Winds of Change
Kapitál
A wave of Democratic victories is reshaping U.S. politics, elevating candidates who challenge corporate influence, militarism and the party establishment. With affordability, healthcare and foreign policy driving voters, will Democrats seize this opening for transformative reforms—or repeat the compromises of the past?
It will be a few more weeks before the votes are counted and the elections certified, but 2026 delivered a tsunami of Democratic wins across the United States, including wins by candidates the party’s corporate establishment despises. Trump and his regime’s suppression of dissent were on the ballot. So were Israel, crypto, data centers, and war more broadly. Above all, so was the affordability of daily life.
Populism at Its Best
Two themes carried the progressive movement to major wins across the country and at every legislative and executive level: economic populism (in the term’s actual meaning, not its pejorative misuse in Slovak politics) and rejection of Israel’s genocide.
Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and Troy Jackson in Maine won their U.S. Senate seats with unapologetically progressive, human-rights-forward campaigns. They pushed against the Democratic Party’s corporate politics and won voters over with a bread-and-butter agenda.
Five members of the Democratic Socialists of America won U.S. House seats after prevailing in fiercely competitive primaries. One of them, Angela Gonzalez-Torres, defeated a sitting California representative Jimmy Gomez in the general election. And following New York City earlier this year, another card-carrying DSA member, Nithya Raman, was elected Mayor of Los Angeles, ousting Karen Bass, a longtime favorite of an older generation of progressives.
New Order in Washington
Democrats flipped both the U.S. House and the Senate. Anti-war, people-first representatives now hold significant leverage in the Democratic House majority. I expect negotiations inside the party to look very different from the Biden era, when a small AOC-adjacent cohort pushed against corporate Democrats.
Some pundits predict that Trump will simply veto anything Democrats pass. That prediction misreads Trump’s motivations. He is not George W. Bush, driven by ideology. He has an almost desperate need to be popular and celebrated. If Democrats were to lower the eligibility age for Medicare, the universal health insurance program for seniors, to 50, Trump might very well sign it into law. His unpredictability is Democrats’ opportunity. His mild demeanor toward Democrats since the election may signal a different dynamic over the next two years.
Florida on the Brink of Change (but Resisting)
Election night was also a reminder that the party’s kingmakers would still rather lose than welcome an unabashed progressive into the top ranks. The party invested nothing in the high-profile U.S. Senate race that catapulted Angie Nixon to national stardom. With a small budget but a spirited campaign, Nixon lost only narrowly to the Republican incumbent. Even a modest investment from the party could have changed the course of history.
After mid-cycle redistricting and contentious primaries, pro-Israel lobby darlings Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Jared Moskowitz easily won their general elections. They will continue to shape the Democrats’ official foreign policy agenda, and not in a good way. Both will likely keep their House Foreign Affairs Committee assignments, especially if House Democrats elect Hakeem Jeffries Speaker.
Still, their brand of politics is in its final years of dominance. Public opinion has shifted dramatically, driven by the ongoing genocide of Palestinians and Israel’s ethnocentric supremacy and apartheid, while the boomer generation’s political influence declines. Americans are tired of funding Israel and military adventures abroad while they struggle to cover housing and healthcare at home. People now connect their pain not only to corporate greed but also to military waste. My hope is that the coming presidential primaries and the 2028 general election will move U.S. foreign policy significantly away from its imperialist, hegemonic tradition.
Move Left or Move Over
Democrats dominated well beyond federal races. In my second home, Arizona, Democrats won control of the state House, Senate, and governorship for the first time in 60 years, and swept every statewide office. Democrats in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Nevada also won state trifectas. Texas made history by electing Gina Hinojosa governor and James Talarico senator, flipping the state House, and securing important down-ballot wins.
Democrats won districts considered unwinnable, not by appealing to conservative values but by leaning fully into economic populism and class war against billionaires. Fighting for Main Street has become the moderate position.
Much of this reminds me of 2006, when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s war in Iraq, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and a looming financial collapse handed Congress to Democrats. But one thing is different. In 2006, the party won by recruiting economic conservatives with no interest in transformative legislation. We got Obamacare, which propped up private insurers, instead of universal public health coverage. We got a financial reform law that didn't break up the banks "too big to fail" and left them largely free to gamble, instead of a real New Deal-style overhaul of Wall Street. This November sent many new faces to Congress, like James Talarico, who, at least in his rhetoric, ran an all-out anti-oligarch, anti-tech, anti-Musk campaign in deep-red Texas. We are poised for a big legislative agenda that delivers for people.
A More Courageous Future
Watching the Democratic Party from the inside only feeds my Eastern European cynicism. And yet even I sense something very different in American politics. Only six years ago, supporting Palestinian liberation, diplomacy over militarism, transformative immigration policy and a strong economic security agenda put a candidate on the insurgent fringe. I ran for Congress on that platform in 2020. Today those positions are campaign pillars. DSA-endorsed challengers ran on them in solidly Democratic districts. So did many winning candidates from traditional backgrounds in red districts, up and down the ballot.
The rhetoric is not the only thing that has changed. There is also a new awareness that Democrats must seize the moment, legislate aggressively, and pursue ambitious reforms that meaningfully improve people’s lives. “Now is not the time” posturing is no longer acceptable, even to staunch party loyalists.
Generational change has been underway for some time, but it took the destructive policies of Trump’s regime to shift the Overton window. This cycle, young voters turned out in numbers unseen since the Obama years, ushering a more courageous class of politicians into office at every level of government. The winds are changing.