IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

[E]ven after the 2020 election, many Democrats still seemed to think Biden's primary win was a one-off. Maybe, they figured, it was a fluke that reflected Democratic voters' desire to find the most electable candidate to defeat the Bad Orange Man, not the voters' actual preference for the old guard.

The recent elections in San Francisco demonstrate that it might not have been the fluke they imagined.

Here, many Democratic regulars have become actively hostile to the new order that was imposed during the Trump years, and they are banding together to do something about it.

Their coalition is made up of older black voters, elder millennial HENRYs, Asian Americans, working-class union Democrats, wine moms, and Gaybraham Lincoln drag queens. Together they have majority power in the city, and they are trying to put an end to the leftward lurch by reasserting the more practical liberalism of the late-aughts glory days.

And so far, it's working.

Democrats in D.C. and across the country should probably take note.

Last week, there was a special election to fill the empty assembly seat in San Francisco's Flamin' 17th. It's a majority-minority district that runs from the city's Italian North Beach neighborhood to the Haight-Ashbury of the Grateful Dead; then across the Castro, where naked gays occasionally roam the streets; through the Hispanic-turned-hipster Mission neighborhood; all the way down to multicultural South San Francisco.

While I haven't done a full head-count myself, there are likely fewer Republicans in this district than there are homosexuals. Gavin Newsom won a Bashar al-Assad-like 89.5 percent of the vote there in 2018.

In other words, the 17th is not a haven for red dogs or crypto-conservatives. Peter Thiel left S.F. for L.A., after all.

So how did Matt Haney, a basic white guy in navy slacks, win the seat in a landslide?

Given the deeply liberal electorate, Haney's campaign can't be considered "centrist" in any meaningful sense of the word. But it is noteworthy that he won with the support of those who had been pushing the recalls of the left-wing school board members and D.A. Chesa Boudin.

Haney wasn't a natural vehicle for this backlash to San Francisco's new progressive establishment. He had been a career politician in the city. During his time on the city's board of supervisors and board of education, he would have best been described as a progressive left Democrat. He even got swept up in the faddish political moment as one of the officials who in 2016 pushed to rename George Washington High and other schools, which prompted a backlash among residents.

But during this year's special election, Haney recognized the political winds were shifting.

He ran a successful campaign for the broad middle of the Democratic party, finishing first in a primary whose third-place finisher, Bilal Mahmood, ran even more to the center--and then swamped the DSA-friendly challenger, David Campos, in a run-off.

Haney was able to pull off these wins by falling back on a politics reminiscent of his first boss--Barack Obama.

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