Monday Morning Politics: What Makes a Moderate?

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone.
The Abdul El-Sayed nomination in Michigan last week is just the latest example of primaries in both parties really, not all the primaries, but some in both parties, that have produced candidates considered more appealing to the base, right? Others have produced those considered more likely to appeal to swing voters. In many of these cases, candidates in both parties, now that they've won their primaries, are using terms like moderate or common sense to describe themselves, no matter where others put them on the political spectrum, and using the terms radical or extreme to describe their opponents. At least in general election races, maybe we're a long way from the 1964 presidential campaign, when Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, far right by the standards of his day, embraced being called an extremist.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:09)
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:20)
Barry Goldwater in 1964 Contrast that, perhaps, to the current Republican nominee for US. Senate from Texas, Ken Paxton, who won his primary, remember, by being a harder core Republican than the incumbent John Cornyn. Paxton, in his victory speech on primary night, called his Democratic opponent James Tallarico the most radical candidate Texas has ever seen. As you will hear, why?
Because of his dietary choices.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:49)
This campaign is not about red versus blue.
It's about so much more.
My opponent is the most extreme radical the Democrats have ever nominated. He's even running a vegan campaign, whatever that is.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:03)
Ken Paxton, The New Yorker's Jon Allsop has a take on these labels, how they were used in the past and how they're used today. He's got an article called, What Does It Even Mean to Be a Moderate? He's got another one specifically on the El-Sayed victory and other results from last week, called Democratic Infighting Won't Stop Here. Jon, thanks for coming on with us. Welcome to WNYC today.

**Jon Allsop** (2:25)
Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be with you.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:28)
You begin your article about the word moderate with some quotes from the loser in the Michigan primary, Haley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed. Here's one of the stretches you cited and you'll tell us why.

**Haley Stevens** (2:42)
Okay, some of you have seen, you know, there's those cool kids on the internet. They're doing the cool kid chatter. Some of them might be the coastal elites, making fun of how I talk.
Not okay.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:03)
Haley Stevens, a little snippet from her closing arguments in the Democratic Michigan Senate primary. Jon, what point were you setting up by citing that quote?

**Jon Allsop** (3:13)
Yeah, so I think it's important to establish that quote was kind of a defense of a previous viral quote that she gave, which I'm sure many of your listeners will have seen if they had an internet connection in the last few weeks, which was her addressing a meeting in the suburbs of Detroit where, among other things, she said, I'm going to go and advocate on our behalf in DC, including by giving a little bit of stick it to them, was the kind of phrase that was, I guess, the most memorable from those remarks.
I cited that and the remarks that you just played for two reasons, I guess. Most directly, I guess it was to establish that there was this kind of war playing out online between her and her supporters and supporters of Abdul El-Sayed who mocked comments like those as inauthentic or excessively attempting to put on a veneer of folksiness, if you will, and there was a lot of discourse about whether her Michigan accent had changed over the years, whether she was putting it on, I guess, was the implication.
And it was to say that while a silly conversation in many respects traced a broader, more serious ideological fault line within the Democratic Party. But I guess the second reason I quoted particularly the little bit of stick-it-to-em remarks was to show that Stevens' campaign, even though she was the designated moderate in the race, was leaning into a rhetoric of fighting, fighting on behalf of people in Michigan against Donald Trump, that has become pretty much standard for any Democratic politician that wants to survive contact with the base these days. And that is, at least in a kind of basic sense, or at least reads as such, I think. I think it reads as, to some extent, populist. But that's a word, of course, that not a lot of people would use to describe her politics. And so it sort of, to me, I guess, gestured towards an interesting contradiction that I guess I explored as the piece went along.