It's not either/or.

Why are progressive voters constantly forced to accept establishment candidates in primary after primary?

“The Kamala-Gavin rivalry builds to possible 2028 showdown,” reported Alex Thompson for Axios on October 12, 2025. “Since they entered California politics over 20 years ago, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom have ducked a one-on-one showdown. Now the Democratic rivals are barreling toward what could be a contest on the biggest stage: the 2028 race for the White House.”

“It could be a Hollywood script,” gushed Thompson.

Except it’s not.

Quick question: Who is dragging the Democratic Party down more, Kamala Harris or Gavin Newsom?

Trick question: It’s both.

Real life isn’t a straightforward, multiple-choice test. Forget choosing from the available two answers. The answer can be and is both, neither, and a dozen other complex reasons besides.

Neither Gavin Newsom nor Kamala Harris is the strong candidate Democrats need to lead them out of the wasteland of Never Trump. Democratic Party voters know this, even if they can’t always articulate why.

But it’s really very simple: If Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris were capable of leading the Democratic Party out of its current morass, righting the ship, and charging down the field to retake the House of Representatives one year from today, they would have done it by now.

Nothing but air and opportunity in the Democratic Party at the moment. The field is wide open. And it’s not because progressive voters aren’t familiar with Newsom or Harris.

Ditto Democratic Party House leadership, a rudderless, listless bunch in terror of primary challenges from more popular up-and-comers. They are confounded and horrified by Donald Trump’s failures, and even more confounded and horrified by his successes.

The best Democratic Party laureates have to offer the American people at the moment are podcasts, dumb internet jokes, profanity, book tours, land acknowledgments, and a chance to vent during a pointless “No Kings” parade.

“Democrats Are Losing the Culture War,” reflected Justin Vassallo for the Liberal Patriot on October 13, 2025. “Partisan Democrats have a habit of blaming every disadvantage on ‘disinformation,’ much as Trump decries ‘fake news’ when basic reporting or public opinion is against him. But Democrats from the Biden White House down to the municipal level had indulged positions that average voters regard as misguided, wacky, or flat-out wrong and inscribed them into policy, usually without significant small-d democratic input.”

“To actually repair the deficit with the working class, Democrats and grassroots organizers aligned with the party must finally accept they are losing the culture war — not because the masses are hopelessly bigoted, but because the party line strayed from what reasonable voters are comfortable with,” declared Vassallo. “Americans from all walks of life share a healthy suspicion of dogma, inherited from the Enlightenment and the country’s own political traditions. Whether the proselytizing comes from the sectarian left or the sectarian right, they refuse to submit to beliefs that traffic in guilt and rely on manipulation rather than persuasion. Emboldened progressives forgot this, mistakenly believing the threat of the right’s illiberalism would always dwarf their own rising militancy. In a strange parallel to the Reaganite Moral Majority, identity politics at its most extreme encroached baldly upon the individual’s freedom of conscience. Accordingly, people rebelled.”

Democrats, he argues, are still deep in denial about why they were defeated in 2024.

“The unwillingness to even scrape the surface of the party’s cultural woes is bad politics,” laments Vassallo ultimately.

He isn’t the first to say so.

Prominent Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman have been cautioning prudence, begging for a rapid retreat from the deeply entrenched and vitriolic nature of the current U.S. political climate.

But Democrats like Sen. Fetterman have been cautioning the party’s mandarins to ditch the toxic brew of polarizing, fringe identity politics for a long while. Democrats like Marianne Williamson have been willing to call out the Democratic Party primary machine.

The Democratic Party hasn’t allowed a real, free-for-all primary since a then-unknown barnstormer named Barack Obama ran away with the thing so unexpectedly in 2008.

If Barack Obama had been forced to run in the 2016 Democratic Party primary, he would probably have been forced out. An army of well-meaning party loyalists, analysts, and acolytes would have been convinced he couldn’t win.

Neither Kamala Harris nor Gavin Newsom is going to fix what is currently wrong with the Democratic Party. That is, how the Democratic Party systematically alienated the working class over the last decade and lost them to Donald Trump.

Harris and Newsom are Democratic Party politicians from the State of California — a state so poorly run, most people can’t afford to live there despite the many advantages of doing so.

Crime, high taxes, homelessness, energy deficits, budgetary shortfalls, over-regulation; the list goes on and on.

Most people in the U.S. — average working-class would-be Democrats all across the country — can’t afford to live in California and don’t know anyone who can.

The average home in California costs over $750,000. Even without mortgage rates as punishing as they are, that is well out of range for the vast majority of working-class American families.

Harris and Newsom, for all their compassion, can’t understand that. They are out of touch. The Democratic Party would be better off holding a proper primary next time.

Let the best candidate win. (Even if it’s Bernie Sanders.)

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)