Democratic insurgents are winning on economics, not culture

Some recent Democratic primaries have led a segment of observers to conclude that, as one political observer noted, it’s “Bernie’s party now,” increasing nervousness among others that the party is nominating candidates who are too far-left for a general election.

The supporting evidence is straightforward enough: Although the leftist-versus-centrist scorecard is muddled overall, with moderates scoring victories in several key contests, including California’s top-two governor’s race, candidates backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and self-described democratic socialists, such as Sanders himself, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have racked up a string of successes. These have come most recently in Washington, D.C., and New York, where two incumbent House members were unseated by insurgent Mamdani-backed progressive challengers.

The progressive victories have not been limited to deep-blue political locales. For example, in a critical House battleground in California’s Central Valley, a 31-year-old upstart and former Medicaid recipient defeated a moderate legislator whom the national party had recruited and financed. The same week, progressive union leaders secured swing-district nominations in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Montana. The most notable case was in Maine, where Graham Platner beat a sitting two-term governor by more than 50 percentage points (the governor, seeing the writing on the wall, had already suspended her campaign).

From a certain vantage point, the Democrats’ leftward trajectory seems unmistakable, leading some Democratic stalwarts to wring their hands as they look ahead to the fall.

This reading misses the plot, though. In the main, the 2026 primaries have not been a story of center versus left. They’ve been insurgent versus establishment, outsider versus insider, populist versus elitist, pugilist versus accommodationist. The winner in Pennsylvania is a firefighter. The winner in Ohio is an iron worker. The winner in Montana is a former smokejumper. Platner is an oyster farmer. All are fresh political faces. Across the country, the Democratic rank and file are exhorting their Washington wannabes to confront the conventional order, echoing, in form if not content, the populist clamor that has remade the Republican Party.

But the Democratic proletariat will not be seizing the means of production anytime soon. Recent polls by the New York Times/Sienna and the Manhattan Institute show them favoring centrism over leftism by substantial margins that barely differ by race, sex, or class. These findings track the success of relatively moderate politicians like Roy Cooper in North Carolina and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, and they represent a remarkable U-turn from just a few years ago.

The left-right scale, however, is a notoriously blunt measure of ideological identity. Beneath these polls’ topline results, the data reveal that Democrats, and independents, do tend to prefer progressive policies on bread-and-butter issues like health care and jobs. What they’re dialing back is their early-2020s enthusiasm for anything assailable as “woke,” such as transgender rights campaigns, DEI initiatives, criminal justice reforms, or language-policing crusades.

It is those academically fashionable but broadly unpopular attitudes that tend to code as deeply left-wing and elitist these days, and a big part of Platner’s appeal—along with that of Mamdani in New York, Josh Turek in Iowa, Bob Brooks’ in Pennsylvania, and several other Sanders- and AOC-backed populists—is an “everyman” emphasis on economics, not culture.

These candidates strike swing voters as anything but radical, dissolving the so-called trade-off between candidates who excite the base and those who have crossover appeal—because they are increasingly the same. Consider two nominees who seem to have very different profiles: Randy Villegas, a son of Mexican immigrants running in California’s Central Valley, and James Talarico, a grandson of a Baptist preacher running in Texas. Both tell voters that “The real fight in this country is not left versus right … It’s top versus bottom,” a line that traces to Ralph Nader’s 2000 Green Party run. Villegas is often counted as a base-booster and Talarico as a swing-suitor, but their pitches are identically populist.

At any rate, the progressive-populist-insurgent uprising should not be overstated. The Sanders/AOC endorsement record includes nearly as many defeats as victories, and the wins have disproportionately, though not exclusively, occurred in progressive havens such as New York City or Washington, D.C. Some of those wins can also be chalked up to early money advantages gained through national donor networks, reflecting endorsements by both the Democratic establishment and the Sanders wing.

Regardless, the question come November will probably not be whether voters recoil at the Democratic populists’ so-called pinko proclivities, but whether they can maintain their working-class bona fides under scrutiny. Will Platner still be seen as an embattled oyster farmer and combat veteran, or as an elite boarding school alumnus? Will Villegas retain his image as a gritty immigrants’ son raised on Medicaid, or will he be recast as an activist political science professor?

The vigorous pursuit of blue-collar voters by “blue American” candidates is a significant story in itself. Having largely ceded the white working class to Republicans in recent cycles, a new crop of Democratic politicians seems intent on reclaiming the identity that had defined the party for the better part of two centuries—during much of which, it is worth noting, Democrats held a national advantage). Whether they win control of Congress this fall will turn much less on their ideological tenor than on the president’s approval ratings, but the Democratic brass should not lose much sleep regardless: There is no clear pattern of their primary electorates putting up radicals who will struggle with general electorates. Where the “Berniecrats” are winning, they are doing so with populist appeals that actually meet most swing voters where they are.