Editorials Memo To Midterm Voters: It's Democrats, Not Republicans, Who Are The Extremists Today 10/30/2018 Election 2018: Every day in the run-up to the midterm elections, the mainstream news peddles the same message: Republicans are extremists. But look at the data, and you see that it's Democrats who are increasingly well outside the mainstream. Writing in New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait had this to say about the Republican party: "Everything that was terrible about the party that nominated Trump is significantly, terrifyingly worse today. Even more distressing: It is likely to lurch further rightward regardless of the outcome of the elections." As a mainstream journalist, Chait is hardly saying anything unusual about Republicans. Day after day, the mainstream press files stories describing Republicans as fascists, sexists, racists, anti-Semites, etc. Here's a tiny sampling of recent headlines: "How Republican Extremism Became Normalized." "Yes, the Republican Party Has Become Pathological." "Why Are Republicans Promoting Ultra-Right Extremism." "The Proud Boys, the GOP, and 'The Fascist Creep.' " What evidence is there of this, other than President Trump's often abrasive rhetoric, and the actions of a few crazed lunatics? Trump's agenda so far has been mainstream conservative — tax cuts, deregulation, strong defense, secure national borders. (President Clinton said similar things about illegal immigrants and border security when he was president.) Where Trump has strayed from conservative orthodoxy, it's tended to be toward the left — witness his efforts to force down drug prices and his rhetoric on trade. But survey data show fairly conclusively that when it comes the ideology of each party, it's Democrats who have been moving to the fringe. A Pew Research Center report out last year, for example, showed that while the Republican views shifted slightly to the right from 1994 to 2017, Democrats has moved far to the left. Nearby is the table we ran when that report came out. A Gallup poll from 2015 pointed to the same trend. It found that Democrats had become far more liberal over the previous 15 years. Republicans hadn't changed in their views much. In fact, they had moved leftward on some social issues. This year, the Democratic field is full of self-declared socialists. And the Democratic party has embraced a radical agenda of socialized health care — via the artfully named "Medicare for all" — free college, a doubling of the federal minimum wage, "guaranteed" federal jobs, eliminating ICE, a government takeover of corporate boards, and so on. Prominent liberals routinely say the most incredibly extremist things, without anyone batting an eye. Case in point is actor James Cromwell, who recently promised violence if Republicans retained control of Congress. "If we don't stop (President Trump) now, then we will have a revolution for real," he said at an awards ceremony this week. "Then there will be blood in the streets." You'll try in vain to find any Democrat who — after lecturing the public on the dangers of Trump's word choices — has denounced Cromwell's rhetoric. Despite journalists' endless efforts to portray Democrats as reasonable, mainstream moderates, the public is getting wise to their increasingly extremist views. This summer, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that just 33% think Democrats are mainstream today, while 56% say they're out of step. Just two years before, 48% said Dems were mainstream, and only 42% said they were out of step. So please, enough about how extremism can only be found among Republicans. https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/extremists-democrats-republicans/
Democrats, beware: We are leaning left too far BY FORMER GOV. ED RENDELL (D-PA.), OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 11/02/18 https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/413951-democrats-beware-we-are-leaning-left-too-far