Turn on Fox News or look to any right-wing media outlet, and you’ll be fed a constant diet of stories claiming that progressives and the Left have taken over the Democratic Party. On paper, they seem to have a point: the Democratic Party’s progressive and neoliberal wings in Congress are almost evenly balanced. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has ninety-nine voting members in the House of Representatives, and the New Democrats (the home of the party’s neoliberal hard core) claim ninety-eight as of August 2022.

But that picture is a serious distortion of the real balance of power in Congress and inside the Democratic Party. In truth, the membership numbers of official caucuses do a poor job of capturing the strengths of the Democrats’ factions. Despite efforts by progressives to tighten caucus rules, for example, the Democratic Party’s Congressional Progressive Caucus still claims as members many representatives who oppose progressive priorities like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. The party’s other two ideological caucuses — the Blue Dogs and the New Democrats (whose political differences seem fairly minor at this point) — are somewhat more ideologically consistent but do not include all members who could reasonably be classified as “neoliberal Democrats.”

In order to develop a realistic sense of the party’s factions, as well as their respective strategies and opportunities for growth, we need to ignore affiliation with ideological caucuses and go straight to the positions congressmembers have taken on key internal party debates. Doing so reveals that the party’s neoliberal wing still holds the dominant position and also exposes the unreliable nature of many in its progressive group.