Seth Moulton is not a progressive; he will tell you that himself. He’s a New Democrat Coalition member, he rather prominently picked a fight by opposing trans participation in youth sports right after the 2024 elections, and he’s generally a down-the-line, center-left Democrat.
Yet the moment he jumped into a U.S. Senate primary against progressive Ed Markey, he essentially kicked off his campaign with the announcement that he would be returning all donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and would refuse any further contributions from them. “AIPAC has aligned itself too closely with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government,” Moulton wrote in a statement.
This is far from an isolated incident. Mallory McMorrow, running for Senate in Michigan, has called Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, and after appearing to solicit support from AIPAC in a leaked message, said she would not accept any. Likely 2028 candidate Pete Buttigieg flipped to support limiting arms sales to Israel, joining multiple former recipients of AIPAC cash. People like House Armed Services Committee ranking Democrat Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) and New Democrat caucus leader Brad Schneider (D-IL) and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), who are as squarely inside the pro-Israel foreign-policy establishment as anyone, are criticizing the Netanyahu government and favoring the use of U.S. leverage. The annual AIPAC-funded trip to Israel for freshman Democrats had low attendance.
Polling now shows Americans opposing military aid to Israel and sympathizing more with the Palestinians. The numbers among Democrats are a whopping 54-13 in favor of Palestine. This is at all levels of the party, including older voters. So unfolding events moved the center of gravity on this issue, and forced all factions of the Democratic Party to its side. But it didn’t happen in a vacuum. For all the discomfort over college students protesting on campuses, it played a major role in pushing attention and changing minds.
In other words, the issue led the politicians, not the other way around. College kids and activists don’t have a super PAC, and in 2024 their few champions in Congress actually lost ground amid an onslaught of AIPAC cash. But none of that mattered when public sentiment changed: Those in power got out in front of the parade and pretended to be leading it.
Related: Maine’s populist Senate candidate thinks we are in a new Gilded Age
I’m reminded of this when seeing the factions who dominate online discourse on the broad left become fans of and pull out all stops to defend political candidates. It would be incorrect to say that politicians don’t matter—they most certainly do—but they matter less than people might think, and are often better seen as instruments of power. Moving politicians to care about important issues is a more durable and proven avenue to political change than going about the thankless task of trying to install politicians in every position that matters who are perfect representations of your beliefs.
I didn’t know the name Graham Platner until one of our writers told me about his launch for a Maine Senate seat two months ago. There is definitely precedent from the John Fetterman experience to be skeptical of downwardly mobile candidates adopting the trappings of the working class. (Warren Platner, Graham’s grandfather, designed Windows on the World, and my parents had a Platner dinette set growing up, which they didn’t realize would become a prized object when they sold it after a move.)
But although I know I’m supposed to have a take about the tattoo designs chosen by a drunk 21-year-old Marine while on leave in Croatia, my best guide to what this person would do in office is, well, what he says he will do in office. And that platform leads with the affordability crisis and the dangers of a corrupt, billionaire-led economy, states that campaign finance reform is the necessary first step to unlocking progress, opposes ICE kidnappings and U.S. complicity in genocide, backs unions, wants to guarantee health care as a human right, and opposes concentrations of economic and political power.
What becomes clear is that the platform lines up generally where the rank and file of Democratic voters are today. That didn’t happen out of nowhere: The public prioritized affordability, candidates who took them seriously benefited, and that’s where the rest of the party went. The feeling that we’re in a morass of corruption and corporate-led government has been pervasive, and those who align against it are being rewarded.
Fighting corporate power has been a sleeper issue in the past, but it’s an animating one now. I did an interview a couple of weeks ago with Bob Brooks, the head of the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association, who is running in a critical swing seat in the Lehigh Valley. The interview was initially notable mostly for the incomparably loud snoring of Brooks’s pet bulldog. But I then asked him about a recent Senate hearing on the inability to procure fire trucks around the country, and he immediately perked up. “Three companies bought up the fire truck makers in the U.S.,” Brooks told me. “I drove a ladder truck, mid-mount. That same truck cost $750,000 when I was hired, now it’s $2 million. And the worst part, the lead time to get it is three to five years, it used to be 12 months.”
This union guy coming alive on fire truck manufacturing monopolies is again not something limited to firefighters. Joe Biden was literally nobody’s model for who to lead a revolution in anti-monopoly thinking; he was branded the senator for the banking industry while representing Delaware. The circumstances changed within the party, and he installed people like Lina Khan to rewrite the rules on competition. Winning the battle of ideas broadly mattered, not electing a champion of those ideas.
I also recently talked to Saikat Chakrabarti, an early employee at Stripe who cashed out and got into politics as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign manager and first chief of staff. He left to run a think tank that dealt a lot with industrial policy, and then decided to challenge Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco, gaining attention with a kickoff rally a few weeks ago that drew 700 people on a random Thursday.
“Most people in Congress spend six to eight hours a day calling donors for money,” Chakrabarti told me. “That’s your primary job, not trying to figure out what are the real solutions to what people are facing.” He was motivated to run after the Democratic paralysis when faced with the fascist tendencies of Donald Trump, and the belief that you could instead prove that democracy can be a force in improving lives and showing that it’s superior to authoritarian government. “The country wants a shock to the system, people are voting for any candidate calling for bold sweeping change,” he said.
If I showed you the rest of my notes from the interviews with a union firefighter and a cashed-out tech worker seeking the same job, but didn’t tell you which was which, it would be genuinely hard for you to correctly choose. Both are highlighting affordability concerns in housing and health care; both foreground the need for fighters; both think America should be building things again. (When I asked Chakrabarti about the AI bubble, he said the fact that half of the nation’s growth is coming from the data center build-out is “less about AI and more about how rest of the economy is doing jack shit!”) Both see the value in fresh candidates and not the same people who drove the party to its low approval ratings and deer-in-the-headlights stance in the face of the Trump wrecking crew.
In other words, they have drifted to the issues Americans tell them are what they should be fighting for: liberal on fiscal policy, guarded on imperial adventures, and desperate to smash the corrupt structures undergirding our democracy.
(For what it’s worth, Chakrabarti’s race is upside down because it looks increasingly like Pelosi will retire and try to handpick her successor. That’s not Chakrabarti and it’s not local state Sen. Scott Wiener, who jumped into the race this week to get ahead of Pelosi’s announcement. My point still stands.)
None of this totally lines up with the idea that there are “progressives” that must defeat the “establishment,” or that there are “fighting moderates” who have to rein in the party on social issues and beat the social justice warriors. I don’t think any of that is how politics actually works anymore. Treating politics like sports fandom where you stan your team and rage against the others loses sight of how change is better made by building terrain and moving public opinion so politicians are forced to walk onto your side.
Does this mean that electoral primaries are meaningless fights? I’m not saying that. You may see the recent controversies as relevant to Platner’s sincerity, which are important judgments that all voters make. And while two-term governor Janet Mills is talking about a surprising number of the same things as Platner, you might have a problem with a 79-year-old freshman Senator beginning a six-year term. (For my money, it is more relevant that Mills chooses to support maintaining the filibuster, an impediment to every single goal she claims to care about.)
But the political conversation online has obscured everything but questions of character, image, and affect. Where people came from or what identity they espouse matters less to me than who they plan to fight for. Rohit Chopra worked at McKinsey; Lina Khan went to Yale Law and teaches at Columbia; some of the biggest fighters in Washington were waitresses, and some of them never had a job other than politics.
If someone’s past or their temperament means that they can’t win election or effectively govern, I’m not going to spend my time making apologies for them. Tina Smith was an excellent senator after Al Franken. Nobody is indispensable. But this endless gauntlet of oppo research and response isn’t what a mature political movement spends its energy on. Changing the territory where any politician, friend or foe, feels comfortable is incredibly underrated. That’s a good use of time for anyone who wants to see a better America.