Democratic leaders respond to strength, which is interesting in its own right). 
2. It’s worth asking why organizing was so much more successful in Collingswood than Cherry Hill or Camden. Campaigns can be highly idiosyncratic, and it’s dangerous to read too much into them, but I’m going to hazard an educated guess about the success in Collingswood. The biggest thing is that Collingswood fits the profile of a Bernie town. It has progressive values, a young audience, and as a result is already seeded for an anti-establishment message. In other words, for this crowd, there’s a chance that the wider work of Bernie Sanders already did some of the work of making arguments about why existing democratic infrastructure deserves skepticism (think of the DNC controversy last cycle). 
   
   That’s really different than in Camden and Cherry Hill, where there are fewer Bernie voters.
   
   My guess is that a similar message of progressivism with a focus on fair processes and primaries, worked differently in the different communities.
   
   Of course, there’s a lot of pure infrastructure and organizing discussions here, and very different demographics and socio-economics across these communities. But that’s my first guess. 
   
   
3. This has implications for strategy on both sides. It means that the party’s focus on unity and criticizing progressives for opposing Trump (or the more aggressive mailers, websites and emails) may work with limited constituencies while actually galvanizing Bernie-type voters. It means the very explicit focus by progressives on critiquing the machine may struggle to build a broader coalition and face the same ceiling that Bernie Sanders’ approach does nationally. 

 

Tags: collingswood, primary