Insurgents Are Revitalizing the Democratic Party

To hear the DC insiders tell it, insurgent socialists and progressive firebrands are wrecking the Democratic Party. Don’t believe it. The insurgency that swept across the United States during the spring and summer of 2026, with its spike in voter turnouts and headline-grabbing primary results for young candidates who are challenging entrenched incumbents, is not, as some would have you believe, undermining the world’s oldest political party in this critical midterm-election year. The insurgency is revitalizing it. And if established party leaders don’t screw things up—by echoing Republican talking points about a “dangerous” left, or by opting for caution when the electorate is calling for action—this revitalization has the potential to build a vibrant coalition of Democratic base voters and legions of younger, more diverse, and newly registered ones. If it is sufficiently bold and innovative, strategic and inclusive, this coalition can do more than simply check and balance Donald Trump, by giving Democratic candidates and economic-populist independents control of the House and the Senate and key governorships nationwide. In the run-up to the 2028 presidential election, it can merge Democratic candidacies and movement energy into a political force capable of finally realizing the deferred dreams of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights and the Freedom Budget for All Americans that A. Philip Randolph and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. advanced as an essential extension of the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s.

Too many Democratic Party leaders in recent years have complacently mounted campaigns that address legitimate fears of Republican hegemony, yet fail to offer a bolder vision that speaks to the most powerful of all incentives to vote: hope. We’re not talking about vapid “It’ll all work out in the end” optimism or, worse yet, the dismissive “Just trust us” messaging of old-school politicians. We’re talking about a radical hope that lives can be made dramatically better by movements that recognize and embrace Patti Smith’s promise that “people have the power…to dream, to rule, to wrestle the earth from fools.” This is the prospect that FDR entertained when he dramatically expanded the Democratic coalition by proposing a New Deal that pundits dismissed as extreme—even socialistic—but that the electorate embraced as essential. This is what Barack Obama understood when he had the audacity to call a divided nation to “come together as a single American family. ‘E pluribus unum.’ Out of many, one.” And this is what the Rev. Jesse Jackson was talking about four decades ago when he pleaded for a new Democratic politics based on the idea that “if you raise up truth, it’s magnetic. It has a way of drawing people.”

The progressive gospel that Jackson preached in his Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s, and that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders outlined in his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids, laid the groundwork for what a new generation of candidates and activists propose today. They are speaking confidently about enacting Medicare for All, taxing the rich, ending poverty, protecting immigrants, and changing our foreign policy. They are remaking American politics and policymaking—as the July vote by 103 House Democrats (including former House speaker Nancy Pelosi) to end US aid to Israel demonstrated. What Politico described as a “seismic shift” in the party and in Congress is taking place because voters all over the country are demanding a new politics.

After a trio of insurgents—Democratic Socialists of America members Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier and veteran progressive Brad Lander—swept New York’s Democratic primaries in June, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was mocked for his claim that democratic socialists with working-class economics and values-driven agendas “can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.” Less than a week later, 29-year-old DSA member Melat Kiros defeated a 15-term incumbent in a Colorado House primary. That same day, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who pledged to stand up to corporate monopolies on behalf of workers, farmers, and consumers, overcame a 30-point deficit in the polls to beat a sitting senator in the state’s primary for governor. Weiser’s win shocked the Democratic leadership and his own progressive supporters, whom he heard asking on primary night, “Can I really believe again?”

It’s not just that Democrats can believe again. They must.

The Democratic brand as it’s been defined by its congressional leaders is unpopular, even among Democrats. It doesn’t have to be that way. The party can become every bit as appealing, and electable, as it has ever been. But that won’t happen if control over its future remains in the hands of the people who spoiled the brand in the first place.

Democratic voters know that the party needs a new direction, and they are forging it by nominating candidates such as US Representative Analilia Mejia, a key aide to Sanders during his 2020 presidential bid whose February special-election victory in a suburban New Jersey district shocked commentators. “People will say that this district is not the kind of district in which a progressive or a lefty could win. But it’s not about left/right,” Mejia, the sole candidate in a crowded Democratic-primary field to call Israel’s assault on Gaza a genocide, said on election night. “It’s about right and wrong.”

By choosing candidates like Mejia, who easily won her general election, Democratic-primary voters are charting a new course. They know—better than many party leaders, it seems—that it is necessary to remake the party as a popular movement for economic, social, and racial justice, for saving the planet, and for a foreign policy that chooses human rights and diplomacy over bloated Pentagon budgets and forever wars.

That gap between the electorate and party leaders has led to this dynamic and sometimes contentious moment. Media outlets are paying attention to Democratic primaries and scrutinizing the results from Maine to California, Pennsylvania to Texas. Right-wing publications like the New York Post run articles warning about dire consequences for Democrats as a result of a “socialist takeover.” Former Clinton-administration commerce secretary William Daley—whose centrist choice for Illinois’s March Senate primary got crushed by a progressive contender—complained that “this far-left socialist, some call ‘progressive,’ part of society [is] basically trying to take over the Democratic Party.” Leaders of Third Way, the DC think tank that puts a contemporary spin on the neoliberal agenda of the old Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)—which Jackson called “Democrats for the Leisure Class”—warn that “the DSA’s radicalism makes it not a faction to be appeased; it is a movement to be opposed.”

But voters don’t see it that way. They are open to candidates—be they democratic socialists such as Pennsylvania House nominee Chris Rabb, or progressives like Minnesota Senate candidate Peggy Flanagan, or old-school economic populists like Troy Jackson in Maine and Sherrod Brown in Ohio—who break with status quo politics. That’s not surprising. Remember: Bernie Sanders represents a rural state and was the first non-Republican to win his Vermont Senate seat since the 1850s; and some of the most progressive members of Congress, such as Wisconsin’s Mark Pocan, represent urban, suburban, and rural districts. And look at the polling analyses from groups like the Center for Working-Class Politics, which remind us that “championing progressive economic policies can reverse the exodus of blue-collar voters from the party” and that “contrary to what many might expect, the working class has become both more progressive on economic issues and less conservative on social issues in recent decades.”