Can Democrats Escape the Vise Grip of Progressive Primary Voters?

Editor’s note: The Liberal Patriot is pleased to welcome Henry Olsen as a regular contributor to the newsletter, publishing twice a month starting in the new year. Henry’s knowledge of political history, geography, elections, and ideological trends in the U.S. and Europe is unmatched, and we hope you learn as much from his columns as we do. Welcome Henry!

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Most establishment Democrats believe the party’s 2028 nominee needs to tack to the center, especially on social issues, to maximize the party’s chance to win. That looks sound on paper, but implementing it faces a serious obstacle: the party’s primary voters.

Democratic Party primary voters are significantly more progressive and left-leaning than they were even in 2008. That fact was driven home in two high-profile mayoral races, in New York City and Seattle, where little-known progressive challengers easily defeated well-known establishment figures.

Those contests are especially significant when one applies those results to the method by which Democrats traditionally apportion convention delegates. Extrapolating from those victories—and other high-profile progressive versus establishment races—suggests there’s a real chance the party could nominate someone who leans into, not away from, the hard progressive zeitgeist.

The Democrats’ intra-party shift leftward remains underappreciated. In the 2008 primaries, Hillary Clinton won the primaries in large part because only 47 percent of the voters were liberal; her margin came from the 53 percent who said they were moderate or conservative. (She lost the nomination because Barack Obama crushed her in the party’s progressive-dominated caucuses, winning 13 of 14 from Super Tuesday on.)

By 2020, however, a supermajority of Democratic primary voters were either liberal or very liberal. Exit polls for most states showed between 60 and 65 percent of voters were some variety of liberal. Only a few Southern states, such as Oklahoma and Mississippi, were as centrist in their ideological orientation as the national party had been just twelve years earlier.

Democrats since then have moved even further to the left. Gallup polling has found that the share of Democrats calling themselves either liberal or very liberal hit record highs in 2024. This is particularly the case on social issues. Sixty-nine percent of Democrats said they are liberal on social issues in 2024, up dramatically from 48 percent just ten years earlier.

Neither Zohran Mamdani’s nor Seattle’s Katie Wilson’s victories should have surprised people in light of these facts. New York and Seattle are overwhelmingly Democratic. Given that, one should expect that an angry party that wants nothing more than for its officeholders to fight against Trump would choose the most radical alternative.

Democrats might say that this sentiment can be confined to the party’s left wing and that a candidate more acceptable to swing voters can emerge during a national contest. But the party’s delegate allocation rules suggest that view is naïve.

Both Democrats and Republicans rely on mass voter primaries to select their nominees, but they sharply differ on how those elections filter into selecting convention delegates. The GOP relies on winner-take-all elections in either states or congressional districts (CDs), greatly enhancing the power of a candidate who can win a plurality of votes. It also allocates delegates evenly to congressional districts, usually giving three delegates to each district regardless of how strongly Republican that region is.

Democrats, on the other hand, use a proportional representation system to select their delegates. Any candidate that receives 15 percent of the vote in either a state or a congressional district gets a proportional share of the delegates. The party also requires each state to apportion delegates to sub-state levels if it has more than one congressional district. All but two states allocated delegates by congressional district (two—Texas and New Jersey—use state legislative seats) in 2020, and the 15 percent rule applies to delegates selected in those places too.

Crucially, Democrats also allocate their delegates across these unevenly, favoring seats that give large shares of their votes to Democrats. This practice varies among states, but in many states it is quite significant. In 2024 in Mamdani’s New York, for example, Manhattan’s 12th CD sent 11 delegates to the convention, while a rural upstate heavily GOP seat, the 24th CD, sent only four. Winning the support of voters like those in the 12th would give a candidate a huge leg up on someone whose appeal was more pronounced among swing voters who likely do not participate in the party primaries.

The New York City mayoral primary is instructive in how this could operate. Mamdani beat former governor Andrew Cuomo after ranked-choice voting in nine of the eleven congressional districts wholly contained within the city. I took each candidate’s share of the vote and applied that to the number of delegates each seat selected for the 2024 convention. That gave Mamdani a 46-33 delegate lead.

This result arose largely because of the party’s allocation rules. Lower Manhattan’s 10th CD sent ten delegates to the convention, and Mamdani’s 68 percent would have given him seven of those ten. Meanwhile, Cuomo’s 60 percent wins in NY 5 and 15 mattered much less because they only sent seven and five delegates, respectively. Furthermore, the allocation formula meant that he would have won only seven of those 12; Mamdani’s 40 percent was enough to prevent Cuomo from running up the delegate score.

Mamdani, therefore, would have won more delegates than Cuomo from these three seats despite losing two of them by large margins.

Wilson’s victory in Seattle is harder to map because it occurred in a non-partisan general election where Republicans and independents could also vote. Her opponent, incumbent Bruce Harrell, won the city’s more affluent precincts, which are also where Donald Trump did best. Wilson won the city’s deepest blue areas, which suggests she would have easily won a partisan primary.

Replicating Wilson’s showing would likely give a progressive a significant delegate haul. Most of Seattle is in the 7th CD, which sends ultra-progressive Pramila Jayapal to Congress. It selected ten delegates to the 2024 convention, three more than any other. Many of Wilson’s best precincts are in the neighboring 9th, which selected seven delegates.

A moderate might do better in rural Washington’s 4th CD or noted Blue Dog Democrat Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s 3rd. But those two seats selected only eight delegates combined. That person cannot hope to win the nomination without running close to even in the progressive heartland—and that means tacking to the left to prevent losing in a landslide.

This pattern repeats itself in most states. Minnesota, for example, tilts its delegates toward seats in Minneapolis and St. Paul, while Oregon’s rewards Portland and its suburbs. Colorado sends more delegates from Denver and Boulder seats than it does from rural or suburban regions. In state after state, the places where white, socially progressive voters dominate send more delegates to the convention than do the more moderate areas Democrats need in order to win the general election.

The only counterweight to that are black-dominated seats. Black voters support Democrats in similarly overwhelming numbers to white college progressives, and their congressional districts receive similar overweighting in delegate allocation. Pennsylvania, for example, rewards Philadelphia’s 2nd and 3rd CDs. Southern state Democratic primaries tend to be dominated by black voters, and CDs with black majorities in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina dominate their states’ delegate allocations the way Seattle and New York City rule theirs.

But this raises a separate question for party moderates: which of their putative favorites can garner supermajority support from this wing of the party base? Joe Biden’s support with black voters saved his faltering candidacy and provided the foundation for his victory. Someone trying to replicate his path to turn back this cycle’s version of Bernie Sanders will need to rely on those voters, too.

Does anyone think Josh Shapiro or Andy Beshear currently has that appeal?

The Democratic nomination contest will start in earnest in 2027. Things might change, but the party’s swift drift to the left is now many years old. That means the wins of progressives like Mamdani and Wilson are more likely to be harbingers than exceptions. How Democrats navigate this torturous path will likely have a significant, if not decisive, impact on their ability to win back the White House.