Progressive push hits wall against conservative Democrat in deep-blue district

he won an argument about ICE from the moderate side. Patrick Roath ran at him from the left, made the primary a referendum on immigration enforcement, and lost anyway in a district that hasn't voted for a Republican for president since the Coolidge administration. That's not a fluke. That's voters telling their own party something.

Lynch has never pretended to be a progressive darling. He's the guy who votes with union halls more than hashtags, and Massachusetts 8 apparently likes it that way even now, even with the loudest voices in Democratic politics demanding purity on immigration. Roath ran the campaign progressives keep insisting is the future of the party. It wasn't, at least not in South Boston and the working-class suburbs that make up this district.

There's a lesson here that national Democrats keep refusing to learn cycle after cycle. The people most online are not the people most representative, and a district full of union households and cops and firefighters doesn't necessarily want their congressman treating ICE agents like the villains of the republic. Lynch understood his own constituents better than a challenger who thought Twitter sentiment was a governing majority.

We'd be lying if we said this changes the national picture much. One safe seat in Boston isn't a realignment. But it's a data point, and an inconvenient one for anybody selling the idea that the Democratic base is uniformly racing leftward on immigration. Some of it clearly isn't, and it just proved that at the ballot box.