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.
“You can go around the gatekeepers now,” said one Democratic strategist working with several insurgent campaigns who requested anonymity to preserve relationships. “They have a little bit of power, but they do not have the power they used to, and they’re going to be the last people to figure that out.”
The establishment, however, believes many of these challengers are speaking more to politics-obsessed social media users than to the actual voters who will decide elections. They’re backing candidates they believe are most similar to past winners, who they say will be more focused on lowering grocery prices than changing the Democratic Party.
Success for the insurgents is far, far from guaranteed. Establishment-backed candidates ultimately dominated midterm primaries during Trump’s first term in office.
Robert F. Bukaty via Associated Press
If there’s one candidate who embodies the disparate trends creating this crop of Democratic insurgents, it’s Graham Platner. A 41-year-old Marine veteran and oysterman, Platner launched his campaign to oust Republican Sen. Susan Collins in August.
He immediately went viral and has been riding a wave of momentum since: His campaign raised $4 million in its first six weeks of the race, held a rally with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and is drawing hundreds of attendees to town halls in the state’s more conservative rural areas.
But on Tuesday, national Democrats’ pick to challenge Collins will enter the race. Gov. Janet Mills is 77. She’s also amazingly the only registered Democrat to win statewide office in Maine since 2006. (Maine does not elect its other statewide executive positions, and Sen. Angus King is an independent who caucuses with Democrats.)
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and its leadership consider her a far safer bet to challenge Collins, who has weak approval ratings but also a long track record of political survival. Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand made recruiting Mills a top priority, part of their broad strategy of focusing on what they see as proven vote-winners.
This strategy has led them to recruit some candidates whose quality is unquestioned like former Gov. Roy Cooper to run in North Carolina and former Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio. But it also inherently led them toward older candidates with defined track records and clear ties to the national Democratic Party brand, rather than the changemakers sought by the party’s insurgents.
“The DSCC is focused on winning Senate seats and flipping the majority in 2026, and our strategy is guided by the best way to do that,” a committee aide said.
This has led to the most grumbling in Michigan and Iowa. While the DSCC is unlikely to officially endorse candidates this cycle, Schumer and Gillibrand have lined up behind Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan, citing public polling showing her leading the primary and doing better in the general than her two opponents. In Iowa, the other campaigns believe they are lining up behind state Rep. Josh Turek because of his track record of winning in a district that has voted repeatedly for Trump.
“You have to give them their flowers on recruitment,” said one veteran Democratic senate strategist, requesting anonymity to criticize party leadership. “Where they’re messing up is trying to pick candidates in races where there are multiple viable candidates. Josh Turek is not Roy Cooper. They’re overplaying their hand and making it harder for a Democrat to win the general [election].”
It’s unquestionable that Schumer and the DSCC are facing more intraparty resistance than ever. Schumer has long been to clear fields and funnel donor money to his preferred candidates, and DSCC-supported candidates have lost just one primary in the past decade.
Among those who are more willing to challenge party leadership include Sanders, who has endorsed both Platner and El-Sayed. Sanders has only endorsed against a DSCC-preferred candidate once before, in the Kentucky Senate race in 2020. Another progressive who tries not to get crosswise with leadership, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), has endorsed Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota even though Schumer and Gillibrand prefer Rep. Angie Craig in the race.
“It saddens me that Democrats are gonna have to raise millions of dollars fighting against each other,” Sanders told HuffPost this week. “[Platner] can win the Senate race in Maine, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that happens.”
These fights will matter the most in Maine and Michigan, two states Democrats must win to have any chance of flipping the Senate, which Republicans now control with 53 seats versus 47, in either 2026 or 2028. Fundraising reports set to be filed this week in Michigan will show Stevens is set for a financial dogfight: She raised $1.9 million in the third quarter, compared to progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s $1.75 million and media-friendly state Sen. Mallory McMorrow’s $1.7 million.
In Maine, establishment Democrats think Platner is too untested and perhaps too liberal ― he supports Medicare for All and wants to defund ICE ― to win a general election. But he’s clearly strong enough to challenge Mills for the nomination, a prospect the establishment seems ready for. They’re confident the feisty Mills will display enough gusto and gumption on the campaign trail to quiet concerns about her age. They’re also already discussing ways to blunt Platner’s working-class image.
Mills will start the race with a massive lead in name identification, which should help her lead in early polls. But Platner’s campaign is confident a be-everywhere, do-everything media, and campaign strategy will close the gap over time. The campaign’s internal polling found 38% of Democratic primary voters knew who Platner was just two weeks into his campaign, before the campaign had spent a dime on paid media.
“We know Graham is someone special, and we know that the more people see him ― whether it’s on TV or in the newspaper or on their TikTok feed or at a town hall ― the more they like him,” said Joe Cavello, a spokesman for Platner. “He’s a young man, and he’s ready to campaign all around the state.”
George Walker IV via Associated Press
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.
And the simple fact there are leftwing primary challenges at all this cycle is a major shift compared to 2022 and 2024, when the left was most playing defense as groups linked to AIPAC came after members of the progressive squad.
“We came into this cycle thinking this was our chance to swing back against these corporate and right-wing super PACs,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director for the progressive group Justice Democrats. “Voters don’t want to see this same crop of Democrats sworn in in January 2027.”
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.
He’s the fourth candidate Justice Democrats have endorsed so far this cycle, and Andrabi said the group hopes to endorse between five and 10 more primary challengers in the coming months.
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.
“The people that get it are going to be just fine,” McDonald said. “The people that don’t get it probably shouldn’t be fine.”
Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the party affiliation of Sen. Susan Collins. She is a Republican.