The Progressive Caucus in the House has 95 members. The House New Democrat Coalition has 101 members. I found this post by Mort Kondracke at RealClearPolitics on the contest between them pretty interesting:
The New Dems are hardly conservative — they backed legislation extending civil rights laws to LGBTQ persons and equal pay for women — but are proposing realistic programs on health care, climate change, worker empowerment and infrastructure that will actually better the lives of the mass of Americans — and are likely to be popular.
Instead of Sanders’s Medicare for All health plan (supported by six other presidential candidates), the New Dems are sponsoring legislation to strengthen Obamacare, undo Trump’s sabotage of it, stabilize private insurance markets and expand coverage by lowering drug and insurance costs and offering tax credits to offset premiums.
Some polls suggest a majority of voters favor Medicare for All, but others show a majority prefers to improve the current health system rather that replace it with something new. In one poll, only 13 percent favors eliminating private insurance, as Sanders proposes.
On climate change, as opposed to AOC’s Green New Deal that calls for a World War II-style mobilization to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years — clearly heavily government mandated — New Democrats backed HR 9, which the House passed May 2, requiring Trump to recommit to the 2015 Paris Climate Accord and its goal of limiting world temperature increases.
In all likelihood you’ve never heard of the New Democrats. None of them are doing fashion shoots but they’re at least as representative of today’s Democratic Party as the progressives are and possibly more so.
