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THE LAST SIX MONTHS HAVE BEEN EITHER THE BEST OR THE WORST FOR THE PROGRESSIVE LEFT, but it depends on who you ask.
If politics is the art of attention, the social-democratic-adjacent wing of the Democratic Party (known across Europe as “almost every mainstream political party”) has had a banner 2026.
Because Fox News, Elon Musk and your uncle keep saying Democrats are electing communists, here’s a reminder from my July essay, “Nordic Happiness Can Scale in the U.S. if We Let It”:
The most popular parts of the political platform of today’s elected Democratic Socialists in America are almost indistinguishable from the platform of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Republican party—strong unions, robust living wages, and a social safety net that works to leave as few people behind as possible.
Democratic socialism is the basic starting point of politics in essentially every democracy except ours.
On to Michigan, where Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic Senate primary. El-Sayed is not a self-declared democratic socialist, but he is very comfortably on The Left. Here’s how Lisa Lerer describes the campaign in The New York Times:
A charismatic campaigner, he fueled his candidacy with promises to lower costs, provide universal health care and ban corporate money in politics. Fluent in podcasts and social media, he crafted a platform centered on taxing billionaires, opposition to Israel and Medicare for all.
Pretty simple, but can it win a Senate seat in the Midwest? If the party gets behind him, El-Sayed can absolutely win. Democrats can afford nothing less. I would hope that this is the one lesson Democrats will finally learn from their Republican colleagues of the 2000s—if you can keep the caucus together on the broad strokes, you can wield a lot of political power and exact dramatic change upon America.
Look around you: Healthcare and childcare costs are through the roof, gas prices are untenable, there is a land + drone war on the European continent, ICE is running rampant across America, Iran is absolutely embarrassing Trump, the Middle East is asunder, and on and on. This is the product of decades of status quo politics combined with two years of Trump chaos and, above all else, money. Countless sums of money.
It’s not hard to see a winning political message here for Democrats of all stripes. If anything, it’s a page lifted mainly from the Sanders 2016 playbook—and there are reasons to think it can work in Michigan. It can probably work almost anywhere. Trump is underwater on every reputable poll released in the last 6 months, and we are back in anti-establishment election territory. People across the political spectrum are fed up with Trump, and they aren’t too thrilled with Democrats who are not standing up to him—outsiders should fare quite well in these midterms, and that’s not a bad thing.
As you know from my 20+ AI essays, workshops in 16 countries and 25 cities and my low-volume, high-utility “Talking AI w/ Sree & Digimentors” WhatsApp group, I am always looking for ways to help folks get smarter about AI. Now, here’s another. I am working with Adam Aslanian, a hands-on AI engineer and implementer for small businesses, to put together an unusual FREE event on Wednesday, Aug. 19, noon-1 pm ET: AI Solved LIVE! You and others can submit an AI problem or issue you are having at work (small business and nonprofits only, please) and we will pick a couple of them to solve live in front of our audience. Sign up to just watch or to participate. Either way, you will get to ask questions, see the recording and more. Did I mention it’s free?
Learn more about AI Solved LIVE
In Wisconsin, the end result was different as democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost to centrist Democrat David Crowley in the gubernatorial primary. Hong led in the polls for months, and seemed to be cruising. That ended on election night with a Crowley victory and a wave of “is this the end of The Left?” columns. But a democratic socialist taking a governor’s race primary down to the wire in a swing state is a big deal regardless of the result.
More to the point, as this piece by Kellen Browning and Julie Bosman notes, Hong was not a particularly strong candidate to begin with, and she spent the waning days of the campaign litigating old tweets. She lost by fewer than 4,000 votes. Now, you can watch Fox News and hear the endless stream of “the radical left this and that,” or you can come to terms with the fact that the radical left wants you and everyone else to have affordable healthcare. Taxing a billionaire or two is in there, too.
These are not part and parcel of a radical agenda or a radical left position. It’s something the vast majority of Americans agree with.
Nate Cohn broke all of this down on “The Daily” last week and it’s worth a listen. He discusses the 2016 race and how this year’s elections mirror it in so many ways. He also draws a similar conclusion—and he does so largely without racehorse politics jargon and labels, which I love.
This was always supposed to be a tough map for Democrats, especially when it comes to competing in the Senate. I refuse to believe that. Again, look around. Get out and shake some hands and talk to people and I think you’ll find a general malaise that Democrats have the platform to solve. Almost every race is in play, and that’s how Democrats should be acting as a party.
Congressman Ro Khanna delivered a fantastic speech to this effect at the DNC meeting in Austin on August 15—an excerpt:
When we fight on policy instead of platitudes, Trump’s coalition can crack. We saw it with the Epstein Files Act. I stood with survivors and worked with Thomas Massie to pass the most consequential legislation a Democrat has passed in Trump’s second term. It is the moment when Trump’s presidency began to unravel.
That is the kind of substantive politics I believe in.
I am from the economic patriotism wing of the Democratic Party — the New Deal wing of the Democratic Party.
We believe a national economic project is our path back from the wilderness years.
We see that America is at a breaking point, and that if we do not offer a new economic bargain, we will break.
We understand that those who have lost two elections to Trump are no experts on electability and have no standing to tell a new generation of Democrats that their ideas for justice are too radical.
Whatever reservations middle-of-the-road Democrats have about their colleagues to their political left, they can rest assured that they will be getting an ally who will vote with the party 9.9 out of 10 times. That simply has to be enough.
That’s right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez votes with her party 97% of the time. Ilhan Omar votes with Democrats 95% of the time. Party unity is already happening on that side. If anything, I’d worry much more about Senate Democrats who continue to vote to confirm Trump appointees.
This is an election season fully about consequences and accountability, and I think every candidate, regardless of party, that runs on those things alone will have a fighting chance.
More from Khanna’s speech:
Some say that my call to tax billionaires is class warfare.
I have news for them: The billionaires have already been waging a class war.
They are decimating unions, outsourcing jobs, and putting the cost of homes out of reach. America is in a five-decade class war. It is time to get off the sidelines and show whose side we are on.
I should not be one of the only federally elected California Democrats supporting a ballot measure to tax billionaires so poor people have healthcare. We should be fighting for poor kids, not billionaires.
Nearly 100 billionaires live in or near my district. They ran a million-dollar candidate against me because I supported the tax. I won 63 to 6.
If I can be for a billionaire tax in the heart of Silicon Valley, how is this a hard vote for 434 other members?
The last thing we should see anywhere is a group of centrist Democrats attacking their caucus mates. They should be pouring money into their campaigns and allying with them whenever possible.
Congressman Khanna is absolutely right—it’s high time for the consultants who contributed to losing two of the last three presidential elections to Donald Trump to be taken down a notch.
BTW, here’s my March 2026 essay, “Yes, the Dems Can Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.” Now tell me your thoughts (in public in the comments, or quietly, via email!)
Have an idea for anything we’re up to? Let’s collaborate! sree.sreenivasan1@gmail.com
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