What’s the Secret to These Southern Democrats’ Success?
The results next week might suggest that one of those five approaches is clearly worse or better than the others electorally. But it will be hard to draw sweeping conclusions. Elections are complicated and multifaceted. El-Sayed’s biggest challenges probably aren’t his ideology but being Muslim in a country with a lot of Islamophobic people, and the resistance that he has faced from fellow Democratic politicians. Being safe and boring probably works better for Cooper—who has been previously elected statewide several times and is white and male—as compared to Bottoms or Crowley.
If there is no obvious tactical or strategic lesson from the midterms, that will be a lesson itself. Having lost the intraparty debate on policy, the center-left is now fixated on tactics and strategy. Instead of leaning into the merits of centrist positions, center-left Democrats these days argue that Democrats must sound more like Cooper and less like Jackson to win in swing states. Progressives are now trying to win these arguments by claiming that candidates must adopt more left-wing stands, such as opposing data centers to win in purple areas. I am hoping (perhaps futilely) that election results that don’t clearly vindicate or undermine a particular campaign strategy can allow the party to move back to disagreements about policy, which is the right battleground. We can’t ever predict who will win Wisconsin; we can figure out which candidate’s position on wealth taxes is closest to our own.
I suspect that the biggest lesson will be that “parties are electable, not candidates,” in the words of Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica. Democratic candidates having a chance in states that Trump won comfortably in 2024 (Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas) and being well ahead in states that are normally close (Georgia, North Carolina) suggests the story of 2026 isn’t about individual candidates. It’s notable that polls suggest that Cooper, despite his tempered rhetoric about Trump and Republicans, is winning less than 10 percent of the GOP vote, similar to Ossoff. Democratic and independent voters are broadly rejecting Trump and the Republican Party. That gives Democrats with different backgrounds, policy views, and strategies chances to win.
