Warren led opposition to the bill. She contended that it could open taxpayers to more liability or make it easier for mortgage lenders to discriminate.
Warren, Heitkamp and Sanders were not available for interviews.
Frank believes Democratic concerns about the changes were overblown, although he also worries about more mortgage discrimination as a result of the law.
Some saw the issue as embodying a wider dilemma in the Democratic Party this year: balancing a general shift toward more progressive ideals with a desire to take back Congress. In particular, younger voters and candidates — who faced burdensome student loans and a difficult job market after the crisis — have embraced more left-wing policies, according to Princeton’s McCarty.
The change was most notably manifested when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old New York activist still paying off her student loans, beat high-ranking Rep. Joe Crowley in a Democratic House primary. Ocasio-Cortez, who in November will likely become the youngest woman elected to Congress, won in a heavily blue Queens and Bronx district that Crowley represented for two decades.
And just last week, 44-year-old Boston City Council member Ayanna Pressley defeated longtime Democratic Rep. Michael Capuano in a primary election.
At the same time, many Democrats view courting independents and Republicans as critical to winning the GOP-held seats the party needs to flip to win a House majority. Democrats in red states such as Heitkamp’s have touted moderate, bipartisan credentials as they try to keep their Senate seats this year.
Since winning over GOP voters is critical, Democrats must strike a balance and represent centrist, pragmatic interests even as progressives push the party left, some experts say.
“This effort is not going to be a happy marriage. The warfare between centrists and progressives will backfire if it allows President Trump to get re-elected or Republicans to hold onto the House,” McCarty said. “It’s a marriage of convenience, not love.”
But as the midterms and 2020 approach, Frank does not expect centrist Democrats to push for more changes to the law bearing his name. He notes this year’s bank bill has not come up much on the campaign trail, where endangered Senate Democrats have drilled into health-care policy.
Experts expect health care, as well as economic issues such as the federal minimum wage or a jobs guarantee, to cause the most debate among Democrats as they decide which vision is best to defeat Trump. While discussions about whether government should have a larger role in health care do not trace perfectly back to the crisis, the job and wage issues are more directly linked, according to Bivens.
Frank sees a few reasons why financial regulation has not surfaced more often as a campaign issue, and may not even in 2020. Aside from disarming the CFPB — which Frank worries has not received enough attention — the GOP has largely backed off talk of repealing financial regulations. That is partly because centrist Democrats indicated they would not go further than the bill passed earlier this year.
In addition, he calls it difficult to campaign on the concept of having prevented a crisis, which is difficult for voters to see.
“It is hard to take credit for the absence of something bad. Unlike, say, health care, which delivers good to a lot of people, the virtue of financial reform is that it prevented a lot of bad,” Frank said. “And it is always very hard in a political campaign to take credit for disaster averted.”
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