The Democrat said his greatest challenge in 2010 was trying to find the center in his congressional district in upstate New York. Maffei, who lost to Republican Anne Marie Buerkle, said the trouble with his terrain was that “the right was very right, and the left was very left, so the amount of diversity was huge.”
The political climate was so polarized last cycle, Maffei said, that major issues such as healthcare presented a lose-lose scenario for Democratic centrists.
“If I had voted against the healthcare bill, it would have been a bigger profile in courage than voting for the healthcare bill,” he argued. “Either way, it was a lose. It could have in theory led to a primary, or at least a significant amount of grousing.”
The most difficult part of the current political environment for Democratic centrists, argued Davis, is it has become so nationalized that even some of the most conservative House Democrats appear unable to survive in more conservative states.
Citing the defeats of Alabama Democrat Bobby Bright and Mississippi Democrat Gene Taylor last cycle, Davis said even centrists who successfully brand themselves as conservatives are under threat of extinction.
“Those two guys essentially did everything you should do in terms of branding,” he said. “It would have mattered in a less nationalized political climate.”
All three former members lamented the increasingly polarized nature of political primaries in both parties, where the hard left and hard right exert a disproportionate impact. In his run for Alabama governor, Davis was repeatedly attacked from the left for being too moderate.
Davis emphasized the scale of the party’s losses in 2010, saying that Democrats who blame the outcome on the state of the economy are kidding themselves.
“It’s not that people thought that we were in this deep depression in November of 2010,” Davis said. “But they thought that there had been too much spending in Washington, too aggressive an increase in government and too much of a movement to the left across the board.”
Maffei and Nye aren’t the only Democratic centrists who might opt for rematches next year. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (N.Y.) is wooing a number of former members, including Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (S.D.), who lost to Republican Kristi Noem last cycle.