Democratic elites breathed another sigh of relief after Tuesday’s Illinois primaries as the most radical progressive candidates for Congress all lost. The fact that many of the winners so far in Texas, North Carolina, and Illinois are still well to the left of the median voter, often coupled with a recent shift leftward, should give them pause. What works to win a Democratic primary may not be sellable to a national presidential electorate.

Centrist Democratic groups frequently stress that the road to the White House runs through the moderate, unaligned voter. Those voters, they say, tend to want to hear about traditional kitchen table concerns like jobs, inflation, and crime. The centrists advise focusing on these concerns and downplaying—or better yet, distinguishing their views from—the cultural issues where Democrats’ base voters are out of step.

These people make little secret of their desire that someone like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro or Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear will lead the 2028 ticket. Former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel is aggressively putting himself forward as another possible candidate in this lane. All seem to want to lean heavily to the center as they work to become this generation’s New Democrat, Clintonesque reformer.

That strategy is sound as far as it goes. The problem is that such a person needs to survive a Democratic primary where the majority of convention delegates will be chosen in safely Democratic states and congressional districts. To get to the center, then, the potential centrist savior first has to defeat or mollify the left.

That’s much easier said than done, and this year’s primaries so far show little proof that this is possible.

Texas is a case in point. State representative James Talarico beat progressive firebrand Representative Jasmine Crockett by winning most suburbs and running up a large margin among Hispanics. But old tweets and videos released since the primary show that Talarico embraced, and apparently still embraces, many of the progressive left’s most controversial shibboleths. Centrists worried that Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights might have cost her the election should be terrified that Talarico’s statement that there are six genders will drive swing voters far away.

North Carolina provides another cautionary tale. Representative Valerie Foushee barely survived a primary challenge from progressive Nida Allam, winning by less than one point. The congresswoman had once received financial support from AIPAC and was part of an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel in 2024. But that group and its views on Israeli actions in Gaza and the Middle East have become toxic in Democratic politics. Foushee disclaimed AIPAC backing in this race and now loudly criticizes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Her switch in time may have saved her. It is nonetheless a telling indication that she survived only by moving leftward to be closer to the progressive position.

The battle for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District is a clear indication of where the Democratic center is. Yes, 26-year-old progressive internet journalist and influencer Kat Abughazaleh lost, but she handily won in Chicago and easily bested the most moderate serious candidate, state senator Laura Fine, to finish second. The winner, Evanston mayor Daniel Biss, is an open critic of AIPAC (although he labels himself a “progressive Zionist” in the J Street mold) and is nearly as leftist as the fiery Abughazaleh.

The party avoided nominating a future member of the Squad only to elevate someone likely to become Illinois’ Ro Khanna. That’s not what Third Way and other establishment Democrats who favor “combative centrism” want to see happen in 2028.

If anything, the primary results so far are fantastic news for California Governor Gavin Newsom. He has spent the last year triangulating Democratic progressives and centrists, showing the former he fights Trump at every opportunity while positioning himself for the latter as the sophisticated grown-up in the party room. That’s why he now either leads or is a close second to former vice president Harris in national presidential primary polls.

Centrists are also hamstrung by the fact that the most sizable moderate faction within the party electorate, black voters, tends to prefer serious black candidates even when they are more liberal than might be ideal. Harris, for example, was chosen by 59 percent of black voters in a recent Harvard/Harris poll, compared to only 15 percent for Newsom. If Harris does run, she would likely prevent a moderate white candidate from obtaining the early polling numbers they need to raise funds and remain viable into the early contests.

Candidates who want to track to the center also have to look at the fates of Democratic senators who have tried to favor the middle at the expense of the party base. Senators Kyrsten Sinema’s and Joe Manchin’s support of maintaining the filibuster rather than reforming it to pass signature party initiatives led to a collapse in support among Democrats. Neither person ran again, as it was painfully clear they had no path to re-election.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman is experiencing the same thing today. He has largely voted the party line but has been vocally supportive of Trump’s actions against Iran and occasionally voted for Trump nominees. A recent poll found he’s popular with Pennsylvania independents, garnering a 48 percent job approval rating. But his ratings with Democrats have cratered: only 22 percent of Democrats approved of his performance.

Rational Democrats will see this and act accordingly. They will ensure they don’t infuriate the progressive base and hope that stylistic moderation and some carefully modulated distinctions will satisfy moderates. Anyone old enough to recall Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis’s attempt to play the same game in 1988 remembers how that turned out.

Even the rare victories of genuinely centrist Democrats like that of former Representative Melissa Bean in Illinois’ 8th Congressional District prove the point. Bean’s six-point win over progressive businessman Junaid Ahmed was enough to give her the nomination, but presidential contests award delegates proportionally by congressional district. A centrist who did as well as Bean did against Ahmed would garner only one more delegate than a progressive.

That could also easily be offset by progressive victories in seats based in more liberal and urban areas, areas that also tend to award more delegates than the ones where centrists are stronger. Indeed, Bean’s 8th district sent five delegates to the 2024 convention, while the 9th sent seven. A progressive like Abughazaleh would likely have won as many delegates for finishing second in the 9th as a centrist like Bean would win by winning the 8th.

The good news for Democrats so far is that the progressive surge evident in last year’s New York and Seattle mayoral races may have peaked. The bad news is that it often takes a “progressive lite” to hold the line. Whether that will be enough to beat a Trump Republican—particularly in more competitive states and districts—is anyone’s guess.

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When Kamala Harris announced that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz would be her running mate in 2024, my first reaction was curious optimism for the Democratic ticket. I hadn’t followed Walz’s career especially closely, but I was familiar enough with him to know that he hailed from a rural area of a Midwestern state and that he had been a Blue Dog Democrat during his time in the House of Representatives. This seemed like exactly the kind of candidate the party could use to engage with the more conservative-leaning rural and working-class voters whom they had lost to Trump over the previous eight years.

But then I began to see the reactions from my peers, many of whom are highly educated, urban-dwelling, professional class voters whose cultural politics are often quite left-wing—more or less the median Democratic base voter. Most were elated by the Walz pick, and I was suddenly less sure about my initial reaction.

When I dug into Walz’s background some more, and I found that his political profile had changed pretty dramatically since his days as a Blue Dog. In his two campaigns for governor in Minnesota, he had adopted more progressive positions on a number of issues. His base of support had also shifted away from red-leaning rural counties, where he had lost immense ground, to blue-dominated and highly educated metro areas—especially the Twin Cities. Even so, Democrats believed he could open doors for them in the former. As one pollster said at the time:

Selecting Walz is a signal that [Harris] and the campaign think she can be competitive enough in rural, small-town areas, and her path to 270 still does cut through the Rust Belt. It also sends an important message about Harris, how she wants to round out her ticket…She picked a white guy governor from the Midwest who can go into small towns in the Midwest and help her with those voters.

Many Democrats seemed jazzed that they had found a candidate who looked like the voters whose support they needed to win but who also didn’t seem to hold any of the culturally conservative views shared by those voters. And ideally, he had the credibility to convince some of them to leave their “outdated” views behind and to nudge them toward Harris’s forward-thinking agenda. It was a win-win-win.

As I observed at the time, however, the argument in favor of Walz’s appeal was

predicated on little more than identity politics: the idea that white working-class voters will be reassured by having someone who “looks like them” on the Democratic ticket and thus be likelier to vote for Harris…Offering Walz to white working-class voters as a means of “representation” may actually come off as quite patronizing. Rather, many voters are looking for someone who shares their values or supports their favored policies… It also strikes at the heart of an assumption that the party continues to wrongly make in the year 2024: that most voters need to identify with a candidate’s race or gender to consider voting for them.

Ultimately, there was not only no evidence that Walz had helped Harris improve her standing in these places or with these voters, but in fact she lost further ground. In fairness to Walz, running mates rarely have a major impact on presidential tickets, and it was probably unreasonable to expect him to turn Harris’s fortunes around with voters who had an issue with the party brand, not just one or two specific politicians.

Still, he clearly did not add much to the ticket, either, and there was evidence even at the time that rural voters, specifically, were not keen on him. There may be a useful lesson in this for Democrats: in today’s highly polarized America, where cultural issues increasingly inform political divisions, candidates who appeal to culturally liberal college grads are probably less likely to find support among culturally conservative working-class voters.1

It’s not evident, though, that Democrats have accepted this. They certainly seem to comprehend the importance of improving their standing with working-class voters and in red-leaning places. Yet, some of their candidates running in key midterm states have quite Walz-ian profiles.

Two notable examples are James Talarico and Graham Platner, who are running for the U.S. Senate in states that will help determine which party controls the chamber in 2027 (Texas and Maine, respectively). Both men appear to embody a “new way” for Democrats hoping to win difficult races.

Talarico has garnered national attention for his well-spoken manner as well as his eager willingness to engage with conservatives and talk about his faith—rarities among Democratic politicians today. Polling ahead of Democratic primary election showed these attributes had helped convince likely voters that he was more moderate than his opponent, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett. This, coupled with the Christian roots of his campaign messaging, has excited Democrats who hope Talarico can make inroads with conservatives in highly religious Texas.

Platner, meanwhile, looks on the surface like he was designed in a lab to win over working-class voters. He is a burly, blue-collar figure from a small Maine town whose resume includes military service and a career as an oyster farmer. He has touted his support for gun rights and, like Talarico, leaned into economically populist messaging. Early primary polls have shown him trouncing increasingly unpopular incumbent Governor Janet Mills. Democrats seem to hope Platner will break the archetype of affluent, lawyerly candidates the party is known for fielding.

Talarico and Platner have clearly captured the imaginations of liberal Democrats around the country who are desperate to win back the Senate and check Trump’s power. According to 2025 fourth-quarter fundraising estimates, both of them finished in the top five among all Senate candidates, and much of their support has come from small-dollar donors. All this has surely convinced some Democrats that they are close to cracking the code to winning conservative-leaning rural and working-class voters.

There are a couple of problems with this thinking, however. The first is that both candidates engage in what my colleague Ruy Teixeira has called “cultural denialism”: a tendency that some Democrats have of dismissing cultural issues—and thus voters’ concerns about them—for not being “real issues.” This usually manifests as deflecting from conversations about thorny topics like race or gender toward others like economic populism, where candidates feel they are on more sound footing.

Talarico, for example, has attempted to side-step past controversial statements regarding transgender issues by suggesting they don’t really matter and voters aren’t concerned with them. Speaking on a panel at the SXSW conference this week, he asked, “What do the American people care more about? Culture wars or actual wars? Pronouns or prices?” Elsewhere, he has stated, “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. The culture wars are a smokescreen.”

Many Democrats likely agree with him, but others may find these deflections off-putting. As Washington Post columnist Ramesh Ponnuru put it, “A lot of voters…find the issues he dismisses important in themselves and signs of whether a candidate shares their worldview.”2 All this, plus a growing digital trail of other, highly left-wing statements from his past, isn’t likely to do Talarico any favors in a state that voted for Trump by 14 points, where conservatives are a large plurality of the electorate, and where voters overall see themselves more ideologically aligned with the two prospective Republican candidates than with Talarico.

Platner has taken a similar approach to dismissing cultural issues, saying, “Every single breath we take discussing culture war stuff is a breath we are not talking about universal healthcare. It’s a breath we are not talking about going after wealth where it’s been hoarded. Not talking about breaking up corporate monopoly power. That’s what we need to be focusing on.” Though he may not want to talk about these issues, Maine voters have thoughts on them. Statements like this risk signaling that he doesn’t care about those thoughts, and few voters appreciate hearing that their concerns don’t matter to politicians.

The second issue facing both men relates to their coalitions. Let’s start with Talarico. To win Texas, which no Democrat has done at the statewide level since 1994, he would need to at minimum replicate Beto O’Rourke’s coalition from 2018. That cycle, when O’Rourke came the closest of any recent Democrat—falling short by just 2.5 points—Republicans and Republican-leaning independents accounted for nearly half (49 percent) of the Texas electorate, according to the AP VoteCast survey. A fascinating analysis of post-COVID migration trends from the New York Times found that newcomers have made Texas even more Republican in recent years.

Moreover, generic ballot projections from Nate Silver show that under the current national environment, which leans five points toward Democrats, the partisan baseline in Texas would be +5.6 points Republican. This means Talarico would need a national shift of another five points just to be on an even playing field.

As regular TLP contributor Justin Vassallo has pointed out, there were some promising signs for Talarico in the primary election results earlier this month, including his strong performance with affluent liberals and ability to turn out Hispanics at a high rate. However, he still has a steep hill to climb, and early general election polling shows him trailing O’Rourke’s 2018 margins with key groups, including Hispanics and non-college voters—both of whom are typically more conservative than the median Democrat. It remains to be seen how these groups will trend as they get to know him better in the campaign, but there is a real possibility that they struggle to connect with his cultural attitudes.

In Maine, Platner may be facing similar coalitional issues. Nicholas Jacobs, a longtime rural politics scholar who himself lives in rural Maine, has documented how Platner’s biography isn’t quite as “everyman” as it may seem:

But his story cuts both ways. He’s the grandson of a celebrated Manhattan architect, his father is a lawyer and his mother is a restaurateur whose business caters to summer tourists. He attended the elite Hotchkiss School. It’s a life of silver spoons and salt air.

Jacobs added:

That tension mirrors the Democratic Party itself, led and funded by urban professionals who are increasingly aware of just how far they strayed from their working-class roots. If Platner is to prevail, he must assemble a coalition that expands beyond what the party has become—concentrated in urban and coastal enclaves, financed nationally and culturally distant from much of rural America. Yet Platner’s immediate hurdle isn’t rural Maine at all. It is the Democratic primary, and those voters do not live where his campaign imagery is set.

Maine remains far more Democratic-friendly than Texas—Harris carried it by seven points, so Platner would not be starting a general election as far behind as Talarico in Texas. And some analysts believe that longtime Republican Senator Susan Collins could be vulnerable in this midterm environment. Still, the state has a long history of electing moderate, independent-minded senators, and Collins would have plenty of material to work with against Platner to paint him as anything but. This makes it more imperative that he break through with the types of voters Democrats have lost ground with over the past decade.

The real issue facing Democrats is this: they are still struggling to understand how to connect with conservative-leaning Americans largely because many of them don’t know any. They therefore often end up rallying behind candidates whose biographies, presentations, and views they like, and then they convince themselves that these candidates will appeal to conservatives, too.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that candidates running in red places who lean left on culture, such as Talarico, can win, especially in a midterm cycle when the incumbent president has grown increasingly unpopular. Some right-leaning voters may even be willing to overlook these Democrats’ more liberal cultural views for an economic message that resonates with them. But that disconnect does make these candidates’ jobs harder. Texas and even Maine are not as blue as Virginia, New Jersey, or New York City, where Democrats running for governor and mayor last November more or less successfully sidestepped hot-button culture war fights in favor of “affordability” messaging. This approach is less likely to work in the states that Democrats need to win for a Senate majority like Texas, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, or even Maine.

An alternate path for the party is to try identifying candidates who have at least some genuinely right-leaning cultural attitudes that are more in line with the voters whose support they need. As Matt Yglesias wrote in the New York Times yesterday:

Iowa was won twice in a row by the Black guy with a professorial demeanor from Chicago and then three times sequentially by the silver-spoon real estate tycoon from New York. Neither fit the part perfectly, but both catered to the views of voters who like the existing social safety net but worry Democrats will sacrifice their well-being to serve narrow special interests or small minorities.

Yglesias noted how Trump successfully pushed Republicans away from many of their unpopular positions on issues like Medicare, Social Security, the Iraq war, abortion, and gay marriage. Meanwhile, eight years earlier, Obama

questioned whether his daughters deserved a boost in college admissions and affirmed that marriage should be between a man and a woman; as president, he took on teachers’ unions over questions of pay and seniority and espoused an all-of-the-above energy strategy that environmental groups didn’t love.

In a recent interview with TLP, the Searchlight Institute’s Adam Jentleson recalled how not long ago the Democrats controlled Senate seats in deeply red states like Arkansas, Louisiana, and West Virginia, all of which helped deliver them a super-majority during Obama’s first term. He added that to earn power like that again, Democrats would need to expand their tent to include people who hold more culturally conservative positions, noting that the party has fielded some of these candidates in House races this cycle.

Indeed, so long as Democrats are uncomfortable allowing these kinds of candidates into their tent, they will struggle to consistently compete in the Senate and Electoral College—institutions that have longstanding biases toward states with smaller and more rural populations—among other offices. The path forward will require an embrace of ideological pluralism in their ranks and a heterodox coalition, including identifying and welcoming truly centrist candidates who can compete in places that lean to the right of the nation. This may not thrill the party’s base, but it may be just what Democrats need.

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In Texas’s open Senate primary last Tuesday, Democratic hopes of “flipping” the Lone Star State soared to their highest level since former Representative Beto O’Rourke polled within the margin of error in his unsuccessful bid to topple Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2018. Turnout for the Democratic winner, state representative James Talarico, and the runner-up, Representative Jasmine Crockett, surged above ballots for the leading Republican candidates, despite widespread reports of voters being turned away at polling stations in Dallas and Williamson counties due to recent changes to voting rules by local Republicans.

The enthusiasm gap between the parties startled political observers, as did Talarico’s six-point margin over Crockett. Though Talarico entered the race months before Crockett, the self-styled MAGA antagonist was perceived to have some strong advantages. Crockett was (and remains) a rising star capable of energizing Democrats who have demanded much more combative leadership since Trump’s return to office. She had already built a strong social media following due to her flair for “clapback” interactions with Marjorie Taylor Greene and other hard-right figures, while her blunt primetime speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention had catapulted her into the limelight as one of the Democrats’ most prominent younger black voices.

Talarico, meanwhile, came across as comparatively restrained—and perhaps a bit over-rehearsed, at least in the beginning. A Presbyterian seminarian, Talarico foregrounded his Christian faith and spoke solemnly about a “politics of love” that might transcend America’s existential tribalism. That seemingly “unpopulist” posture made the press susceptible to halfhearted attempts to draw an ideological distinction between him and Crockett. Talarico’s outreach to independents and disaffected Republicans was associated with “moderation,” whereas Crockett, presumed to grasp what the base wanted, was depicted as the progressive “firebrand.”

That distinction always felt artificial. On the surface, the contest between Talarico and Crockett was mainly a contrast in style rather than policy positions or ideology. It was not a Lone Star reprise of Mamdani vs. Cuomo or Bernie vs. Hillary. Upon closer inspection, however, the contest did reflect two different theories of how to strengthen the Democratic coalition. In a state that has perennially frustrated the party’s ambitions but which remains the key to Democrats ever achieving an FDR-style majority, Democrats have had to learn the hard way that possessing “star power,” which motivates the base, is only part of the battle. As in the Midwest and the purple states of Georgia and North Carolina, the more essential piece of the puzzle is figuring out how to expand the coalition’s geographic range and finally attenuate the Republican grip on smaller cities and towns.

The results laid bare Talarico’s keener understanding of the challenge before Democrats. Crockett’s strategy leaned heavily on appeals based on identity and her persona; it essentially boiled down to a belief that a candidate with enough charisma could still mobilize the “rising American electorate” of younger minorities by fanning outrage over Trump’s record. Talarico approached the electorate differently even as he aimed to exploit his own “authentic” viral moments. Bereft of a bulwark equal to Crockett’s support among black voters in East Texas, Talarico instead treated the primary as a test run for the general election. By necessity, he waged a less hyper-partisan campaign that focused on voters alienated by contemporary politics and upset over spiraling costs.

The strategy paid off impressively while disproving the confused narrative that Talarico was the conciliatory moderate of the two. As the primary entered its final stretch and the strength of his ground game in Latino enclaves became apparent, Talarico had the air of an insurgent with the rhetoric to match. “We already have class warfare in this country,” he rejoined to a skeptical attendee of one of his town halls, underscoring, “it’s the billionaires waging war against the rest of us.” Within a matter of months, the boyish 36-year-old—tougher and shrewder than his neighborly demeanor conveyed—had added his own touch to a message embraced by Democratic insurgents from Maine to Montana.

Last Tuesday’s results suggest that Democrats in tough environments don’t have to make a false choice between a positive and patriotic “big tent” pitch and economic populism. They likewise indicate that in a state that has undergone as many rapid changes as Texas, Talarico’s message of compassion and renewal holds promise against a bilious and caricature-laden GOP that has come to resent the very demographic and cultural transformations induced through its obsessive pursuit of economic growth. Nevertheless, exuberant Talarico supporters wishing to savor this moment know the sense of unstoppable momentum will be short-lived. Although the Republican nominee has yet to be determined—a runoff election between incumbent Senator John Cornyn and state attorney general Ken Paxton, his far-right challenger, is scheduled for May—Talarico faces the same array of challenges that has vexed Democratic candidates the past three decades.

As a young white progressive, he must decisively mobilize culturally moderate and religious Latinos who theoretically lean left on economics but have repeatedly failed to leverage their demographic weight at the polls; maximize turnout among all segments of the black community, from the urban machine and new black entrepreneurial class to struggling service workers; harness the growing electoral power of Asian and South Asian Texans; and—no less crucial—cut down Republicans’ lopsided margins among rural, blue-collar whites. In short, Talarico has seven months to fulfill his wager that he can realign the Texas electorate—and do so by transforming working-class expectations of what Texas politics can deliver.

Doing all this simultaneously will be an extraordinary lift. Talarico can be fairly certain to run up the score with affluent liberals and the more economically insecure parts of the Brahmin left, as his resounding margin in Austin illustrates. And his striking ability to turn out Latinos has cast aside the initial impression he was the Sun Belt’s answer to Pete Buttigieg—quick-witted and skilled at countering right-wing talking points, but with limited traction beyond the ranks of college-educated whites. Yet even in the event that the scandal-tarred Paxton ends up being his opponent—thus boosting his chances with moderates—Talarico faces an uphill battle when it comes to flipping precincts in Republican-leaning Tarrant and Williamson counties and deepening the faint blue hue of Fort Bend, key urban areas in which Democrats must dramatically overperform and best Joe Biden’s short-lived gains from 2020.

The path is all the more daunting given Talarico’s uncertain-at-best standing with black voters, whose sense of urgency in this election will be especially critical to Democratic tallies in Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and Jefferson County. At over four million residents, Texas has the largest share of black Americans in the country, fueled in part by migration after the Great Recession and, later, Covid. Although this influx has arguably made black Texans more heterogeneous in their cultural outlook and economic interests, they form, as in Georgia, the bedrock of the Democrats’ urban base and establishment, making a strong alliance with Crockett and other local black leaders vital to Talarico’s chances.

How much ground Talarico needs to make up is anyone’s guess. Crockett readily endorsed him after the results came in, but the primary had taken a sour turn in early February when former U.S. Representative Colin Allred, following the claims of a content creator, accused Talarico of calling him a “mediocre black man.” Talarico strongly denied the charge, insisting he had only characterized Allred’s failed bid to unseat Cruz in 2024 as underwhelming. But a wave of online sniping among influencers and other informal campaign surrogates ensued, briefly creating the impression Talarico was mistrusted by black activists. While the fallout seems limited, the black electorate has become less predictable in recent years, with turnout surging when Barack Obama and Joe Biden headed the Democratic ticket and declining when Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were the standard-bearers. At the end of the day, Talarico's team must find a way to obtain more than 89 percent of the black vote—the share O'Rourke was estimated to have won—even if they are banking on unprecedented turnout among Latinos and young people.

Different aspects of Talarico’s biography and political identity could make it all come together. His religiosity could attract older black and Latino voters, who tend to be churchgoers, while his steadfast cultural liberalism is bound to generate a strong get-out-the-vote effort among other core Democratic constituencies. And his story of his mother’s determination to provide him a good life after leaving an abusive relationship with his birth father may well stir voters otherwise weary of liberal platitudes about resilience and hope.

Then again, Talarico’s basic fidelity to identity politics—at bottom, not meaningfully different from Crockett’s—could undermine his overtures to working-class independents and wavering Trump voters. He has pointedly cast MAGA’s cultural priorities as focused on the “wrong one percent” and enjoined his audiences to train their ire on the monied interests distorting American democracy. But Texas is still Texas: it skews to the right, despite its overflowing sociocultural and political contradictions. In what has been the epicenter of America’s culture wars over immigration, gender, guns, and abortion, Talarico may soon come up against harsh limits in his attempts to defy polarization and extend a hand to those who don’t agree with progressives on every issue.

Yet, as daunting as the odds are, Talarico’s campaign has concrete reasons to be optimistic. The blowback from ICE’s abuses and rapidly declining consumer sentiment, likely to worsen as the escalating war with Iran spikes energy, food, and shipping prices, may well spark the rebellion against the state’s MAGAfied establishment that eluded past Democratic challengers. Latinos who fueled Trump’s four-point improvement in 2024 over his 2020 victory in the state are now swinging toward Democrats because of the administration’s draconian and increasingly unpopular deportation regime, including in the Rio Grande Valley, where anxiety about border crossings, crime, and inflation had contributed to Trump’s stunning gains with traditional Democrats. The mounting cost-of-living crisis, meanwhile, has diminished Texas’s allure as a high-growth state with a middle-class-friendly housing market. Rents and utilities are up sharply in several metros while construction has slowed due to the chill sweeping through the immigrant-dependent sector. The explosion in data centers, moreover, has raised alarm over the demand placed on local water supplies and the state’s notoriously vulnerable energy grid, spreading grassroots opposition that transcends partisan loyalties. Together, these conditions may allow Talarico to close the deal and burnish, in turn, the new Sun Belt populism that has strengthened his voice.

Talarico, of course, knows he cannot depend on a perfect storm to yield an upset. Republicans are determined to consign Democrats to permanent minority status across Texas and the South, and the national Democratic Party, through endless fumbles and sins of omission, has done vanishingly little to stop them. Talarico will thus have to fight for every last persuadable vote—and not shrink from the onslaught his adversaries are preparing. The question, then, that should animate Talarico’s team as he forges ahead is whether they can continue to build something bigger than a proxy referendum on Trump’s record—and leave behind a movement primed for the battles to come. His fellow insurgents, near and far, are counting on it.

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Last month, at the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration, New York Times political analyst Nate Cohn took a look at the state of the president’s 2024 coalition. According to his data, many of the voters who helped make Trump president for a second time have swung hard against him over the past year, including, notably, racial minorities and young voters. Both groups have historically voted heavily Democratic, but Trump made significant gains with them in 2024. Now, however, both support him at lower rates than they did not just in 2024 but in 2020 as well.

Suffice it to say, this is far from ideal for Trump—and for his party, which faces an uphill battle heading into this year’s midterm election. Historically, the president’s party performs poorly in midterm years, and the lower the incumbent’s approval rating, the worse the carnage tends to be. In the Trump era, the GOP has also begun to rely more on less-frequent voters to win. If, as Cohn’s data shows, some of them even start to turn on Trump and instead go back to supporting Democrats, things could get ugly very quickly for Republicans.

Yet, as we regularly note, Democrats have not fully capitalized on Trump’s struggles so far and face issues of their own. Their favorability rating remains even lower than his—including among independents—which represents a reversal of where things were at the same point in 2018, the last midterm cycle under Trump. Democrats’ lead in the generic House ballot test today is also four points behind where it was at that time, even as many polls suggest they have near-unanimous support from their own voters.

Additionally, it is not yet clear that Trump’s woes have brought his party down with him. For example, polling shows that voters continue to trust Republicans more than Democrats on immigration and the economy, which the Times’s survey identified as the two most important problems facing the country today.

There are also signs that Republicans may be retaining some of Trump’s gains with core segments of the electorate, even as he himself has stumbled. Here is a look at how some of them voted in the national House popular vote in 2018 versus where their support lies now:

These numbers are generally consistent with what we’ve seen in recent years: it appears that a meaningful share of younger and non-white voters have moved to the right and may be staying there.1 The most glaring shifts are from racial minorities. In 2018, Democrats won black voters by 84 points and Hispanics by 40 points. Today, those leads are down to 55 points and 16 points, respectively. And even though voters aged 18–29 have soured on Trump, they are still 11 points right of where they were eight years ago.

There is certainly some good news here for Democrats, too. For starters, they have continued to make gains with white college grads, who are some of the most reliable voters in non-presidential years. Moreover, the Times’s polling shows there are relatively high shares of undecided voters across several cohorts, including young voters (11 percent), Hispanics (12 percent), non-college voters (10 percent), and independents (15 percent). If Democrats simply break even among these outstanding voters, it could leave them well-positioned for a strong midterm election.

But this data suggests that some of Republicans’ gains during the Trump era are very real. After only winning seven percent of black voters in 2018, Trump improved slightly in 2020 and then doubled that vote share in 2024 to 15 percent. In the Times’s generic ballot test, Republicans today are at 19 percent. This means that Democrats’ margin drop from 84 points to 55 isn’t just due to a high number of undecided black voters but real movement to the right.

We see a similar story with Hispanics: Republicans won only 29 percent in 2018, but today they are at 36 percent (though this trails Trump’s 46 percent from 2024). That means that even if Democrats ultimately clean up with the 12 percent who are undecided, their margin over Republicans would still be lower than it was in 2018.

Why does this data matter? Because of the stories that Democrats tell themselves about the state of their coalition. If they think that Trump’s gains in 2024 were a fluke—more of a “de-alignment” than a realignment, as some analysts on the left have argued—they risk convincing themselves that their lost voters will come back to them without Democrats needing to do much to precipitate that movement. They may, for instance, assume they will by default reap the rewards of Hispanic backlash to Trump’s immigration enforcement. This would be a mistake. Rebuilding a durable, winning coalition requires finding ways to reconnect with the voters who not long ago left them for Trump, and who may have a hard time trusting them after the Biden years.

It is of course possible that the above data won’t have much bearing on the midterms. Many of the Trump voters who have grown bitter toward him are likely to be those infrequent voters with weaker partisan loyalties, and they may simply sit out the election entirely, which would still work in Democrats’ favor. But these trends also illuminate longer-term shifts that will certainly matter for 2028 and beyond.

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At a February 7th campaign event dubbed “Rally for Our Republic,” Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia assailed the Trump administration as the “most corrupt of all time,” asking rhetorically, “If you’re Steve Bannon, how do you sell any of this?” to the left-behind Americans who helped power Trump’s election victories. The widely circulated, pugilistic speech depicting Trump’s cabinet as part of the “Epstein class” was exactly the kind that base Democrats hungry for stronger leadership in Washington have been demanding since Trump’s return to office. Yet Ossoff’s speech was also notable for recasting the MAGA GOP as the party of intrusive and oppressive big government. “What happened to ‘don’t tread on me’?” jeered Ossoff after recounting Republican attempts to justify ICE’s lethal force and trail of violence. In the face of Trump’s escalating attempts to centralize power, Ossoff previewed how federalism and negative liberty might be reclaimed as progressive causes.

The speech was also a potent reminder that today’s swing state Democrats, incumbents and insurgents alike, have not been cowed into taking a bloodless stance on Trump’s record for fear of losing the suburban moderates and independents whom Democrats need to be competitive in conservative-leaning areas. As illustrated further by the increasingly combative style of Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego and James Talarico, the Texas State Representative vying with Representative Jasmine Crockett to flip a Senate seat held by the GOP since 1961, Sun Belt Democrats east of the Colorado River have become less guarded about the stakes facing their constituents and the country. But their rhetoric also takes firmer aim at the forces and interests that have tightened the financial vise on working families. Though they have yet to consistently match Bernie Sanders’s fusillades against America’s richest elites, their change in register reflects a bet that tenacity and conviction, not caution, is the key to reviving Democratic prospects in regions the GOP has dominated since the end of the New Democrat era.

These glimmers of a new Sun Belt populism challenge the conventional wisdom regarding Democrats’ strategy in the Southeast and Southwest. In the aftermath of the 2024 election, public attention turned toward the party’s new class of putative moderates—those who had won very close elections in recent years and had overperformed Kamala Harris—and the sobering advice they had for a party establishment that many ordinary voters saw as dysfunctional and disingenuous. Democrats, advised Gallego, Arizona’s newly minted junior Senator, had to get serious, fast, about the border and public safety, admit they underestimated inflation’s toll, and accept that working-class minorities aspiring to the American dream have little patience for progressive politics when it doesn’t manifestly advance their hopes. The heavy implication was that Democrats had to exit their echo chamber and reconnect with voters who want a simple, clear agenda focused on security and opportunity.

It wasn’t just rhetoric, either. Twelve senators, including Gallego and Ossoff, voted for the Laken Riley Act the day of Trump’s inauguration, to the dismay of progressives who warned it would undermine due process and violate other civil liberties. The dilemma over how to win the confidence of moderates who swung to Trump over the border crisis and simultaneously hold rogue agencies accountable hasn’t relented since. As a majority of Americans conclude ICE makes them “less safe,” Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen, both of Nevada, have counseled other party moderates to take a tougher stance on crime while pressing for targeted DHS reforms.

Sensitive to charges Democrats still have no appetite to regulate immigration, pragmatists such as Gallego have similarly straddled the line. Although he has attacked the “goon squads” deployed in Minneapolis and said ICE is “rotten” at its core, Gallego continues to stress the importance of border security, reforming the asylum process, and strengthening operations that deter drug and human trafficking. Many activists have thus wondered if, in the stand-offs to come, the party’s most vulnerable incumbents might make unsavory compromises in order to look tough and stay viable back home.

And yet, a year into Trump’s second term, such fears have largely diminished. Instead, there has been a pronounced shift in emphasis among the Sun Belt’s rising stars toward fighting corruption and abuses of power. Along with former North Carolina governor and Senate candidate Roy Cooper, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and a handful of Southern insurgents hoping to fuel a blue wave in the House, these Democrats have taken the fight to the GOP’s hard right but also become more vocal about confronting monopolistic practices that drive up household expenses and undercut local economies.

This surge in left-populist rhetoric beyond liberal strongholds is proof that Democrats’ ideological factions don’t necessarily correspond to fixed regional blocs. But it also marks a change from the pattern that had emerged in recent decades. Before economist Thomas Piketty coined the “Brahmin left” typology, terms like “San Francisco liberal” or “Massachusetts liberal,” while wielded as pejoratives by Republicans, had captured the realignment that was underway in the Democratic Party by the mid-Aughts.

The party’s ascendant bloc comprised college-educated, urban-dwelling whites and minorities who were economic progressives to varying degrees but were closely associated with a positive outlook on globalization, feminism and LGBT rights, and environmentalism. Rust Belt and red state Democrats, by contrast, either reflected the party’s embattled protectionist faction, and thus did not always align with other liberals on immigration or climate policy, or the more socially conservative remnants of the party’s New Democrat phase. Mostly Southern, these latter Democrats by and large symbolized the kind of moderation that other party members had grown frustrated with but which, for obvious electoral reasons, couldn’t be spurned outright.

The Tea Party moment then brutally accomplished what urban liberal activists couldn’t achieve on their own: purge their party of dozens of “centrists” who, it must be said, often seemed more interested in incremental bipartisanship and old-fashioned logrolling than overdue reform. In both the 2010 and 2014 midterms, Democrats suffered staggering losses in conservative-leaning states that had previously supported several down-ballot Democrats even as they shifted steadily to the Republican column in presidential elections. Those outcomes underscored for many observers that the dynamic that had emerged in the post-civil rights era had reached its apogee: the Northeast and West Coast were the bastions of contemporary progressivism, while the former states of the Confederacy, sans Virginia but with the addition of Arizona, home to Barry Goldwater, John McCain, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio, formed the indisputable base of “movement” conservatism.

Democratic strategists and activists were divided, however, over how to put together a coalition that would make up for the losses that had accumulated under Barack Obama. Despite the demoralizing pattern in the Southeast and Southwest, there was a sense, prior to Trump’s 2016 victory, that the worst had come to pass and that a new generation of more energetic, social media-savvy leaders, buoyed by the multiracial “rising American electorate,” would keep Florida firmly in the presidential column and at last tilt Texas, Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina in Democrats’ favor. While Ohio and the fabled “blue wall,” it was generally agreed, had to be defended, many strategists ventured the party would be better off cutting its losses in Iowa, Missouri, and Indiana and concentrating on the Sun Belt states that were rapidly gaining in population.

These debates became fiercer as Bernie Sanders mounted a credible challenge to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary. Clinton memorably played up Sanders’s undeniable lack of support from older Southern black voters, while strongly signaling she would mobilize the younger minorities who would determine Florida and North Carolina and even put Texas in play. Clinton, moreover, tied race to Sanders’s economic pitch to depict his movement, like Trump’s base, as essentially backward-looking and pessimistic. Sanders, Clinton insinuated, was capturing an intergenerational bloc of globalization’s losers: the old, anti-free-trade white left of industrial labor and its sympathizers, as well as millennials “living in their parents’ basement” since the Great Recession—frustrated “baristas,” in Clinton’s words, who were unhappy with their education and career prospects and looking for “free” stuff. (Besides its condescension, Clinton’s outlook ignored that black manufacturing workers, from Detroit and Gary, Indiana, to the Southern piedmont, had also suffered heavily from offshoring and import competition.)

Remarks like these, matched by Clinton’s glaring lack of campaign stops in Wisconsin and Michigan, came to haunt the Democratic establishment following Trump’s 2016 upset. Clinton had made it sound as if Sanders’s movement was unsuited to understanding the preferences and aspirations of the diversifying New South. But she failed to rally the minority voters her campaign assumed would propel her to victory—black turnout noticeably dipped from the surge obtained by Obama in 2008 and 2012, particularly in those very regions Clinton implied were stuck in Fordist nostalgia—and Florida, then the most prized toss-up state, began its sharp swing to the right.

Since then, the party has wrestled with how to fix its image problems in the Midwest while maximizing opportunities across the Sun Belt. In the latter case, the ability to project “star power” that might overwhelm local Republican machines has had enormous purchase among Democratic operatives and progressive media. Yet the results have been a muddle. Insurgent candidates such as Beto O’Rourke, whose bid to unseat Senator Ted Cruz generated national excitement, and Stacey Abrams, who ran two unsuccessful campaigns for governor of Georgia, were feted like celebrities. But their 2018 defeats, although fairly narrow, underscored the limits of relying on resistance liberalism and viral media clips in fast-diversifying states.

A few breakthroughs in 2020 and early 2021 amid a less than stellar down-ballot performance for congressional Democrats nationally seemed to reaffirm the case for moderation. Heartened by Joe Biden’s narrow 2020 victories in Arizona and Georgia, as well as the election of Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock, and Ossoff to the Senate, national Democrats tentatively concluded that the rising American electorate would indeed be the linchpin of Democratic victories, but that it was essential to also mobilize suburban independents and “Romney Republicans” alienated by MAGA extremists. In effect, Democrats outside deep blue states had to strike a balance between harnessing appeals to identity while praising the shared advances and aspirations of regions eager to move on from the terrible legacies of Jim Crow.

It was thus taken for granted that left-populism would not emanate from the South and Southwest—that it would stay isolated to a few coastal cities and Northern Rust Belt districts. The new slate of purple-state Democrats, reflecting the party’s center of gravity, were more culturally liberal than their New Democrat predecessors. But they were otherwise expected to play their counterparts in the Trump era, especially as the forecast worsened in 2024; to win and be reelected, they would have to visibly break with their leadership and the progressive base on select issues and be measured in their criticism of economic inequities and concentrations of market power. The Sun Belt, after all, was attracting hundreds of thousands of Northerners and Californians—many of them minorities—purportedly in search of the “pro-growth” policies and lower costs that Republican incumbents repeatedly boasted of.

The Trump administration’s chief priorities, its brazen corruption, and persistent economic headwinds have upended that calculus. Indiscriminate tariffs, the yearlong uptick in grocery prices, the sluggish job market, the rollback of basic consumer protections, the collapse of antitrust enforcement, and the surge in utility rates due to the energy demands of AI data centers are hurting ordinary Sun Belt residents no less than blue state ones. Trump’s expansive detention and deportation regime has also repulsed countless Latinos whose support in 2024 likely contributed to his victories in Arizona and Georgia and his even stronger performance in Texas. Finally, as the housing crisis has become national in scope, the Sun Belt’s advantages have dwindled—a sign, perhaps, the region has become a victim of its own success. The discontent all this has generated suggests Sun Belt Democrats can afford to be more like the populist Texan Jim Hightower or Florida’s legendary New Dealer Claude Pepper and less reminiscent of the overcautious Al Gore as they push to expand their coalition’s geographic reach.

Indeed, Democrats following Ossoff’s and Gallego’s lead have strong reasons to channel an older strain of populism, one which guided the best of the South’s liberal reformers. While the national party treats its regional obstacles as a fait accompli dictated by the preferences of red state electorates who have rewarded Republicans decrying the ills of the “woke” left, there is nothing inevitable about the current red state “growth model” or its popularity. In fact, its support may prove weaker than meets the eye. Despite the Sun Belt’s allure, tepid wage growth, minimal workplace protections, and regressive taxes continue to weigh down working families hoping for greater mobility. But whether one regards the “Texas Miracle,” “Florida’s Blueprint,” and their equivalents as enhancing opportunity or enabling exploitation, these are far from the only development traditions known to the Sun Belt. For all the assumptions that the South and Southwest have historically stood for rugged individualism, these regions have a storied reputation of contesting monopoly power and employing antitrust laws to diversify their economies. They also benefitted enormously from New Deal programs that spread electrification and public power and corresponding regional planning boards that seeded industries beyond textiles, furniture, and mining.

Laissez-faire governance, in short, has rarely if ever defined the section’s laudable progress. Insurgents who can get this history right, while proudly invoking their states’ many triumphs over stereotype, will be best positioned to magnify the shortcomings—as well as the mounting philosophical incoherence—of Republican rule at the local and federal levels.

That’s not to say it’ll be easy to change the minds of Sun Belt voters conditioned to view liberalism warily. Gallego and Ossoff have amassed a national following, and the telegenic Talarico may have a shot at joining them in the Senate if he overtakes Crockett, his Democratic rival. But their party has yet to cultivate down-ballot insurgents who can replicate, in district after district, the kind of upset recently pulled off by machinist Taylor Rehmet in North Texas. Furthermore, their shared strategy of leaning into anticorruption populism while largely ignoring the liabilities of progressive identity politics has yet to be really put to the test. Even if Trump’s support continues to crater, Ossoff faces a tough reelection environment, and his fate in November will have an outsized impact on whether Democrats triangulate at all on the issues that contributed to their harrowing 2024 losses.

Still, as the heavy hand of Trump’s politicized agencies, deportation efforts, and unscientific tariffs sap the economic vitality of local communities at the same time that the well-connected are handsomely rewarded and shielded from oversight, Democrats have a rare opportunity to turn the tables in the regions at the center of their dreams and disappointments. By this time next year, observers across the political spectrum may be talking about a very different—and wholly unexpected—Southern renaissance.

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At the end of last year, we wrote about how the 2026 midterm environment was shaping up to be a good one for the Democratic Party. They have been cleaning up in special and other off-year elections. Their lead in the generic ballot is ticking steadily upward. Consumer sentiment is abysmally low. And Donald Trump’s approval rating—including on the issues that won him the 2024 election—is cratering.

Despite this apparent momentum, however, one place that could still be a challenge for Democrats this November is the U.S. Senate. The upper chamber of Congress has long had a bias toward states with relatively large rural populations, and as American politics has grown more polarized along urban-rural lines, especially during the Trump years, Republicans have gained a clear edge in the fight to control the Senate.

Since the 1994 midterms, the GOP has controlled the Senate for a total of 20 years while the Democrats have had the majority for only 12. And since the start of the Trump era (2016), Republicans have held the majority for eight years, averaging a six-seat margin, compared to Democrats’ four years and average one-seat margin.

At present, Republicans have a 53–47 margin in the Senate. Because they also hold the presidency, they could stand to lose up to three seats and still hang on. So the question is: can Democrats net four seats this November and win a majority?

Let’s first look at the big picture. Historically, the president’s party loses congressional seats in midterm elections. The losses are almost always steeper in the House than in the Senate, given how many more seats the former has. They are also usually greater for the president’s party when his approval rating is underwater. Going back to the 1960s, parties that controlled the White House lost an average of just one Senate seat when the president’s approval sat above 50 percent. However, that figure grew to 3.6 seats when his approval was below that benchmark.1

The good news for Democrats is that Trump’s approval rating is under 50 percent—it sits at just 41 percent as of this week, per Nate Silver’s averages. Moreover, it has been ticking steadily downward since last summer, and it is unlikely to be back up to 50 or higher by this November.

However, there is also reason for caution. For starters, even if we round the average 3.6-seat loss in the chart up to four seats—the number Democrats need for a majority—it’s still an estimate from the past, not a guarantee of what will happen this year. The bottom-right corner of the chart offers another complication. In each of the last two midterm elections, the incumbent president’s approval rating sat in the low 40s, and yet their party saw a net gain in Senate seats: two for Republicans in 2018 under Trump and one for Democrats in 2022 under Biden. This is a good reminder that it also matters which specific seats are up for election.

Consider 2018, Trump’s first midterm. Democrats that year picked up two Senate seats as part of a blue wave election nationally. But Republicans also flipped four Senate seats of their own, all in states that Trump had won two years earlier. Three of the four—Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota—had backed him by at least 18 points, and we now know that the fourth (Florida) was starting to trend more Republican at the time.2

The landscape this year is slightly different, and Democrats won’t be defending any seats in states that broke heavily for Trump. But the path to 51 seats won’t be easy, either, even if his approval rating stays in the basement.

To be sure, Democrats are still favored to make net gains this year. For starters, most observers expect that they will successfully defend on their own turf. Though there are two Democratic incumbents running in states Trump won—Georgia and Michigan—his 2024 margins in them were much narrower (2.2 points and 1.4 points, respectively) than they were in most of the states Republicans flipped in 2018. And this time, the national environment should be much friendlier for Democrats.

Moving to Republican territory, the strongest Democratic pick-up opportunity is likely Maine, which Kamala Harris won by 6.9 points. Incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins has been a strong candidate for years, though it’s very possible her luck will run out this year as partisanship continues to harden. Then there is North Carolina, where incumbent Republican Senator Thom Tillis is retiring, leaving an open seat. In a good year, this would be a strong Democratic target as well. Assuming they defend all of their other seats, adding these two states would put them at 49 in total.

This, however, is where things get very tricky. Remember, Democrats would need to net at least two more seats to win the Senate, as a 50–50 split still gives the GOP a majority with Vice President Vance serving as the tie-breaking vote. At this juncture, there appear to be four other Republican-controlled seats that could be viable targets for Democrats.

• Alaska. This may be Democrats’ best bet for getting to 50. They notched a big recruiting win when former Congresswoman Mary Peltola agreed to run for the seat against Republican Senator Dan Sullivan. Peltola won both an August 2022 special election for an open Republican seat and the subsequent general election but lost re-election in 2024. She proved to be a fundraising juggernaut in each of those campaigns, and she should have the political winds at her back this year. Meanwhile, Sullivan is among the least popular incumbent senators today, and early polls show Peltola with a slight lead. The big question is what the electorate will look like. Alaskans voted for Trump in 2024 by a healthy 13 points, though Peltola kept her race much closer, winning 48.8 percent of the vote at the end of ranked-choice voting. This race is probably a must-win if Democrats are to have any shot of securing a majority.

• Iowa. Though Democrats were competitive in the Hawkeye State for decades, it swung hard to the right in 2016 and has remained there ever since. As of today, they hold just one statewide office: state auditor. And in 2024, Trump carried the state by 13 points, the largest margin there of his three presidential runs. This will undoubtedly be a harder lift for Democrats. However, the current incumbent, Joni Ernst, is not seeking re-election, leaving behind an open seat. Congresswoman Ashley Hinson is the presumptive Republican nominee, while Democrats look to have a three-way primary that includes state Senator Zach Wahls and state Representative Josh Turek. The other factor that may be working in Democrats’ favor is the fundraising picture. Though Hinson faces little real competition for the GOP nomination, end-of-year filings show that she does not have a substantial money lead over the Democratic candidates. Still, Democrats have not won at the federal level in Iowa since 2008, and it’s unlikely that will change this year.

• Ohio. If Democrats can flip Alaska’s seat, Ohio might be their best bet for getting to 51. Of the four states on this list, Ohio went for Trump by the smallest margin in 2024 (though he still carried it by 11 points). The biggest reason for Democratic optimism here is their recruit: former U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, who served from 2006 until 2024, when he lost his seat by 3.6 points. Part of Brown’s appeal in this blue-collar state has been his persistent focus on helping improve life and conditions for American workers. In a better national environment this year, Brown could be poised for a comeback. He won’t have the benefit of incumbency this time, but it may not matter. Initial fundraising returns show him trouncing Republican incumbent Jon Husted by a nearly two-to-one margin, and early polling indicates this will be a tight race.

• Texas. Perhaps no Senate race has received as much attention as this one. Long Democrats’ white whale—they have not won a Senate race in Texas since 1988—the party hopes things may finally change this year. Depending on whom each party nominates, the general election could well be in play. New internal polling from the NRSC suggested that Republican Ken Paxton is vulnerable against either James Talarico or Jasmine Crockett for the Democrats, while incumbent GOP Senator John Cornyn would be set to narrowly defeat Talarico and win more comfortably against Crockett.3 The closest Democrats have come to winning here recently was in 2018 when Ted Cruz won re-election over Beto O’Rourke by just three points. That year, though, the national environment was 8.6 points Democratic, a few points ahead of where it sits today. One possible X-factor may be how Hispanic voters, many of whom supported Trump in Texas, feel about his aggressive deportation policies. If a critical mass not only swings toward Democrats but turns out—something they don’t always do in midterms—it could make things interesting here.

Clearly, all hope is not lost for the Democrats in their pursuit of a Senate majority. At the same time, part of what makes their task so difficult is basic math. The Argument’s Lakshya Jain put together a helpful graphic estimating the outcomes of these four races in a 2018-like “blue wave” environment.4 In every case, they would still come up short.

Silver’s state-level generic ballot estimates tell a similar story: at present, with the Democrats leading Republicans nationally by 5.6 points, the GOP is still favored in all four states. His projections also show that Democrats would likely need the national environment to shift at least five more points in their direction—a D+10.6 wave, the largest House margin in a midterm election since 1982—to start putting some of them in play.

Of course, forecasts and projections are not definitive, and real-world factors such as candidate quality and fundraising can make a big difference. There is also still a long way to go between now and November, and if Trump’s second-term policies keep pushing away many of the people who helped make him president, things could change in a hurry. But all this is a reminder of why it is so important for Democrats to figure out a way to compete in places that lean to the right of the country—and soon.

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In a matter of weeks there has been a sea change in Democrats’ expectations for the 2026 midterms. Throughout 2025, a series of lousy polls suggested Democrats had to scramble in order to capitalize on voters’ dimming view of the economy. No longer. Polls show that independents have recoiled at ICE’s pattern of lawlessness and the White House’s callous response to the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, a sign Trump’s 2024 coalition is quickly unraveling; while the backlash may ebb if the administration scales down and reconfigures DHS’s operations—something that is highly improbable as long as Stephen Miller oversees immigration policy—Republicans are now on the defensive on multiple fronts. Accordingly, with Trump underwater on most issues, Democrats are at last beginning to act like an opposition party that is determined to triumph.

It is indeed tempting to think Democrats have momentum on their side. They are nevertheless burdened by the fact that they could win control of the House without dramatically changing the state of play in states they must win in 2028 to regain the presidency. In fact, even if a so-called wave election occurs, it may do little to solve Democrats’ persistent regional woes in the Midwest and Southeast. Several special election victories in state legislatures have buoyed Democratic hopes that they can compete in some unlikely places, fueling fantasies of massive thirty-point swings like the one obtained by machinist Taylor Rehmet in North Texas. But the party’s infrastructure is still seriously impaired in the Lone Star State as well as former purple states such as Iowa, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina—to say nothing of Tennessee, Montana, Missouri, and Indiana, where the terrain is somewhere between daunting and impossible, even for “Blue Dog”-style candidates.

The discrepancy between the Democrats’ solid lead in the generic ballot and the actual districts they have a shot at flipping crystallizes the severity of the problem. So far, the Cook Political Report ranks only 14 Republican-held seats as genuine toss-ups; of these, six are in solid blue states. A significant fraction of Democratic pickups will hinge, conspicuously, on maximizing the party’s opportunities in deep blue California and Virginia, which will be partly achieved through redistricting. Furthermore, much of the support Trump has hemorrhaged seems to be concentrated in blue states in which Kamala Harris underperformed relative to Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Evidently, waging a campaign of brazen partisan retribution through a variety of federal funding cuts and ICE raids is a surefire way to repel less ideological voters and reinforce Democratic support in states liberals and progressives are already favored to dominate.

It’s possible fast-changing circumstances allow Democrats to overcome these structural weaknesses. Trump’s alarming threats to “nationalize” federal elections, followed by Steve Bannon’s call to deploy ICE agents at polling stations, actions that would violate the Constitution, have given Democrats reasonable cause to campaign again on “defending democracy,” despite that strategy’s dismal utility in 2024. Trump’s increasingly vile statements, surpassing past offenses, coupled with congressional Republicans’ tone-deaf view of the economy, could also foment a revolt at the ballot box in the name of common decency that enables Democrats to hold him “accountable” once more come January 2027.

Yet this path to victory, contingent as ever on popular revulsion toward MAGA’s excesses, won’t drastically change the Democratic Party’s image in regions that have switched, in the span of a decade, from competitive to forbidding. And if Democrats fail to fix it, they won’t be in any position to forge a genuine big tent and avert the debilitating losses the 2030 apportionment process promises to inflict. Indeed, without impressive upsets in Trump country, Democrats will remain a party of the highly educated Northeastern seaboard and West Coast, with all that implies in terms of its sociocultural outlook and understanding of rural and Rust Belt issues.

On the upside, there are signs Democrats finally grasp it is crucial to run relatable candidates in swing districts who are focused, above all, on strong communities and effective governance. Most Democratic insurgents are wisely targeting vulnerable or scandal-plagued incumbents by talking tough about special interests and corruption without making everything about Trump. Key candidates such as firefighter Bob Brooks (for PA-07), Scranton mayor Paige Cognetti (for PA-08), former newscaster Janelle Stelson (for PA-10), pastor Sarah Trone Garriott (for IA-03), law professor Christina Bohannan (for IA-01), and small business owner Rebecca Cooke (for WI-03) are plain-spoken about the ways in which local prosperity and opportunity have been decimated by corporate consolidation, anticompetitive practices, declining union membership, and ever-shifting trade policies. Although these candidates still need to win their primaries, their races, along with those in MI-07 and MI-10, are bound to determine whether Democrats, should they prevail in November, secure a majority greater than 10 seats.

One thing that is especially encouraging about these candidates—as well as their compatriots in key Senate and gubernatorial races—is that they appear to be deeply familiar with their communities. All highlight the plight of small farms and local mom-and-pops, know prospective constituents who are exposed to the intensifying contraction in manufacturing employment, and decry soaring health care costs that are vacuuming up whatever savings working families have. Their analogues among better-known Democrats include Representative Chris Deluzio (PA-17), Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, and former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown—Democrats who stand firm on core liberal values but strive to connect with working-class Trump voters.

Another asset these contenders share is that they show conviction but eschew ideological rigidity. Some, like Brooks and Cognetti, seem poised to be anticorruption firebrands armed with developmental goals that can appeal to a cross section of voters. Others, like Garriott, James Talarico, the Christian progressive vying for his party’s nomination in the Texas Senate race, and Rob Sand, the presumptive Democratic nominee for governor of Iowa, lean into an almost-spiritual message about the importance of rebuilding civic life. But none can be really classified as an AOC-style progressive or a “centrist” in the vein of Joe Manchin. That alone is refreshing, but it wouldn’t count for much if the central message wasn’t both muscular and hopeful. Past red state challengers, in a bid to sound “post-partisan,” sometimes spoke too cautiously about “kitchen table” issues. This cohort is much more willing to name what is broken in 21st-century America while emphasizing the great potential of ordinary citizens to renew the country’s promise.

Granted, it remains difficult to judge how much Trump’s troubles spell doom for embattled Republicans. The midterm cycle has yet to enter full swing, and individual polls for most of these candidates vis-à-vis their Republican opponents are limited. Nevertheless, a good indicator of Democratic momentum will be whether Cooke, Stelson, and Bohannan, who all fought close races in 2024, can carve out consistent leads of three points or more by early summer. Another barometer will be whether Democrats quickly boost their lead in the generic ballot, which so far lags their polling average from the 2018 cycle. Perhaps the most promising sign of a wave election would be if underdogs in districts Republicans are currently favored to hold can move the needle to the toss-up category. Other credible insurgents who are attempting to expand the map include Sam Forstag (for MT-01), a smokejumper with a populist message comparable to Dan Osborn’s, and Jamie Ager (for NC-11), a 4th-generation farmer who may just exploit local dissatisfaction with North Carolina’s radicalized state GOP and Trump’s disruptive agricultural policies. Should a few long-shot challengers close the polling gap in districts Trump won by fifteen to twenty points, Mike Johnson’s Republicans will be headed for a stinging defeat.

Still, the limited spread of truly vulnerable Republicans is a reminder that Democrats, despite raised hopes, have no room for error. And they only have a brief window to lay the groundwork to make more elusive seats competitive. Leading insurgents are concentrated in the Electoral College’s most fiercely contested battlegrounds and Iowa, a state that had been virtually abandoned by national Democrats following Barack Obama’s standout victories there. That underlines an uncomfortable truth about today’s Democratic establishment: after years of running on “defending democracy,” the party has only belatedly accepted that it must field authentic candidates who speak candidly to the same frustrations and hardships Trump successfully exploited in 2016 and again in 2024.

There is a lesson here for a national party inclined to merely hoist the banner of “affordability” and “No Kings.” Across much of the heartland, there are profound challenges that have festered and permutated over generations, from the 1980s farm crisis to NAFTA to the double punch of the China shock and opioid epidemic. Candidates who recognize that the problems facing working families run much deeper than being able to occasionally dine out or take a family vacation—that what’s at stake is nothing less than a way of life—will be best equipped to amplify the contrast with Republicans who have little to show but fealty to Trump and their donors. But the insurgents who are willing to be forthright about what ails America should prepare to get uncomfortable, too. As much as powerful rhetoric and clear proposals to take on special interests will be at the heart of any Democratic breakthrough, insurgents aren’t going to be able to wish away every cultural and policy landmine. To assemble a winning coalition that includes independents and Republicans who feel betrayed by their leadership, they will inevitably have to distinguish themselves from the Brahmin left and Biden’s record, particularly on immigration.

That might prove enormously fraught, given that an overwhelming majority of the Democratic base, as well as a growing number of party leaders, support either overhauling or eliminating ICE entirely. By contrast, independents, while believing ICE’s actions have gone “too far,” remain leery of where Democrats truly stand on border enforcement. Democrats, accordingly, cannot afford to confuse rising opposition to Trump’s deportation regime with a vote of confidence in their vague promises to not repeat the mistakes of the Biden era. While immigration is less salient for independents relative to 2024, this is primarily because, up until the upheaval and terror of the last several weeks, they were essentially satisfied with the halt in immigration that followed Trump’s return to office.

On such a volatile issue, then, the middle ground in districts that are conflicted about both parties’ approaches isn’t necessarily obvious. Many Americans recoil from the cruel practice of family separation, the inhumane conditions frequently endured by detained migrants, and the prospect of “Amazon”-scale detention centers. They also don’t want an anarchic system that overwhelms local services and floods the labor market in neighborhoods and cities already contending with stagnant wages and inflated housing and health care costs. And insurgents, though they may be tempted to harness legitimate outrage over ICE’s abuses, won’t want to come across as remotely sympathetic to open borders.

Yet establishing a stance that strikes ordinary voters as nuanced but principled—one that could feasibly defuse one of the key issues driving political polarization—is easier said than done. The matter is complicated by the astronomical cost of running a congressional campaign, the imperative to amass a war chest to counter bare-knuckle right-wing PACs, and the kingmaker role played by advocacy groups and donor networks who remain wedded to identity politics. The paradox is that, deprived of strong local party branches, the next generation of red state Democrats are hemmed in by the very party structures they need to reform. Underdogs by definition need outside financial support, and insurgents, no matter how “independent,” may find themselves under pressure to simply avoid discussing their party’s chief liabilities.

The challenge of how to simultaneously be a “good Democrat” and a “different kind of Democrat” in a tough race captures the larger dynamic troubling the national party as it tries to regain working-class voters. Lately, a host of vocal party strategists have gamely hyped the notion that the Democratic coalition is already a big tent that spans from progressive populists like Zohran Mamdani to pragmatic governors like Kathy Hochul and Josh Shapiro to “Blue Dog” voices like Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Their argument is that each party faction has gotten better at accommodating the others and identifying the goals and themes that might appeal to independents, irregular voters, and soft Trump supporters.

It’s a seductive narrative meant to boost morale and make the most of Trump’s falling approval rating. But this sudden effort to coexist ahead of the midterms and muffle internal debates is not the same thing as a project to fearlessly expand the Democratic coalition—to add, in effect, some 8-10 percent of disappointed Trump voters and convert at least another 5-10 percent of low-propensity ones. Democrats say they want to, but then indulge in the kind of petty purity politics that just resurfaced in the Texas Senate race and which turn off potential supporters. They should know better, considering they want to cease relitigating the disappointments and defeats of the last decade. A genuine big tent will only be brought about if the national party, in no uncertain terms, ditches the litmus tests that have repeatedly penalized purple and red state Democrats and driven away the very voters it claims to champion.

With just nine months to go, determined insurgents are ready to put everything on the line. It is high time the rest of the Democratic Party acted like more than another midterm victory is at stake.

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MAGA warriors are apt to taunt their less fervent GOP allies with the question, “Do you know what time it is?” Democrats implicitly face the question from their aggressively progressive wing, which accuses the leadership of insufficient courage and ingenuity in fighting Trump. Early primaries in Texas and Illinois will provide a big clue as to how the Democratic primary electorate is reading the clock.

The Texas Senate Democratic primary is the first big race to watch. Party grandees make little secret that they prefer State Representative James Talarico. The former Presbyterian seminarian regularly invokes his faith and fuses Christian principles and imagery into his appeal. In a state known for its Republican tilt and strong religiosity, it’s no wonder many establishment Democrats think Talarico is the party’s best bet to flip the seat.

The trouble is that Democratic voters may not see it the same way. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett has made a name for herself in recent years with a highly aggressive, progressive persona online and in progressive-dominated media like MS NOW. A party swiftly moving to the left, and one that seems to value fighting more than results, could easily choose her in March 3rd’s contest.

Then there are the racial dynamics. Talarico is reeling from accusations that he called former Rep. Colin Allred, the Democratic Senate nominee against Sen. Ted Cruz in 2024, a “mediocre black man.” Allred, who dropped out of the Senate race after Crockett entered and is now contending to regain his old House seat, has endorsed Crockett and dismisses Talarico’s explanations and denials. Crockett, who is black, seems all too happy to see her foe’s campaign in trouble.

Both candidates enter the final month with over $6 million in the bank, more than enough to battle it out on the airwaves even in Texas’s diffuse and expensive media markets. Crockett’s large advantage with black voters, who should cast about 20-25 percent of the primary ballots, might prove to be decisive if she can combine that strength with support from the party’s most progressive elements.

Republicans, who might be saddled with embattled and controversial Attorney General Ken Paxton as their nominee, would surely rather face Crockett than Talarico. If that matchup happens, the Texas race will likely be a test case of the progressive theory that an aggressive style and unapologetic views can win by increasing turnout.

The congressional primaries in Illinois may hold even greater significance in the ongoing struggle for the party’s identity. Five Chicago-area seats are open due to retirements or attempts to run for Senate. The winners in those ultra-safe districts will be indicative of which wing of the party is ascendant.

Primary rules in Illinois should boost the chances of ultra-progressive candidates. That’s because the winner only needs a plurality of votes to become the nominee and hence the next congressmember. Progressives don’t need to appeal to the party’s establishment or shrinking moderate wings; they only need to mobilize the faithful to be in the running to prevail.

The Hispanic-dominated 4th Congressional District has no primary because incumbent Rep. Chuy Garcia waited until the end of the filing deadline to declare he wasn’t running. That sneaky maneuver allowed his Chief of Staff, Patty Garcia, to file and run unopposed (some furious Democrats have filed to run as independents against her in the general election). The others, however, all feature multi-candidate mashups that make the proverbial clown car look like a highly disciplined Formula One racing team.

The race to succeed Rep. Robin Kelly in the Chicago South Side-dominated 2nd Congressional District is typical. Ten Democrats, including former Rep. and convicted felon Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., are vying to head to Washington. The race nonetheless seems to be boiling down to a classic progressive versus establishment showdown between the two with the most cash on hand, State Sen. Robert Peters and Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller.

Peters sports the endorsements of progressive icon Sen. Bernie Sanders along with a host of local leaders and unions. He also represents about 11 percent of the seat’s population, and surely much more of the Democratic primary electorate given the overwhelmingly Democratic nature of his seat. If he can run up the score in his backyard and attract progressives elsewhere, he should easily be able to get close to a third of the vote.

Miller sports an impressive array of local endorsements and has more cash on hand for the final months. Her local district, however, is based entirely in the suburbs and contains none of Chicago. She likely will need to win big among the Democrats in the largely Republican and rural counties that the Democratic gerrymander attached to this seat to have a shot.

Thirteen Democrats are campaigning to succeed retiring Rep. Danny Davis in a 7th Congressional District seat that attaches the heavily black West Side of Chicago with racially mixed suburbs. There is a strong progressive running, Reed Showalter. His website features him wearing a “free Palestine” button and pledges to reject funding from corporate PACs and the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. With only a bit over $250,000 raised through 2025, though, he likely does not have the resources to prevail even in such a heavily divided field.

Most of the other candidates are establishment black politicians, with State Rep. La Shawn Ford and Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Evans having raised enough money to effectively compete. Ford also sports Davis’s endorsement, which, combined with his own representation of about 10 percent of the district, likely makes him a slight favorite.

Two relatively moderate outsiders, however, threaten to shake the race up. Dr. Thomas Fisher, a black ER physician, has raised over $600,000 and has been endorsed by the Chicago Tribune. But that amount of money pales in comparison with the $1.8 million white businessman Jason Friedman has pulled in. Friedman is running on a clearly moderate platform, emphasizing job creation, education, and fighting crime in a platform that seems tailor-made for the suburban part of this seat.

It would be shocking to see Friedman win this historically black seat, one that remains 45 percent black by citizen voting-age population and likely much more than that in a Democratic primary. The crowded field, though, means anything could happen.

The other two seats offer clear establishment versus progressive storylines. The 8th Congressional District race has eight candidates, five of whom have raised over $500,000. But the two money leaders, former Rep. Melissa Bean and Junaid Ahmed, occupy clear ideological lanes that mark them as the putative frontrunners.

Bean is trying to return to the descendant of a seat she surprisingly lost in the 2010 Republican wave. Back then, she was an outspoken moderate and a leader in the Blue Dog and New Democrat coalitions. She has since held executive positions in Chicago-area business and financial organizations. She remains staunchly in the establishment lane, featuring endorsements from former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and Sen. Tammy Duckworth.

Ahmed is the polar opposite in terms of backing and emphasis. The campaign video on his website calls him a “progressive fighter” and features pictures of people wearing buttons proclaiming “Medicare for All” and a house with a “Green New Deal Now” sign. He’s been endorsed by progressive leaders Reps. Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal, along with Justice Democrats and Our Revolution.

A multi-candidate race with many significant competitors is always unpredictable. An Ahmed win in this entirely suburban seat, however, would send a clear signal that the rise of the left is not confined to urban or university enclaves.

Finally, the 9th Congressional District’s outcome will receive outsized national attention for two reasons: the importance of AIPAC and Israeli-Gaza policy and the presence of 26-year-old ultra-progressive internet influencer Kat Abughazaleh.

This fifteen-person race has a number of potential spoilers, such as State Senator Michael Simmons and State Rep. Hoan Huynh. Simmons’s senate seat, grounded in northern Chicago, includes 22 percent of the district’s population, a formidable base with which to start. But he’s only raised $324,000, only the 8th most in this expensive race. He would have to hope that the other, better-funded candidates cut themselves up and allow his residual name identification in his home region to propel him to a narrow and unconvincing win.

Huynh has much more money—over $1 million—but a much smaller regional base, as his state house seat only includes 8 percent of the district. He also lacks a clear ideological profile or a list of nationally prominent endorsements. His hope rests on an even slimmer reed than Simmons, likely hoping that he can do well in his home area and among the 12 percent of citizen-voting age adults who are of Asian ancestry.

The consensus and the limited polling to date hold that this is a three-person race between the top fundraisers: progressive Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, State Senator Laura Fine, and Abughazaleh. Each has raised over $1.9 million, with Abughazaleh leading the way with an amazing $2.7 million. They have done so using very different approaches, however, differences that could matter as they race down the home stretch.

Biss has been heavily dependent upon very large donors. His campaign finance statements list 373 donors who have contributed at least $2,000 for a total of $1.16 million, 58 percent of his total contributions. People who gave at least $1,000 added an additional $490,000 to that. How many of these large donors will give more, and how many other large donors can Biss find before Election Day?

Abughazaleh, on the other hand, has raised nearly $1.9 million from unitemized receipts—people who give in such small amounts that their names do not need to be legally reported. That small-dollar donor base comes from progressive activists all around the country and is likely to continue as the race heads to the finish line.

Fine straddles the two candidates, with very few unitemized contributions but many fewer large donors than Biss. She also starts with the largest geographic base, with about a quarter of the district within her senate seat, although she shares much of that with Evanston’s Biss. She nonetheless has an asset neither of her major foes does: substantial outside support from pro-Israel donors. They might keep giving until primary day, especially since Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American, has called for recognition of a Palestinian state.

Polls show this is anybody’s race. Fine released an internal poll this week showing her tied with Biss at 21 percent, with Abughazaleh third at 14 percent. That’s within the margin of error and comes before any of Abughazaleh’s ads have run on television.

Pro-Israel outside groups also seem to have just launched a major outside ad buy for Fine, Bean, and Miller. The Jewish Insider notes that each of their major opponents has either condemned Israel’s war in Gaza or called for a ban on the sales of offensive weapons to the Jewish state.

We thus have the lines drawn in the early primaries. Will the establishment hold on, or will the rising tide of the left sweep all before it? Either way, the clock toward decision day is ticking fast.

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We spend a lot of time at TLP giving Democrats business about the philosophical, political, and policy errors they too often fail to acknowledge or correct on matters ranging from the economy and governance to immigration and crime. In an age of partisan cheerleading by both Democrats and Republicans, we believe yelling about the perfidy of the other side while sticking your head in the sand about your own problems gets you nowhere. “Politics without winners,” as two astute analysts called it.

One of the biggest challenges for Democrats, exemplified by the last presidential administration, is finding a new generation of political leaders who are younger, patriotic, and more diverse in terms of their job backgrounds and who favor common-sense (or “heterodox”) approaches to politics and policy over ideological rigidity.

Enter the new organization, “The Bench,” which is seeking to organize and support a crew of candidates who fit the bill for politically viable generational change. The organization’s goal with this effort is not necessarily to win every race right away but to help new people progress within the party who, given their backgrounds and perspectives, would help to address the negative public face of Democrats, a party held in very low esteem by many voters.

As described in The Washington Post:

The idea, said Andrew Mamo, a spokesperson for the group, is to identify up-and-coming talent within the Democratic Party and provide candidates with the resources needed to win what, in most cases, will be their first race.

The group works with the broader Democratic ecosystem, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other organizations, and Mamo said it can supplement that work by focusing less on explicitly winning races and more on changing the kind of candidates the Democratic Party backs.

“These are not people you would endorse if you just want to put as many wins on the board as possible,” Mamo said. “They are the kind of people who are going to make the big D brand more palatable. They are hopefully going to win seats and show, if we follow people like these guys, we can make the party brand better.”

Here’s the inaugural class of Bench candidates with brief background info.

House Candidates

• Jamie Ager (NC-11), 4th generation farmer

• Shannon Bird (CO-08), state legislator

• Bob Brooks (PA-07), firefighter and union leader

• Cait Conley (NY-17), Army combat veteran and national security expert

• Mike Cortese (TN-05), Nashville business executive and Metro Council member

• Sam Forstag (MT-01), smokejumper and union leader

• Sarah Trone Garriott (IA-03), Lutheran pastor and state legislator

• Nancy Lacore (SC-01), retired Rear Admiral, former Chief of the Navy Reserve, and helicopter pilot

• Matt Maasdam (MI-07), Navy SEAL veteran who carried the “nuclear football” for President Obama

• Darren McAuley (FL-15), Air Force military physician and flight surgeon

• Denise Blaya Powell (NE-02), small business owner and former corporate executive

• Bobby Pulido (TX-15), small business owner and multi-Latin GRAMMY winner and American GRAMMY nominee

Senate Candidates

• Mallory McMorrow (MI Senate), state legislator

• James Talarico (TX Senate), state legislator and former public school teacher

• Josh Turek (IA Senate), state legislator and two-time Paralympic gold medalist for Team USA

  ---

A few things of note about these Bench candidates:

They are noticeably younger. At a time when prominent Democrats like Rahm Emanuel are calling for a mandatory retirement age of 75 for the president, cabinet officials, members of Congress, and federal judges, Bench candidates are all in their 30s to 50s, with no candidates older than 60.

This is a positive move for a party whose last president and House and Senate leaders were in their 70s or 80s.

They are (mostly) not lawyers! If a person could snap their fingers and make one big change to the Democrats, my wish would be to temporarily banish all the lawyers from running for office and controlling the party apparatus. Lawyers have their place in American life, but the Democratic Party is overrun with these figures who, let’s face it, tend to make terrible candidates, seemingly have no philosophical core, and flip their principles in an instant to avoid responsibility for failures and make themselves anew. It’s fun to watch lawyers in court argue positions they don’t really believe, with faux conviction, but this character trait makes for untrustworthy politicians who appear distant from voters’ lives and drive cynicism.

In contrast, the new crop of Bench candidates are farmers, veterans, businessmen and women, athletes, pastors, doctors, firefighters, bartenders, and plow drivers. If Democrats want to return to their historical position as the party of economic advancement for working- and middle-class Americans and ditch their professional-class cultural obsessions, they need leaders who come from these communities and occupational backgrounds.

They are locally focused and don’t fit easily into existing left-right schisms. Many in Democratic circles mistakenly assume that being young and offering change means by definition that you’re an online leftist or a DSA-aligned figure. There are plenty of good young Democrats who are not cut in the mold of Zohran Mamdani and others like him who have been successful in deep-blue cities and states but wouldn’t go over well in more competitive environments or in terms of reaching more rural and conservative electorates.

But these Bench candidates are not “centrists” in the traditional sense. For example, Bernie Sanders has also endorsed Bench candidate Sam Forstag, the smokejumper and union leader running in MT-01 against the Republican incumbent, Rep. Ryan Zinke, on a pro-working-class agenda of good jobs, higher wages, and affordable housing. PA-07 candidate Bob Brooks, a former Bethlehem firefighter, bartender, and snowplow driver, decries the corporate takeover of politics and laments the loss of the days when a blue-collar job could support a decent living. His platform includes repealing Citizens United, banning corporate PAC money, instituting term limits, and ending stock trading by members of Congress, along with raising the minimum wage, increasing taxes on the wealthy, and helping people get into trade schools and find affordable housing and childcare.

Likewise, although you won’t notice the Bench candidates employing losing slogans like “Abolish ICE,” you will hear fierce denunciations of out-of-control ICE tactics coupled with proposals to make the agency more effective and accountable for successfully enforcing immigration laws and border protections without threats to citizens and people exercising their constitutional rights. Similarly, Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow supports a public option for health care but opposes the “Medicare for All” idea endorsed by one of her primary opponents, while James Talarico focuses on tangible health care reform ideas like his state-led effort to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs.

These are candidates trying to win competitive elections and flip seats in red areas by representing the values and policy desires of working-class voters and their families in a pragmatic manner.

It’s not TLP’s place to tell anyone how to vote. But we do hope you’ll at least give these Bench candidates (and future ones) a fair hearing in upcoming primaries or general elections and support them if you are so inclined.

Democrats have been talking about generational change forever. It’s nice to see new groups and candidates who aren’t down-the-line democratic socialists standing up to do something about it.

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Editor’s note: Ruy will be talking with Bench Senate candidate Josh Turek on The Liberal Patriot Podcast out this Friday. Please give it a listen!

Democrats have good reason to look forward to this year’s midterms. History suggests they are a near lock to retake the House despite the redistricting wars, and the 2025 results were overwhelmingly positive for them.

There are nonetheless some important indicators that do not tell this robustly positive story. Understanding the mixed signals the electorate is sending will be key if Democrats are to fulfill their dreams and usher in a blue wave.

The congressional generic ballot is the first warning sign. Despite President Trump’s low job approval numbers, Democrats are currently only ahead by about 4 points. They were ahead by roughly 7 points at this stage of the 2018 midterm cycle. (Nate Silver's model shows a slightly larger 5.3 point lead for Democrats, but also shows Democrats running well behind where his generic ballot average had them in 2018.)

This makes sense when one considers that Trump’s job approval rating was nearly three points lower back then than it is today. Despite all of Trump’s missteps and bad news, he remains more popular today than eight years ago, and this has a direct impact on the race for Congress.

One also has to factor in how static congressional preferences are in most election years. It seems strange to say that given how many hundreds of millions of dollars are soon to be unleashed in campaign spending, but it’s true.

The final national congressional vote has not differed by more than 1.6 points from the Real Clear Politics average on January 21 of an election year since 2014. It’s possible that could change this year—the past is not always prologue—but the nation’s extreme and increasing polarization suggests that what Democrats see now is roughly what they will get in November.

That said, winning the national congressional vote by 4 points would represent roughly a 7-point improvement on the margin from 2024. That would still give them a 10-25 seat gain in the House and could even make Senate control possible if every race broke their way. But that’s a far cry from the massive gains in past Democratic landslides such as 2008 and 2018.

Partisan identification is another warning sign. True, Democrats have been picking up ground here, too. They now lead by five points in Gallup’s most recent polling, a dramatic improvement from their deficits between 2022 and 2024. But that is all from independents who lean Democratic; core Democratic partisanship actually dropped one point between 2024 and 2025.

One must also note that Gallup polls all adults, which includes non-citizens. Trump and Republicans have fared much worse on polls of all adults than those of registered voters throughout the latter half of 2025 (likely due to the ICE raids). The quarterly Wall Street Journal poll only finds a slight improvement from 2024, moving from an R+2 lean in October 2024 to a D+1 tilt today.

Then we have the partisan registration trends. Decision Desk HQ’s data expert, Michael Pruser, keeps track of these, and he finds that Republicans are still out-registering Democrats in most states that register voters by party. That’s not what one would expect to see if Democrats were rising in popularity.

It’s not that Republicans are doing great in most states. The real winners this year have been independents, as the share of voters choosing neither major party has risen substantially. Those independents seem to be leaning toward Democrats right now and could well stay there. But that’s different from a partisan revival.

Voters’ opinions of the two parties bear these observations out. Republicans remain slightly more popular than Democrats in Decision Desk HQ’s polling averages despite a decline in the GOP throughout the year. Democratic favorability has barely budged despite the other positive trends.

Put it all together, and one must conclude that the election is not going to be a cakewalk. Candidates matter less than they used to, but bad Democratic candidates can still cost the party in key races. Trump could improve his standing as the year progresses, and every point his job approval rises reduces the chance Democrats make significant gains, especially in the Senate.

In short, the game is still on with everything left to play for. Let the races begin!

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Today marks one year since Donald Trump was sworn in for a second term as president. After looking stronger than ever before on Inauguration Day, most metrics show that his standing with the public has since declined substantially.

According to averages compiled by Nate Silver, Trump’s approval rating as of this week sits at just 42.1 percent against a disapproval rating of 55.2 percent, good for a net approval of -13.1. At this time last year, that figure was +11.7, marking a 24.8-point swing. His current standing puts him even slightly below where Joe Biden was at the same point in his presidency (-12.2).

The severity of Trump’s political decline is evident in how Americans feel he has handled some of the top issues facing the country—specifically, immigration and the economy. A new Wall Street Journal poll examined his approval rating across ten issues, and on eight of them he held a double-digit net-negative approval, including inflation and prices (-17), tariffs (-10), and the economy overall (-10).1 He also struggled on related questions, including whether voters believed he is looking out for the middle class (-12) and has the right priorities (-14).

On just one issue—border security—was his net approval in positive territory (+6). Immigration ranked second-best at -4, consistent with numerous other polls across the past year. However, even there, the public has been growing restless about some of his policies. According to Silver’s data, throughout the second half of 2025 Trump’s net approval on immigration was four to five points underwater on average, far better than for economic issues. This month, however, it dropped below -10 for the first time. The Journal also found that majorities of voters believe Trump has gone too far in deploying ICE agents and deporting people living in the U.S. illegally.

CBS and YouGov conducted an even more in-depth survey gauging voters’ views on how Trump has handled immigration, and the picture remained poor for him overall. Take the topline finding: since last February, support for his deportation program has declined significantly, falling from +18 points (59 to 41 percent) to -8 today (46 to 54). Fully 61 percent of Americans—including 68 percent of independents and even one-in-five Republicans—believe ICE has been “too tough” when stopping and detaining people, up five points since November.

The rest of the survey didn’t get much better for him. Far greater shares of Americans reported feeling uneasy (54 percent), frustrated (51 percent), unsafe (47 percent), or exhausted (42 percent) by Trump’s presidency than felt confident (25 percent), satisfied (21 percent), safe (20 percent), or energized (18 percent). Moreover, majorities said he has given too much attention issues like deportations (53 percent), international/overseas events (53 percent), and imposing tariffs on other countries (60 percent), while a whopping 74 percent believe he has not paid enough to “lowering the prices of goods and services.”

Big picture: Americans are (still) primarily worried about their finances, think Trump is too preoccupied with other matters, and increasingly disapprove of how he is handling most issues.

Frustration with an incumbent president typically presents an opportunity for the opposition party. Indeed, Democrats have already found much political success over the past year, and the midterm environment is shaping up to favor them overall. But whether they can capitalize on Trump’s poor standing has yet to be determined, and as we have warned previously, negative attitudes toward him may not automatically translate into support for the party—a warning that recent polling has reinforced.

Despite their misgivings about Trump, voters still trust Republicans in Congress more than Democrats to handle most big issues. In the same Journal poll, voters were asked which party they prefer to handle ten issues, and they chose Republicans on seven of them. By far the GOP’s best-performing issues related to immigration, a reminder of the hole Democrats find themselves in after Biden’s four years. A meager 20 percent of voters trusted Democrats to handle border security versus nearly half (48 percent) who picked Republicans.

Moreover, even as Trump’s approval for handling economic issues has been in the gutter for months, Republicans continue to hold an advantage on inflation (+6), tariffs (+2), and the economy overall (+6). The CBS poll told a similar story: Americans preferred Trump and Republicans’ approach on both economic and immigration policy to the Democrats’.

Unsurprisingly, Democrats’ best issue is still health care, as it has been for years. The party may be comforted by the knowledge that in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm election—the closest parallel to the current election cycle—polling looked pretty similar regarding whom voters trusted more on health care (D+16) and the economy (R+9). And that November, Democrats experienced a “wave” election.

The one issue that is very different this time, however, is immigration. Americans have become quite a bit more restrictionist on dealing with illegal immigration compared to eight years ago. In the CBS poll, they were evenly split on whether those living in the U.S. illegally should be allowed to stay and apply for citizenship (46 percent) or required to leave (45 percent). Similarly, while the public leaned heavily against Trump’s approach to deportations, they were split 50–50 on supporting his goals.

It’s very possible this won’t matter much in the November election. The out-party typically sees success in midterm years, even when they have deficits of their own. Democratic voters will no doubt be fired up to turn out, and the impact of Trump’s first-year moves on health care might allow the party to press its advantage on the issue with swing voters. But the fact that Democrats don’t hold a trust advantage on immigration or the economy—Americans’ top two issues in the CBS poll—may pose a challenge for them in more competitive races, and even beyond this year.

All we know for certain right now is that Trump’s woes are hurting Trump. Maybe they will end up trickling down the ballot and making life difficult for his party, as well. But tempting as it may be to hope all this will help buoy them back to good standing, it is clear Democrats still have work to do to get back in voters’ good graces.

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As 2025 comes to an end, all eyes in the world of politics now turn to next year’s midterm elections. Currently, things are shaping up well for the Democratic Party, as they typically do for the party that doesn’t control the presidency. Among the issues that may help propel them back to power in Congress and downballot is the cost of living. An issue that once drove Trump’s return to the presidency has become an albatross for him and his party.

Now, Republicans are set to pour lighter fuel on the situation. Congress has officially recessed for the holidays and did so without shoring up subsidies meant to keep costs under control for the roughly 24 million Americans who get their health insurance through the exchanges set up under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Failing to extend those subsidies or offer some other reform to tackle the rising costs means premiums will increase for tens of millions of people at the beginning of the new year. Politico explains:

Premiums are set to rise by 26 percent on average next year, according to an analysis from the health research organization KFF, and the loss of the enhanced credits would mean consumers have to devote more of their income to health care costs. That means the out-of-pocket contribution from subsidized enrollees could more than double due to the loss of the boosted credits, according to KFF.

However, KFF added that most enrollees could see even steeper increases in what they pay than 26 percent:

This 26 percent is the increase in the amount insurers are charging, which in most cases is not what enrollees pay. 22 million out of 24 million marketplace enrollees currently receive a tax credit. The amount subsidized enrollees pay is not what insurers charge, but rather a sliding-scale share of their household income, based on a formula set by Congress. If Congress extends the enhanced tax credits, the amount subsidized enrollees pay each month will remain about the same, even though the amount insurers are charging is increasing sharply.

If the enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of this year, KFF estimates that currently subsidized enrollees will see their monthly premium payments more than double, increasing by about 114 percent, on average.

At a time when Americans remain frustrated with the state of the economy and cost of living (something Trump seems well aware of), letting health care costs spike will only add to their stresses. Let’s take a look at the bigger picture—and at the political impact this could have on Republicans next year.

1. Heading into 2026, a greater share of Americans wants the government to prioritize health care.

New polling from AP-NORC asked Americans to list in their own words up to five issues they want the government to tackle in 2026. The economy was by far the top priority, with roughly seven in ten respondents mentioning at least one economic issue. But perhaps just as notably: 41 percent cited health care issues, up from 33 percent one year ago and putting it slightly behind immigration (44 percent).

The poll also found that Trump’s approval rating on health care sat at just 29 percent, which ties his lowest level in the poll’s history—December 2017, only months after his failed attempt to repeal the ACA.

2. More Americans are worried about health care costs than at virtually any other time in the last 25 years.

A recent Gallup survey found that 29 percent of Americans cite costs as the “most urgent health problem” facing the country, the most since 2004 and tied for the highest level this century. Access to health care was a distant second at 17 percent, followed by obesity at just eight percent.

Similarly, Fox News reported that the share of voters saying they are “extremely” concerned about the price of health care hit 55 percent this year—a 17-year high—while another 30 percent were “very” concerned. When breaking down several different health care issues, a large plurality (44 percent) identified “the price of health insurance” as their biggest concern.

3. Millions of Americans with marketplace plans will either pay substantially more or lose coverage entirely if the enhanced subsidies expire.

Congressional Republicans have tried to soften the blow of forthcoming premium increases by arguing that the highest-income Americans would see the worst of it, which is correct. However, middle- and lower-income families will still be hit with substantially higher costs as well, and chances are they won’t be able to weather it as much as higher-income earners. Politico broke down how much monthly premiums will go up for Americans depending on their age and family status:

Even higher-income households may find it difficult to afford these spikes, but for those on the lower end of the income scale, higher costs could make affording health care nearly impossible—leaving them without coverage entirely. In fact, according to CBO estimates, roughly four million people are likely to lose coverage without the ACA subsidies.

4. Obamacare is more popular than ever before.

Despite starting out as a highly contentious policy, the ACA has only grown in popularity since is passage in 2010. Since December 2016, the public has maintained a net-positive view of the law, hitting record popularity in 2025 when 66 percent of Americans viewed it favorably against just 33 percent who did not. This included a whopping 71 percent of independents and even more than a third (36 percent) of Republicans.

New Gallup polling confirmed this, finding that a record-high share of Americans approve of the ACA and, perhaps just as importantly, only 25 percent said they supported repealing the law, including a mere 17 percent of independents.

5. Medicaid remains popular as well.

Medicaid, which provides health insurance to nearly 80 million low-income Americans, is even more popular than the ACA. Fully 83 percent view the program favorably, according to KFF, the highest level since the beginning of Trump’s first term. This includes an identical share of independents and a massive 74 percent of Republicans (the latter of whose favorability has grown by 11 points from last year).

Following the passage President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, an estimated 7.8 million Medicaid recipients could become uninsured. Combined with a higher premiums on the ACA exchanges, this could lead to chaos in America’s healthcare industry short of Republicans providing their own fix—and quickly.

6. Voters trust Democrats more than Republicans to handle health care issues.

Though Democrats are still working to earn back voters’ trust on a range of issues, they have consistently had an advantage over Republicans on health care. According to KFF, 43 percent of voters say they trust Democrats to do a better job of addressing the future of the ACA compared to 32 percent who say the same of Republicans. That gap was slightly narrower on the matter of addressing the high cost of health insurance but still favored Democrats, 39 to 33.

As the cost of health care becomes a more salient issue, Democrats appear poised to benefit. KFF asked respondents, “If your health care expenses increased by $1,000 next year, do you think that would have a major impact, a minor impact, or no impact at all on each of the following in the 2026 midterm elections?” Large pluralities said that it would have a “major impact” on their decision to vote (49 percent) and the party whose candidates they would support (46 percent), including a majority of independents.

7. Republicans will face blame if ACA premiums increase.

Recent polling shows that President Trump (41 percent) and Republicans in Congress (35 percent) will receive the lion’s share of the blame if Congress fails to shore up the ACA’s subsidies, a view held by 82 percent of independents, 64 percent of non-MAGA Republicans, and even one-third of MAGA Republicans.

Democrats—especially those in battleground races—are highly likely to make health care a centerpiece of their campaigns, just as they did in 2018. It does appear that the growing salience of this issue is already working in their favor, as it has forced Republicans to divert their attention to an issue on which they are weaker. As Punchbowl News explained last week:

So in less than two weeks, millions of Americans will see a huge spike in their premiums or they’ll lose coverage as Congress goes over the Obamacare cliff. This plays into the growing economic fears felt by many Americans. President Donald Trump spoke to this issue in his Wednesday night address from the White House, although it’s clear Republicans are going to have to go a lot further than he did if they want to turn things around.

In fact, if you zoom out right now, congressional battles are being played, in large part, on Democrats’ turf. They have Republicans talking about health care. Johnson says House Republicans will spend a good chunk of next year on the issue, a topic on which the GOP is typically weak. Next month also will be about government funding and social programs, which again favor Democrats.

Will the health care issue ultimately boost Democrats? If the 2018 elections were any indication, there’s a strong chance it will. That year, 27 percent of voters—a plurality—identified health care as the top issue facing the country, and they voted Democratic by a margin of more than three to one (76 to 22 percent). In that same election, 41 percent of voters approved of Trump’s handling of health care versus 59 percent who disapproved, a gap that is markedly worse today.

It’s also important to remember that there were no fundamental changes to the healthcare system in Trump’s first two years. The GOP’s effort to repeal Obamacare came up short. And yet, just the threat of repeal proved to be a political liability for them.

Additionally, the economy was in far better shape then than it is today. Even within that context, Democrats made massive gains in the midterm election. If the ACA’s subsidies expire, not only will millions of Americans feel tangible effects as a result, but it will come at a time when their feelings about the economy are far worse than they were eight years ago.

It’s rarely wise to speculate about how things will evolve in the Trump era, and it’s impossible to know what the top issues will be for voters by next November. Republicans may also find a fix for these problems in the interim. But at present, they are clearly struggling to adequately address what is an important issue for many voters—and when the party in charge fails to do that, it usually doesn’t end well for them.

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The 2026 midterms are shaping up to be a good one for the Democratic Party. They are overperforming in special elections and off-year contests up and down the ballot. Their lead in the generic ballot poll is growing, albeit marginally, and they may even be winning the gerrymandering battle.

But they have a tougher task ahead as they try to win back the U.S. Senate, an institution that has long had a pro-rural bias and where Republicans have increasingly built an edge. For Democrats to flip the chamber, they’ll not only have to defend all of their current seats and win two Republican-held “toss-up” seats, which would get them to 49. They must also pick up at least two more seats1 from states that voted for Trump by double digits just last year, such as Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, or Texas.

One of those states, however, may already be in jeopardy. Last week, Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett announced her candidacy for the Texas Senate race. One of the most liberal members during her time in the Texas House, Crockett has made a name for herself since arriving in Washington in 2023, largely by grabbing the spotlight and lobbing rhetorical bombs in every direction.

In some of her more notable statements, she:

• Mocked Texas Governor Greg Abbott for using a wheelchair, leading to pushback from disability-rights organizations;

• Said that Hispanics who voted for Trump—roughly 50 percent of the Hispanic electorate in Texas—have a “slave mentality”;

• Incorrectly accused that EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin on the floor of Congress of taking money from Jeffrey Epstein (and later claimed she never made that accusation);

• Dismissed white critics of DEI programming as “mediocre white boys”; and

• Said that black Republican Congressman Byron Donald, who married a white woman, had been “whitewashed,” adding, “Some of our skin folk are not our kin folk.”

Even in a state or district that leaned slightly Democratic, these comments would be nonstarters for most people. And to state the obvious: Texas, which backed Trump last year by 14 points, is not a Democratic-leaning place. Crockett’s highly charged comments seem to have already made an impression in Texas—and not a good one. According to a recent poll from the Democratic group Change Research, fully half (49 percent) of Texas voters say they would “definitely not” vote for her in the race.

So, how does Crockett plan to win? Many Democrats running in Republican-leaning places have a strategy for reaching out to at least some Trump voters. But Crockett has a different view. When CNN anchor Laura Coates asked her how she would win over Trump supporters, Crockett said it “wasn’t her goal” to convert them. Coates followed up, “Do you need to?” To which she replied, “No, we don’t.”

Crockett instead said she prefers a strategy of mobilizing a lot of “non-voting” minorities who, in her mind, would obviously vote Democratic if only someone convinced them to turn out. A handful of other progressive Democrats running in red (or at least swing) states have favored this approach in recent election cycles because it doesn’t require them to moderate in order to appeal to voters across the aisle. The problem is that there is no evidence from any of these previous candidates that such a strategy works.

One of the more high-profile adopters of this thinking was Stacey Abrams, who ran two campaigns for governor in battleground Georgia. Her team made a conscious decision to follow this playbook rather than try to win over moderate white voters. However, the theory didn’t pan out. She was not only one of the few swing-state Democrats to lose a high-profile statewide race in a “blue wave” year (2018), but she lost by an even wider margin the second time around (2022) following essentially the same roadmap.

Democratic candidates in Republican-leaning Texas have also tried to find success with this formula—to no avail. The one candidate who came close to winning statewide, Beto O’Rourke, took a completely different approach in his 2018 U.S. Senate campaign, visiting all 254 counties in the state (many of which are deeply Republican) and embracing liberal-but-not-far-left positions.

Crockett has shown little interest in doing those things—or even in pitching an agenda to voters. This was apparent in the first ad of her campaign, in which she not only failed to take the opportunity to introduce herself to those who don’t know her and those who might be skeptical of her candidacy, but she didn’t talk at all. The 45-second ad instead simply trained the camera on her and overlaid insults that Trump has made about her.

Like other trendy “resistance” candidates of years past, Crockett is almost certain to attract extensive media attention and raise large sums of money. But history shows that this success can be meaningless when a candidate is a bad fit for their state. Crockett also begins the campaign trailing both of the top Republican candidates in the race by eight to nine points.

Democrats have one viable alternative to Crockett in the primary in Texas State Representative James Talarico. Though he too has fashioned himself as a progressive, he has taken a very different approach in the Senate race so far compared to Crockett: engaging directly with conservatives in the state and specifically making his religious faith a core part of his pitch.

The two candidates’ differences may be best summed up in comments they each made about immigration. Speaking to a group of undecided conservative Texas voters recently, Talarico argued that “immigration makes America stronger,” engaging the room with a positive case while simultaneously acknowledging the need to have a secure border and, importantly, his own party’s shortcomings on the issue:

I’m an eighth-generation Texan. My family has been here since it was Mexico. My mom actually grew up in Laredo, right on the Texas-Mexico border. I feel like we Texans understand immigration more than people outside of Texas because we live with it every day—the benefits and the challenges. The more I travel the state, the more I’ve realized that most Texans are in the same spot on this issue.

The metaphor I’ve used is that our southern border should be like our front porch: there should be a giant welcome mat out front and a lock on the door. We can both welcome the stranger—welcome immigrants who want to contribute to this economy, who want to live the American dream, who want to make us stronger and richer—and we can keep people out who mean to do us harm.

I will say what I think not enough Democrats have been willing to say: Joe Biden failed us on our southern border. I remember talking to my colleagues in the Texas legislature who represent border communities. They told me about the utter chaos on the border. And that failure by Joe Biden paved the way for Donald Trump to come in, with masked men in unmarked vehicles, secret police tearing parents from their children, kidnapping people off the street.

I think both parties have failed us on this issue. I think we all should all come together and finally pass comprehensive immigration reform—more immigration judges, more border patrol, modernize our ports of entry where most of the fentanyl gets in, reform the asylum system, relieve the visa backlog. We should finally fix this problem instead of grandstanding on it.

By contrast, here is Crockett in a speech she gave before a black church congregation this past April, which circulated again on social media this week:

So I had to go around the country and educate people about what immigrants do for this country, or the fact that we are a country of immigrants. The fact is ain’t none of y’all trying to go play farm right now… You’re not. We done picking cotton. We are. You can’t pay us enough to find a plantation.

Democratic voters will choose next year between two candidates running two very different campaigns. Early polling suggests Crockett is a favorite to win the party’s nomination, even as nearly half of registered voters in the state say they are a “no” on her from the outset (compared to 40 percent who say the same thing about Talarico). Texas may be a long shot for Democrats no matter what. But in a cycle where flippable Republican Senate seats are at a premium, running a candidate as polarizing as Crockett may all but take this one off the map.

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Editor’s note: a shorter version of this piece first appeared in UnHerd.

As 2025 comes to a close, TLP will begin ramping up our coverage of next year’s midterm elections. With just over 11 months to go, all signs point to a favorable environment for Democrats. If the elections were held today, it’s a good bet that they would win back the House of Representatives, as they did the last time Trump was president. They may even flip one or two governor’s seats and a handful of state-legislative chambers.

Currently, however, it’s unclear just how strong a national environment they will enjoy next year, and whether it will be capable of lifting candidates in places that voted for Trump by significant margins in 2024. So today, we’ll take a look at where things stand across several key metrics and determine what we can glean from the data we have.

The 2025 Election Results

One sign of very real optimism for Democrats is the party’s performance in last month’s elections—specifically, in the races for New Jersey and Virginia governor. Yes, both states have voted blue at the top of the ticket for the better part of at least the last decade-and-a-half. But it was the fashion in which Democrats won that impressed:

• In both contests, the Democratic candidates won by double digits;

• They outperformed the party’s past nominees for governor dating back to 1993 in New Jersey and 1965 in Virginia, and their approximately nine-point over-performance of Kamala Harris was a stronger showing than Democrats enjoyed in 2017 versus Hillary Clinton in these states;

• Turnout in each state also surpassed levels seen in the 2022 midterm election, a sign of very real enthusiasm among Democratic voters; and

• Especially important: there is evidence in both the exit polls and post-election polling that the Democratic gubernatorial candidates won back small but meaningful shares of 2024 Trump voters.

It’s difficult to extrapolate from these results as we look forward to 2026 to guess what the national House popular vote margin might look like. In 2017, Democrats won the Virginia governor race by nine points and the New Jersey race by 13.5, but the following year they won the House popular vote by a smaller 8.4 points. However, the fact that Democrats’ margins in this year’s contests were larger than they were in 2017 portends a national environment that may well be at least as favorable as the one they experienced in 2018.

Special Elections

Perhaps the most hopeful sign for Democrats right now is their performance in special elections. According to data from election analyst Nathaniel Rakich, the median swing in states and districts with special elections this cycle (relative to the partisan baseline of those places) has been 11 points toward Democrats. In the Trump era, that is the largest swing for either party.

As the above chart shows, Democrats in the Trump era have routinely had an edge in these off-year elections, and yet that has not always translated to success in the subsequent general election. However, the last time the party came close to their current 11-point median swing was a nine-point margin in 2018—when, like now, they were the out-party looking to bounce back in a midterm at a time when Trump was president. Coupled with this year’s election results, this is a signal that Democrats are likely heading into a “blue wave” type of environment next year.

The Generic Ballot

Perhaps the best tool available for gauging how the country is thinking about the midterms outside of actual election results is the generic congressional ballot (or GCB), a poll question asking which party Americans want to see control Congress in the upcoming election. As we have previously noted, these polls in recent midterm cycles have been predictive—as far as 18 months out—of not just which party is likely to have the advantage in the upcoming elections but sometimes even what their margin in the national House popular vote will be.

According to two different trackers, at the time of this year’s November elections the GCB was around three points in favor of Democrats (and their candidates in the most high-profile races far exceeded that). Since then, it has ticked up by a point or two. In another poll conducted by , likely voters were pushed to pick one party or the other and gave Democrats a 7.6-point edge (53.8 to 46.2).

By comparison, though, around the same time in the 2018 cycle, the GCB already showed an 8.9-point advantage for Democrats. Moreover, the final margin that cycle ended up being an almost identical 8.6 points. So, currently, even in their best-case scenario, Democrats are underperforming relative to their last big midterm as the out-party.

All this also suggests that the GCB has been a better predictor of the midterm picture than the 2025 elections or special elections that precede it.1 One of these two metrics will have to give come next November. It’s possible the Democrats’ advantage in the GCB will improve before then to match their other performances. But there is a world of difference between a national environment that mirrors this year’s (~D+15) or even 2018’s (D+8.6) versus one that is only D+4.

Trump’s Approval Rating

A quick reminder of how a president’s approval rating affects their party’s midterm prospects:

[One] strong historical predictor of midterm results is the approval rating of the incumbent president, which correlates highly with their party’s seat loss in the House. The only presidents in the polling era whose parties experienced a net seat gain in a midterm election (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) enjoyed approval ratings north of 60 percent (66 percent and 63 percent, respectively). But even a strong approval rating doesn’t guarantee success for a president’s party. […]

In his first term, Trump’s Republicans lost 42 House seats. Given the more constricted House map this time around, it’s very unlikely his party’s losses will be that deep next year, no matter his personal standing. However, a low approval won’t do them any favors…

Indeed, one phenomenon that has remained consistent in politics for decades: a poor approval rating for the president virtually guarantees his party will lose House seats.

After a relatively stable period stretching from the beginning of July to mid-October, President Trump’s net approval rating has taken a hit, dropping from -7.6 percent on October 20 to -14.7 as of last week (though it has ticked back up slightly to -13.1 this week). This trend is evident at the issue level as well. On his best issue, immigration, Trump had been holding steady for much of the July to October period, with a net approval rating of around -3 percent. Over the past month, however, that dropped to -8.1 percent, the worst standing of his second term. He is in even worse shape on the economy (-21), as his approval ratings there—specifically on trade (-17.8) and inflation —(-34.1) have also slid.

It is possible that Trump, who has defied political gravity time and again, is now being weighed down by the six-year itch.

Perceptions of the Economy

Much like presidential approval, the state of the economy can have a strong influence on election outcomes. A robust economy isn’t always a guarantee of success for the incumbent party, but a bad one—or at least one that voters believe is bad—almost always creates an unfavorable national environment for them. The problem for Trump and the Republicans is that there are few signs that any metric is better today than it was back in 2018, when they got shellacked, while several key things are worse.

On the surface, the economy today looks somewhat similar to that of 2018. Inflation has come down from its recent surge to just three percent, though this is still higher than it was seven years ago (2.5). The unemployment rate is around 4.4 percent, up a bit from seven years ago (3.8 percent) but not terribly alarming.

The more pressing issue for Republicans, however, is that many voters still do not feel as though things have gotten better under their leadership, and many are worried about the future. According to the University of Michigan, the current consumer sentiment index, which gauges how consumers feel about the state of the economy, is just 53.6. For comparison, that figure was 98.6 in the run-up to the 2018 midterms.

We can see a similar story in a recent (and brutal) Fox News poll. Among the results:

• Three-quarters (76 percent) of voters said that economic conditions today are either “only fair” (34 percent) or “poor” (42 percent, a plurality);

• A strong plurality (46 percent) said they had been “harmed” by the economic policies of the Trump administration (for context, no more than 43 percent ever said the same about President Biden’s policies in Fox’s polling);

• Sixty-two percent blamed Trump rather than Biden (32 percent) for current economic conditions;

• A majority (52 percent) said inflation is “not at all” under control;

• Majorities said their costs have gone up since one year ago for groceries (85 percent agreed), utilities (78 percent), healthcare (67 percent), housing (66 percent), and gas (54 percent); and

• Perhaps worst of all for Republicans: 53 percent of respondents in the poll said they think Democrats have a better plan for making things more affordable than does the GOP (43 percent).2

Additionally, in a September CBS poll, the top words Americans gave to describe the country’s economy were “uncertain” (61 percent) and “struggling” (54 percent). Sixty-seven percent expected prices to go up in the coming months.

These poor economic perceptions have already hurt Republicans. As we discussed in our post-election analysis last month, voters in places like Virginia who believed the economy was not in good shape voted overwhelmingly Democratic. And as we established above, voters nationally are souring on Trump’s handling of the economy. According to Nate Silver’s latest aggregates, the president’s net approval on inflation, specifically, is deeply underwater, with just 31.3 percent of Americans approving against fully 65.4 percent disapproving.

If things don’t improve between now and next November, Republicans will likely be in for a world of hurt.

Issue Trust

One of the most important predictors of Trump’s success in last year’s election came in pre-election polling from Gallup, which found that voters saw Republicans as the party “better able to handle the most important problem” facing America. Gallup considered this question to have a strong relationship to past presidential election outcomes—and it turned out to be prescient.

Fast-forward one year and that same indicator has now flipped. Whereas voters before the last election trusted Republicans over Democrats by a margin of 50 to 44 to handle the top issue, they now trust Democrats by four points, 47 to 43.

Polls from David Shor and The Argument have shown a similar reversal in the Democrats’ fortunes. According to the Argument’s Lakshya Jain:

We asked voters about their top two issues and, unsurprisingly, 60 percent of voters ranked “cost of living” as a top-two issue in our survey. But despite Trump’s tariff policy and the continuing frustration with high grocery and consumer-goods prices, Democrats won these cost-of-living voters by just under half a percentage point in our survey.

However, he adds:

Those numbers aren’t good for Republicans, but they’re a lot better than Trump’s nightmarish approvals on those issues are… This suggests that Democrats face real trust problems on the economy that haven’t really gone away yet, despite voters giving Trump exceptionally poor marks for his economic stewardship.

A year from now, Democrats may have a more robust trust advantage over the Republicans on handling the economy, but they still have work to do to restore that trust following four years in with which many voters were left feeling completely dissatisfied with the party’s leadership on this issue.

Overall, the picture looks promising for Democrats ahead of next year. However, we want to end with an obligatory note of caution, specifically, regarding the Senate. In a world in which the national environment mirrors 2018, Democrats can expect to successfully defend all of their Senate seats and likely flip two of Republicans’: Maine and North Carolina. But to get the 51 seats they need for a majority, they will be forced to win in states that voted for Trump by at least 11 points last year, such as Iowa, Ohio, and Texas. And that means the party will need an even stronger national environment than they had in 2018.

Jain put together a helpful graphic showing what the outcomes in these types of Senate races would look like if Democrats merely repeat their last “wave” performance:

This is why we at TLP write so often about the need for Democrats to address their structural issues. Winning big in midterm and other off-year elections delivers real benefits for the party—namely, they gain power and subsequently get to wield it. But three of the most important institutions in American politics—the presidency, Senate, and Supreme Court—will become harder to capture over time if they can’t address their longstanding weaknesses and become more competitive in right-leaning places.

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Democrats are feeling quite good about themselves coming out of this month’s big elections. They won races up and down the ballot in cities and states across the country, leading some to believe they’ve gotten their mojo back after last year’s devastating loss to Donald Trump. As I wrote last week, they certainly have reason to celebrate these wins.

But a bigger test is coming up in next year’s midterms—specifically, in their bid to retake the U.S. Senate—and the real fight for the party’s future lurks just beyond that in the 2028 presidential primary. As Democrats begin to contemplate what their party will look like in both the last two years of Trump’s presidency and the post-Trump era, they’re facing big questions, including who they will represent, how they can compete in parts of the country that have spent at least a decade trending away from them, and just how big their tent should be.

We got our first glimpse of the answers to some of those questions in this month’s elections, as voters embraced candidates of wildly different ideological persuasions. However, most of these wins came in states or cities that lean Democratic to varying degrees. Each of the next two national elections will require Democrats to field candidates capable of competing in places that vote to the right of the country.

While it’s tough to predict whom Democratic voters will nominate in next year’s hard-to-win contests, let alone for president in 2028, two recent studies offer some early evidence of what voters want to see from the party’s candidates.

The first is a massive survey from Echelon Insights1, a Republican-aligned polling outfit, which asked respondents who said they were not committed to voting Democratic in next year’s midterms what might make them change their minds. Specifically, Echelon gauged whether a Democratic candidate adopting certain positions on high-profile issues would make these respondents more or less likely to support them.

A majority of respondents pointed to four items that they say would make them more open to supporting a Democrat, including a greater focus on working-class economic issues, standing against corporate power, fewer culture war fights, and an openness to bipartisanship. These findings were consistent across demographic groups, including with a majority of non-college voters, working-class voters, rural voters, and even Trump voters. Meanwhile, the positions least likely to change minds? Strong support for Israel, support for fracking, and opposition to abortion.

Again, these are voters who are not already “definitely” planning to vote Democratic in the 2026 midterms but whose support might help push the party’s candidates over the finish line in competitive races. Many of them are looking for candidates who lean left on economic issues and tack toward the center on social matters—who look out for voters’ material needs without getting sucked into fights they don’t believe impact their day-to-day lives.

More recently, the Democratic-aligned group Blueprint published the results of their own, similar survey, which polled Democratic and independent voters to gauge what they want to see in the party’s candidates across three different dimensions: personal biography, political record, and issue focus. Here’s how they describe the it:

Using a “Mad Libs” style conjoint test, we presented dozens of potential bio facts, records, and issue priorities to understand what meaningfully moves a “generic Democrat’s” favorability. The result is a map of the traits, life choices, and policy focuses that voters reward—and the ones that sink them from the starting gate.

In essence, Blueprint wanted to know, if these voters were to build their ideal Democratic candidate, what would he or she look like—and what traits would the voters value or prioritize over others? As it turns out, despite being on the opposite side of the aisle, their results paint a strikingly similar picture to Echelon’s.

On the whole, voters prioritize candidates who are middle- or at least working-class, blue-collar workers or small-business owners, ideologically moderate and committed to bipartisanship, and focused on pocketbook issues over culture war fights. The traits that were least sought-after? Affiliation with socialism, having served in the Biden administration, hosting a podcast, wealth, and a focus on hot-button social topics.

Blueprint described what the “perfect mad libs Democrat” would look like:

This Democrat is a working-class veteran who has spent their career guided by science, evidence, and facts, created jobs in the private sector, and believes in finding common ground. They’re running on protecting Social Security and Medicare, bringing down the prices of food and goods, and making healthcare more affordable.

Though there were some differences in how Democrats and independents prioritized certain traits—Democrats, for example, were far likelier than independents to prioritize “fighting Trump’s authoritarianism”—the most and least effective ones were generally shared by both.

Of course, Democrats can’t create the perfect candidates in a lab. However, both surveys offer the party a good look at what many voters—especially middle-of-the-road voters—want to see from them. Though longtime TLP readers may not be very surprised by these results, the survey findings nonetheless continue to serve as useful guidance for a party trying to find its way back to power.

To have a chance of winning a Senate majority in 2026 and the presidency in 2028, Democrats will need to find candidates capable of winning in places that lean to the right of the nation as a whole—sometimes by quite a bit. This necessitates accepting candidates into the “big tent” who may deviate from base Democrats on some issues but are good fits for their states’ electorates and willing to meet voters where they are.

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As Democrats struggle to rehabilitate their party, there has been an immense focus on which policies and stances alienated working-class voters of all backgrounds. Several post-election autopsies have concluded the party needs to “moderate,” or at the very least allow individual candidates to depart from the stances urged by “the Groups,” i.e., the party’s most influential lobbies and advocacy organizations. These stances, which are primarily but not solely sociocultural in nature, are increasingly recognized as having calcified a new orthodoxy inhospitable to voters who either disapprove of the current order of Democratic priorities or disagree with the priorities themselves.

What it means to moderate ahead of 2026, however, remains highly contentious and open to interpretation. There is also pushback to the notion that any form of moderation should happen at all. The prevailing tendency in this debate argues that the Democratic Party moved “too far to the left” in response to Trump and Trumpism. In this reading of the electorate, Democrats’ shrunken regional base, among other dire trends, has debunked the electoral merits of “check all the boxes” progressivism. Another perspective argues that, on the contrary, Biden-era Democrats failed to govern in a way that fully resonated with the voting blocs they depend on. Despite Biden’s legislative victories and various executive orders, the party remained too incrementalist in the policy realm and too deferential to Wall Street. To moderate, in turn, would simply mean compromising on core values and betraying the progressive base.

Still a third view offers that the party effectively did both of these things—move to the left and prop up the status quo—and that this is not so paradoxical once one differentiates between a pre-2015 left and the “woke” left, which penetrated the party’s upper ranks and coursed through party-adjacent organizations, philanthropies, and other culturally liberal institutions. This viewpoint further cautions that how “the left,” “populism,” “progressivism,” and “moderation” are defined in the present context, and how these concepts relate to and diverge from historical precedent, are of central importance to how the party moves forward. Rather than prescribe a one-size-fits-all comeback strategy, it recommends that Democrats field candidates who are a better match for their districts, can buck both party insiders and influential lobbies on a range of issues, and still advance (and perhaps even author) reforms that help working families and struggling communities.

A year from Kamala Harris’s defeat, some voices within the broader liberal-progressive ecosystem may think that debating what went wrong is flogging a dead horse. At its worst, skeptics of the protracted autopsy warn, this process encourages a circular firing squad when the focus should be squarely on resisting Trump’s abuse of power. But such debates are vital to stepping outside of the party’s still-potent echo chambers and understanding why millions of voters have either drifted into Trump’s orbit since 2020 or exited electoral politics and grassroots organizing altogether. Indeed, although historically high levels of polarization would seem to imply “stasis,” the party system has continued to evolve, all in ways that look to disadvantage Democrats unless there is a profound and fearless effort to build a more ideologically heterogeneous and regionally diverse coalition.

The top goal of a vigorous, party-wide debate should be to produce more winning candidates who address voters’ pessimism head-on. Still, party reformers will run into trouble if the main takeaways are too sweeping or simplistic. Let’s start with the case that the Democratic Party moved too far to the left, which for many is now synonymous with “wokeness.” The argument that “the left” is responsible for the party’s current orthodoxy and its concomitant loss of working-class voters is typically presented as an open-and-shut story of a hyper-online activist class dethroning moderate liberals and torpedoing the party’s odds outside major coastal metros and university hubs. Recent demographic trends in favor of Trump’s GOP, in some cases dramatically shrinking long-presumed Democratic advantages, confirm what many believe to be self-evident. Yet this is also a story of one left superseding, or at least subordinating, another.

It is true, for instance, that “social justice” activists and professional advocates (meaning those employed by nonprofits, NGOs, and the like) put enormous pressure on the party establishment to “resist” Trump by taking stances diametrically opposed to his. There was also a significant effort between roughly 2015 and 2023 to expand existing party commitments on the sociocultural front and innovate policy demands that were supposed to play to the Democrats’ advantage by engaging “underrepresented” constituencies. The premise was that Democrats had not sufficiently mobilized the constituencies that composed their modern, post-1960s base, and that they weren’t attending urgently to the concerns of millennials and Gen Z, who were widely reported to be the most culturally liberal and climate-conscious voting bloc ever.

In practice, these two approaches meant taking stances on immigration, gender identity, DEI, criminal justice, and climate change that were not the Democratic Party’s main focus prior to this period. With the partial exception of climate policy, these issues did not greatly reflect the goals of the party’s traditional left flank either, which were oriented to reducing inequality and financial predation, reviving the labor movement, providing all Americans with genuinely good and affordable health care, curbing money in politics, and ending foreign wars and military adventurism.

Nevertheless, this more “populist” left assumed it was in common cause with the identity-based “neo-progressive” left. MAGA, the congressional GOP’s dominant “starve the beast” small-government wing, and a complacent Democratic elite all stood in the way of overdue reform. With activist-influencers calling for total #Resistance and Trump courting white nationalists, it seemed only just and necessary to amplify the party’s ascendant activist wing, whose demands were framed as a direct continuation of the civil rights struggle and the new social movements of the 1970s. Notwithstanding some accusations that the “Bernie Bros” didn’t get it, this claim was largely taken at face value, even as the new orthodoxy increasingly appeared to open up new electoral cleavages that frayed, rather than grew, the Democratic coalition.

One might think that Trump’s 2024 victory viscerally negated the theory that a “woke”-ified left would realign the Democratic Party in a productive manner and actually capitalize on a “rising American electorate” long forecast as naturally pro-Democratic. Yet Trump’s first year back in office—by some measures much more jarring, transgressive, and extrajudicial than his first term—has compelled many on the party’s left flank to close ranks rather than admit error. As such, progressives still harbor the fantasy that it was Biden’s frail condition, his scaled-back domestic agenda, and Harris’s insipid and “centrist” general election campaign, not the real-life policy impacts of neo-progressivism, that contributed to Trump’s return.

The problem with this narrow “blame the party elites” approach, however, is that by the 2022 midterms, the public was well aware of what the neo-progressives stood for—and wasn’t responding in the way the neo-progressives had hoped. After years of moving in a more liberal direction on cultural and social issues, the broader electorate demurred when it came to the priorities the Democratic leadership had been pressed to put front and center. And it would be fallacious to say the majority of Democrats in office didn’t, in fact, oblige the advocacy groups who had merged with and partly overtaken the old establishment. Indeed, far from staying mum or ruthlessly “triangulating” to win the average voter who had been pummeled by inflation and felt Democrats were off-track culturally, Democrats leaned hard on the message that democracy, diversity, and the climate were all at stake—to no avail.

A more grounded variant of the “Democrats didn’t do enough” or were “too compromising” argument is that Democrats in the 2021-2022 period pursued a reformist economic agenda that was, rather maddeningly, lackluster considering the amount of legislation and federal spending involved. Left-populist critics of the Biden record note, for instance, that Covid-related anti-poverty measures like the expanded Child Tax Credit were temporary; that the party was slow to address the cost-of-living crisis; that, aside from a couple of targeted corporate levies, the Biden administration didn’t raise taxes on the wealthy (as Presidents Clinton and Obama had done); that the rollout of several industrial policies and infrastructure investments was excruciatingly slow; and that, amid a phenomenal surge in wealth at the top, efforts to improve wages, collective bargaining, and consumer protection were checkered at best.

These and other shortcomings have since been acknowledged by several Biden appointees and advisors, including in a new report by the Roosevelt Institute. As that report aptly notes, “democratic legitimacy requires a government capable of speedily and visibly responding to ordinary Americans’ aspirations and discontent.” Still, the argument that Democrats simply fell short in delivering bold, lasting reform dodges the negative consequences of the party’s cultural leftism. It assumes that economic interventions of a more populist nature are all that it will take to reverse the party’s Trump-era losses (and perhaps convert some of those millions of eligible voters who have essentially said no to “all of the above” throughout these unprecedented times). That outlook—which may soon be bolstered by praise of the “Mamdani model”—simply disregards that Trump’s 2024 victory improved over his 2020 performance in nearly 2,800 counties, including in normally deep-blue regions.

This leaves the third theory of party decline and renewal, which argues that Democrats need to finally reckon with their cultural baggage and delineate more convincingly which fights they will pick on behalf of workers, consumers, and small businesses. At the risk of being called heretics, proponents are nudging forth the verdict that the distinctions between pre-woke liberal populism and pious neo-progressivism need to be reclaimed if the party is to have more than a prayer in swing districts and red states such as Ohio, Iowa, Montana, and North Carolina that were once receptive to populist-leaning Democrats. Otherwise, they warn, Democrats are doomed to watch the Trump White House and a MAGA-fied GOP ride roughshod over democratic norms and violate the country’s separation of powers.

There are signs this perspective is getting a hearing across the Democratic coalition. In “Deciding to Win,” a new report from the Welcome Party organization, its authors observe:

Being moderate means taking popular positions on issues that are important to voters and being willing to break with one’s party on issues where the party orthodoxy is unpopular.

Being moderate does not mean running on a defense of the political establishment, elites, corporate interests, or the status quo. It also does not mean having a mild-mannered temperament or taking the centrist position on every issue.

These are important points, but pragmatic left-populists would argue there are additional distinctions to be made if moderation in 2026 is to not convey wimpiness and incrementalism. One is that moderation today should not be conflated with the technocratic “centrism” of the 1990s and 2000s, which connoted a very fixed set of establishment-friendly opinions on taxes, the deficit, social programs, trade, industrial policy, and antitrust that, while perhaps initially appealing to suburban swing voters, was impervious to changing economic conditions and shifts in public opinion, especially after the 2008 global financial crisis. A return to this centrism, which reigned for a time as the Democratic Party’s post-Reagan orthodoxy, would be ill-equipped to deal with the causes of Trump’s rise and comeback. Moderation heading into the 2026 midterms would mean something different: recalibrating or breaking from the post-2015 orthodoxy, while drilling down on the measures that would most immediately improve the economic well-being of burdened Americans and offer a positive contrast to the GOP’s record.

The other distinction left-populists are trying to work out, which needs to be refined further, is that moderation in a sociocultural sense is not inherently a cowardly surrender to the MAGA worldview. It is not a recommendation to wind back the clock to some fictional standard of public morality, social conformity, and monoculturalism, as dreamt up by right-wing nostalgists. Rather, it is an admonition to recognize what has been hiding in plain sight but which most progressive commentators find so hard to accept. Trump’s electoral success has been powered in part by converting voters who, by the standards of pre-2015 progressivism, were moderate to fairly liberal. In other words, they weren’t (and aren’t) vehement nativists, hostile to gay rights, militantly anti-abortion, indifferent to environmental protection, or dismissive of concerns about police brutality. They grew averse to the Democrats, however, the more the new orthodoxy (with its insinuations about how backward the average, non-college-educated American is) gained currency within the party’s highest echelons.

This phenomenon might seem distasteful or incomprehensible. Democrats groan, “How could these so-called moderate voters possibly give the amoral, white-supremacist-coddling, and self-aggrandizing Trump the benefit of the doubt?” It would nevertheless be futile to refute the ways in which it has transformed our politics. The breadth of Trump’s 2024 coalition, the increasing scale of the Democrats’ regional polarization penalty, and the association of progressivism with a “woke” left-establishment axis (rather than with the common good and safeguarding the American dream)—these challenges all suggest the rise of the “moderate” Trump voter is one Democrats must first accept if they are to arrest the MAGA realignment.

How insurgents and reform-minded leaders court such voters will probably determine Democratic fortunes in 2026 and 2028 more than anything else. Indeed, barring a Covid-style crisis or a dramatic downturn equal to the Great Recession, the Democrats’ political reinvention will hinge on whether they demonstrate an unflinching drive to treat disaffected independents, partisan defectors, and yes, even unrepentant working-class Trump voters as normal people with legitimate concerns.

Still, Democrats must be careful not to replace one orthodoxy with another—nor act as if there is only one script to reach what remains a fairly vast, if dejected, political middle. As Democrats contemplate what it means to be “populist,” “progressive,” or “moderate” at this anxious juncture, they will do best by remembering their greatest triumphs have always reflected the dreams and aspirations of ordinary Americans.

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Over the past few weeks, two topics have been top of mind for many political and election observers: the continued poor standing of the Democratic Party (captured in several recent polls, which my colleague John Halpin covered well last week) and newly energized Republican efforts (and Democratic counter-efforts) to change congressional district maps mid-decade for a political edge in next year’s midterms. Both developments have prompted another question among many of these same observers: are the Democrats at risk of blowing it in next year’s midterm election?

With still over a year to go, it’s difficult to say with much confidence how things will shake out; after all, even a week can feel like a lifetime in the Trump era, let alone a full year. Still, more than six months into Trump’s second term, we’re getting a clearer picture of how his agenda is panning out, how the public is responding to it, and what this all might mean for the Democrats’ midterm hopes. Below are several factors we’ll be monitoring to gauge whether the party should anticipate a wave election next year—or a ripple.

Historical Trends

The primary reason Democrats are favored to make gains next November is that they are the “out” party, and out parties historically gain ground in midterm elections. Since the Civil War era, the president’s party has only gained House seats four times: 19021, 1934 (when FDR was building his New Deal coalition), 1998 (when Americans penalized Republicans for overreaching on Bill Clinton’s impeachment), and 2002 (when the country rallied around George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks). Even in the last midterm election, which many analysts viewed as a win for President Biden’s Democrats relative to expectations, they still lost nine House seats and their majority.

In other words, it’s very likely that Democrats, who need to net just three House seats for a majority, will flip the House back. The Senate is more fickle, but the out party is likelier than not to make gains there as well. Over the same period, the president’s party lost seats in 24 of 42 midterm elections (or 57 percent of the time), and since the Depression Era, they have lost seats in 15 of 23 elections (or nearly two-thirds of the time). In a vacuum, Democrats should be favored to do well in the Senate, too.

House and Senate Maps

However, the maps for both chambers may present challenges to the Democrats as they work to win them back. Let’s start with the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53–47 majority. As their base has become more rural and working-class, the GOP’s structural advantage in Senate elections has deepened. This has made it more difficult for Democrats to regularly compete in many states.

This cycle’s Senate map is unlikely to help them, either. At first glance, the map should present them ample opportunities, as they are defending 13 seats to Republicans’ 22. But the nature of the seats on the ballot paints a rockier picture: the Cook Political Report rates fully 17 of those GOP-held seats safe and another three reaches for Democrats at best. Just two Republican seats are currently expected to be truly competitive: North Carolina and Maine. Meanwhile, Democrats must successfully defend four competitive seats of their own to have any chance of winning a majority.

Democrats may have a decent chance of defending all of their seats and snagging Maine and North Carolina, where they’ve struggled to win these Senate seats of late in part because they targeted them in unfavorable national environments such as 2014 and 2020.2 In a midterm year with a fairly unpopular incumbent president, they might be able to oust Maine’s Susan Collins, whose popularity has waned as of late, and finally win in North Carolina, which will have an open seat next year. However, Democrats still need two more Senate seats for a majority, which would have to come from states Trump carried by at least 11 points like Iowa, Ohio, and Texas.

In the House, the playing field is also quite narrow—and may become even more so by next November. Following the 2024 presidential election, Republicans kept their House majority. And while they experienced a net loss of one seat, leaving them with one of the narrowest majorities in history (220–215), the number of obvious future pick-up opportunities for Democrats coming out of that election was fairly low.

Part of the reason for this is that Democrats are starting from a higher floor this time around (215 seats) than they did in 2018 (194 seats). Moreover, the remaining seats on the board simply present fewer opportunities to go on the offensive. There are just three districts where both a Republican House candidate and Kamala Harris won last year, and at present the party is only favored to win back one of them (NE-02). Beyond those three, Cook considers just seven other Republican-controlled seats “toss-ups” and nine more “lean Republican.”

On the flip side, Democrats must defend at least ten “toss-up” districts of their own as well as 12 “lean Democratic” seats. This may not sound too hard: given that historical trends favor the out party and Democrats only need to net three seats for a majority, some might consider a Democratic majority a foregone conclusion. And indeed, they will be heavily favored to secure it.

However, Republicans aren’t going down without a fight. Under the direction of Trump, several GOP-controlled legislatures appear keen on redrawing their congressional maps to make Democrats’ task even harder. While Democrats hope to limit the damage through redraws of their own, their options for doing so are more limited. Thus, assuming they manage to flip the House anyway, they might need an even bigger national House popular vote (NHPV) margin if they hope to net more than a few seats and give themselves some breathing room on key votes.

Generic Ballot

One way to project which party is favored to win the House and what their final NHPV margin might be is through something called the generic ballot test (GBT). In surveys, pollsters will ask whether respondents favor the Republican candidate or Democratic candidate for their district’s House race. This measure offers a look at which way the race for the House majority might break.

Since 2004, pollsters have significantly reduced the GBT’s margin error, and it has correctly predicted which party would win the NHPV in every midterm election. Though the accuracy of the GBT hinges on its final, pre-election output, polling analysts have found that the survey question is often quite predictive even as far out as right now. According to CNN analyst Harry Enten:

[T]he generic ballot, even this early in a midterm cycle, can be quite predictive of the outcome of the following year’s House elections. Once you control for which party is in the White House, the generic ballot about 18 months before a midterm election is strongly correlated (+.78) with the eventual House result—i.e., the share of votes cast for the president’s party versus the share of votes cast for the opposition party.

If this trend holds, it may not be welcome news for Democrats. As of this week, the party held a 2.9-point average lead in the GBT. Though a nearly three-point lead might sound meaningful, consider that at the same point in the 2018 cycle—where they went on to flip 42 Republican House seats—Democrats enjoyed around a seven-point advantage, which grew to over ten points by November 2017. One year later, they won the NHPV by 8.6 points, the largest margin in a midterm election in more than 30 years.

There is of course still time for Democrats to improve their advantage here. But it is concerning that they have been unable to grow their GBT advantage even as Trump’s approval has declined, especially when support from self-identified Democrats in those polls is near-unanimous. This means they’ll likely need to gain substantial ground with independents to boost their midterm hopes.

Democratic Favorability

One major difference between this cycle and 2018 is that Democrats are far less popular this time around. Recent surveys have shown the party’s standing hitting historic lows while Republican self-identification among the public hit its highest point in more than 30 years in January. Democrats’ longstanding edge in voters registration has also seen a steady decline since that midterm election.

Despite all this, Democrats could still have a good midterm, and they don’t need to look very far back to find a historical parallel for their situation. Heading into the 2008 presidential election, Republicans were saddled with an deeply unpopular incumbent president, his deeply unpopular foreign war, and a deeply unpopular bailout of Wall Street, whose actions had brought the global economy to the brink of a depression.

In the face of this, Barack Obama won a decisive victory and entered his first term with historically large majorities in Congress. At the start of the new Congress, Republicans’ approval rating was a paltry 28 percent, and they were down big with even their own voters. Things looked bleak. Then, the following November, they made historic gains of their own, capturing the greatest number of House seats (64) in a single election since the Great Depression.

As RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende has observed, one of the reasons so many people in 2010 didn’t buy the “red wave” narrative was that Democrats maintained a higher favorability in pre-election polling than Republicans. Today, it’s Republicans who enjoy a slightly higher favorability. None of this assures that Democrats will bounce back with a historic win like Republicans did 15 years ago, but it’s enough to caution against linking Democrats’ current polling woes to their midterm prospects. Much of their lackluster polling stems from dissatisfaction among their own voters, who likely want to see them fight Trump more than they are. It’s a good bet many of them will come home by next November.

Presidential Approval

Another strong historical predictor of midterm results is the approval rating of the incumbent president, which correlates highly with their party’s seat loss in the House. The only presidents in the polling era whose parties experienced a net seat gain in a midterm election (Bill Clinton and George W. Bush) enjoyed approval ratings north of 60 percent (66 percent and 63 percent, respectively). But even a strong approval rating doesn’t guarantee success for a president’s party.

For example, in 1958, President Eisenhower’s approval rating ahead of the midterm was a very respectable 57 percent, but the Republicans experienced a net loss of 48 House seats. More recently, George H.W. Bush’s 58 percent helped blunt deep losses in 1990, but Democrats still flipped eight seats.

But Obama’s two midterm elections offer even more relevant parallels. Ahead of each one, his approval rating sat at 44 to 45 percent, mirroring Trump’s approval today. The result was two abysmal showings in which Democrats collectively lost 77 House seats and were set back nationally at least a generation.

In his first term, Trump’s Republicans lost 42 House seats. Given the more constricted House map this time around, it’s very unlikely his party’s losses will be that deep next year, no matter his personal standing. However, a low approval won’t do them any favors, and what it looks like by next November is contingent on what’s going on elsewhere by that time.

State of the Economy

One factor that often sinks the fortunes of any president is a sour economy. Look no further than last year’s election. Four-in-ten voters said the top issue facing the country was the economy and jobs, and they broke for Trump over Harris by 61 to 37. Swing voters, specifically, identified inflation as a key reason why they chose not to vote for Harris.

To be sure, even a good economy may not prevent midterm losses for the president’s party, as Trump himself experienced in 2018. But a bad one often leads to electoral pain for the “in” party, as many swing voters will cast their ballot with the economy at the top of mind. Though Trump arguably won his second term primarily because voters trusted him over Harris to get the economy back on course, many view his early actions with great unease—and now attribute their frustrations to his policies.

A recent Morning Consult poll found that six-in-ten Americans blame Trump’s policies for driving up the cost of living, while just one-in-four said in a recent AP-NORC poll that they believe his policies have helped them. Trump’s approval on the economy has been underwater since mid-February and currently sits at around -12 percent. It is even lower for his handling of trade (-17 percent) and inflation (-26 percent).

However, as 2022 showed, voter frustration over the economy—and inflation, specifically—isn’t guaranteed to wreck the fortunes of the incumbent president’s party. That year, a majority (51 percent) of voters said that inflation was “the single most important factor to their vote,” and fully one-third still voted Democratic in their House contest. In fact, though inflation stood at 7.8 percent ahead of the midterm election, Democrats managed to avoid sweeping defeats across high-profile battleground races. Further complicating the picture is research from the American Presidency Project, which finds a weak historical relationship between inflation and midterm seat gains or losses.

So, while a fragile economy is never an asset for an incumbent president or their party, it may not necessarily spell doom for them either.

The Turnout Factor

Another reason why Democrats are thought to have an advantage heading into next year is that their new coalition includes many reliable voters. In 2022, when history says they should have suffered a crushing midterm defeat, Democrats prevailed in key races thanks to higher turnout among crucial constituencies. Similarly, they have been overperforming in special elections every cycle since Trump first took office. Some analysts have attributed this to the party’s new, highly engaged coalition.

Trump’s return to power and early controversial moves have strengthened the resolve of many core Democratic voters, who are strongly motivated to turn out next year. A CNN poll from last month found that even as the party’s image was in the dumps, their voters were fired up:

Overall, 72 percent of Democrats and Democratic-aligned registered voters say they are extremely motivated to vote in next year’s congressional election…That outpaces by 10 points deep motivation among the same group just weeks before the 2024 presidential election and stands 22 points above the share of Republican and Republican-leaning voters who feel the same way now.

However, Democrats should not expect that Republicans won’t be highly motivated by next fall as well. David Wasserman notes that while Democrats had a turnout edge in special elections in 2017 and 2018, their sizable advantage diminished in the midterms “because both parties’ intensity levels surged in a more nationalized context.” Democrats’ edge over Republicans was still “good enough to capture 235 House seats—just not the 270 seats they would have captured had November followed the 63 percent vs. 48 percent turnout pattern of the specials.”

Things have also changed since then. In just the last midterm election, loyal MAGA voters were among the highest-propensity voters. According to a recent study by the polling firm Echelon Insights, among all Trump voters, the “Hard Right” constituted an outright majority (52 percent) of those who were likeliest to vote—twice the size of the next group and far larger than any group of Harris voters.

Democrats will still likely hold a turnout advantage in next year’s midterm, but they shouldn’t be surprised to see a Republican surge around Election Day that could blunt significant gains.

Issue Salience

Finally, the issue landscape may be giving Democrats a break. An April Gallup poll found that the top issues Americans worried most about all concerned their wallets: the economy generally (60 percent worried “a great deal”), healthcare access and costs (59 percent), inflation (56 percent), federal spending and the budget deficit (53 percent), and Social Security (50 percent). Meanwhile, immigration, by far the Democrats’ worst issue, has been declining in salience, and other recent Gallup polling has shown that Americans’ concerns about immigration levels have also decreased since last year.

Democrats would surely rather talk about Trump’s handling of the economy, for which he is receiving dreary marks from the public, than immigration. If the economy continues to face challenges ahead of next year’s midterms, it may offer the party a strong issue on which to run in swing states and districts.

Though we at TLP often write about the need for Democrats to develop an alternate vision to Trump to sell to voters, the reality is also that midterm elections are usually a referendum on the incumbent president (and their party). So the fact that Democrats are still struggling to coalesce around a shared vision for the future doesn’t necessarily signal anything about how they will perform next year. But even as we acknowledge they should do well in the midterms, there is also evidence that the road ahead may not be without its challenges.

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