Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist assemblywoman from Queens, was listening to a campaign speech by Cait Conley, a centrist Army veteran from the Hudson Valley, when she felt a pang of recognition.
“She was talking about billionaires,” Ms. Valdez, who was elected last week in her solidly Democratic district, recalled of Ms. Conley, who flipped a Republican seat in a conservative-leaning area. “It’s like, this sounds like Bernie 2016.”
Now both women are headed to Congress after a Democratic sweep that handed their party firm control of the House and Senate but quickly gave rise to a debate in their ranks about whether progressives or moderates will have the upper hand in driving the agenda come January.
Unlike in the past, however, members of both factions — centrist Democrats who captured competitive districts and the most liberal members in safe seats — appear to have coalesced around a common theme many of them agree won their party the midterms and should be their focus: economic populism.
The last time Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., bitter policy disagreements between moderates and progressives over how expansive their legislative plan should be prompted intraparty feuds that threatened to derail their economic agenda.
Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate are already navigating some of those same rifts. Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer, the centrist New York Democrats who are now their party’s leaders in the minority, are facing resistance from the left to their bids to keep the top posts in the majority. Some progressives have demanded that they commit to embracing specific far-reaching policy changes on the heels of overwhelming electoral victories.
But for all of the policy disputes that Democrats will still be forced to confront when they take power in January, there is broad agreement among many of the newly elected members on an agenda focused on cutting costs and combating corruption.
Senators-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Troy Jackson of Maine — both left-leaning leaders who won in more competitive states — ran on Medicare for all. Senator-elect James Talarico of Texas, a moderate who prevailed in his Republican-dominated state, campaigned on allowing every American, regardless of age, to join Medicare. In heavily Republican Kansas, Senator-elect Adam Hamilton called for expanding Medicare to cover vision and dental care. Nearly all of them railed against billionaires and corporate greed.
“They say it differently, but they are all on the same theme,” Mr. Schumer said in an interview. “It echoed from one end of the country to the other. It set an echo chamber.”
Voters almost uniformly reported that tackling government corruption was one of their top issues in the midterms. A memo issued by House Democrats’ super PAC after the elections said that in focus groups and interviews, “voters cast blame far and wide” for rising household costs, “from greedy corporations and their wealthy C.E.O.s, to corrupt and conflicted politicians.”
That dynamic has already created some unusual ideological crosscurrents in the party. Representative-elect Sam Forstag of Montana, who flipped a conservative seat, told his constituents in a video recorded during new member orientation in Washington this week that he planned to join both the Blue Dog Coalition — a centrist group traditionally made up of southern Democrats — and the liberal Progressive Caucus, two factions that are often at odds with each other.
“The overlap is, well, giving us the chance to fight for populist economic policies that are actually going to help working people, and finally put us back at the front of the line in terms of who Congress should be working for,” Mr. Forstag said.
The approach is also shaping how newly elected Democrats are thinking about using their oversight power in the new Congress. In the past, the most liberal Democrats have clamored for impeachments to punish misconduct.
Now, even progressives are arguing that their party should train their focus on government and corporate wrongdoing that has driven up costs for Americans.
“We really need to look at any specific instance of corruption that can be tied directly to the material circumstances of working families today,” said Representative-elect Melat Kiros of Colorado, a liberal who won a primary race against a veteran Democratic congresswoman.
“I don’t know necessarily that investigating the Qatari jet has a direct impact to the material circumstances of a working person right now in the country,” Ms. Kiros said, referring to the luxury jet given to President Trump by the Qatari royal family. “But I do think if we talk about the role that some of these health insurance companies have been having in the dramatic continuing rise in health care costs today, the collusion that takes place between the big four meatpacking companies and the rise in groceries and meat specifically, right? These are very specific harms that the American people and the American consumer is facing.”
Those issues may also orient Democrats should they choose to try to dare Mr. Trump to veto affordability legislation — around health care or otherwise — through the budget reconciliation process, which allows a party to circumvent the Senate filibuster when passing bills.
The last time Democrats attempted to pass filibuster-proof domestic policy legislation, when the party had a governing trifecta in 2021 under Mr. Biden, progressives and centrists clashed. Liberals refused to support a bipartisan infrastructure measure prioritized by the moderates until the Senate passed their top priority: a behemoth package to fund climate programs, health care, education and child care.
But with Mr. Trump in the White House, Democrats sound more willing to put aside such disagreements and find measures they can coalesce around and pressure the president to accept.
“People just feel like we’re being scammed all the time, and the quality of the things that we enjoyed is getting worse, and people are getting incredibly rich off of it,” Ms. Valdez said. “Even if we won’t agree 100 percent on the specifics with everyone in our caucus, I think we’ll have a lot of places of agreement in tackling this corporate greed.”
Michael Gold and Carl Hulse contributed reporting.
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