A pastor in Kansas. A Paralympian in Iowa. A former Presbyterian seminarian in Texas.
Democrats expanded their map this week with big wins in traditionally red states that the party had all but written off for years by making appeals to moderate, independent and Republican voters.
At the same time, progressives won key races in two purple states, Michigan and Maine.
The combined victories amounted to a sweeping triumph that will send an ideologically diverse crop of new Democratic lawmakers to Congress in January, but internal debates are already emerging about what lessons the party should draw ahead of the 2028 presidential campaign.
For centrists, the results demonstrate that the best way to flip conservative strongholds where their party has long struggled is through embracing moderate candidates and positions that appeal to a broader array of voters. Progressives argue that the victories in Maine and Michigan show that left-wing populists can energize the party’s liberal base and win back some of the working-class voters who had flocked to President Trump.
The debate arrives at a moment of unusual opportunity for the Democratic Party, which will hold large majorities in Congress next year and will seek to carry its midterm momentum into the 2028 cycle.
The discussion over the party’s direction is already playing out as donors, officials and politicians converge at party meetings and liberal gatherings across the country to take a victory lap and plan for the future. And as potential presidential contenders accelerate their quiet planning, they are using the results to make a case for the next nominee — and, possibly, themselves.
“There’s a ton of non-MAGA Republicans and independents that are giving Democrats a second look and a second chance,” Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, who is considering a presidential run, said in an interview. “I don’t happen to think socialism is the way to win their hearts and minds.”
He added: “We don’t want to be identified with that anymore.”
Representative Ro Khanna, a California progressive who has also been teasing a bid, had a different assessment.
“The results show that there is no electoral penalty for being a progressive,” he said in an interview. “The stale talking points of the establishment, which lost twice to Trump, about who they deem electable or not electable is totally out the window.”
Revenge of the Moderates
The early skirmishes are the latest round of a decade-long dispute over the Democratic Party’s direction and strategy.
In the first few months of this year, it appeared as if progressives had the upper hand. Liberal insurgents knocked off moderate rivals in blue districts in New York, New Jersey and Colorado, and they prevailed in Senate primaries in Maine, Michigan and Minnesota.
But in the general election, the moderates roared back, using explicitly bipartisan appeals to win by notable margins in states that had not elected Democrats to the Senate in years or, in the case of Kansas, nearly a century.
In Iowa, Josh Turek, the party’s nominee for Senate, ran a closing-stretch TV ad about how he opposed transgender athletes participating in youth sports. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton, a pastor who until this year had been a registered Republican, offered direct appeals to Trump voters and described himself as “a liberal conservative and a conservative liberal” who was above party politics. And in Texas, James Talarico embraced a “politics of love” that leaned away from partisanship and focused on “top versus bottom,” or the rich and powerful against ordinary Americans.
While all three men embraced economic populist platforms that promised to lower costs and raise taxes on billionaires, they also denounced what Mr. Hamilton called the “hyperpolarization in Washington.”
“Those candidates ran on that kind of pragmatic platform, saying we’re going to focus on the issues that impact our community, and we’re going to be independent voices, not putting parties and politics first,” said Representative Adam Gray of California, a Democrat who is the chairman of the moderate Blue Dog PAC. “They did better than their progressive counterparts. I think you’re going to see that in the data.”
Victories for the Left
Progressives rode a different path to victory.
The party’s Senate candidates in Maine, Michigan and Minnesota placed left-wing rallying cries at the center of their campaigns, promising to establish “Medicare for all”; calling to dismantle the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency; and accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza.
In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed combined some of those promises into a call-and-response slogan: “Money out of politics, money in your pocket and Medicare for all.”
In an interview, he credited his victory to his willingness to try to upend the political system. He suggested that not everyone in his party was on board with that idea.
“I think one of my big critiques of Democrats has often been that we just treat the symptom and not the disease,” he said. “Some people want to treat the disease without treating symptoms, right? You’ve got to treat both.”
He wasn’t the only progressive feeling bullish. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the dean of congressional progressives, claimed near-total victory in an interview. Of the candidates he endorsed, the only one who did not win was Angie Nixon, a democratic socialist who fell just short in the Florida Senate race.
Mr. Sanders said Democrats should not hesitate to press a progressive agenda next year in Congress. He argued that Americans had voted for major changes, including wealth taxes, a higher minimum wage, universal health care and ending foreign wars.
“They want a government that stands up to the working class, that takes on the oligarchs, that delivers for working families,” he said. “We can no longer engage in same old, same old, status quo policies.”
In the House, Representative Greg Casar of Texas, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, boasted that his group would expand its ranks by 25 members next year. He cast the midterms as a generational victory for the progressive movement.
Progressive winners of House races included Will Lawrence, a co-founder of an environmental group, the Sunrise Movement, who flipped a Republican-held district in Michigan; Brian Poindexter, who defeated a scandal-tarred Republican in northeast Ohio; and Randy Villegas, who prevailed in a redistricted House seat in California.
“This election cycle, the progressives made a big new bet that by endorsing populist candidates in seats Trump won big, we could show that a populist progressive message can win anywhere,” Mr. Casar said in an interview. “And that paid off.”
He added, “Progressive ideas won.”
‘They Were Saying the Same Things’
With so many Democratic wins, not all the ideological lanes were quite so clear.
Both moderates and progressives claimed some credit for the party’s flips of Republican-held seats by Sam Forstag, a union leader and smoke jumper in western Montana; Bob Brooks, a Pennsylvania union leader; and Rebecca Cooke, a Wisconsin political fund-raiser.
Democratic leaders have tried to downplay the party’s divide. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, who is widely expected to become the next majority leader, and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is poised to become speaker, stressed unity. They said all of the party’s candidates had run by focusing on the cost of living, corruption and the Iran war.
“Whether they were progressives or moderates, they were saying the same things,” Mr. Schumer told reporters.
Still, some officials in both wings of the party interpreted the results through the prism of what kind of Democrat would be best to nominate for president in 2028.
With the jockeying for the presidential race escalating this week — Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois released a memo on Wednesday promoting his proposed agenda for the next two years — the fight over the party’s direction will unfold both in Congress and in the early primary states.
A chief target of the centrist scrutiny was Mr. El-Sayed, who won in Michigan after his party sent its full armada to help him.
Former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Kamala Harris stumped for him. Mr. Schumer’s super PAC invested $67 million into the race even though Mr. El-Sayed said he would not back Mr. Schumer to be party leader.
In the final weeks, some party officials quietly grumbled that a more centrist candidate would have cost less and freed up money for Democrats to expand their playing field of competitive races into places like Florida and Mississippi, where a moderate candidate leads a Senate race by just over 2,000 votes as counting continues.
Progressives, for their part, noted that Mr. El-Sayed had been undercut by his moderate primary rival’s surprising late endorsement of the Republican nominee.
Broadly, centrist Democrats have argued that progressive candidates, despite winning, underperformed in blue or purple states. Democrats are on track to win the national popular congressional vote by about 13 percentage points, according to estimates by The New York Times. Mr. El-Sayed won his Senate race by seven points, Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota by 10 and Troy Jackson of Maine by six.
“The people who won handily in states Democrats haven’t won in decades were the people who practiced the politics of addition, not the politics of subtraction,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the center-left Center for American Progress.
Some other Democrats were already looking ahead to the next race.
Even before the polls closed on Tuesday, aides to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York released a five-page memo detailing her contributions to midterm Democrats and again articulating her thinking about whether to seek the 2028 presidential nomination.
“In the coming days and weeks, much will be discussed about the future of the Democratic Party and 2028. You may be asked whether you support her running for president or for Senate in New York or staying in the House of Representatives,” the memo concluded. “We’d recommend you rely on the details of this memo and answer that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez will continue to do what she’s always done: look for ways to do the most good for the most people.”
Michael Kruse contributed reporting from Detroit.
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