Abdul El-Sayed ran for governor of Michigan in 2018, emphasizing his progressive views and endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders. He didn’t gain much traction and ultimately lost by more than 20 percentage points in the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer, who was backed by the party’s center-left establishment. Eight years later, El-Sayed, now seeking a U.S. Senate seat, is running the same kind of campaign. But this time, he’s effectively tied in polls with the establishment’s favorite, Representative Haley Stevens, and could win the August 4 primary.
Candidates often do better in their second bids for office. But El-Sayed’s strong performance is emblematic of broader trends. Progressives, after struggling in 2022 and 2024 in primaries against more centrist Democrats, are in the midst of an electoral revival. And they are breaking through not just in very blue areas but in purple ones, such as Maine, Michigan, and California’s Central Valley.
Why? Because the Democratic establishment has made some huge blunders, and the party’s left wing has made some smart tactical adjustments. Put all of that together, and the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is alive again, with progressives winning key primaries around the country and positioning themselves to potentially capture the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028.
We’re now a decade into intense primary battles between the Democratic left and center-left, with both sides having strong and weak periods during that time. Sanders’s surprisingly strong campaign against Hillary Clinton back in 2016 reinvigorated the Democratic left and inspired a spate of other progressive challengers to more centrist Democrats. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most prominent of the numerous Sanders-aligned progressives who defeated more centrist Democrats in 2018 and 2020.
But centrist Eric Adams’s win in the 2021 New York mayoral primary was the first of a string of major defeats for progressives. Two years ago, Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who had been elected in 2020 as part of the initial progressive wave, were defeated in primaries by opponents who got heavy support from centrist organizations. Centrist Democrats successfully painted progressives as ignoring practical issues like crime and damaging the Democrats’ national brand by pushing overly liberal ideas. They also were shrewd in fighting the intraparty war, targeting progressives like Bush who had controversies around them unrelated to their policy stands.
So how have progressives come back? In large part because of own goals by the Democratic establishment. Zohran Mamdani was greatly helped by city’s center-left backing a candidate (Andrew Cuomo) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and had to resign the governorship in shame after being accused by numerous women of sexual harassment. Graham Platner is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine because the party establishment backed a candidate (Janet Mills) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and almost 80 years old, annoying Democratic voters who are leery of older candidates after Joe Biden’s failed 2024 run.
Peggy Flanagan, the progressive candidate in Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary, is leading in part because her centrist opponent, Representative Angie Craig, stupidly voted for a Trump-backed anti-immigration bill, angering the state’s liberals. In nearly all of these races, the progressive candidates can straightforwardly condemn Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, while centrist donors insist that the candidates they support take pro-Israel stances that are out of touch with Democratic voters.
Broadly, the Democratic establishment has discredited itself with the party base, with massive electoral (2024) and policy (the Gaza war) mistakes. So endorsements from centrist leaders such as Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer no longer carry much weight and arguably hurt centrist candidates more than they help them. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is so toxic in liberal circles that it tries to hide its role in backing centrist candidates, thereby limiting AIPAC’s effectiveness. A candidate such as El-Sayed can brush aside the establishment’s claims that he is unelectable in a general election because the center-left’s political acumen is no longer trusted by voters after it lost the White House, Senate, and House in 2024.
“When you have 70, 75 percent of the Democratic base saying, ‘We don’t agree with what Netanyahu’s doing in Gaza,’ but you have members of your party who are still voting to send arms to that government and who are telling you that the issue is complicated, when you’re seeing children being blown up … you start to question them not only on that issue but on other issues, as well,” Mamdani adviser and longtime Democratic Party operative Patrick Gaspard told me on a Right Now episode last year.
At the same time, the progressives have sown the seeds of their recent successes. They have smartly changed their rhetoric. Mamdani and numerous other progressive candidates deleted their tweets calling for defunding the police and have broadly stopped calling for police reforms.
In terms of policy, that’s disappointing. The police in America deserve much scrutiny and accountability. But this shift is shrewd politics. Progressives are no longer fighting on an issue where public sentiment is against them. Leftist candidates still support Medicare for All, free college, and other big expansions of government programs, but they fixate on those ideas a bit less than a decade ago, perhaps aware that even voters who agree with those proposals doubt they will ever happen.
Instead, the left these days leads with an anti-billionaire, anti-Washington populism, along with more incremental affordability proposals. Candidates such as Flanagan and California House hopeful Randy Villegas decry the growing power of billionaires and call for banning members of Congress from selling stocks. Both of those positions are extremely popular with the public.
Progressives have also gotten savvier and more ruthless in their campaign strategies. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul are as centrist as Representative Dan Goldman and even more powerful. So why did New York progressives opt against aggressive primary challenges to Jeffries and Hochul while focusing attention on taking down Goldman? Because Goldman is in a very progressive district and therefore easier to beat.
Progressives, while still decrying the outsize role of money and big donors, are creating their own super-PACs, aware that they can’t win races if they are vastly outspent. Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Mamdani often endorse the same candidates, creating a kind of progressive crescendo behind their choices. In Nebraska, populist candidates are running as independents, realizing they can’t win under the mantle of the Democratic Party in places where the party is super unpopular.
None of this guarantees progressive success this November or in the future. Mamdani could fail as mayor. Platner could be hit by another scandal, and he and other progressive candidates could lose in November. It will still be extremely hard for Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Ro Khanna, or another person closely associated with the party’s progressive wing to win the Democratic presidential nomination. All that said, in the days after the 2024 election, when party strategists were blaming progressive causes and groups for the losses, I was deeply concerned that the Democratic Party would move decisively to the right. It hasn’t. Instead, progressives have led the fight against Trump, forced the party’s establishment to admit its failings in the Biden years, and reinvented their own strategies in winning ways. A Muslim man named Abdul, backed by Bernie Sanders and calling for a new kind of politics in America, could be the party’s candidate in Michigan. Progressives are making progress.
