A political revolution is happening on the left of American politics. This summer, a young, progressive generation from outside the Democratic Party’s mainstream defeated a crop of candidates favoured by the party establishment and corporate donors in primaries around the country. In June, three candidates endorsed by New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, defeated incumbent Democrats in congressional primaries in the city. Another democratic socialist, who has promised to oppose the deployment of troops to the capital, is on course to become the next mayor of Washington DC. The biggest race of the summer came in August when Abdul el-Sayed defeated the state legislator Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary for the US Senate in Michigan. Stevens had a 12-to-one spending advantage, but it did not matter. The centre of gravity in the Democratic Party is shifting to the left.
This revolution has been a long time coming. For much of the past decade, the main opposition to Maga has been a Democratic Party embodied by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Beneath the surface, there have always been signs that a truly leftist politics was insurgent. Look at Bernie Sanders’s surprisingly successful challenge to Clinton in 2016, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseating an establishment incumbent in 2018, or the fact that Biden’s economic agenda resembled the Green New Deal. Then Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral primary in 2025 showed the power of an agenda that opposed Israel and promised affordability if it was filtered through colourful, short videos. Mamdani, like many of the other candidates, is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a grassroots organisation separate to the party itself that is now acting as an incubator for left-wing candidates. Across the country candidates who call themselves democratic socialists or progressives are defeating the old guard.
Their pitch could be summed up by El-Sayed’s campaign slogan, a call-and-response at rallies. Money out of politics. Money in your pocket. Medicare for all. “Right now, the experience of living in America is about feeling like the life you want is just out of your grasp, and whoever offers the most convincing explanation of why that is gets to win an election,” El-Sayed told me earlier this year. He thinks Trump has long offered appealing – if incorrect – answers to voters. Whereas the “Democrats have just denied that it’s true”. They don’t want to recognise the economic insecurity of voters because they are too reliant on corporate campaign contributions “to actually tell the truth”.
In the same way that the Republican establishment once watched aghast as Donald Trump mauled his way to the nomination in 2016, the top brass of the Democratic Party is flailing in trying to deal with its unpopularity. Without ideas, charisma or vitality, it looks stumped. The momentum in the party is on the left. “There’s only, in my mind, two fully defined wings in US politics right now,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, a former vice-president of the DSA and founding editor of the socialist magazine Jacobin. “There’s the Maga Republicans and there’s [the] DSA and democratic socialism.” The centre cannot hold.
If the Democratic establishment met the Sanders insurgency in 2016 with antagonism, then it might now be forced into accommodation. The 2020 social revolution following the Black Lives Matter protests made few demands on the Democratic establishment beyond adopting woke language and dropping to one knee. The current attack on the establishment is harder to repel. That’s because it is fuelled by two substantive issues. The first is economic inequality. These new candidates shun money from corporate donors, the lifeblood of the establishment. Anger towards tech oligarchs and the roll-out of artificial intelligence indicates a distrust towards the way power is distributed in the economy. The absence of affordable housing has created resentment among the urban youth. Billionaires are now ripe for attack in a way that once would have cut against American aspirationalism.
The second is the radicalising effect Israel’s destruction of Gaza has had on how young people vote. These two factors combined in the Michigan race: the fact that El-Sayed’s opponent was backed by $32m from the (pro-Israel) American Israel Public Affairs Committee allowed him to cast what he was fighting as pro-Israeli corporate interests.
Since the campus protests in 2024 and the anger at the Democratic National Convention’s refusal to let a Palestinian-American speak, anti-Israeli politics has become the test for whether young socialists will support Democratic politicians. The destruction of Gaza may not be in the headlines as much as it once was – but Palestine has acquired a symbolic significance within the party. A DSA co-chair recently said she supported congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier heading to a pro-Palestinian rally the day after 7 October. Meanwhile, a scepticism towards Israel has grown on the right, rooted in America First and rising antisemitism. Insurgents on both sides of the aisle share a dislike for the US-Israeli alliance. The long-held consensus in Washington towards Israel is breaking down.
I’m told that the party’s congressional leadership is already drawing up plans to accommodate the new intake on the Hill. There is a nervous recognition that they will have to move on issues such as Israel. But the extent to which they do depends on how many leftists take seats in January. If El-Sayed is able to win in his tight race against the Republican Mike Rogers in November, then the mandate that victory will give him – and the anti-Israel caucus in Congress – will pile the pressure on Democratic leadership to move against American aid for Israel.
For all the talk about Israel and affordability, these insurgents are struggling to shake the toxicity of their former woke selves. On 9 August, Ocasio-Cortez laughed as she recounted how an ally of hers always says that “woke 1.0 was crazy”. It was a glib attempt to move past an ideology that even some on the left of the party now accept helped Trump return to power. The laughter will sound piercing to those who lost their jobs due to cancel culture, or lost out on jobs because of positive discrimination. Nonetheless, given that many progressives have long claimed wokeness was some fictional right-wing conspiracy theory, this is a notable shift. It is a sign that the new left-wingers want to tone down identity politics – and recognise its political, if not moral, downsides – and fight on economic grounds.
But there are signs that this is a cosmetic shift. It’s not as if Mamdani campaigned against woke extremes or cancel culture in favour of free speech and a non-racial conception of the citizen. His campaign simply dropped the language of victimhood and grievance and pushed practical policies concerning the cost of living wrapped in hopeful optimism. There has been no repudiation of woke. Woke 1.0 implies that there will be a woke 2.0. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has written, “awokenings” are cyclical phenomena that have much more to do with intra-elite competition than a genuine concern for social justice. It is hard to excise a mode of politics that has seeped so deeply into the progressive mind – from therapeutic language to the rejection of the idea that facts matter more than what one person might claim as their “lived experience”. Note how by 2020 Sanders was forced to caveat his calls for economic restructuring in terms of racial justice. In a decade or so, we might be listening to President AOC say, “Wow, woke 2.0 was crazy.”
Some leftists have consistently argued that identity politics was pushed by the Democratic elite to distract voters from calls for economic radicalism. A case in point: Hillary Clinton’s remarks in 2016, as Sanders threatened her coronation, about breaking up the big banks. “Would that end racism?” she said. “Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?” As El-Sayed told me, “In the absence of an actual material critique, you’ve seen a lot of Democrats lean in to that wokeness issue.”
“Anecdotally, I don’t think these people [on the far left] are extremely woke,” Sunkara said. “I think the vanguard of this stuff was a lot of the NGOs around the Democratic Party, as opposed to this portion of the left.”
While it’s true that critics of identity politics were often found on the materialist left, it’s not true to say that the DSA is devoid of wokeness. Francesca Hong, the DSA candidate for Wisconsin governor, was slow to disavow her past claims that Thanksgiving should be cancelled for “celebrating colonialism”. In another social media post in 2019 she said she was on the “verge of a anxiety attack [sic]” in a restaurant because there were too many “old white people who didn’t think we spoke English”. These comments overshadowed the last few weeks of her campaign and Hong narrowly lost the primary on 11 August.
Even if DSA candidates are now trying to distance themselves from this rhetoric, that does not mean the overall radicalism of the platform is being diluted. For instance, in June, congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier said she would never deport anyone because every deportation is “rooted in deeply racist ideology”. She said that borders were a “very modern” concept. “So much of the global conflict we’ve seen over the last few centuries has been over bordering. And so much human life has been lost over it, right?” Four times when challenged she refused to say that a murderer should go to prison.
For some democratic socialists, these sorts of controversies are bumps in the road on the long march towards a socialist future. This is a generational project. Sanders’s former aide David Sirota has compared his old boss to Barry Goldwater. Though he lost to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election, Goldwater heralded a rightward shift within the Republican Party that culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In other words, Sanders is a man before his time. His popular runs for president in 2016 and 2020 showed that a more populist economics resonated with many Democrats, even if the establishment was ultimately able to ensure Clinton and then Biden won the nomination. There were 16 years between Goldwater’s defeat and Reagan’s victory. As Sirota notes, it has only been ten years since the Sanders campaign in 2016. Yet, Goldwater won his party’s nomination whereas Sanders did not. Further, there is a question over how leftists would fare on a national scale without the weight of money the Republicans will bring to the presidential race. In 2016, unlike Sanders, Trump won the nomination partly because he was able to finance his own campaign.
Another parallel on the right is the rise of the Tea Party movement. In April 2009, the Fox News columnist John Tantillo wrote that the Tea Party will be remembered as little more than a “fad that flopped”. In the New York Times, Paul Krugman said their events did not “represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment” because they were backed by right-wing billionaires – only for the Tea Party to kickstart Trump’s takeover of the GOP. Those dismissing socialist candidates as ephemeral today will look equally presumptuous.
If the Tea Party analogy holds, then it makes sense that, at the moment, the movement’s presidential candidate is not obvious. AOC is the front-runner, but still seems unsure whether now is the time to make a move. Sunkara thinks that if she doesn’t run for president, the leader of the United Automobile Workers union, Shawn Fain, could excel at striking a balance between representing the working class and not having a “strong position on a lot of this cultural stuff”.
Whoever emerges to lead this revolt on a national scale, the wheel of what the Democratic Party represents is turning. The old guard in Washington has lost control over the narrative, and, more importantly, it is unable to rely on donor cash to control who climbs the ladder to power. The insurgents are tapping in to an economic angst among a youth whose emotional state echoes the frustrations that fuelled Trump’s rise on the right. They are trying to pivot away from the unpopular and racial ideology of wokeness towards more substantive issues on the economy and foreign policy. Some may have dropped their progressive views in favour of a purely materialist argument. Some never held those views, while most have simply realised they are politically self-defeating. What is clear is that the last vestiges of the liberal establishment are being forced to accommodate the radical youth, setting the stage for a power struggle over what the party stands for after the new Congress convenes in January.
[Further reading: Woke 1.0 was crazy, and it isn’t over]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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Subscribe here to commentConflict drives clicks. So it’s understandable that news sources of all stripes have been pushing this “moderate” vs. “socialist” narrative.
For starters, these contests need to be viewed individually. The DSA itself is a hodgepodge of groups ranging from Maoists to social democrats. I currently live in NYC and consider myself an “Obama liberal”. Last year I gladly voted for Zohran Mamdani – ranking him #1 in the primary and voting for him in the November election. Though I can’t imagine voting for Francesca Hong if I had been in Wisconsin.
And it should be pointed out that the electoral record for the socialists has been mixed. While Angie Nixon won an upset victory in Florida for US Senate nomination with a well-organized campaign, two of her socialist colleagues in the Sunshine State fell flat in their efforts to unseat incumbent Democratic US House members.
If there is a division in the Democratic Party it is probably best described as establishmentarians vs. vocal activists. And there are also some who blur the difference between the two.
Organized person to person campaigning is almost always more effective than buying ads on TV and social media. This has been a strength of the socialists in recent campaigns. Mamdani’s volunteers actually listened to what their neighbors had to say rather than preaching at them. This is old school politics at its best. Voters are more likely to pay attention to their neighbors than to AI slop on Meta.
In general, people want leaders who will stand up and fight for them. Regardless of label, this is what Democrats need to do if they are to amass enough power to displace MAGA.