It didn’t take long after the primary polls closed on August 18 for Jared Moskowitz, a moderate Democrat who has represented a South Florida congressional district since 2023, to declare victory—not just over his opponent, union organizer Oliver Larkin, but also the Democratic Socialists of America, which had backed Larkin’s campaign. “Florida is known for hurricanes,” Moskowitz told Politico. “And so the DSA is a disaster area in Florida—and there’s no federal reimbursement coming to help these people.” On X, around the same time, he sent a message to the leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who had campaigned for Larkin: “My condolences.” The following morning, almost as an afterthought, Moskowitz returned to X to thank his family and his voters for their support. “My dad died of cancer 4 years ago,” he wrote. “He would have enjoyed all of this. I miss him.”
Moskowitz is both pugnacious and extremely online, which also means he’s a bit of a troll. And Moskowitz had reason to gloat. The biggest source of the campaign’s bitterness had been perhaps the one issue the two candidates agreed on: Moskowitz himself, a staunchly pro-Israel centrist who at times resembles a Republican. Indeed, Moskowitz has described himself as a “[Ron] DeSantis Democrat”—a nod to his stint as director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management under the state’s term-limited, MAGA-lite governor. (It’s not clear if there are other DeSantis Democrats, or if Moskowitz is a caucus of one.)
Moskowitz and his allies argued that running anyone but a pro-Israel moderate would amount to political suicide in the recently redrawn 25th congressional district, which voted for Donald Trump by nearly 10 points in 2024. Meanwhile, Larkin was campaigning on the idea that someone with Moskowitz’s politics no longer had a place in the Democratic Party. He ultimately lost by nearly 30 points. Cue the Moskowitz gloating.
There was just one problem. The very same night, Angie Nixon, a young, progressive state representative from Jacksonville, won a shocking upset victory over Alex Vindman, a hero of the resistance during Trump’s first term, in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. Vindman had the backing of a number of national Democrats and spent more than $9 million—almost 13 times what his opponent put into the race. Oh, and Nixon had just joined the Democratic Socialists of America months earlier. Florida is known for hurricanes, after all.
Welcome to the wild, chaotic world of Democratic politics in 2026, where every competitive primary result was contradicted by the next.
Primary season can seem endless, but things got really interesting in August, which began with Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive doctor campaigning on a platform of Medicare for All, becoming Michigan’s first Muslim Senate nominee. He narrowly defeated Haley Stevens, the suburban Detroit House member who was backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and who had outspent El-Sayed by roughly the same margin by which Vindman outspent Nixon.
A week later, Francesca Hong, a former chef and progressive member of Wisconsin’s state Assembly, lost to moderate, establishment-backed challenger David Crowley after her commanding polling lead crumbled in the final weeks of the race, thanks in part to a poor defense of past “woke” comments and positions. A week after that race, Florida primary voters headed to the polls—and in Moskowitz and Nixon, moderates and progressives both found reasons to claim victory.
What are we to make of all this? If you’re looking for something analogous to the Tea Party that upended Republican politics in 2010 or to the rise of Trump, who co-opted it six years later, you’ll end up with whiplash. For better or worse, the slow civil war between Democratic moderates and progressives that began 10 years ago is still very much ongoing.
Preelection polling suggests that the party could see its biggest midterm gains in 20 years. If, that is, this uneasy coalition can hang together.
Speaking to a packed Detroit Opera House in mid-July, Bernie Sanders made the case that voting for Abdul El-Sayed in the upcoming Senate primary carried existential importance. The battle between El-Sayed and Stevens—who outspent El-Sayed by about 12 to 1, including roughly $30 million from the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—had become “an election of historical significance.” Its outcome, Sanders said, would “show the nation whether AIPAC and other billionaire-funded super PACs can spend tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars to buy a U.S. Senate seat.”
Two weeks later, El-Sayed, who had been favored by double digits in several preprimary polls, squeaked out a victory. The polling miss undercut the significance of El-Sayed’s triumph. Stevens had once said, “Israel comes to me in my dreams”; El-Sayed, meanwhile, ran on ending military aid for the country.
Something is clearly happening within the Democratic electorate, the outlines of which you can see in El-Sayed’s rise. The party’s base has, broadly speaking, grown more progressive, less supportive of Israel, and more suspicious of its leaders, particularly after Trump’s reelection in 2024. Even the Democratic Socialists of America will almost certainly see their ranks in Congress grow from two—Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—to seven. Indeed, a postelection fixation on El-Sayed’s and Hong’s underperformance compared to polls distracts from the fact that both results represent unprecedented performances for Midwest progressives.
Of course, the real significance of El-Sayed’s victory won’t be clear until November, when voters choose between him and Mike Rogers, the Trump-backed Republican currently leading in many polls. But if a candidate like El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, can win in Michigan, it will be vindication for those who have spent the past decade insisting that “Bernie would have won” ever since Hillary Clinton lost Michigan (and most of the Upper Midwest, and the presidency) to Trump in 2016.
El-Sayed is particularly notable, but he is hardly alone. Other primary results gave the party’s progressives much to feel hopeful about. Sam Forstag, a labor union leader and former smoke jumper, won a crowded House primary in Montana with the support of Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. With the same two endorsements, Randy Villegas, a school board trustee in California’s Central Valley, ran a health care–focused campaign in a district that includes the third-highest percentage of Medicaid beneficiaries in the nation. Melat Kiros, the DSA member who will likely represent Denver in Congress next year, ran on Medicare for All, federal rent control, abolishing ICE, and a moratorium on data centers. She knocked out Diana DeGette, a 30-year incumbent, in a race that may have had more to do with anti-incumbent fervor than policy distinctions: DeGette is also a progressive.
The party’s left wing is performing particularly well with what New York political writer Michael Lange has termed the “Mamdani Coalition,” after the group of voters who propelled New York City’s youthful and proudly socialist mayor to victory last fall: “young people of all races, socialists, progressives, pacifists, tenants, millennials, South Asians, Arabs, Muslims, college-graduates, ‘No Kings’ boomers, the children of immigrants, [and] the cost-burdened (working families, fixed-income seniors, mortgaged homeowners).” It’s a coalition very similar to the one that (broadly) propelled El-Sayed to his primary victory, though it’s also clearly one that has its limits, particularly in rural areas.
Not everything has gone the insurgents’ way in 2026, of course. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a centrist foe of the party’s left flank, easily fended off a progressive challenger for her seat in southwest Washington. Cori Bush’s attempt to win back her Missouri House seat from the AIPAC-backed Wesley Bell fizzled. And then there’s the case of Graham Platner, the oyster farmer and Maine Senate primary winner, who bowed out not long after months of negative reporting culminated in accusations of sexual assault. If Platner’s spectacular litany of scandals—racist and sexist Reddit comments, a Nazi tattoo, allegations of sexual impropriety—can be written off as a fluke, they do nevertheless reflect a broader challenge: selection and vetting of insurgent or relatively inexperienced candidates.
Apart from Platner, the Democratic race that best illustrates this came in Wisconsin, where Hong had built a huge lead in early polls, based in large part on her pledge to institute a moratorium on data center construction in the state if elected. But concerns about her campaign persisted, based partly on Hong’s social media history. She had backed calls to abolish both the police and the Senate in the past, and when asked to explain a 2020 tweet stating that Thanksgiving should be canceled because of its colonialist associations, Hong did not initially disavow it. “Bringing folks around the table to share conversation and build community is always a good thing,” she said in August. “But,” she added, “Thanksgiving is also a time that’s incredibly painful for many people in our communities.” It wasn’t until a follow-up interview that she said, “I don’t want to cancel it. I actually love it.” The damage was done.
It was a silly episode for pretty much everyone involved. But it crystallized concerns about Hong that had been bubbling up for some time among members of the state Democratic establishment. In July, Wisconsin’s incumbent governor, Tony Evers, pushed David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, to reenter the race 10 days after suspending his campaign—he was polling fourth at the time—largely to counter Hong. It was a bet that ultimately paid off, thanks in part to all the turkey talk: When the state’s primary voters went to the polls, Crowley narrowly beat Hong, thanks in part to concerns about her electability. But the “safe pick” carries risks of his own, most notably his support for data centers—an issue that had likely hurt him in the primary before he emerged as the establishment’s choice. That issue has mattered a great deal in Wisconsin; right now, Republican nominee Tom Tiffany is arguably running to Crowley’s left on it.
Unsurprisingly, El-Sayed’s narrower-than-expected victory and Hong’s loss were treated as a reckoning by some: “THE FAR LEFT HITS A WALL,” read a Politico headline after the Wisconsin result. It’s true that some primary voters simply panicked and worried that running a progressive (or a socialist, in Hong’s case) was too risky, but should El-Sayed be elected to a Senate seat in a state Trump has won twice, it may signal to voters that such a choice is not so risky, after all. Of course, if El-Sayed loses, party moderates will cite the loss as a reason to avoid taking unnecessary risks and pushing policies like Medicare for All, or defending trans rights, or advocating for a wealth tax on billionaires—all of which are part of the El-Sayed platform.
None of this is to say that “electability”—that amorphous, hard-to-define quality that moderates love to invoke as a reason to back establishment candidates—isn’t still an issue for voters. They may want change, but they also want candidates who are skilled enough at threading the needle between popular positions and popular appeal. Hence, perhaps, El-Sayed’s relative underperformance, and Hong’s surprise defeat.
So, what does a winning candidate look like in 2026? The race in Michigan is particularly important for progressives, who have shown in recent election cycles that they can both win power and wield it effectively in solidly blue cities, suburbs, and college towns. But can they begin to replicate that success in more competitive or purple states—states that will likely decide the next presidential election? A win in Michigan opens up a lane for progressives in other competitive races across the country—including, perhaps, one in a presidential primary.
Of course, an El-Sayed win would also mark arguably the biggest single advance in progressive power since Sanders first launched his quixotic presidential campaign in 2015. It would signal that the party’s left flank was not just gaining momentum but possibly on the verge of attaining real control over the party. The durability of the Democratic coalition has thus far largely been belied by a kind of unspoken arrangement in which progressives slowly accrue power without gaining quite enough to unseat the current establishment. Moskowitz compared his victory in South Florida to a “hurricane.” What would he say if El-Sayed wins in Michigan?
