Ivo Vegter: What the DA's boring manifesto could teach America's Democrats

South Africans watching the Democratic Alliance's dull, rules-based manifesto for the local government elections may recognise a familiar pitch playing out in America's midterms. Columnist Ivo Vegter argues Democrats have been handed an unusually favourable opening, given Donald Trump's illegal tariffs, ballooning government stakes in private firms and battered institutions, but risk squandering it by nominating Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates in seats moderates alone can win. The comparison to the DA is deliberate: like South Africa's opposition, Vegter contends, Democrats would do better selling competence and institutional neutrality than ideology, since American voters remain broadly centre-right despite their disillusionment with Trump..By Ivo Vegter*.MAGA has offered voters the most persuasive case against radicalism in living memory. Some left-wingers are determined to fight fire with fire.Last week I reviewed the Democratic Alliance’s manifesto for South Africa’s local government elections and concluded, without excessive enthusiasm, that it would be sensible to vote for them.Its chief virtues were that it was largely a promise to comply with rules that already exist. Its platform was not revolution. It was competence and honesty.That is a modest thing to sell, unless you’re pitching it as competition to a stark record of incompetence and corruption.Like in South Africa, competence and honesty are, right now, the most valuable unsold commodity in the US, but the Democratic Party seems intent on selling exactly what Trump warned Americans against: radical leftist lunacy.The socialist summerThe 2026 Democratic primaries have produced a genuine insurgency of the left, and the commentariat has been twittering about little else, of late.The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), founded in 1982 and for four decades a mere footnote in that country’s politics, broke through with Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York in late 2025.This year its members or endorsees have unseated entrenched incumbents, among them a Denver congresswoman who had held her seat since 1997 – beaten by a democratic socialist activist who wasn’t even born when she took office.Last week a state legislator and DSA member took Florida’s Senate nomination from an establishment Democrat who outspent his challenger more than 16 to one – by 56% to 44%.The DSA’s leadership is now openly talking up a presidential run in 2028..Shallow insurgencyTo be fair, the numbers are less impressive than the headlines.The Brookings Institution identified 282 DSA-endorsed candidates this cycle. Only 29 carried a national endorsement; the rest came from local chapters applying wildly inconsistent standards, and more than half were running for city council or state legislature.Set against 7,386 state legislative seats and some 77,000 local elections, the DSA slate is a rounding error, and the share that won a nomination is well under 1%.More to the point, they lost more primaries than they won where it counts. DSA-backed candidates for Congress and statewide office won fewer than half their races, and as districts became more competitive, fewer ran and even fewer won.Just 10 prevailed in seats leaning anything less than 10% in favour of the Dems on the Cook Partisan Voter Index. The Cook Political Report made the same point in July: the hand-wringing about a “Democratic Tea Party” that could hand the Republicans victory in the November elections overlooks the fact that in most competitive seats, centre-left candidates have prevailed.Most, but not all. The insurgency is shallow, but real.Most of its wins came in races where Democrats cannot lose, and most of its losses where Democrats must win. A heavily gerrymandered election can hinge upon a few key losses, however, and the ascendancy of the DSA is propaganda gold for the MAGA-dominated Republican Party.The case against the incumbentsThe insurgency’s fuel is not difficult to discern. It is the spectacle of a governing movement that promised a golden age but delivered a protracted, expensive and damaging ego-trip, punctuated by tantrums and reckless U-turns.Consider the record. Tariffs were the centrepiece: the instrument that would rebalance trade and bring factories roaring back. Instead, manufacturing employment is down 75,000 jobs since the second inauguration, the manufactured goods trade deficit is bigger than pre-Trump, and construction spending on manufacturing facilities has fallen by nearly a third.Total non-farm employment grew by 716,000 in Trump’s first seventeen months, against 2,007,000 in Biden’s last seventeen.The Federal Reserve’s economists calculate that tariffs imposed through November 2025 raised core goods prices by 3.1%, accounting for the entirety of excess inflation in that category.Then, in February, the Supreme Court ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorise the president to impose tariffs at all, locating the taxing power in Congress, where the Constitution rather plainly puts it.Some $160 billion had already been collected. Refunds have since accelerated to the point where, since May, the government handed back more than it took in.Trump’s signature economic policy was illegal, inflationary and net revenue-negative. It is difficult to fail more comprehensively..Read more:.Helen Zille: The Burke saga, a response to Corné Mulder, and the battle for Joburg and beyond.Et tu, GOP?What should concentrate any classical liberal mind is that the party that ran against radical leftism has been nationalising the means of production more rapidly than at any time outside major economic crises.Since June 2025 the federal government has taken ownership positions in as many as 30 companies, by Cato’s count: a golden share in a steelmaker, 9.9% of Intel, stakes in rare earths, quantum computing and eighteen semiconductor firms – amounting to some $26.7 billion in all.Cato rightly calls it state capitalism and creeping socialism, and notes that the most striking feature of the latest tranche is how unremarkable government ownership has become.The party that exists to warn America about the dangers of socialism has quietly assembled a sovereign wealth fund.Partisan institutionsThe damage inflicted on America’s bureaucratic institutions is even worse, and will outlast it.The Justice Department has pursued prosecutions of a former FBI director, a state attorney-general, a sitting senator and a former national security adviser, among others.Courts threw out two of the most prominent cases with some embarrassment. The attorney-general, asked on Meet the Press whether the president should have a say in individual prosecutions, answered, “Yes, of course.” (Hint: the correct answer is, “No, of course not!”)Trump attempted to fire a Federal Reserve governor – the first such attempt in 112 years – and the Justice Department opened a Trumped-up (see what I did there?) criminal investigation into its chairman, Jerome Powell, before quietly dropping it three months later.Powell said plainly that the question was whether monetary policy would be set by evidence in the best interest of the public, or by intimidation in the best interest of the president.And in January federal immigration agents shot dead two American citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis. Polls found only 40% of voters approve of ICE’s conduct; even Mike Pence called for restraint.ApprovalThe voters have noticed.Although the MAGA base likes that Trump lies like wildfire, his approval rating has slipped to historic lows, and is negative in 47 of the 50 states. Just a third of Americans consider him honest, and even fewer consider him a good role model.His net approval is now negative on all his signature issues: immigration (-12.4%), trade (-25.7%) and worst of all, inflation (-42.4%).Consumer confidence is in the toilet, having fallen to levels that, other than during the height of the Covid pandemic, haven’t been seen since Obama’s presidency.The jaws of victoryThe result is the most favourable midterm environment either party has enjoyed in years.Democrats lead the generic ballot (in which respondents choose between an unnamed Democrat and an unnamed Republican) by six to eight points.One forecast gives them an 85% chance of flipping the House, and 55% of taking the Senate, too.They will need every point of that lead. Democrats must win on the merits in seats gerrymandered to resist them.That requires persuading moderate Republicans and appealing to independents who are appalled by the administration but not remotely in the market for Bernie Sanders-style socialism.America remains, as it has been since Reagan – even during Democratic administrations – a centre-right country.Third Way calculates that self-identified conservatives have outnumbered liberals* three to two since 2004, and that has not changed. That means Democrats need to convince 60% or more of moderate swing voters to win races. (* Note: the term “liberal” is used here with its left-wing American meaning, and not in its free-market European or “classical liberal” sense. We are not the same.)Socialist landslide = GOP winWhich brings us back to Florida, where the insurgent socialist Democrat beat the moderate establishment Democrat by a landslide.The moment the socialist won the nomination, non-partisan forecaster Larry Sabato moved the Senate race from “Likely Republican” to “Safe Republican”, noting helpfully that the silver lining was that Democratic donors would now spend the money somewhere useful.That is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: the nomination turned a tough competitive contest into a write-off overnight. The same will happen in every competitive race where the Democrats field a socialist instead of a moderate.One newly nominated socialist congressional candidate in New York, backed by Mamdani, had to scrub old social media posts praising communism and Marxism.The party’s progressive Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, one of the poster boys of the leftist insurgency with deep historical ties to the DSA, now takes pains to point out that he is not a DSA member, not a socialist, and is really a pragmatic progressive who believes in regulated capitalism.This has “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” written all over it. When you have to spend an election campaign explaining what you are not, the opposition hardly needs to air attack ads.Trump has spent a decade insisting all Democrats are all crazy socialists. They’re not, but the Democrats don’t have to field a great number of actual socialists to make that accusation stick. Strategically, the Democrats could hardly do worse..The boring optionThe DA’s manifesto offers a more sensible template, and I say that having spent 2,500 words last week being lukewarm about it.Its pitch is that municipal government should be as dull as a tap that works: merit-based appointment over cadre deployment, ring-fenced revenue, funded budgets, and consequence management for officials who steal.Almost none of it is original; most is National Treasury policy the governing party declines to follow. The DA’s differentiator is not what it believes, but that it proposes to obey the rulebook while its opponents do not.Now transpose this to American mid-term politics. The American equivalent of rooting out corruption is a Justice Department that prosecutes crimes rather than enemies. The equivalent of funded budgets is not compounding the national debt. The equivalent of merit-based appointment and ending cadre deployment is a civil service and a central bank not staffed by unqualified, inexperienced loyalists. The equivalent of fixing the pipes is a promise that grocery prices will be set by markets rather than by a Lower Grocery Prices Act.Neutrality is conservativeNone of that requires socialism. It requires institutional neutrality, which is a conservative project in the oldest and best sense, and is available to any party willing to be boring on purpose.I should be fair to the insurgents. Their diagnosis is not stupid: the establishment they are rebelling against lost the working-class vote and then explained at length why this was everyone else’s fault.Several upsets were about age rather than ideology – one 78-year-old Connecticut incumbent lost a race fought largely over his birth certificate. And a democratic socialist lost Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary partly because she went on a national media tour and let voters get a good look at her.Candidate quality still matters, perhaps more than ideology.But the burden of proving they are capable of governing lies with the Democrats. They do not need headlines about why socialists might win big in November. They need seats where moderate swing voters will make the difference.Two forms of statismThe uncomfortable truth is that American voters are not being offered a choice between free-market capitalism and socialism.The incumbent administration owns equity in thirty companies, leans on companies over their margins, and routinely interferes in markets or threatens to punish companies that do not bow to the president’s will.The insurgency proposes much the same, only honestly and with better reasoning for it.The choice is actually between two kinds of state direction: one by left-wing central planners, and the other by a right-wing Nero.The third option, which moderate Republicans should be selling when left-wing Democrats are in power, and which moderate Democrats should be selling right now, is a government that does fewer things, does them competently, and stays within the law while doing them..Read more:.DA's local government manifesto is competent, not radical: Ivo Vegter.Winning platformSouth Africa’s opposition has stumbled toward roughly that position, less from philosophical conviction than out of pragmatism and experience.America’s Democrats have been handed the same opportunity on far better terms, by an opponent who has spent eighteen months making the case against unchecked executive power more vividly than any left-wing pamphlet could.They can run on sanity, competence, clean governance and institutional neutrality. That would be a winning platform and, unusually, the correct one.Or they can field DSA insurgents in districts drawn to defeat them, and spend December explaining that the electorate was not ready for socialism..*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalist, columnist and speaker who loves debunking myths and misconceptions, and addresses topics from the perspective of individual liberty and free markets..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here.

Ivo Vegter: What the DA's boring manifesto could teach America's Democrats

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