Everyone Better Hope the Centrist Theory of Politics Is Wrong

One of the most popular Substack posts I’ve ever written is called “The Bernie Sanders Movement Is Finally Dead.” Published in early 2025, it now looks hilariously dated. As the results of this year’s primaries show, the left-wing insurgency against the Democratic establishment is not dead by a long shot. Leftist candidates, almost all of them inspired or endorsed by Sanders and many backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, have won congressional primaries all over the country, most notably in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed just clinched the Senate nomination. This wave seems partly caused by backlash against many Democratic politicians’ support of Israel, partly caused by party voters embracing left-wing economic ideas, and partly caused by general anti-establishment feeling.

Leftists haven’t taken over the party just yet. Moderates have won plenty of primaries themselves, and most of these left-wing victories have occurred in deep blue parts of the country. To a degree, what’s been happening is progressive lawmakers are being replaced by a more fiery flavor of progressive. But the new thing about this primary cycle is that leftists have won primaries in a few competitive districts. In California’s Central Valley, progressive Randy Villegas beat a more moderate candidate and will now face Republican David Valadao in the general election. In western Montana, Sam Forstag won a primary after being endorsed by Sanders and could plausibly pull off an upset against his Republican opponent. El-Sayed won a vicious Senate primary that originally featured two more centrist candidates.

So now we get an exciting, and terrifying, political experiment. Are those left-wing candidates in swing districts and states going to be able to beat Republicans? Or were the centrists right all along?

As I noted in my premature obituary for the Sanders movement, for 10 years Bernie and his acolytes have argued that left-wing populism appeals to enough persuadable voters (and disaffected non-voters) that lefty candidates can beat Republicans in competitive races. This has pretty much never happened. Instead, Democrats who have won in red parts of the country have had moderate or conservative tendencies, like Washington State’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez or Maine’s Jared Golden (who just retired from Congress). That would seem to validate the boring centrist argument that there is no hidden cache of voters yearning for left-wing ideas. But the left can argue back that Democrats haven’t really tried to run populists in competitive races, so how can anyone say for sure that wouldn’t work?

To pick one big example of how this hypothetical debate is essentially unresolvable: Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump in 2024. Many leftists believe that this was because Harris did not campaign on a left-wing economic platform — taxing the rich, redistributing more via benefits to the poor. They can point to polling that shows that Americans who voted for Biden in 2020 but didn’t vote at all in 2024 “were not motivated to vote for Harris because they found her views on key pocketbook issues too feeble,” as The American Prospect put it. But If you followed the election closely, you might remember that Harris did try out a bunch of populist messaging on economics, to the point where economists were criticizing her plans for being unrealistic. And prior to dropping out, Joe Biden proposed a new wealth tax on billionaires. The argument from the left, I guess, is that Harris wasn’t aggressive enough in her populist messaging, and maybe that’s true. Maybe if you swapped Harris out for Bernie Sanders, he would have won. Maybe if you swapped Harris out for someone who was a better TV and podcast communicator, that person would have won regardless of their ideology. Maybe it’s just very difficult to campaign on any economic message when you’re the de facto incumbent and you’re being blamed for inflation.

Setting aside the specifics of the 2024 election, progressives for years have espoused variations of a theory that many nonvoters are sympathetic to left-wing views and can be inspired to vote by the right kind of populist message or candidate. Some groups think that climate change can motivate these fickle sometimes-voters. Other factions want to emphasize taxing the rich or Medicare for All. Still another view is that it’s not about policy positions at all — Democrats just need to be more combative. The data journalist G. Elliott Morris has argued that Democrats’ core problem it’s that they’re viewed as “weak” and need to get tough. Moving to the center would just signal more weakness, Morris writes: “Moderation carries the obvious downside that looking more conciliatory reinforces the perception that Democrats are weak.”

Abdul El-Sayed is one of the most important candidates in the country — the Senate, and Democrats’ ability to block Trump’s judicial nominations and otherwise check his power, could hinge on El-Sayed’s contest against Republican Mike Rogers. And El-Sayed won his primary by embodying the progressive theory of politics.

He’s most famous for his anti-Israel views because that’s the major issue dividing Democrats at the moment. But El-Sayed is not just left-wing on Israel, he’s left-wing on everything. He’s a big Medicare for All guy, he used to support the defund the police movement, he’s in favor of abolishing ICE, on down the line. He’s outspoken about all of this; no one is accusing him of being weak. He’s dismissed concerns about him being divisive and less electable than his primary opponent, telling Mother Jones:

We’re building a much bigger coalition than the one that they think, you know, we’re breaking apart, because a lot of people wanna be a part of the truth. They want their kids to have good healthcare. They want to be able to travel good roads. They want good schools, and they wanna know that our tax dollars aren’t hurting other people.

As for the idea that you have to have some moderate views to win voters, El-Sayed dismissed that in a recent interview with Vox, saying, “If Michiganders wanted ‘moderate,’ why would they have elected Donald Trump twice?”

That’s a rhetorical question, but the obvious answer is: Because many voters thought Trump was the more moderate option.

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In 2024, according to a New York Times poll, more voters thought Kamala Harris was “too liberal or progressive” than thought Trump was “too conservative.” One CNN poll from earlier this year found that 58 percent of voters think the Democratic Party is “too liberal,” an all-time high. Other recent polling shows that self-described leftists are a fairly small minority in the U.S., with most Americans describing themselves as “centrist,” “center-left,” or “center-right.”

Not all of these poll respondents will have a clear idea on what policies count as “left-wing” or “right-wing” and not everyone falls into clear political categories, especially when you talk about “low-information voters,” i.e. the guy you meet at the bar who loves Medicare for All and trans rights but thinks illegal immigrants should get the death penalty. But clearly, there are many voters who think that Democrats are too left-wing. In an election in a swing state or district, a Democratic candidate should ideally have some kind of pitch for them, a differentiation between the candidate and the negative caricature of Democrats people have in their heads. This doesn’t mean a candidate need to be pro-Israel or adopt other right-wing views — moderation can be expressed through personal style, a stated willingness to work across the aisle, an empathy for Trump voters’ concerns about immigration, and so on. But Democrats who have won in purple or red areas often have views that piss off progressives, because they need to court people who sometimes vote Republican, and that means not acting like typical Democrats.

The question for down-the-line progressives is, how are you going to reach voters who are not down-the-line progressives? El-Sayed’s theory seems to be that he doesn’t need many of those voters, because his progressive coalition is “much bigger” than the existing Democratic coalition.

While I hope that El-Sayed is correct and he can be part of a Senate majority that checks Trump, I also worry that leftists have been engaged in a lot of complicated intellectual maneuvering to avoid conceding that boring moderates win elections. For three decades, Susan Collins has been winning elections in Democratic-leaning Maine by being a boring moderate Republican. Boring moderate Democrat Roy Cooper won gubernatorial elections in Republican-leaning North Carolina and may win a Senate seat next year (if Republicans don’t convince voters he’s not a moderate). Biden was the boring-est, moderate-est candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary, and he beat Trump. Arizona’s Ruben Gallego and Georgia’s Raphael Warnock aren’t “boring,” but they won tough elections in swing states without being firebrands in the El-Sayed mold. Republicans in the Trump era are often unpopular extremists and there’s a lot of recent history showing that Democrats don’t need to match Republicans’ freak to beat them.

One possibility raised by Matt Yglesias is that 2026 is such a good year for Democrats that even if El-Sayed does worse than a typical Democrat would, he’ll still be able to win against Rogers. Sure, that could happen. But then I look at the general election polls, which are a mixed bag but broadly show a close race, and then I think about how Michigan voted for Trump two out of three times, and I get nervous. The fact that the final primary polls overstated El-Sayed’s support among Democratic voters doesn’t make me more confident.

We’re going into this election with potentially the Senate majority on the line and an aging, corrupt, wannabe fascist sitting in the White House. There are now real stakes in the left-wing bet that a candidate like El-Sayed can inspire voters to turn out. Hopefully all these no-fun centrists are wrong about politics, because American democracy could be on the line.

Fingers crossed!

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