Opinion | The Democratic Party Should Be a ‘Very Big Tent’

Former D.N.C. chair Jaime Harrison said, “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for a nomination. Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. … Focus on building the party you actually support.” James Carville and Rahm Emanuel have been arguing that there are people who are running for Democratic nominations who should not be in the Democratic Party, that the Democratic Party should set limits on who is part of it. This is an old debate in parties. How big of a tent should you be? Where do you come down on it? I think it should be a very big tent. It is possible to get so far beyond the pale that party members themselves will vote to do something. I’ve seen Republicans running as Democrats in order to become spoilers. We saw Republican super-PACs funding avowed antisemites. In Texas, we saw these things happen. But there should be a big tent and there should be big contests of ideas, and there should be different candidates who represent very different things in different places. I hear the argument, and I’m sympathetic to the argument that Republicans will wield whoever has the most extreme view anywhere in the country as a weapon against candidates in the purplest places or the reddest places in the country. And that does happen. But it’s also the case that the voters who are most on the fence about who to support, they’re not tracking the contested House primaries in New York. You have to have a kind of deep immersion in the Fox News cinematic universe for a lot of these names to mean anything to you, and swing voters just don’t look at the world that way. And nor should they.