The Democratic Left Continues Remaking the Party
Left-wing and DSA candidates prove they resonate well beyond the "coastal elite" with Michigan wins.
The stunning defeat of Rep. Haley Stevens by insurgent progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat represents the latest in a string of establishment losses within the party that show no sign of slowing across the country.
While the Michigan race for U.S. Senate was the blockbuster event, the Democratic Left notched a series of additional wins. Donavan McKinney, backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, unseated incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th congressional district. Sunrise Movement co-founder William Lawrence won a competitive Democratic primary for Michigan’s swing 7th congressional district. Down-ballot races also produced a series of Left victories, including Uncommitted Movement co-founder Abbas Alawieh’s win in Michigan’s 2nd State Senate District.
The Left’s most prominent loss came in Missouri, with the defeat of flawed former Rep. Cori Bush in a rematch with incumbent Rep. Wesley Bell.
On balance, last night was a major step forward for the American Left, continuing a pattern that finds itself reaching well beyond the supposed “coastal elite,” as Rep. Stevens suggested heading into election night.
As establishment Democratic figures wring their hands about whether or not “moderate” voters will vote for the party’s successful primary candidates, one is left to wonder which voters they mean, or if they’re signaling a subconscious wish for Republicans to defeat the ascendant Left. The party’s dreadful 2024 featured presidential nominee Kamala Harris proudly emphasizing her gun ownership and demanding that America maintain the world’s most “lethal fighting force,” even as the party platform dropped its opposition to the national death penalty.
In a shock to absolutely no one outside Democratic Party stalwarts, Harris was defeated by former President Donald Trump, who promised a reversal of the enfeebled President Joe Biden on international and economic policy.
Of course Trump wouldn’t deliver. But the promise was more appealing than the Harris campaign’s perceived guarantee of an additional four years of Biden’s disastrous foreign policy combined with a lack of perceived immediacy on domestic policy, such as the administration’s unimpressive response to the end of the national right to abortion in the United States following the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
Why would the public believe the impeached and criminally convicted Trump would keep his promises? I’m not so sure they did. Trump expanded his vote total, but Harris’s larger problem was attrition: she lost millions of voters who supported Biden, many of whom sat out 2024 altogether. Trump’s victory depended less on any turn toward moderation than on his retaining more of his previous coalition while Democrats failed to mobilize theirs.
Overnight global celebrity and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani represents a similar casting out of a broken establishment, albeit with a much deeper degree of seriousness and empathy than Trump has ever managed to muster. His joyful, unabashed democratic socialist politics resonated well beyond a socialist base and into everyday voters grateful to see a leader who demonstrated a genuine care for others, devoid of obvious triangulation or fearmongering. His positive job ratings in New York and national favorability numbers provide evidence that the charm offensive continues to pay dividends, including his megaviral video about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (ironically, in which the mayor walks back a campaign promise to arrest him).
The two parties’ electorates are not converging around a coherent isolationism. They are converging, unevenly, around exhaustion with open-ended military commitments and wars that bear little relationship to Americans’ material security. Democrats have moved especially sharply against unconditional military support for Israel amid its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, while Trump’s second administration has alienated voters who interpreted “America First” as a promise of restraint rather than another cycle of intervention.
Democrats have a unique opportunity to seize on this issue, specifically because Trump 2.0 took a hard turn into interventionism that spits in the face of the MAGA voters who expected a redux of the president’s first administration. Instead, cynical establishment Democrats are lobbing accusations of antisemitism and “far -Left” ideology at emerging figures, especially Muslim politicians, in an attempt to stir controversy and animate warmongering special interests. They warn that scared “moderates” will vacate the party and find refuge in the arms of far-Right Republicans.
Democratic voters’ disgust with Israel’s genocide in Gaza is difficult to overstate, and the party’s electorate increasingly rejects financing the atrocities. Nearly three-quarters of Democrats favor reducing or outright ending military support for Israel. Catering to the party’s shrinking pro-war constituency risks depressing substantially more turnout than it generates.
The shift in what constitutes a popular Democrat today—consider the successes of Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders—speaks to the way in which the demographics of parties are in constant flux due to generational turnover, ideological evolution and a host of other issues. These are not static, unchanging pools of people that need to be held in balance. They are matrices of constant movement. And with an energized primary electorate propelling insurgents to victory, perhaps it stands to reason that the candidates they actually want are most competitive with a post-neoliberal electorate.
As Democratic primary after primary demonstrates, voters are done with stuffy bureaucrats who use their tax dollars to bomb children abroad while delivering nothing for them at home. Americans are struggling to manage basic economic survival in this nation. It should surprise absolutely no one that they’re turning toward the candidates who speak to their needs and values, instead of a broken party apparatus too busy playing war games to deliver for their own people.
Unless establishment Democrats adapt, they will continue to be displaced by a populist electorate in which both the MAGA right and an anti-oligarchy, anti-war Left are competing to consign the old political order to history.