From Tennessee to Maine, electoral challenges to the establishment are growing.
Kevin Robillard at HuffPost:
WASHINGTON ― Democrats spanning the party’s ideological spectrum and the nation’s geography are launching electoral challenges to the party’s establishment, turning a much-discussed insurgency against a party whose approval ratings are at record lows into a reality. A sitting governor is entering a key Senate race with no guarantee of victory against a candidate who was totally unknown just three months ago. A 30-year-old activist-turned-state legislator is running against a longtime incumbent in a bright blue House district. Three Senate candidates in the same race brought in significant fundraising hauls, showing the establishment’s pick is not guaranteed a free walk to the party’s nomination.
All are evidence of a movement against party leadership’s dominance of key primaries and bets Democratic voters are looking for something new after President Donald Trump’s victory in 2024. “Most of our base finds the current position of the Democratic Party out of touch on class, out of touch on values and moral clarity, out of touch on the desire to fight back and the ability to fight back,” said Tommy McDonald, a Democratic media consultant with Fight Agency, a firm working with many of the party’s insurgent candidates. “A lot of people are feeling like there is a problem and that now is the time to fix it.”
“In everything from red to blues” ― the Democratic Party’s term for House seats they hope to file ― “to safe Democratic seats, you’re seeing high quality candidates step up, put their lives on hold to take the country back and fight back,” he added.
The candidates making up this insurgency are varied but share a set of broad critiques of the Democratic Party: Some, but not all, want to push the party further to the left or in a more populist direction. All believe the party has lost touch with the working class, and some are working class themselves. Many of them are relatively young and hope to paint their opponents as old and out-of-touch. And all believe the party’s communication methods are ill-suited to a world where capturing voters’ attention is more difficult than ever. They also believe the Democratic establishment, their credibility with their own voters battered by former President Joe Biden’s political failures and Trump’s victory, is at its weakest point in recent American political history.
[...] On the House level, Democratic challenges to the status quo are generally not targeting the same seats the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is worried about when it comes to winning back the House. Instead, they are mostly focused on deep blue seats. That doesn’t mean there are absolutely no problems for Jeffries, who could end up facing a primary challenge of his own. There is one GOP-held seat in California where progressives and the DCCC seem set to back different candidates, and a primary challenge to centrist Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine.) launched earlier this month. Some of the other candidates facing stiff challenges are members of the Congressional Black Caucus, a key part of Jeffries’ power base. Republicans are eager to highlight any sign of key candidates moving leftward.
[...] The group’s latest recruit, Tennessee State Rep. Justin Pearson, raised more than $200,000 on the first day of his campaign. An activist-turned-legislator who entered the national spotlight when Tennessee Republicans briefly kicked him out of office following a gun control protest, his challenge to 76-year-old Rep. Steve Cohen is set to touch on nearly every major fault line in the Democratic party, including age, class, race and support for Israel. [...]
But a major driver of the relative primary peace on the House battlefield is an unusual alliance between the moderate-to-conservative Blue Dog Democrats and progressives. Both groups have joined forces to back candidates modeled at least in part after Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who narrowly lost in a rural Wisconsin seat in 2024 and is running again in 2026, boasting endorsements from both Sanders and moderate Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin. These candidates, including firefighter union leader Bob Brooks and Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti in Pennsylvania, are populist on economics and have connections to the working class without taking the cultural stances of most progressives. That formula, for the moment, seems acceptable to moderates, progressives and party leadership.
The insurgency’s first success came earlier this year, when New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to win the Democratic nomination for New York City Mayor. (Mamdani is again favored to defeat Cuomo, now running in the general election as an independent, on Election Day.) Republicans are eagerly comparing and linking candidates like Cooke and Platner to Mamdani. Those comparisons make Democrats who fear voters will punish the party for moving left understandably nervous. But to many of the insurgents, Mamdani’s other traits ― his focus on affordability and income inequality, his aggressive use of social media, his willingness to directly challenge the party’s establishment ― are more important than his precise ideology. And if incumbent Democrats and party leaders are able to understand that, they believe, the insurgency won’t be much of a threat.
HuffPost has an excellent article on the Democratic Insurgency that is heating up in primaries in this election cycle for the 2026 midterms.
Some of the primaries fall along moderate v. progressive lines (IL: Budzinski v. Blaha, MO: Bell v. Bush, ME: Dunlap v. Golden), while some fall along old entrenched v. younger fighter lines (ME: Mills v. Platner, TN: Cohen v. Pearson), and some may be a mix of those things (MI: Stevens v. El-Sayed v. McMorrow).
