https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/nov/08/democratic-party-midterm-election-centrism
The post is headlined via two early paragraphs of the Guardian's item, run together.
More from Guardian's analysis -
Take the wins of eight card-carrying democratic socialists who are entering the House of Representatives, three of whom – Avila Chevalier, Melat Kiros and Donavan McKinney – are unseating establishment candidates to do so. Avila Chevalier, who was an immigration organizer and part of the student encampment, ran because her opponent, Adriano Espaillat, refused to meet with Mahmoud Khalil’s family when he was abducted by ICE and also refused to call for the agency’s abolition.
Their victories were facilitated by Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York last year. But what paved the way for him, and them, I have argued, was the pro-Palestine movement that put their bodies on the line and that made it so that most Democrats are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
It is a shift that the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) itself recognized when it declared that it will no longer endorse candidates or give campaign contributions; that its money was now toxic and served as a flag to Democratic voters not to support their candidates.
Senators-elect Troy Jackson and El-Sayed – who are progressive, but not DSA members – have called what’s happening in Palestine a “genocide” and won contentious competitions doing so in Maine and Michigan respectively. James Talarico in Texas said “God is screaming at all of us in Gaza as we speak”.
A similar thing happened with regards to other social movements. Today 77% of Democrats (and half of all Americans) support abolishing Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE), a position incredibly unpopular in the last two decades that activists have been organizing for it.
Democrats, who have long been in bed with tech, ran against AI datacenters, pushed by organizers who emphasized their destruction of the environment, water supply and social effects on everything from student learning, theft of intellectual property, to the creation of nonconsensual porn.
But these problems, while shaping candidate platforms, were secondary to economic issues for most voters. Gallup polling just before the election showed healthcare (68%) as the number one issue that registered Democrats found “extremely important”. An earlier poll from You-Gov indicates what they want: a staggering 85% of Democrats support Medicare for All.
The same Gallup poll showed that for Democratic voters it’s not just the economy that’s the top concern for their vote, but specifically “income and wealth distribution” (65%) over and above gas prices (53%). Said in a different way it’s not just “affordability” that people want, it’s affordability through justice and social programming – it’s redistribution ie socialist policy.
The blue wave is cause for celebration – the Democratic party is in a two party system, the only alternative we currently have to a Republican party that has gotten unfathomably brutal, that wears white supremacy like a crown.
However, the Democratic party too is a part of the same political machinery that has funded ICE administration after administration. That has funded the genocide in Gaza. That did not succeed in enshrining healthcare for all, or cancelling student debt. That has not brought us the progressive, socialist policy that Americans crave. And it is unclear, despite this pressure from voters, that the party is going to do differently this time.
Read the rest at the link given at the top of this post.