Which Way Should the Democratic Party Go Now?
At seven-fifteen in the morning on Monday, July 13th, when Democrats in Maine were in the midst of a hastily created process to find a replacement for Graham Platner, who had just withdrawn as their nominee for the U.S. Senate race, a security camera in the city of Biddeford captured a white Kia circling slowly through an intersection. The driver, a twenty-five-year-old immigrant from Colombia named Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, had been shot and killed by an ICE agent. This winter, after federal agents killed two people during an immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, Democrats were able to say that the mass protests they supported in response had forced ICE to retreat. Now, as the prospective candidates in Maine rushed to express their outrage at Guerrero’s death, it was obvious that the retreat had been temporary.
The fast-approaching 2026 midterm elections present the Democrats with both an opportunity and a crisis. The opportunity exists because President Donald Trump is unpopular, has failed to stop the rise in consumer prices that helped doom his predecessor, and seems unable to end the aimless war in Iran that he started. Americans now tell pollsters that they are more likely to vote for Democrats than for Republicans this fall. The crisis is that a narrow victory may not be sufficient to dislodge Trumpism, which is now deeply entrenched in government. And, though the Democratic leadership is looking to recapture the resistance spirit of 2018, its defining problem is a long-standing one in the Party of how to manage the movement that Senator Bernie Sanders started a decade ago, whose populist appeal and generational momentum it needs in this anti-institutional moment but whose principles it does not fully share.
That tension has been most vividly on view in Maine, where the Republican senator Susan Collins is now seeking a sixth term in a state that Kamala Harris won by more than six points in 2024. Platner’s emergence there last year had the quality of myth. A couple of left-wing political operatives saw Platner, an oyster farmer, in a local video opposing the development of a corporate salmon farm in Frenchman Bay, and matched his name to records of donors to Sanders’s campaigns. Platner, they learned, was also a harbormaster and a veteran of two Marine combat tours in Iraq and an Army tour in Afghanistan. One of the operatives reportedly e-mailed colleagues that Platner was “one of the most talented politicians of our time. Maybe any time”; both Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsed him. He did turn out to be a commanding barnstormer, a foul-mouthed and fluent denouncer of wealth and corruption, whose appeal drove the sitting governor of Maine, Janet Mills, out of the race. But his candidacy collapsed in a series of scandals, involving first a Nazi-associated tattoo and offensive posts, then allegations of bad behavior toward women, and, finally, untenably, an accusation of rape. Platner denied it, but he dropped out.
One theory heard often in politics is that the Democrats are repeating, in ideological inverse, the experience of the Republicans in 2010, when the Tea Party overtook the G.O.P., eventually clearing the way for Trump. (“Warning for Democrats’ Future Is Lurking in GOP’s Past,” a USA Today headline put it, with impressive concision.) Such takes refer to a parallel not just in the rise of populists like Platner but also in primary upsets of powerful incumbents by radical newcomers affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Representative Adriano Espaillat, of New York City, and Representative Diana DeGette, of Denver, a progressive stalwart, were defeated by young insurgents, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Melat Kiros, respectively, who came out of the Gaza protest movement and the D.S.A., and who took some positions far outside the mainstream. (During an interview with the online publication The New York Editorial Board, Chevalier declined to specify whether her support of prison abolition meant that a man who randomly killed another man should not be sent to prison.) A columnist for The Atlantic wrote, “The D.S.A. is a parasite.”
That reaction perhaps suggests that there have been more of these upsets than is the case. In races where an incumbent congressional Democrat has lost this year, anger over Gaza has played a role, and in each of them the issue has drawn both donations and attention. But across the country only five Democratic incumbents have lost primaries—two of them because of redistricting—which does not really add up to a revolution. An alternative theory to the Tea Party one is that the general sense of emergency in 2026 has led Democrats, and especially the rising young figures hoping to lead the Party, to embrace political pragmatism.
This summer, two politicians have caught the attention of the Party’s base, both of whom are under forty. On the left, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of New York, pointedly declined to endorse Platner—even before the rape accusation, she called the mounting claims against him “hard to stomach”—and has been favorably cited by David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s political guru, for echoing the former President’s themes of hope and change. From the center, Jon Ossoff, running for reëlection to the Senate in Georgia, spoke critically of the Gaza war early on, and has focussed a controlled campaign on the President’s corruption, a traditional populist theme. These approaches seem to be working: in an Emerson 2028 Presidential-primary poll, Ocasio-Cortez and Ossoff were tied for third place, just behind Pete Buttigieg and Gavin Newsom.
Such political talent is rare. In Maine, to replace Platner, the Democrats eventually settled on Troy Jackson, the most organized of the prospects. A former logger who finished third in this year’s gubernatorial primary, Jackson lacked Platner’s ability to excite the public, but he was preferred by supporters of Sanders, who had endorsed him for governor.(Collins called Jackson a “Bernie bro.”) And, having spent six years as the president of the state Senate, he was palatable to the Party establishment. Last week, Jackson tweeted that Collins had “helped destroy Roe v. Wade, she advanced Trump’s $990 billion Medicaid cuts, and she gave ICE $70 billion to continue its rogue terror campaigns.” Political pabulum, yes, but maybe also a preview of what the Democrats’ campaigns this fall will offer: not exactly transformation, not even resolution, just a dogged and prosaic insistence that things in the country are going very badly. ♦