Center-left Democratic officials are coalescing around the opponents of Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in primaries that will take place over the next month. That’s in part because of ideology—many centrists simply don’t agree with the progressive policy stands of Hong and El-Sayed. But some centrists say that they are backing Hong and El=Sayed’s opponents because progressive candidates like those two don’t often win in swing states. And many of Hong and El-Sayed’s supporters are also essentially buying into that historical analysis. They are deeply invested in Hong and/or El-Sayed winning the general election, suggesting those victories would be unique evidence of progressive electoral strength in swing states and would show that someone like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could be elected president.
Both sides’ perspectives are ahistorical, too caught up in the current Mamdani-Sanders-AOC moment. Numerous progressives have won in swing states and districts in the past. Neither El-Sayed nor Hong would be the first progressive candidate to win in the Midwest. Ocasio-Cortez wouldn’t be the first president with a left-wing background. These primaries are a real fight over which faction controls the Democratic Party today. But they shouldn’t obscure the success of progressive candidates years and even decades before anyone had ever heard of Claire Valdez or Ilhan Omar.
What makes this debate complicated is that there are not precise definitions of progressive, leftist, or other such ideological terms. And what constitutes progressive or leftist politics changes over time. Many progressive politicians were not supportive of same-sex marriage in 2002, but virtually all progressive politicians hold that stance today. So for this article, I looked at politicians who were described or self-identified as progressive or very liberal during a given campaign and their results.
Let’s go back 20 years. “An unabashed progressive takes aim at a Senate seat in Ohio,” was the tagline of a November 2005 piece in the leftist publication In These Times. The author is Chris Hayes, who went on to greater fame. The unabashed progressive is Sherrod Brown, then serving in the House. Brown is considered a traditional Democrat now. But back then, his opposition to the Iraq War and deep skepticism of NAFTA and other international trade agreements put him firmly on the Democratic left. “If a bedrock economic populist like Brown can win in a red state, it will explode the post-Clinton conventional wisdom that anything resembling ’class warfare’ is a non-starter for the Democrats,” Hayes wrote. Among those who praised Brown in Hayes’s article was Bernie Sanders, then Vermont’s congressman.
Brown ended up winning the Ohio Senate race in 2006—against a two-term incumbent—by 12 points. “I ran a very outspokenly progressive campaign, standing up for the middle class, taking on the drug companies and the oil companies … And I think that that campaign shows that you can win in moderately conservative states as progressive Democrats,” Brown told NPR in November 2006.
Two years later, a man described by another In These Times writer as an “unflinching progressive” won Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and other states across the Midwest. Again, today we don’t think of Barack Obama as being particularly leftist. But in 2008, being a strong opponent of the Iraq War, a critic of the death penalty, and a skeptic of the Israeli government, all positions he held in his rise in Illinois politics, were very much on the party’s left. Obama’s 2007 voting record was the most liberal of any senator, according to National Journal.
And it’s not just those two. In 2012, Tammy Baldwin, who had been a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was elected to the Senate from Wisconsin. Andy Kim won reelection in 2022 in a competitive district in New Jersey even though his opponent attacked him for being a member of the Progressive Caucus. Ruben Gallego, elected to the Senate in 2024 from Arizona, was a member of the Medicare-for-All and Progressive caucuses during his House days.
Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford University, found that from 2016 to 2024 there were 27 successful U.S. House campaigns in swing districts by candidates whose ideology was left of the average Democratic politician. Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman won Senate races in swing states even though voters perceived them as fairly progressive, says Bonica, citing the Cooperative Election Study, in which voters themselves rank candidates on a seven-point ideological scale. (Sadly, Fetterman has changed his stripes since then.)
Progressive candidates at times obviously lose, including Brown in his 2024 reelection bid. And it’s true that there are far more centrists and more moderates than progressives representing swing districts and states. But that’s in part a screening effect. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee tend to encourage centrist politicians to run in swing areas, direct donors to give money to those candidates instead of their progressive rivals, and often endorse those moderates in primaries. So the number of moderate nominees in swing areas is much larger than those who are more progressive. But moderates and progressives win at similar rates, according to Bonica’s research. What really matters is incumbency—progressive and moderate Democratic candidates tend to lose to Republicans in office but win open seats or when they are the incumbents.
“El-Sayed and Hong as a test of whether progressives can win swing states gets it backwards. They’re a rare case where the choice is actually on the menu. Whether they win will track the national environment and each state’s lean. Parties are electable, not candidates,” says Bonica.
So what’s being tested in Wisconsin and Michigan is not whether a person who has a history of progressive activism, has called themselves a progressive, or has a very progressive voting record can win in a swing state. That’s already happened. Often. Hong is trying to do something unique, in that there isn’t a record of self-identified democratic socialists winning in swing states. That could be tougher, as some polls show voters in Wisconsin and other states are very skeptical of socialism.
And Hong and El-Sayed, if they win their primaries, will be trying to win a general election after the media and their opponents have spent months casting them as very progressive and they themselves have in some ways embraced that label. That’s often not the case for successful progressive candidates. During the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Obama did not run as the most unabashedly progressive candidate, instead positioning himself as the young outsider who might inspire the country. In 2012, Baldwin was unopposed in the Wisconsin Democratic Senate primary. Gallego left the CPC before his Senate run. In contrast, Hong has courted the left-wing vote among Wisconsin Democrats. El-Sayed has campaigned with Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. So it is possible that while a person with a progressive history can win, a person who fully leans into progressivism during the primary will have trouble pivoting to the general election and assuring voters that they aren’t too liberal.
On the other hand, numerous Republicans have run as full-throated conservatives during primaries and then won in swing states in the general election. That’s what Marco Rubio did in 2010 in Florida, and what Donald Trump nationally six years later. And both Hong and El-Sayed (and other progressives such as Ocasio-Cortez) these days are running more on fighting high costs and billionaires than on the broader ideology of socialism. They are winning voters who probably don’t really fully understand or support socialism’s tenets.
We don’t know if El-Sayed or Hong will even make it to the general election. But either way, their candidacies shouldn’t be considered some make-or-break moment for progressive politics in America. Progressives have already won in swing states, including in presidential elections. What we’ll learn in the next months and years is whether swing states will accept today’s version of progressivism, one led by self-described socialists (Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani.) You might say no. But I was covering politics in 2004 and not many people imagined Senators Brown and Baldwin and President Obama. America’s voters often progress more quickly than we expect.
