There is a lot of commentary about factional divides inside the Democratic Party that flattens everything into a single “left-wing insurgents against the moderate establishment” frame that I think is much too simplistic. Today, I’m going to talk about an important distinction between two different strands of progressivism. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about a divide in the moderate camp.
Most of the many Democratic primaries this summer have featured a moderate-versus-progressive split.
And, to an extent, that’s just what you’d expect from a primary. When candidates run against each other, they need to differentiate themselves in some way and the result is typically a bit of an ideological divide, even when that’s not strongly supported by the candidates’ records.
Less typical, though, was this primary season’s marked and fairly coherent left-wing insurgency: Graham Platner in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander in New York, all of whom upset the apple cart.
It’s tempting to shorthand everything that happened over the course of the primary season in terms of this insurgency — not only are those races scored as progressive victories over moderates, but so are wins by Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Phil Weiser in Colorado.
But I think that’s a little perverse.
Flanagan and Weiser were both statewide elected officials who were arguably “next in line” for the races they won. What’s more, while I think you can really say that the candidates they beat (Angie Craig and Michael Bennet, respectively) are more moderate than your average Democrat, that’s actually not true of a lot of the candidates the insurgents beat. In particular, many of the House incumbents who got knocked off, if anything, had political profiles very similar to Flanagan — they were Medicare for All proponents, ICE abolitionists, etc.
In fact, I think a lot of these simplistic characterizations of the 2026 primaries elide the existence of what I’d argue is the largest and most important faction in the Democratic Party.
Let’s call it the Progressive Establishment.
What is the Progressive Establishment? Think of those who favored Barack Obama’s second term leftward pivots or the people who supported Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016 but were glad that his presence in the race held her feet to the fire and forced her to tack left on policy. The people who thought Elizabeth Warren in 2020 offered the best of both worlds.
In the House, there are almost 100 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Most of these people do not have the fame and personalistic following of Bernie Sanders or second-generation Berners like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But they have dramatically more formal institutional clout grounded in a big network of progressive foundations, donor tables, and grant-funded NGOs. And if you can’t conceptualize them as a distinct force in Democratic Party politics, you can’t understand the party today.
The left’s intense policy-demanders
National party leaders are much fonder of the Progressive Establishment than they are the Insurgent Left, but in many ways, I find the Progressive Establishment more problematic.
But the leaders and I have an opposite view of this precisely because we see the same thing: the Progressive Establishment is made up of really intense policy-demanders. They care a lot about getting leadership to agree that the Keystone XL pipeline is bad or that voter ID laws are racist or that infrastructure investments have project labor agreements attached. The Progressive Establishment wants members to sign on the dotted line, and when they do, those members become kosher.
The Progressive Establishment also more or less plays by the rules of friendly politics.
Tina Smith’s retirement opened up a Senate seat in Minnesota, so Peggy Flanagan ran for it. She’s more progressive than Amy Klobuchar, but there’s no universe in which Flanagan would have challenged Klobuchar in a primary. In the open seat primary that emerged, Flanagan ran to Angie Craig’s left and hit Craig hard for not being as dogmatic a progressive as she is. But if, instead of retiring, Tina Smith had resigned and Craig had been picked for the vacancy, it’s again impossible to imagine Flanagan running against her. Flanagan is essentially a regular normie Democrat. She’s left-wing, but she doesn’t see that as inconsistent with being a regular normie Democrat because the Democrats are a left-wing party.