There is a larger story behind the bitterness expressed inside the House Democratic caucus last week after 26 moderate Democratic members defied the leadership to support a Republican proposal to require reporting undocumented immigrants who try to buy guns to immigration authorities.

Two key wings of the congressional Democratic Party have divergent political interests — on one hand the ascendant progressives led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, many of whom have proudly declared themselves democratic socialists, and on the other the band of moderates who flipped most of the 41 districts that went from red to blue in November.

The progressives are committed to an ambitious and expensive set of proposals, including a Green New Deal and Medicare for All, policies they have promised to promote unrelentingly.

This agenda, and the attention it gets, has put the fear of defeat in 2020 front and center in the minds of newly elected House moderates. They see their progressive colleagues shaping an image of a Democratic House leaning so far to the left that it endangers the future of the current House majority.

A story published Feb. 24 by my Times colleagues Catie Edmondson and Emily Cochrane described the agony of the moderate wing.

At a town hall last month in a suburb of Salt Lake City, Ben McAdams, one of the moderate freshman Democrats, faced constituents questioning him about the “socialism” and “anti-Semitism” they had read about. “How long do you intend to ride that train with those people?” one voter asked. Another wondered whether McAdams would be “corrupted” by his service in Congress.

McAdams’ answer captured the bind he and other centrists find themselves in:

“There have been some articles about this, a little bit of tension on the Democratic side: Are we going to veer to the far left or are we going to stay in the center? I don’t know where the Democratic Party will go, but I tell you what, I will stay in the center. People are going to have to take it or leave it.”

The question for McAdams and others is, will such declarations of independence insulate them on Election Day? Some evidence suggests that they will not.

Let’s first examine the specific issue that brought intraparty Democratic tension between moderates and progressives to a boil: a seemingly bland parliamentary gambit called a “motion to recommit” — known in Congressional jargon as an M.T.R.

Under House rules, the motion to recommit is one of the few mechanisms granted to the out-of-power party to shape legislation.

“Controlling the Congressional agenda really is the sine qua non of a successful majority party,” Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University and a senior fellow at Brookings, told me.

If there is one thing that sets Nancy Pelosi apart from other Democratic speakers, it is her ability to maintain control of the Democratic majority on key votes.

It is no wonder, then, that she was outraged when these 26 moderate Democrats supported a Republican motion to recommit on Feb. 27 — explicitly designed to thwart progressive Democrats who adamantly oppose reporting undocumented immigrants to authorities. To Pelosi, the motion was an aggressive attempt on the part of House Republicans to undermine her leadership, and moderate Democratic members who supported it were seeking political cover at her expense.

“We are either a team or we’re not, and we have to make that decision,” she declared at the Democratic caucus meeting. “This is not a day at the beach. This is the Congress of the United States.”

In recent decades, “the motion to recommit has been weaponized,” Tom Mann, a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote me by email. “Like almost every effort on the floor by the minority party in the face of majority control of the agenda in the majoritarian House, it is an electoral weapon used to divide and weaken the majority.”

Jason Roberts, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, provided a brief history of the motion in an email. “It was made into a minority right in 1909. It did not really become controversial until the 1970s. Before then, most bills were considered under open rules” that allowed anyone from either party to offer amendments. In the 1970s, Roberts explained, the Democratic majority “began using more restrictive rules that limited or closed off amending opportunities.” This left Republicans with only one alternative to force a vote on an amendment: the motion to recommit.

Both parties have made considerable use of the motion when in the minority, but historical analysis demonstrates that it has been a far more effective tool for Republicans than for Democrats.

From 1995 to 2006, according to Roberts, Democrats, then in the minority, used it 262 times — but successfully only 1.1 percent of the time. In contrast, from 2007 through 2010, Republicans, then in the minority, forced votes on 181 motions to recommit and won 21.5 percent. Then, from 2011 through 2018, the Democratic minority offered 380 motions to recommit and every one of them failed in the face of united Republican opposition.

During the current session of Congress, Republicans successfully won approval of a motion to recommit on legislation requiring universal background checks on all gun sales, including those conducted privately and at gun shows.

The motion — passed with the support of the 26 Democratic defectors who infuriated Pelosi — amended the legislation to require notification of Immigration and Customs Enforcement when an undocumented immigrant fails a background check.

Almost all of the 26 Democrats who joined Republicans to support the motion represent moderate constituencies, many of which had, until recently, been held by Republicans. Twenty three are on the 2020 National Republican Congressional Committee target list.

There are two key factors that explain why Republicans in the House have been far more successful than Democrats in using the motion to recommit to divide the opposition.

The first is that the concentration of Democratic voters in urban districts means that in order to win and maintain a House majority, Democrats must be victorious in highly competitive districts, many of which tilt to the right.

These Democrats, in turn, are the ones who are the most cross-pressured between loyalty to the leadership and fear of losing support from center-right constituents.

“There are more Democrats representing Republican-leaning districts than there are Republicans representing Democratic-leaning districts,” Frances Lee, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, wrote me in an email.

In 2018, she continued, “Democrats carried a larger share of districts where members have to be careful not to antagonize their Republican-leaning constituents.”

The second reason Republicans rarely provide even token support for Democratic motions to recommit is straightforward: a vast array of local and national conservative media is more than willing to denounce a turncoat. And anyone viewed as disloyal to the Republican Party is likely to face a primary challenger.

Matthew Green, a political scientist at Catholic University, has studied the use of motions to recommit and describes the partisan difference as follows:

“First, Democrats are more ideologically diverse than Republicans. Second, Democratic Party leaders are more divided on strategy than Republicans.”

This is a serious problem, Green continued, “especially if Democrats want to maintain their control of the legislative agenda and keep peace in the family.”

In the past, moderate and conservative Democrats sought to separate themselves from the more liberal national party by building a personal brand that their local voters would recognize. This worked when Tip O’Neill’s famous adage, “All politics is local,” was an effective principle in congressional elections.

“Old-timers like me remember the 40-year span during which Democrats maintained control of the House through a coalition of liberals, moderates and even a few conservatives,” Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, recalled in an email. “They did so by tolerating defections if that was the price of re-election: ‘Vote your district first’.” Liberals still “have to be reminded that there are simply not enough liberals out there to form a majority,” Jacobson added.

The problem now is that the politics of congressional elections are no longer local. In the years since O’Neill retired as speaker in 1987, American politics have become nationalized.

If a conservative or moderate Democrat is running in a Republican-leaning district, he or she must persuade a segment of the electorate to split their tickets, to vote Republican for president, for example, and vote Democrat for the House.

The reality is that split ticket voting is steadily disappearing as more and more voters cast uniformly partisan ballots.

The accompanying chart, a version of which appeared in a paper by Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster, political scientists at Emory and Washington University in St. Louis, “Negative Partisanship: Why Americans Dislike Parties But Behave Like Rabid Partisans,” demonstrates this trend.

It shows that the percentage of voters splitting their tickets has fallen from 41.3 percent in 1980 to just over 14.3 percent in 2016.

The Return of Party Loyalty

Percentage who voted straight ticket vs. split in presidential election years.

100% OF VOTERS

86%

85%

Straight

ticket

80

60

40

Split

ticket

20

15%

14%

’52

’60

’68

’76

’84

’92

’00

’08

’16

100% OF VOTERS

86%

85%

80

Straight ticket

60

40

Split ticket

20

15%

14%

’52

’60

’68

’76

’84

’92

’00

’08

’16

By The New York Times | Source: Steven W. Webster, Washington University in St. Louis

The result is that the number of Democrats and Republicans representing districts that lean to the opposite party has fallen from 132 in 1974 to fewer than 23 in 2018, as the second chart shows. (A version of this chart originally illustrated in a paper by Gary Jacobson, “Donald Trump and the 2018 Midterm Elections.”)

Winning Against the Grain

Number of House candidates who won in districts that lean toward the opposite party. Data for 1962 and 1966 not available.

120

HOUSE

SEATS

90

No Republicans won in Democratic-

leaning districts in the last election.

60

Democrats

30

Republicans

’52

’60

’70

’80

’90

’00

’10

’18

120

HOUSE SEATS

90

No Republicans won in Democratic-leaning districts in the last election.

60

Democrats

30

Republicans

’52

’60

’70

’80

’90

’00

’10

’18

By The New York Times | Source: Gary C. Jacobson, University of California, San Diego

The near elimination of cross-party districts has, in turn, been particularly harmful to Democrats, who held roughly 114 of these districts in 1974, but only 23 in 2018.

More specifically, these trends point to the consistent re-election difficulties faced by both Democrats and Republicans who are swept into office during wave elections like 1994, 2010 and 2014 (Republican) and 2006 and 2018 (Democratic). Their prospects are governed by the accounting principle “last in, first out.”

All of which leads to the very real problem facing the House Democratic Majority. Tom Mann puts it this way:

The nationalization of politics, the rise of intense negative partisanship, and the demise of split-ticket voting mean that the electoral fate of Democrats representing marginal districts now depends much more on the party brand than the candidate brand.

E. J. Dionne, Jr., my longtime colleague at The Washington Post, wrote earlier this week that House Democrats will eventually resolve the problem of Republican motions to recommit

by working out a better disciplined system of granting a limited number of “free passes" on especially tough votes while preventing wholesale defections.

In Mann’s view, efforts by moderate Democrats to create an identity separate from their party by voting against their leadership will likely prove futile, because “Republicans will always attack them as liberals however they vote on these gotcha procedural motions.” In that light, maintaining party cohesion becomes more important:

The keys to holding and increasing their 2018 gains in 2020 lies in the relative standing and unity of their party relative to Trump and his Republican enablers and the nomination of a presidential candidate who can keep the enthusiasm of the resistance alive and not scare away weak partisans and independents with outlandish policy proposals.

Frances Lee raised another problem for moderate Democrats going into the 2020 elections:

The resurgent far left of the party has received media attention out of proportion to its share of the party. The reason Democrats have a majority in the 116th Congress is that they carried so many suburban seats. These suburban members are not going to be blazing the trail for social democracy! But they get very little national media attention compared to the more ideologically strident members.

David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College, shares Lee’s view:

We’re also in a moment when a fair amount of news coverage is suggesting to the American public that the Democratic Party is in the midst of a socialist revolution that is pulling it sharply to the ideological left. The truth is that most newly-elected Democrats in Congress resemble Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger much more than they do Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Rashida Tlaib, but that isn’t the message that reporters and commentators are currently transmitting to their readers and viewers.

Both Sherrill and Spanberger are moderates.

A report by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way demonstrates the crucial role moderate Democrats played in the 2018 takeover of the House.

Third Way examined the Democratic victors in seats that had previously been held by Republicans — the victories that gave Democrats the majority — and found that none of them were part of or endorsed by the progressive mobilization led by the Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress and Our Revolution. In contrast, 33 of the House candidates endorsed by the moderate New Dem PAC won in districts that had been represented by Republicans.

The Third Way report, in combination with the comments from Mann, Lee and Hopkins, suggests that House Democratic strategists — and Democrats generally — should find ways to counter the voices on the party’s left.

Such an effort, however, could easily result in the alienation of the progressive wing that has brought grass roots energy to the fore, energy that would be critical to a 2020 Democratic presidential victory, as well as to House or Senate victories in battleground states across the county.

The reality is that the Democratic Party is a diverse entity, racially, ethnically and ideologically. It is burdened — some would say blessed — with the problems of varied, often conflicting, interests. The struggle to come to terms with these tensions is constant and inescapable. Even shared hostility to President Trump and his Republican Party will not paper over the conflicts.

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post.  @edsall

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