Center-left Democrats used to claim that progressives couldn’t win in swing states and districts. Now, with numerous candidates aligned with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ahead in the polls, most notably Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, centrists are moving the goalposts. The new argument of the center-left is essentially that, sure, some progressives might win in swing areas this year but supposedly not by large enough margins, particularly compared to more centrist candidates.
This rhetorical move is telling and important to highlight. For many progressive and centrist Democratic voters, “electability” is a sincere, good-faith concern. They are trying to balance their liberal policy dreams with practicality. After all, it’s essential to keep today’s authoritarian Republican Party from gaining more power. But for many centrist elites, electability is a tool to marginalize the left. They want to dismiss the progressive movement as electorally inept so that the left’s policy views are discounted even before they are heard. Progressive victories in swing states are therefore a huge threat to the center-left’s power.
So let me state this clearly, before the results in November. Progressive victories in swing states count, no matter the margin. The goal of a candidate is to win the most votes, period. A person elected to the Senate by 12 percent has the same number of votes in the chamber (one) as a person who wins by 0.12 percent. And as their preelection actions are showing, some prominent Democratic activists are deeply invested in diminishing progressives, whenever and however they can. Those Democrats should be treated as ideological actors pushing an agenda, not dispassionate observers just giving advice on how to win elections and stop fascism.
Debates among Democrats about electoral strategy aren’t new. Since Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern’s resounding defeat to Republican Richard Nixon in the 1972 election, various pundits, operatives, and elected officials from the Democrats’ center-left have argued that the party’s activists and progressives are an electoral drag, turning off white swing voters, in particular. What’s different in the Trump era? Two things. Democratic voters are perhaps more obsessed with winning elections than ever before—and for good reason. While the Republican Party has long been terrible, the GOP is arguably more racist, antidemocratic, and plutocratic than ever before. So Democratic voters are deeply concerned with choosing candidates who will beat their GOP rivals in general elections.
Secondly, progressives have largely defeated centrists in the policy debates within the party, making electoral strategy an even more important divide than before. During the 1980s and 1990s, center-left Democrats, most notably Bill Clinton, had a policy vision that was distinct from progressives’. An emphasis on public-private partnerships, charter schools, and reforms to welfare policies were among the components of the “New Democrats’” vision. But the stagnant middle-class wages, massive wealth inequality, and powerful billionaire class that emerged from the Clinton and Obama presidencies have discredited that approach.
These days, centrist Democrats usually just propose smaller versions of progressive ideas: for example, a public option rather than Medicare for All. That incrementalism is paired with an electoral message: “Voters won’t support anything bigger, here are the polls to prove it.” So we have a centrism publicly defined and defended through electoral politics.
The reality of course is that center-left Democratic pundits and officials do have different policy preferences than progressives. Centrists tend to be more supportive of Israel than progressives; more aligned with the police and other law enforcement agencies; less antagonistic toward the wealthy and big corporations; more skeptical of big new government programs. Leaning into those positions, which are largely unpopular with the party base, of course doesn’t help win Democratic primaries or intraparty debates these days. So centrist pundits, politicians, and operatives advocate for their faction largely by claiming that it’s the only bloc of the party that understands how to win elections. (Even though center-left Democrats lose elections all the time—and critical ones at that, such as in 2016 and 2024.)
In a way, the left has accepted the electoral argument levied against it and addressed it. Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and progressive groups such as the Working Families Party have recognized winning in swing states and districts is critical to gaining power and credibility within the Democratic coalition. So they worked hard to boost progressives running in purple and red areas during primaries. Now they are trying to ensure those candidates win in the general election. Among these progressive-aligned candidates are Senate hopefuls Troy Jackson of Maine and El Sayed of Michigan; Michigan’s Will Lawrence, California’s Randy Villegas, Ohio’s Brian Poindexter, and Montana’s Sam Forstag for the House.
These candidates aren’t running on the kind of bold platforms that Sanders did in his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. But many of them are very critical of billionaires and the Israeli government, support Medicare for All, and have enthusiastically welcomed Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez to join them on the campaign trail. Those are not tactics from the center-left’s political playbook. These candidates winning would suggest Democrats don’t have to hew to the center-left’s playbook to win elections in swing areas.
So anticipating progressive victories in swing areas next month, the center-left is already trying to diminish them. “Narrowly winning Michigan in 2024 is more impressive than doing it in 2026” and “Dem Senate recruits are running ahead of their state’s partisan fundamentals except in Maine, Michigan, and Florida” are among the recent tweets from Matt Yglesias, a writer who is very influential in center-left circles. (Florida Democratic Senate candidate Angie Nixon is also strongly backed by progressives and disliked by many centrists.) Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and another frequent antagonist of the left, says, “Maybe there’s a lesson if [Georgia’s Jon] Ossoff wins by a wider margin despite being in a redder state” than El-Sayed in Michigan.
Adam Jentleson, who runs a center-left organization called the Searchlight Institute, spent the weeks after the 2024 election implying that Democrats couldn’t win in swing states unless they abandoned the causes of progressive groups. Now, with Democrats poised to win in those states without moving to the right, he’s arguing that Democrats must also win in deep red states to build a “supermajority” that would defeat the MAGA right.
Electability, once broadly understood as winning in swing states, is being redefined on the fly. The new arguments are that progressive candidates have to win by as much as or more than centrist candidates and in actual red states. According to center-left commentators, 2026 is such an anti-Republican year that virtually any Democrat can win a swing state. So those wins should be downplayed. Centrists say that Democrats might lose in 2028 or in future elections, when the political environment is less favorable, if they could conclude from this year that progressive candidates can win in tough states.
We should ignore this redefinition and those pushing it. Why? First of all, it’s rooted in a flawed analysis of this year’s elections. Elite centrists are emphasizing the comfortable margins by which Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Ossoff of Georgia lead in their Senate races, compared to the smaller advantages for El-Sayed and Jackson. Maine and Michigan are generally more Democratic-leaning than Georgia and North Carolina, and yet the more centrist candidates (Cooper and Ossoff) are doing better. Isn’t that a clear case that centrism works better in swing states, as the center-left pundits argue?
Of course not. Ideology isn’t the only factor in these races—and probably not the most important. Ossoff is an incumbent, which usually adds a few points to a candidate’s numbers. Cooper is essentially an incumbent too, having been elected attorney general and then governor in North Carolina repeatedly. Jackson and El-Sayed have never held statewide office, and the former is running against a strong longtime incumbent in Republican Susan Collins. The entire Democratic Party has been united behind Cooper’s and Ossoff’s campaigns the entire cycle. In contrast, Jackson only became the Senate nominee in Maine after Graham Platner stepped aside. El-Sayed had to run in a very intense primary where millions of dollars in negative ads were run against him. Even after he won the primary, prominent Democrats in Michigan and nationally kept criticizing him.
Neither Cooper nor Ossoff is Muslim or a person of color. El-Sayed is an Egyptian American Muslim who has faced both bigoted attacks from Republicans and totally unfounded charges of antisemitism from some Democrats.
Simply comparing the margins of victories by Ossoff, Cooper, Jackson, and El-Sayed and then drawing sweeping conclusions about progressivism versus centrism in swing areas isn’t honest political analysis. It’s advocacy and hackery.
Secondly, it’s an oversimplistic way to look at future elections. 2028 and subsequent elections will take place in a totally different context from this November. Cooper winning comfortably this year tells us little about how he will do in 2032. It tells us almost nothing about how a candidate with Cooper’s policy views who is not Roy Cooper would do in a national presidential election in 2028.
My fellow progressives are making similar claims too, and they also should be more careful. El-Sayed winning in a Senate race this year in Michigan doesn’t prove that Ocasio-Cortez would win a presidential race in Michigan two years from now, as some on the left claim. They are totally different people, and that will be a totally different election. What a victory by a devout Muslim named Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed in Michigan would show is that American politics are unpredictable. Someone like AOC could win. Someone like Cooper could lose.
Third, this fixation on margins of victory is another example of the troubling sports-ization of politics today. Sure, we have the data to compare various candidates’ winning margins, as if we are comparing the serve speeds of Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. But we shouldn’t be treating politics like sports. While tennis players all want to win three or five sets, El-Sayed and Cooper have fairly different visions for America. A bold, transformative candidate like El-Sayed winning by 0.5 percent is in many ways a bigger story than a traditional pol like Cooper winning by 5 percent.
Considering the relative politics of their states, Amy Klobuchar’s Senate campaign victories have been more impressive than Elizabeth Warren’s. But Warren has been a leading figure in reshaping the Democratic Party to one that more aggressively fights against the wealthy and for the working class. Klobuchar hasn’t changed much of anything in two decades on Capitol Hill.
El-Sayed and these other progressive candidates may not win. Should they fall short, that would be a major setback for the Democratic Party and the country. But if they do win, we should ignore those pooh-poohing their margins of victory. The centrist elites don’t just want the Democratic Party to win elections; they want certain kinds of Democrats to win—those of whom they preapprove. But I think most Democrats would be delighted to see that a candidate can be progressive and be elected in a swing area—by any margin. And that may happen all over the country next month.
