In the week since Democrats won their most commanding victory in recent memory, the party’s so-called moderates have been eager to claim victory for their faction. Despite firebrand progressives winning Senate seats by healthy margins in states like Michigan and Minnesota, an advisor for the centrist think tank Third Way told the Financial Times that the “majority-makers were mainstream and centre-left Democrats.” The empirical argument here is that moderate candidates were both more numerous and over-performed their progressive counterparts that also won. Third Way likewise credits Democrats’ commanding battleground and red state margins to candidates’ willingness to recant more traditionally progressive positions on issues like immigration and energy. But what does it actually mean to be a moderate, and to moderate one’s views? And why does that responsibility only ever seem to fall on progressives?
Given that most campaign pledges and talking points tend to be pretty watery, pundits of all political stripes can fish around in Tuesday’s results for something to flatter their faction. Texas Senator-elect James Talarico said in September that he would support a national ban on gender-affirming care for minors, and supported an “all of the above” energy platform embracing oil and gas as well as wind, solar, and geothermal. Meanwhile, his victory speech would have been at home in a Bernie Sanders campaign stop; he called for universal healthcare and to “unrig this economic system that only benefits the top 1 percent.” The most online members of various camps within the Democratic coalition have spent the last week volleying these data points back and forth at one another, attempting to claim Tuesday’s massive victory as evidence of their own strategic brilliance.
This all feels a bit silly. For starters, Democrats won enough for everyone to have something to celebrate. Democratic Socialists won well beyond New York City’s so-called “Commie corridor.” DSA has sent six new representatives to the House, and elected its members as mayors in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. But most candidates who won were not DSA members or endorsed by DSA chapters. Many took up positions that progressives generally oppose while also bashing billionaires and Big Tech. The vast majority of voters, moreover, were not voting for one faction or another because most people don’t possess coherent political ideologies. These intra-party debates matter mostly insofar as they shape how Democrats will use their Congressional majority, and—relatedly—whether they can convince voters to keep voting for Democrats in 2028. As moderate centrists make the case that moderate centrists won, they’re accordingly arguing that Democrats should govern as moderate centrists.
Vibes-based assessments of who counts as a moderate, however, and what it means “to moderate”—feel relatively divorced from the material factors that determine how politicians campaign and govern once they win. Although much of the discourse around Tuesday’s results has focused on how candidates “moderated” certain traditionally left-wing positions in order to win, there’s a case to be made that centrists walking back their own unpopular stances made just as big of a difference.
On one critical issue—U.S. support for Israel—Democrats have moderated enormously over the last two years. The party wouldn’t even agree to let a Palestinian State Representative from Georgia address the Democratic National Convention in 2024. Democrats’ own autopsy of their loss that year concluded that Kamala Harris’s support for the Biden administration’s continued funding of Israel’s genocide in Gaza cost her critical support, particularly among younger voters. Public opinion has changed rapidly since then. An October 2024 Gallup poll of Americans’ views on the Middle East found that 51 percent sympathized more with Israelis, compared to the 27 percent that sympathized more with Palestinians. When Gallup polled the same question this year, 41 percent sympathized more with Palestinians, while 36 percent sympathized more with Israelis.
This year’s elections reflected that shift, and the erosion of a long-held bipartisan consensus in Congress to unconditionally back Israeli government policy. Out of the 26 races where AIPAC spent more than $100,000 this cycle, 21 of the lobby group’s preferred candidates lost. A tally from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft found that two-thirds of contributions from AIPAC, the AIPAC-linked United Democracy Project, and similar groups were aimed at helping candidates that lost, including Mike Rogers in Michigan and Susan Collins in Maine.
Far from left-wing candidates who’ve accepted generous donations from AIPAC in the past have also denounced the group and its preferred policies. In 2022, for instance, Politico notes that AIPAC spent $2.1 million backing North Carolina Democrat Valerie Foushee’s successful primary campaign against a pro-Palestine progressive Nida Allam; Foushee won by 10 points. In 2024, Foushee received blowback for appearing in pictures with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who called her and other members of a Congressional delegation to Israel “longtime friends” of the country. Facing another primary challenge from Allam this cycle, Foushee officially distanced herself from AIPAC and cosponsored a bill to block certain arms sales to Israel.
Centrists who are currently arguing in favor of moderation insisted back in 2024 that the smart, moderate position was to continue backing Israel as it bombarded Gaza. Matt Yglesias encouraged Democrats to avoid the kind of “contentious, unpopular foreign policy takes” the left was urging them to support. As Matt Breunig noted this summer, Yglesias at some point deleted several tweets to this effect and—like many Democrats—changed his tune.
This is a good thing, of course. It should also cast some doubt on the idea that Democrats should never take up less popular positions or be responsive to the movements and organizations that advocate for them. While political consultants have tended to consider foreign policy a relatively niche and low-salience topic in recent years—i.e. something most voters don’t care about—U.S. support for Israel undergirded many of voters’ top concerns this election. The U.S. entered the war in Iran in no small part at the behest of Trump’s friends in the Israeli government; exit polling showed that 74 percent of voters considered the Iran War a crucial or major factor when voting for members of Congress last week. That illegal, destructive conflict is continuing to drive up fuel prices here, raising the cost to drive gas-powered cars; warm homes and businesses with heating oil; cool them with electrons generated in gas-fired power plants; and transport goods flown in from overseas via diesel trucks. Eighty-nine percent of voters considered the cost of living a crucial or major factor in their vote, per the same exit poll.
It wasn’t only the obviousness of Israel’s crimes in Gaza or the Trump administration’s recklessness that changed how growing numbers of politicians talk about this country’s relationship with Israel, however. Long before October 7, 2023, Palestinian organizers and Palestine solidarity movements around the world drew attention to the Israeli government’s genocidal policies and the U.S. government’s continued support for them. In making a stink about AIPAC and UDP election spending over the last several years, organizers and politicians that support Palestine in the U.S. made it politically toxic for even middle of the road Democrats to take money from those interest groups. That stigma freed candidates from having to embrace those groups’ now broadly unpopular positions in exchange for campaign contributions. This year’s midterms showed that Democrats can win while courting the ire of the groups that have—through campaign donations and lobbying—kept Democrats from questioning the United States’ unconditional support for Israeli government policy.
As they consider what to do with their majorities in the House and Senate—and how to deliver for voters angry about the rising cost of living—Democrats will necessarily have to push to end the war in Iran. That will put them at odds with AIPAC, decades of bipartisan foreign policy consensus, and the Israeli government itself. That such a conflict now feels possible is thanks in no small part to people and politicians that were willing to take up positions they believed in when they were much less popular.
By certain accounts, public opinion would appear to be entirely separate from the work of electoral politics, where candidates’ primary responsibility is to choose from a basket of positions that poll well at that particular moment. Just about every politician would argue that they want to make people’s lives better. Progressives and left-wing politicians have traditionally argued that doing so requires confronting the monied interests that have spent decades pushing for policies that have made the country crueler and more unequal. Happily for those of us on the left, plenty of moderates now espouse a similar view. Let’s hope their faction will also moderate its view on the question of whether electoral politics can help change public opinion rather than merely react to it.
