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WASHINGTON John H. Durham, the special counsel appointed by the Trump administration to scrutinize the Russia investigation, has told the Justice Department that he will ask a grand jury to indict a prominent cybersecurity lawyer on a charge of making a false statement to the F.B.I., people familiar with the matter said.

Any indictment of the lawyer Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, and who represented the Democratic National Committee on issues related to Russias 2016 hacking of its servers is likely to attract significant political attention.

Donald J. Trump and his supporters have long accused Democrats and Perkins Coie whose political law group, a division separate from Mr. Sussmanns, represented the party and the Hillary Clinton campaign of seeking to stoke unfair suspicions about Mr. Trumps purported ties to Russia.

The case against Mr. Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign which he denies.

An indictment is not a certainty: On rare occasions, grand juries decline prosecutors requests. But Mr. Sussmanns lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, acknowledged on Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, while denying he made any false statement.

Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime, they said. Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name.

A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has the authority to overrule Mr. Durham but is said to have declined to, did not comment. Nor did a spokesman for Mr. Durham.

The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.s top lawyer at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.

Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.

At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann relayed data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought that odd internet data might be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.

The F.B.I. eventually decided those concerns had no merit. The special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.

Mr. Sussmanns lawyers have told the Justice Department that he sought the meeting because he and the cybersecurity researchers believed that The New York Times was on the verge of publishing an article about the Alfa Bank data and he wanted to give the F.B.I. a heads-up. (In fact, The Times was not ready to run that article, but published one mentioning Alfa Bank six weeks later.)

Mr. Durham has been using a grand jury to examine the Alfa Bank episode and appeared to be hunting for any evidence that the data had been cherry-picked or the analysis of it knowingly skewed, The New Yorker and other outlets have reported. To date, there has been no public sign that he has found any such evidence.

But Mr. Durham did apparently find an inconsistency: Mr. Baker, the former F.B.I. lawyer, is said to have told investigators that he recalled Mr. Sussmann saying that he was not meeting him on behalf of any client. But in a deposition before Congress in 2017, Mr. Sussmann testified that he sought the meeting on behalf of an unnamed client who was a cybersecurity expert and had helped analyze the data.

Moreover, internal billing records Mr. Durham is said to have obtained from Perkins Coie are said to show that when Mr. Sussmann logged certain hours as working on the Alfa Bank matter though not the meeting with Mr. Baker he billed the time to Mrs. Clintons 2016 campaign.

Another partner at Perkins Coie, Marc Elias, was then serving as the general counsel for the Clinton campaign. Mr. Elias, who did not respond to inquiries, left Perkins Coie last month.

In their attempt to head off any indictment, Mr. Sussmanns lawyers are said to have insisted that their client was representing the cybersecurity expert he mentioned to Congress and was not there on behalf of or at the direction of the Clinton campaign.

They are also said to have argued that the billing records are misleading because Mr. Sussmann was not charging his client for work on the Alfa Bank matter, but needed to show internally that he was working on something. He was discussing the matter with Mr. Elias and the campaign paid a flat monthly retainer to the firm, so Mr. Sussmanns hours did not result in any additional charges, they said.

Last October, as Mr. Durham zeroed in the Alfa Bank matter, the researcher who brought those concerns to Mr. Sussmann hired a new lawyer, Steven A. Tyrrell.

Speaking on the condition that The New York Times not name his client in this article, citing a fear of harassment, Mr. Tyrrell said his client thought Mr. Sussmann was representing him at the meeting with Mr. Baker.

My client is an apolitical cybersecurity expert with a history of public service who felt duty bound to share with law enforcement sensitive information provided to him by D.N.S. experts, Mr. Tyrrell said, referring to Domain Name System, a part of how the internet works and which generated the data that was the basis of the Alfa Bank concerns.

Mr. Tyrrell added: He sought legal advice from Michael Sussmann who had advised him on unrelated matters in the past and Mr. Sussmann shared that information with the F.B.I. on his behalf. He did not know Mr. Sussmanns law firm had a relationship with the Clinton campaign and was simply doing the right thing.

Supporters of Mr. Trump have long been suspicious of Perkins Coie. On behalf of Democrats, Mr. Elias commissioned a research firm, Fusion GPS, to look into Mr. Trumps ties to Russia. That resulted in the so-called Steele dossier, a notorious compendium of rumors about Trump-Russia ties. The F.B.I. cited some information from the dossier in botched wiretap applications.

Some of the questions that Mr. Durhams team has been asking in recent months including of witnesses it subpoenaed before a grand jury, according to people familiar with some of the sessions suggest he has been pursuing a theory that the Clinton campaign used Perkins Coie to submit dubious information to the F.B.I. about Russia and Mr. Trump in an effort to gin up investigative activity to hurt his 2016 campaign.

Mr. Durham has also apparently weighed bringing some sort of action against Perkins Coie as an organization. Outside lawyers for the firm recently met with the special counsels team and went over the evidence, according to other people familiar with their discussions, arguing that it was insufficient for any legal sanction.

The lawyers for Perkins Coie and the firms managing partner did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment.

Mr. Sussmann, 57, grew up in New Jersey, attending Rutgers University and then Brooklyn Law School. He spent 12 years as a prosecutor at the Justice Department, where he came to specialize in computer crimes. He has since worked for Perkins Coie for about 16 years and is a partner in its privacy and cybersecurity practice.

Mr. Sussmann and his firm have been particular targets for Mr. Trump and his supporters.

In October 2018, a Wall Street Journal columnist attacked Mr. Sussmann, calling him the point man for the firms D.N.C. and Clinton campaign accounts, apparently conflating him with Mr. Elias. Perkins Coie responded with a letter to the editor saying that was not Mr. Sussmanns role and that the unnamed client on whose behalf he spoke to the F.B.I. had no connections to either the Clinton campaign, the D.N.C. or any other political law group client.

Four months later, Mr. Trump attacked Mr. Sussmann by name in a slightly garbled pair of Twitter posts, trying to tie him to the Clinton campaign and to the Steele dossier.

Raising the specter of politicization in the Durham inquiry, lawyers for Mr. Sussmann are said to have argued to the Justice Department that Mr. Bakers recollection was wrong, immaterial and too weak a basis for a false-statements charge. There were no other witnesses to the conversation, the people familiar with the matter said.

In a deposition to Congress in 2018, Mr. Baker said he did not remember Mr. Sussmann specifically saying that he was acting on behalf of a particular client, but also said Mr. Sussmann had told him he had cyberexperts that had obtained some information that they thought should get into the hands of the F.B.I.

However, Mr. Durhams team is said to have found handwritten notes made by another senior F.B.I. official at the time, whom Mr. Baker briefed about the conversation with Mr. Sussmann, that support the notion that Mr. Sussmann said he was not there on behalf of a client. It is not clear whether such notes would be admissible at trial under the so-called hearsay rule.

A lawyer for Mr. Baker declined to comment.

Mr. Durham has been under pressure to deliver some results from his long-running investigation, which began when then-Attorney General William P. Barr assigned him in 2019 to investigate the Russia inquiry. Out of office and exiled from Twitter, Mr. Trump has issued statements fuming, Wheres Durham?

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Durham Is Said to Seek Indictment of Lawyer at Firm With Democratic Ties - The New York Times

Many of the conservatives and Republicans appalled by Donald Trumps presidency clutched a hope through the bewildering years: Someday this would all be over and politics would return to normal.

But normal has not returned. Those elected Republicans who stood for legality when Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election found themselves party pariahs in 2021, on their way to being out of politics altogether in 2022.

And its not just a few politicians who have been displaced by the Trump era. Millions of voters have been too. Never Trump is not a political party. It is a dinner party: That jibe was heard a lot in 2017 and 2018. It has not been heard much since. In 2018, Democratic candidates won districts that had loyally voted Republican for 30, 40, 50 years, including those once held by Eric Cantor, Newt Gingrich, and George H. W. Bush.

Tom Nichols: At least Never Trumpers stood and fought

The anti-Trump Republicans did not return home in 2020. Now, in 2021, their former party seems much more eager to welcome anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers than to win them back.

Years ago, the late Christopher Hitchens described to me the experience of losing his faith in socialism. He felt, he said, like a man tumbling down a hill, and every time he clutched a branch to stop his fall, the branch snapped in his hands. Many former conservatives and Republicans experienced a similar disillusionment during the Trump years. In 2017, the longtime conservative commentator Bill Kristol tweeted: The GOP tax bills bringing out my inner socialist. The sex scandals are bringing out my inner feminist. Donald Trump and Roy Moore are bringing out my inner liberal. WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Whats happening is that as former Republicans and conservatives break from old groups, they turn newly suspicious eyes on old certainties.

Once, Republicans and conservatives filled hours of cable-TV time and sold millions of books to argue the supreme importance of truthfulness, sexual fidelity, and financial integrity in a national leader. Then their party nominated and elected a president who gleefully transgressed every one of those human decencies. The minority of Republicans and conservatives who couldnt execute the pivot were left to wonder how to reconcile what our old friends had said with what they now did.

Once, Republicans and conservatives advertised themselves as strict upholders of constitutional principle. They brandished pocket copies of the Constitution as props. Then the leader of their party incited a violent attack on Congress in an effort to overturn an election result. The minority of Republicans and conservatives who upheld legality were forced to confront the fact that their old friends had minimized and condoned the attack, and even glorified the attackers as political hostages and political prisoners.

Once, Republicans and conservatives defined themselves as the party of life. Human life was so precious that the law should require women unwillingly pregnant to give birth anyway. Then came a deadly pandemic, and suddenly life became less important than protecting the spring-break revenues of hotels and restaurants, or indulging the delusions and fantasies of people who got their scientific information from YouTube videos and Reddit threads. And again dissident Republicans and conservatives were left to wonder: What do we have in common with you?

This process of estrangement builds on itself.

I thought we believed X, says the dissident. Youre a bunch of hypocrites for now saying Y. Youre betraying everything I thought we believed.

No, reply the majority. We always deep down believed that Y was more important than X. We never before had to choose. Now we do. And if you choose X over Y, its you who are betraying us.

Economists call this revealed preference: a choice between two competing alternatives that forces the chooser to discover her highest values. Pro-Trump and anti-Trump conservatives have often each been mutually horrified to discover how radically their highest values differed from those of old allies and former comrades.

Read: Never Trump, forever

Not only differbut diverge. Maybe the future pro-Trump Republican was always slightly more sympathetic to authoritarianism, maybe slightly more tolerant of corruption than the future anti-Trump Republican. Then Trump shoved authoritarianism and corruption into the political debateand suddenly people who liked Trump were forced into positions they had never planned to take.

On November 7, 2020, former Trump Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal headlined: If he loses, Trump will concede gracefully. That of course proved a historically false prediction. Mulvaney had worked with Trump; he knew Trumps character. How could he get things so wrong? Partly, perhaps, the article was an attempt to influence Trump in the only way Trump could be influencedby outrageous flattery. But I wonder if it was not also a coping device for Mulvaney himself. Mulvaney faced the question: What would he personally do if Trump turned traitor to the Constitution and attacked the election result? He did not want to think about a terrible possibility, and so he denied the reality of that possibility. On January 7, 2021, Mulvaney resigned from the mostly honorific position of U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland. We didnt sign up for what we saw last night, he told a TV interviewer. And then he went silent. Speaking more would have put him on a path out of the Republican world, and that was a path he did not want to walk.

But some people did walk it, and they too rapidly found themselves in places they had never expected to go. They found themselves political exiles, banished or self-banished from the political home of a lifetime. This was a metaphorical exile only, not the shattering disaster of physical exile. For most anti-Trump conservatives, the losses of political exile have been emotional, cultural, and spiritual rather than material. Yet these losses were unnerving enough in their own way. Human beings are group animals, and they are frightened and stressed when expelled from the groups to which they have belonged. Our political attachments often matter much more to us than our political ideaswhich is why, when forced to choose, so many Republicans and conservatives discarded their former ideas in order to preserve their former attachments.

Many Democrats and liberals may wonder at this point: So what? Who cares? Why is any of this our problem? But it is their problem, like it or not. President Joe Bidens approval numbers sharply dipped in summer 2021, driven by a steep drop in nonaffiliated voters. It looks a lot as if the Republican-leaners who provided Biden his margin of victory in November cooled on him in August and September. Democratic loyalists may find it exasperating to be urged to worry about these fickle new supporters. Republican leaders pamper and flatter their base with scant regard for uneasy moderates. Why shouldnt Democrats do the same?

But Democrats know the answer. Democrats cannot do the same because their situation is not the same. The Democrats cannot win with a base-first strategy. Their base is not cohesive or big enough, and does not live in the places favored by the rules of U.S. politics.

Yet this disparity is not ultimately a disadvantage. The comparative weakness of the Democratic base obliges Democrats to build broad national coalitions of a kind that Republicans have not achieved since the days of the Chrysler K-Car. And those broader coalitions in turn deliver better government than would or could be delivered by a narrower ideological faction.

Thanks to Trump, Democrats find themselves leading a coalition more affluent and less progressive than the coalition many Democratic activists might desire. A Morning Consult poll after the 2020 election found that almost half of Biden voters were motivated primarily by their antipathy to Trump. (That contrasts very sharply with the Trump vote: 75 percent of those voters said they were primarily motivated by support for Trump, and less than a quarter by hostility to Biden.)

If Trump decides to run again, that one act will certainly fortify the new Democratic coalition. But its not enough to rely solely on Trumpian obnoxiousness. The Trump-era political traffic has not moved only one way. Former swing states such as Ohio and Missouri turned much more solidly Republican. Latino voters, too, shifted toward Trump and his party.

Its the former cultural core of the GOPthe college-educated, the professional, the suburbanthat is exiting the party. Its that core that will, if permitted, realign American politics. What do these recent arrivals bring with them to their new political destination? Theyre often described as combining social liberalism with economic conservatism, but that is too broad and too imprecise a description. Here are five more specific ways that Never Trumpers may change the Democratic Party.

Donald Trump hoped to reverse the 2020 election by junking votes after they were cast. His successors more shrewdly hope to decide the next election by suppressing votes before they can be cast in the first place, or by gerrymandering voters in such a way that they dont count equally.

Many Democratic political professionals regret these maneuvers, but see little payoff in battling them. Based on their experience with the historic Democratic electorate, they believe that pocketbook issues are what matter most.

For the Never Trump newcomers, however, democracy is issue one. January 6 was the true last straw for themand preventing the next January 6 their top-of-mind issue. Democracy may not be the issue that motivates the most economically hard-pressed voters. But the less hard-pressed people who are painting the Sun Belt suburbs blue? Many of them live in places where their state governments are controlled by overrepresented rural voters. Their kids are exposed to COVID-19 in schools because overrepresented constituencies can overrule the majorities who want safety protocols. Democracy is not a process issue if you live in Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Houston, or Phoenix. Its the precondition for any fair participation in the governance of your city, county, and state.

The U.S. and global scientific communities have delivered incredible advances at record speed throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. It took only a few days for scientists to crack the viruss genetic code, only a few weeks for scientists to understand how the virus spread, less than a year to develop effective vaccines.

And for their efforts, they were reviled by one of the countrys great parties as enemies of the people. The mild-mannered Anthony Fauci is now behind only critical race theory and Big Tech as a target of right-wing hate.

When your political coalition attracts support from millions of professionals, its respect for professional expertise rises. Thats how Democrats have become the party that acknowledges climate science and encourages vaccination, while Republicans tend toward the opposite.

Peter Wehner: Trumpism has entered its final form

Yet Democrats have their blind spots too, where their own constituencies elevate ideology over expert knowledge. Teachers unions deny the well-attested fact that learning losses increase when schooling is interrupted. Democratic local governments deny that standardized tests measure anything important. Some try to suppress educational programs for gifted children. On all these issues, many Democrats are as far removed from the science as many Republicans are on vaccines or climate. This expertise gap obviously exacts severe real-world consequences. It also may inflict drastic potential political costs.

Globalism is a label for the quickening pace of cross-border immigration, trade, investment, information, and organization. The economic relationship among these factors is complex. Theoretically, its possible to have some without others. But the psychological relationship among the different elements of globalism tends to be more straightforward. Like some of them, and you will probably like all of them; fear any of them, and you will probably fear all of them.

Until recently, those who feared globalism formed a weakly partisan bloc that could swing back and forth between the two parties, or even to a third-party independent like Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996. Trump, however, successfully consolidated the fearers into his Republican Party. Hostility to immigration, trade, and almost any form of international cooperation became a defining theme of his presidency.

Trump held the support of those Americans most immediately harmed by his isolationism by lavishing them with direct cash payments. American farmers lost foreign marketsand got federal subsidies instead. In election year 2020, direct aid from the Trump administration provided one-third of all farm income. But other Americans who bought and sold on global markets got no such compensation for Trumps economic sabotage.

In 2020, Biden appealed to globally minded America by promising to welcome immigrants and to stop insulting allies. But he mimicked the trade skepticism of Donald Trump. If the ex-Republicans extruded by Trump make a more permanent home inside the Democratic Party, however, trade skepticism will come under pressure. It may be good politics in Flint, Michigan, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. But it isnt as effective in Northern Virginia and South Florida, in Silicon Valley and North Carolinas Research Triangle. Retaining Never Trumpers requires discarding not only the snarling aggression of America First but also the quivering apprehension of Buy American.

Days after the 2020 vote, Representative Abigail Spanberger complained to Democratic colleagues about the harm done to House members by reckless ideological rhetoric. We need to not ever use the word socialist or socialism ever again ... We lost good members because of that. The slogan Defund the police, she said, had done even more damage.

The crime wave of 202021, and the unceasing surge of unauthorized people across the southern border, has created a sense of disorder and threat. Some lefty Democrats have either denied that these trends are happening or dismissed their significance. But they are happening, and they do matter. Among Republicans, immigration is ranked as the countrys second-most-important issue (after the economy), and crime ranks just behind. Traditional Republicans and Republican-leaners are swayed by those same influences.

Fiscal and economic issues may not seem to matter in the abstract. But when economic over-stimulus feeds into rising prices at the store, when protectionist trade policy foments electronics shortages that prolong the waiting time for delivery of new cars, when and if middle-of-the-road voters get the impression that economic policy is being driven by interest-group agendas and extreme ideologiesall of that can matter a lot.

Nobody ever won a vote by telling a voter that he or she is wrong. Votes are won by showing the voter that the voter is right, only in a different way than the voter imagined before. Republican excesses offered Democrats an opportunity to remake themselves as the party of the broad American center. That center can be moved, but only by people who demonstrate that they respect its values: security and continuity.

Donald Trump lived by the old dictum that nice guys finish last. He proved it wrong. In 2020, Trump finished second in a two-person racethat is, lastin great part because Americans perceived him as nasty. On the eve of the 2020 vote, only one-third of Americans agreed that Trump could be described as likable.

Youll recall that Trump got considerably more than 33 percent of the vote. A large number of Americans voted for Trump despiteor possibly because ofhis offensive behavior and intemperate language. For those former Republicans who broke ranks against Trump, however, the behavior and language mattered, and mattered a lot.

In late August 2020, The Washington Post profiled an undecided voter. Mike Baker was a retired midwestern businessman in his 70s. He was conservative-leaning, but not an ideologue: As the Post noted, he has practiced social distancing during the pandemic. Normally Republican, Baker had voted against Trump in 2016 because of his acerbic personality. In 2020, he found himself torn: He liked the Trump economy and agreed with many Trump policies, but he appreciated Bidens empathy and willingness to compromise. The personality thing, it just weighs on me, he told the paper. Can I feel good about myself voting for this person thats just not the kind of person I would look up to and respect? The Post left Baker still weighing his decision. But we do know that Biden won in November in great part because he outperformed Hillary Clinton among older white men like Mike Baker.

Heres the warning for the future: The Democratic Party is also home to some abrasive loudmouths. And although none of those abrasive loudmouths has mounted a serious campaign for the presidency, some hold other high offices, and others occupy visible places in the media. Liberal communities tolerate and even approve of language about white men like Mike Baker that they would never tolerate or approve of about anybody else. That language exacts immense political costs.

An absolute majority of white Americans believe that white people face adverse discrimination in the United States. They are not reacting to personal experiences of mistreatment; only one-fifth to one-tenth of white Americans report anything like that. They seem instead to be reacting to a more generalized drumbeat of derision and hostility.

The influx of anti-Trump Republicans into the Biden coalition should highlight the importance of discouraging that kind of talk. Some advice from Franklin D. Roosevelt remains timely today. In 1936, the then-chair of the Democratic National Committee had publicly mocked Roosevelts likely opponent, Alf Landon, as nothing more than the governor of a typical prairie state (Kansas, as it happened). Republicans seized on these dismissive words. Roosevelt wrote to scold his chair. It was bad politics, he said, for New Yorkers like themselves to speak disrespectfully of other parts of the country. If there had to be any characterization, make it positive. Roosevelt suggested instead describing Kansas as one of our splendid prairie states. Roosevelt carried the Midwest in 1936, including Kansas.

Again, the exchange will not be all one-way. A person who votes even once to protest against cruelty and in favor of empathy will be changed enduringly by that single action. We often act first and then develop the explanations for our actions laterand those new explanations may force us to reconsider previous prejudices.

The pro-Trump Republicans and conservatives got one thing right about their anti-Trump former comrades: Never Trump was not fundamentally a political movement. It was a moral reflex. Will that reflex now be integrated into normal politics in the post-Trump era? If it can, it will transform American politicsand very possibly save the country from the forces of polarization, extremism, bigotry, and authoritarianism.

See more here:
David Frum: Are the Never Trumpers Democrats Now? - The Atlantic

In their Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had a heated debate in 2016 about what "progressive" means. Even now, it's not totally clear. Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images hide caption

In their Democratic presidential primary, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had a heated debate in 2016 about what "progressive" means. Even now, it's not totally clear.

A particular question had been quietly rolling around in my head for years one that I finally started thinking harder about lately: When did the word "progressive" creep into my news stories?

More specifically, I started thinking more about it when I covered an Ohio Democratic congressional primary last month a primary in which the candidates and voters talked a lot about who was more "progressive" (and whether being "progressive" is a good thing).

"If you ask someone that's a little bit farther to the right, they may say I'm a progressive," said Shontel Brown, the winner of the primary. "If you ask someone who's a little more further to the left, they'll say I'm a moderate."

And, to be upfront, I myself used the word "progressive"...er...liberally throughout the piece.

But then, the word is so widely used that its meaning depends on the user. To track its recent rise is to tell a story about the divisions currently within the Democratic Party, as well as how far it has (and hasn't) shifted leftward in recent years.

According to a quick NPR archives search, the network's usage of the word to describe Democrats really skyrocketed in 2018, after picking up in 2016 and 2017. That's also the trend that major U.S. newspapers followed, according to my own news database searches. And it's not just that left-leaning politicians became more plentiful the word "liberal," for example, didn't pick up in the same way in descriptions of Democrats. In fact, "progressive" virtually caught up to it in the last few years.

Not only that, but a 2018 analysis from the center-left Brookings Institution found that Democratic candidates identifying as "progressive" picked up then and the word has held on since then.

All of which led me to hypothesize that Bernie Sanders and his 2016 presidential campaign might have something to do with it. So I asked Faiz Shakir, Sanders' former campaign manager in 2020, about the word. And he gave me a surprising answer.

"I'll be honest with you, I don't use the term 'progressive,' " he said. "If somebody calls me 'progressive,' I'm fine; I'm not going to run away from it. But I do tend to think it has lost a lot of meaning."

To Shakir, economic policies that prioritize individuals over corporate interests are progressive. That means there's nuance in his definition: for example, he says he would consider the relatively moderate Montana Democratic Sen. Jon Tester a progressive.

But Shakir also thinks the term has been stretched beyond its roots.

"Over time, what has happened was the word 'progressive' became so popularized that it started to basically encapsulate everything in the Democratic Party," Shakir continued. "It almost became synonymous with, in my mind, the Democratic Party the Democratic Party is progressive, progressive is the Democratic Party."

In U.S. history, the word often refers to the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, when activists advocated for a variety of reforms some were economic, like the fight for greater regulation of industry, and some were social, like the fight for women's suffrage and prohibition. But even then, the movement contained a variety of beliefs.

These days, it's not hard to find a range of definitions of the word. Consider two D.C. institutions located just blocks from each other: the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist think tank founded in 1989 by the also-decidedly moderate Democratic Leadership Council, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, an advocacy organization that backed Elizabeth Warren in 2020.

To Adam Green, co-founder of PCCC, "progressive" has valences of populism, boldness, and fighting the establishment.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was a favorite among further left Democrats in the 2020 presidential primaries. Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was a favorite among further left Democrats in the 2020 presidential primaries.

"Progressive means challenging power, whether that means challenging corporate power on behalf of workers or whether that means challenging systemic racism," Green said. "It fundamentally boils down to being willing to challenge power on behalf of the little guy."

For Michael Mandel, chief economic strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, progressivism also has something to do with growing the economy.

"One strand is anti-corporate and anti-corruption. But at the same time, progressive also has a strand meaning pro-growth, pro-innovation and pro-jobs," he said. "Progress is both social progress, but it's also economic progress."

Mandel, for example, thinks that the antitrust bills that passed a House committee this summer impede economic progress and therefore are not "progressive." (Further complicating this, however, is the fact that prominent self-proclaimed progressives, including Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal, supported those bills.)

It does seem true that "progressive" in popular usage has come to mean something closer to "relatively-left-leaning" than what Mandel is saying often in today's politics, "progressive" and "liberal" are often simply used interchangeably. (Relatedly, there's some imprecision in how the word "liberal" is used, as Graham Vyse argued in the Washington Post earlier this year.)

Clearly self-proclaimed "progressives" had been around for a long time: the Progressive Policy Institute launched in 1989. The Congressional Progressive Caucus started in 1991. The PCCC was founded in 2009.

But the question is why "progressive" gained steam in recent years.

"I think there was a lexical gap, basically, meaning that we had need of a word that we didn't have," said Nicole Holliday, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Holliday also happened to volunteer for Barack Obama's presidential campaign as a college student in 2008. And she saw a bump in the usage of the word around that time.

"I started to see a lot of people that I knew get frustrated because they felt like he wasn't as far to the left as they had expected," she said. "And so I think there were on the ground just some sort of people saying, 'You know, I don't really identify so much with what I think the Democratic Party stands for, or what mainstream liberals stand for.'"

That means the word "liberal" has been assailed over the years not only by the right, by Republicans who effectively made the word into an insult, but also the left, by anti-establishment left-leaners who wanted to distinguish themselves from other Democrats.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., is chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She has backed anti-trust legislation opposed by some centrists in her party, as well as sweeping climate actions in the framework of the Green New Deal. Shannon Finney/Getty Images for Green New Deal hide caption

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., is chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. She has backed anti-trust legislation opposed by some centrists in her party, as well as sweeping climate actions in the framework of the Green New Deal.

The frustration with establishment Democrats like Obama the sense that they were insufficiently leftist and insufficiently bold in their policymaking in part set the stage for Bernie Sanders to run a liberal, anti-establishment candidacy, expanding the debate on a raft of issues to the left. He and Hillary Clinton sparred over the meaning of "progressive" at a 2016 debate, after Sanders said you couldn't be both a moderate and a progressive.

Clinton responded by claiming the progressive mantle: "In the very first debate, I was asked, 'Am I a moderate or a progressive?' And I said, 'I'm a progressive who likes to get things done.'"

Attempting to embrace the label was, for one thing, likely an attempt to latch onto the fervor for change that Sanders tapped into.

But to Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the center-left Brookings Institution, one big reason why a candidate like Clinton was trying to embrace the word may have been very practical.

"Let's face it: America is not a liberal country, nor is it a progressive country," she said. "And if you want to win elections and win hearts and minds, you had to come up with some better way to talk about it because you're outnumbered."

About one-quarter of Americans define themselves as liberals, according to Gallup, while more than one-third identify as conservative.

That may not seem like a huge difference, but it's meaningful in a key way, Kamarck says: Democrats have simply needed majority-moderate coalitions to win nationally.

"The Republican Party doesn't have to be quite as afraid of its conservative base as the Democrats have to be of their liberal base, because their conservative base has for the last four decades been much bigger than the liberal base," she said.

That said, the share of Americans who consider themselves "liberal" has grown, and the Overton window of policy ideas has stretched leftward, bringing ideas like "Medicare for All" into the mainstream.

While Democrats have embraced the term "progressive" and more liberal policy positions in recent years, their thin majorities in Congress give moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., lots of influence over the party's agenda. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images hide caption

While Democrats have embraced the term "progressive" and more liberal policy positions in recent years, their thin majorities in Congress give moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., lots of influence over the party's agenda.

The word "progressive" has become a tool to appeal to those further-left-leaning Americans without alienating the moderates and independents who reject the "liberal" label.

Saying "progressive" dodges that L-word, Kamarck says: "It's an effort to shed a bad label. That's why, pure and simple."

That full coalition has only delivered Democrats razor-thin margins in Congress as the party tries to pass an infrastructure bill crafted by moderates and a larger budget package championed by further-left Democrats like Faiz Shakir.

"You know, literally all of the benefits that will go out will go almost entirely to like working class and lower income and middle class families across America," he said. "So, you know, that to my mind is a major progressive-era accomplishment."

But only if it passes. And right now, it's threatened by the huge power wielded by moderates. West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin says he wants his Senate colleagues to "pause" that bill ... and they need every Democrat to get it done, no matter how progressive they are.

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More And More Democrats Embrace The 'Progressive' Label. Here's Why - NPR

Gavin Newsom, governor of California, speaks during a campaign event at Long Beach City College in Long Beach, California, U.S., on Monday, Sept. 13, 2021.

Bing Guan | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Gavin Newsom survived a Republican attempt to remove him from office as California's governor, ensuring that the Democrat can serve out the rest of his term as the top official in the nation's most populous state, according to an NBC News projection.

With 66% of the expected vote in, Newsom led with 5,619,538 votes, or 65.8%, against removing him from office, compared with 2,916,257 votes, or 34.2%, in favor of the recall.

Polls for in-person voting closed at 11 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Voters had been submitting mail-in ballots for a few weeks ahead of time.

Speaking at a press conference late Tuesday, Newsom thanked his supporters and said "no is not the only thing that was expressed tonight."

"We said yes to science. We said yes to vaccines. We said yes to ending this pandemic. We said yes to people's right to vote without fear of fake fraud or voter suppression. We said yes to women's fundamental, constitutional right to decide for herself what she does with her body and her fate and future," he said.

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The gubernatorial recall effort was the second in California's history to qualify for the ballot, giving Republicans a chance to seize power in an otherwise deep-blue state.

Voters were asked two questions: should Newsom be replaced, and if he is recalled, who out of his 46 opponents in the election should take his place?

Newsom, who was elected by an overwhelming margin in 2018 to a term that would end in 2023, spent months trying to fend off the Republican-led effort that gained traction last year over allegations that he mishandled the state's response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Nearly 1.5 million Californians signed the recall petition due to frustrations over state-issued health orders and the appearance of a maskless Newsom at a dinner party during the height of surging Covid cases.

The recall effort became just one of the several crises that Newsom, steward of the biggest state economy in the United States, had to juggle in the past year, in addition to wildfires, drought, rising costs of living and, of course, the pandemic. Fresh data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that Covid transmission rates in California are dropping, however.

Polling over the summer showed more of a tight race in the recall election but recently shifted in Newsom's favor.

His campaign drove turnout among complacent Democratic voters, who outnumber Republicans in the state's electorate by 2 to 1, as they gained a colossal lead in early mail-in ballot returns.

The governor had a huge money advantage over his opponents. He had a $70 million campaign war chest, and unleashed a flurry of anti-recall ads with prominent Democrats such as former President Barack Obama vouching for him to stay in office.

Newsom received a final push from President Joe Biden, who said at a rally Monday that the results of the election will be felt nationally, shaping the country's direction on climate change, the pandemic and even reproductive rights.

Biden also slammed conservative talk show host Larry Elder, the Republican front-runner of the election, describing him as a "clone" of former President Donald Trump.

Elder drummed up far more support than any of the challengers vying to succeed Newsom, holding a substantial lead over the rest of the field in recent polling. He vowed to reverse vaccination and mask mandates, and echoed Trump's false claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2020 elections, laying the groundwork for misinformation about the recall election.

A wide variety of personalities made up the other 45 candidates who fell short of gaining support from voters. Republican candidates include Caitlyn Jenner, a former reality TV personality and Olympic athlete, and John Cox, who has traveled to campaign events with a live Kodiak bear.

As for Democratic candidates, Hollywood actor Patrick Kilpatrick andYouTube millionaire Kevin Paffrath ran to succeed Newsom.

CNBC's Christine Wang contributed to this report.

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Democrat Gavin Newsom survives California recall election, will remain as governor - CNBC

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) State democrats say theyre fighting back against the governor after he removed the only two physicians from the state Health Care Authority Board earlier this month.

Representative Monroe Nichols announced Monday that hes filing a bill that would restore legislative authority over that board.

It has become unmistakably clear that our governor is more focused on his political future, he said during a Tuesday press briefing. My Republican colleagues gave the governor this new power he abused it.

That power was granted to Gov. Stitt in 2019, when the legislature passed a package of bills that allowed the governor to make hiring and firing decisions for the heads of five state agencies.

Democrats, including Rep. Forrest Bennett, say this gives him too much power.

It is one thing to have that responsibility and oversight spread over several of us, Bennett said. Its another thing entirely to let one person whos very clearly focused on something else call the shots.

House Minority Leader Emily Virgin says she hopes they can continue to address this issue for the other four state agencies throughout the coming legislative session.

We do plan on making this an issue in the upcoming session, she said.

But republican lawmakers, like Sen. Ronnie Paxton, says its necessary for the governor to be able to hold these state agencies accountable.

I just dont see this as an improvement, Paxton said. I see this actually taking us back to the days where theres basically no accountability.

He adds that he would have voted for the 2019 bills regardless of whether the governor was a Republican or Democrat.

The governors office has since released a statement saying Democrats attempts to undo the governors agency reforms are an out-of-touch political stunt designed to score points with special interest groups and unelected bureaucrats.

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Oklahoma democrats seek to roll back governors staffing power over state agencies, starting with the Health Care Authority - KFOR Oklahoma City