In the 19th century, widespread poverty and corporate monopolism spawned a populist movement eventually succeeded by a historic progressive era. It seems today’s democratic socialists are trying to repeat American history.
Last year, Zohran Mamdani ended the Cuomo dynasty by winning the Democratic nomination and general election for mayor of New York City, all without the support of Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. This June, Mamdani — along with the broader progressive and democratic socialist wings of the Democratic Party — continued to enjoy sizable gains when three such candidates he endorsed won their New York City primaries for U.S. House seats against more moderate candidates backed by the party establishment.
In unprecedented upsets even for safely blue urban districts, democratic socialists Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier and progressive Brad Lander all won decisively against multiterm incumbents. Their platforms centered around policies including abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ending funding to Israel amidst the genocide in Gaza, and advocating for Medicare for All among other affordability-centric policies.
These results were replicated in districts across the nation. Excluding national redistricting years, more incumbents have lost this cycle’s primaries than in any year since 1970, sometimes being replaced by more outspokenly left-wing candidates. In Colorado’s First Congressional District, for instance, democratic socialist Melat Kiros defeated 30-year incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette by more than 10 percentage points in the Democratic primary. Most recently in Michigan, despite being at a nine to one spending disadvantage while swearing off accepting any corporate PAC money, progressive outsider Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary in a swing state that went to Trump in both 2016 and 2024. He defeated Democratic establishment-endorsed Haley Stevens, in support of whom the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had spent $32 million, the most any single group has contributed in a Democratic primary this cycle.
With all five of these left-wing candidates being favorites — in El Sayed’s case, a competitive contender — to win their general elections, the progressive gains made this year should be celebrated by the Democratic Party writ large. Instead, Democratic leaders have largely turned against these political newcomers. In doing so, they risk factionalization in a crucial midterm cycle where party unity with the growing democratic socialist movement may be the only foreseeable path to reclaiming a majority in Congress.
When Democratic trailblazers such as former President Barack Obama have stepped across ideological lines to meet with El-Sayed and campaign with Democratic outsiders, some of the highest-ranking leaders in the Democratic Party have joined Republicans in attacking left-wing candidates after recent electoral success. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, for example, called the progressive movement “performative politics,” and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries labeled New York’s growing coalition as “Team Gentrification.” Jeffries had also endorsed five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat over Chevalier. New Jersey Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer even went as far as blasting democratic socialists as “anti-American bomb-throwers” on a mission to “hijack” the Democratic Party.
In the same statement, Gottheimer reaffirmed the Democratic Party’s big-tent politics and welcoming of a wide diversity of positions as a defining strength, even as he rejected embracing democratic socialists within the party in the same breath. While raising the question of why Gottheimer among other Democrats see anti-PAC progressives as challengers, the more urgent question is why a big-tent Democratic Party does not have enough room for democratic socialists or populist progressives.
Contrary to concerns that left-wing nominees hurt the electability of Democrats, research increasingly shows outsider candidates swearing off corporate PAC money generate more voter enthusiasm than opponents beholden to special interests. Election results from this cycle corroborate these findings: From Texas to Michigan to New York, left-wing outsiders are breaking voter turnout records and building coalitions transcending ideological and racial divisions. Yet, the Democratic leaders who should be celebrating voter excitement about these candidates are instead distancing themselves from the progressive movement, a movement that holds the key to the party base’s revitalization.
The perils of this attitude among Democratic moderates are further underscored by their losing record in recent years. Democratic leadership has experienced steady unpopularity in recent years, evidenced by the party’s loss of both the presidency and Senate majority in 2024. This unpopularity has translated to historically reliable Democratic voters either staying home or flipping even in the nation’s most crucial elections. In 2024, for example, New York and New Jersey — thought to be among the safest blue states in presidential elections — both experienced the biggest percentage-point swings out of the 50 states, with President Trump winning over 40% of the vote in both. What’s more, senior advisor to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign David Plouffe later stated that the campaign’s confidential internal polling never had Harris ahead of Trump, meaning the Democratic nominee not only failed to swing the political center, but failed to prove herself as a viable candidate even among her own campaign staff.
Instead of reckoning with the failure from the center to prevent a second Trump term, several establishment Democrats, led by New York Rep. Tom Suozzi, have exacerbated party division by signing anti-democratic socialist pledges to ensure the Democratic Party does not “los[e] sight” of its values. Even if these anxieties about democratic socialists diluting Democratic values hold some truth, however, the same accusation is demonstrably true of establishment Democrats themselves. Most notably, Harris allowed herself to be pushed to the right by Trump on election-defining issues such as the border while remaining non-responsive to voter backlash from backing Israel’s war in Gaza and failing to present a new vision distinct from President Biden’s. Especially when a plurality of Americans are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and a third of Democrats identify as democratic socialists, it is electoral suicide for the Democratic Party to lead with establishment politics in the face of an increasingly progressive base.
Harris’s campaign should serve as a lesson that treating progressivism as a fringe in the Democratic Party costs elections. Likewise, recent history has taught us that maintaining noncommittal, status quo policies to court the favor of moderates will not build the numbers necessary to win elections and safeguard future success. Harris herself has recently seemed to concede this point by embracing her party’s progressive factions: Her July meeting with Mamdani behind closed doors and endorsement of El-Sayed as she weighs another presidential run says as much.
The rising candidates of this year’s cycle in many ways represent what Kamala 2024 was not. These are candidates who lead with concrete policies rather than established political name brand, who run as political newcomers threatening to shake up the established order by putting constituents over special interests, and who champion issues materially resonant with working and middle-class Americans.
Time and again, left-wing outsiders have demonstrated their ability in recent elections to increase Democratic Party turnout and create a greater sense of civic engagement among a disillusioned electorate. These factors explain why democratic socialist labor organizer Angie Nixon won the Florida democratic senate nomination in an upset victory by a massive margin, why democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George is all but certain to be elected mayor of Washington D.C., and why democratic socialists William Lawrence and Donavan McKinney both won the Democratic primaries in districts representing Michigan’s biggest cities. Even beyond democratic socialism, progressive populist messaging can still in part explain why anti-corruption newcomers James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa are polling competitively against and outraising Republican hardliners in Texas, a GOP stronghold that has not elected a Democratic senator since 1988.
It is no coincidence that the voting blocs essential to Trump’s 2024 win — young voters, Latinos, and working class Americans — were the same demographics that won Mamdani the 2025 mayoral election, are driving Talarico’s rising national profile, and have sustained Bernie Sanders’ popularity for the past decade. It is for the same reason that Trump flipped enough Hispanic and working class voters in 2024 to create a winning coalition closer to Obama’s 2012 coalition in terms of voter education and income levels than Harris’ was. Now more than ever, incumbents’ seats are jeopardized if they do not run to materially improve the conditions of their working-class constituents. In this regard, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party consistently outperforms its opposing moderate camp.
In a year where Democrats have an opportunity to win it all back, the key to winning and sustaining support is not in rehashed establishment, PAC-backed politics that — as recent years have shown — are simply not exciting the voter blocs necessary to win. Voters are looking for a viable alternative to MAGA’s widely unpopular politics for the same reasons Trump was elected in the first place: They are attracted to candidates running on popular and identifiable policies, who threaten to challenge unaccountable political actors, rein in special interests, and serve as a vanguard for the oft-forgotten working-class.
It has become painfully apparent that the Trump who promised to drain the swamp has become the embodiment of the swamp, and may have been a part of it all along. Further, his support of unpopular wars abroad in Iran and Gaza, high-profile cases of insider trading and corruption inside his administration, and the country’s worsening inflation have exacerbated the exact anti-status-quo vacuum that gave way to his rise to begin with.
The progressive wing of the Democratic Party champions virtually every popular alternative to these disastrous policies, and they have the rising anti-establishment profile needed to pull off a paradigm-defining party realignment: a leftward swing of the working class back to the Democratic Party. In the coming years, the Democratic Party must capitalize on this opportunity and embrace its burgeoning progressive movement, leaning into grassroots candidates with clear policy goals who favor the American working class over special interests and corruption.
