There are about a thousand takeaways from a historic election like this one, the chief one being the thorough, and thoroughly gratifying, repudiation of you-know-who. But I’m going to focus on the one that gets at the heart of a key question for Democrats about what kind of party they’re going to be heading into 2028 and beyond. And the lesson is this: With Tuesday’s election results, particularly the Senate victories of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and James Talarico in Texas, the 1990s centrist rules about how you win a Senate race in a purple or red state are dead.
The ’90s gave birth to the so-called “New Democrats,” the centrists who’d jettisoned the old liberalism and adopted a more corporate-friendly aspect. For decades, you had to be a New Democrat to be taken seriously. But this week, we entered a new era.
El-Sayed and Talarico were never supposed to win these races. Talarico took positions in the past—notably on transgender rights, an issue that is supposed to be poison for Democrats—that the ’90s conventional wisdom would say there’s no way he could overcome, especially in deep-red Texas. El-Sayed was vehemently opposed by establishment Democrats, some of them because of his views on Israel, but many (and in my anecdotal experience most) of them on the grounds that he was too far left and absolutely unelectable in a swing state like Michigan. I had a number of conversations with Washington Democrats earlier this year in which I heard it said that if he was nominated, the party was just giving that Senate seat away.
But both candidates ran as aggressive economic populists, attacking billionaires and vowing to fight on behalf of working-class people. El-Sayed was ceaselessly on-message: money out of politics, money in your pockets, Medicare for All. And Talarico, while he did walk back some of his more progressive stands on cultural issues, never wavered on economics and delivered what for my money was the single most memorable riff of the campaign: “The only minority destroying America is the billionaires. We are focused on the wrong one percent. Trans people aren’t taking away our health care. Muslims aren’t defunding our schools. Immigrants aren’t cutting taxes for themselves and their rich friends. It’s the billionaires and their puppet politicians.”
People who talk like that aren’t supposed to win Senate seats. But they both won, and won fairly handily. Those inclined to disagree with my thesis will jump in and point out how lucky the candidates were. Talarico faced a uniquely appalling opponent. El-Sayed faced an uncharismatic opponent and gained ground after Haley Stevens’s Wagnerian self-immolation over the weekend. And of course, they benefited from Trump’s massive unpopularity and a bad economy.
Fine. All that’s true. On the other hand: Both had some $200 million thrown into vicious attacks on them and their character. Talarico was unmasculine, gay, nonbinary, whatever. El-Sayed was a jihadist, even a terrorist. And according to the old Democratic conventional wisdom, those attacks are supposed to work.
But they failed. And from this day forward, no one in the Democratic Party can credibly argue that the only way to win a Senate seat in a purple or red state is to nominate a corporate, cautious, centrist Democrat. You might say the Erskine Bowles Era is over.
Who? Erskine Bowles was a good Democrat—of his time. He was a chief of staff in the Clinton White House. After Clinton left office, Democrats in his home state of North Carolina needed a known-name candidate to run for Senate against Elizabeth Dole. He was exactly the kind of candidate the Democrats of that era wanted—a white, moderate businessman from a Tarheel State political family who’d buffed and shined his corporate credentials, in his case spending years at Morgan Stanley.
Dole swamped him, by nine points. Two years later, he took one more shot. That time, he came a little closer, but he still lost to Richard Barr by nearly five points. Later, during the Obama era, Bowles co-chaired a commission that advised Obama to stop all that liberal spending nonsense and attack the deficit. Over the years, he’s sat on the boards of Morgan Stanley, General Motors, Norfolk Southern, and—dum da dum dum—Facebook.
I don’t mean to pick on Bowles. I single him out because he’s emblematic of the kind of person the Washington Democratic establishment types all agreed in their wisdom for three decades the party simply had to put forward for the Senate in swing states (in fact, even in many blue states). The national political media, by the way, by and large parroted this line.
They weren’t always wrong at the time. There were plenty of moderates who won Senate races in swing states. And of course some moderates will still win such races, as indeed some have in these midterms. But the point is that, as of Tuesday, that’s not the only way to skin the cat. And this is a hugely important development.
If El-Sayed can win in Michigan and Talarico can win in Texas, it means that economic populists can win in a lot of places where Democratic conventional wisdom said they could never win. It means that come 2028, when populist Democrats are running in Senate primaries in Wisconsin or Iowa or North Carolina or Florida or maybe even Missouri—all states where Republican incumbent senators will be up for reelection two years hence—no one can say they can’t possibly win.
It’s an absolute sea change inside the Democratic Party—the erasure of 30 years of conventional wisdom that’s been running on fumes for at least 10 of those years—and it means that by 2029, if there’s a Democratic president and the party controls both houses of Congress, they may actually have a critical mass of legislators who are ready to fight for working people.
