Are Populists Winning or is the Democratic Establishment Losing?
The party's takeover is reminiscent of what happened to Republicans in 2016.
A series of recent and upcoming Democratic primaries has the party’s establishment in a panic:
In Michigan, the Bernie Sanders-aligned candidate Abdul El-Sayed looks like he will now easily defeat Michigan Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens to become the party’s U.S. Senate nominee.
In Wisconsin, democratic socialist and state lawmaker Francesca Wong has a massive lead in the race for the party’s gubernatorial nomination.
In New York City, democratic socialists and other progressives defeated establishment picks in a number of races, even unseating two long-term incumbents.
In Colorado, longtime incumbent Congresswoman Diana DeGette was ousted by 29-year-old Melat Kiros, a political newcomer.
One interpretation of these results is that the party is shifting far to the left. In all of these cases, the challengers were clearly more progressive than the incumbents and establishment picks.
This interpretation has been adopted by much of the mainstream media and Fox News — which has become obsessed with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a political group that supported many of these insurgent candidates.
But another way to see these results is that they are the consequence of political and governance weakness by Democratic elites in many parts of the country.
After all, many Democratic incumbents are totally fine. Georgia Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff, for instance, here in the Peach state is beloved by both moderate and progressive Democrats alike. He ran unchallenged in his recent primary and is expected to defeat the Republican candidate, Georgia Congressman Mike Collins, in a landslide.
But the difference between Ossoff and some of these other Democratic mainstays that have been trounced by the rebels is that he has his finger on the pulse of Democratic voters. He has campaigned strongly against the legalized corruption that governs the nation’s capital, and on the issue igniting Democratic activists since 2023 — Israel’s wars — he has found himself clearly siding with the next generation of voters by loudly condemning that state’s war crimes. He doesn’t agree with the party’s left wing on everything, but he also doesn’t demonize them.
You can’t say the same for Stevens, the Michigan congresswoman who appears to be on a collision course with one of the most humiliating defeats an establishment figure has ever suffered.
Stevens, a four-term congresswoman, has been backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the primary Israel Lobby group in the United States. They’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on ads boosting her and attacking El-Sayed, never once mentioning their actual issue (assuring unconditional military support for Israel). The spending gap is so lopsided that El-Sayed is outspent more than ten-to-one.
It is difficult to find any historical analog for a candidate who has been so badly outspent coming from behind and winning the race. But that is what El-Sayed is apparently poised to do.
Why is that? Is he a top tier political talent? I’d argue that he’s charismatic and has adopted popular positions on things like the wars in the Middle East, health care, and corruption in politics.
But with all due respect to El-Sayed, the main advantage he has is how bad of a candidate Stevens is.
She’s spent the last few weeks of the campaign not assembling a compelling policy platform or high-impact and inspiring advertisements but instead whining about how people online are mean to her. It’s hard to imagine that a high schooler with a decent ounce of self-respect would campaign for class president this way, let alone should a candidate for the most exclusive legislative body in the world engage in petty self-victimization.
I would argue that all of the incumbents who are falling to the insurgents suffer from the same level of entitlement and lethargy. They’ve failed to put together a compelling vision and are relying on outside groups and party leadership to smear everyone who opposes them as racist or sexist. It’s hardly any surprise that these kinds of Democratic elites are seeing themselves pushed out of the party tent. After all, it’s not a party if everyone there is as dull as Stevens is.
Most people are more informed than I am about national and state politics, but it appears to me the idea of populist politics becoming a thing is not new. Its been a trend since Trump's first term. The fact that the dems went the opposite direction and found it necessary to abandon their so called base and go after the educated elite voter was always a head scratcher. The recent wins by DSA within the democrat party are good sign that people are looking for candidates who seem to be in touch with what the "man on the street" needs and wants. These candidates are checking all the right boxes, as they say. But the moment of truth is when and if elected to Congress or whatever, are these people going to be the the version of AOC who demonstrated outside of Pelosi's office door when initially elected, or the other version of AOC who at the dem convention, embarrassed herself by stating Kamala and Biden were "working tirelessly for a ceasefire." We need to continue to elect good people, but once these people are in office we need to hold their feet to the fire. Demand real change, not reform, revolutionary change. I' like to see these newbies, sitting outside of Hakeem Jeffries office door and demanding the changes they campaigned on and settling for nothing less.
Good take, but if anything it undersells just how much the Democratic establishment has failed: Republicans currently control all three branches of government and the majority of state legislatures, so the party's power has fallen off a cliff under their leadership. This is all the more astonishing given that, on paper and absent party affiliation, Democratic policies are much more popular: if you ask people about what's actually in the Affordable Care Act, they like it; ask them about what's in the Trump tax cuts, they don't. For that matter, ask them if they want to continue fighting endless wars in the Middle East and arming genocidal regimes, and they really don't--this should have been an obvious issue for the Democrats to own post George W Bush, and yet they allowed themselves to get outflanked by Tucker Carlson.
When you have an obviously winning platform and you keep losing, we have to assume the people running the show are making profound strategic mistakes. Chuck Schumer notably said before 2016 that he didn't really care about losing working class voters because they would pick up more upper middle class suburbanites; we all know how that went. And the absolute failure to meet the moment in 2024 by refusing to address what was happening in Gaza and campaigning with Liz Cheney of all people was just mind boggling. The people who brought us here need to never work in politics again.
At this point, all the establishment has is talking down to the insurgent left and trying to position themselves as the moderate, responsible voices of reason who know about "electability"- yet everyone can see that their track record is abysmal. Claiming the mantle of electability is just not convincing anyone, so if they want to push back on Mamdani-style politics, they need to win on the issues. But this isn't working either because their platform is just written by lobbyists and donors for health insurance companies and foreign governments, so it's completely out of step with the electorate. They just have no answer to 'let's spend our money on healthcare and schools instead of genocide on the other side of the world.'
Personally, I would like to see Democratic candidates who take popular positions while pushing back on some of the more outlandish fixations of the DSA; Ossoff is a great example, and hopefully we'll see more young candidates following his lead. But with these same out of touch boomers in charge of the Democrats, they're going to keep getting routed.