Progressive Caucus Wants to Deliver on Democratic Promises

Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), appearing with four progressives who won in swing seats in the midterms, called for Democrats to pass populist legislation “every week” in the next term focusing on corporate corruption, lower costs, and higher wages. The Progressive Caucus, which expects to welcome at least 25 new members, and will begin the upcoming 120th Congress with more than 100, is putting down an early marker on how Democrats should conduct themselves, with what is likely to be one of the biggest House majorities since the early 1990s.

“We have won immense amounts of political power, and now is the most important time to deliver to keep that power,” said Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), a vice chair of the caucus and co-chair of the CPC’s political action committee, which spent millions of dollars in swing seats this year. “The way we’re going to keep Democrats in office is by passing bold pieces of legislation that show you when you vote Democrats in office, your life will get better.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), a former CPC chair who still co-chairs the PAC, concurred. “We are not popular as a Democratic Party across the country right now,” Jayapal said. “We’ve got a shot to show that we can deliver on the bold populist change people ran on and won on.”

The commonality of the theme builds on a strategy Casar put together last year, his first term as CPC chair. He devised a series of “battleship” bills laser-focused on economic populist topics that candidates could run on anywhere across the country. The idea was to win in 2026 on these bills, pass them in 2027 and 2028, and if they were vetoed, run on them again in the next elections, setting up the agenda that a new Democratic president could sign into law. That raises Democratic credibility on key issues, sets a party agenda, and forces Republicans to make lots of uncomfortable votes, all at once.

“I hope [Donald] Trump signs laws to ban stock trading and take on corporate price-gouging,” Casar said, referencing a couple of the battleship bills. “But if he vetoes them, that should be what we run on.”

The first part of the strategy was successful. Aided by outside forces like the Working Families Party, Justice Democrats, and more, the CPC endorsed nine candidates in so-called “red to blue” races where they were trying to flip seats. Thus far, they’ve won six of those seats, lost two in particularly red turf (in one, Justin Pearson in Tennessee, in a Trump +21 seat, significantly overperformed the national swing), and may still pull out the last one in Maine, where Matt Dunlap is down by fewer than 200 votes. The ultimate verdict there may be rendered in a ranked-choice runoff.

Victorious swing-seat progressives included California’s Rep.-elect Randy Villegas, who is currently up by 32 points in a district that Donald Trump won by two in 2024. (About a third of the ballots are left to count, but the typical trend in that state is that the vote gets more Democratic with the late-arriving ballots.) “Thanks to Reps. Casar and Jayapal and Frost for being there with us, especially in a tough primary election where we had to take on our own party,” Villegas said on the call. He said he would be a “day one co-sponsor” of Jayapal’s Medicare for All bill. “My district has the most Medicaid recipients of any in the country, and we will fight to restore funding for that,” Villegas said. “But the American people are demanding more in this moment.”

Rep.-elect Katy Padilla Stout (D-TX) won by eight points in a seat Trump won 57-42 in 2024. She was part of the massive Texas wave that swept the state on Tuesday. “In a district which many people said was moderate, we’re fighting for the people, and we’re fighting for what families need and what Texans need,” Padilla Stout said. “And that can work in any district.”

Rep.-elect Sam Forstag (D-MT) won a Trump +11 seat; he currently leads by three points in a large swath of western Montana that includes blue dots like Missoula and Bozeman, but which Democrats had failed to carry for years. As I reported two years ago, housing has been in crisis in Montana for close to a decade, with prices and homelessness tripling in some areas, Forstag said: “Our campaign was premised on the idea that everyone in this country ought to be able to work a good job and get a roof over their head.”

And Rep.-elect Will Lawrence (D-MI) faced an onslaught of the most spending by Republicans of any battleground House seat in the country. Yet his organizing skill—his campaign knocked on 250,000 doors in the district, a large majority of its total households—was enough to carry him to a three-point victory. Lawrence made opposition to hyperscaler data center deployment a signature of his campaign. “When we’re not taking the corporate PAC money and have a background as organizers, we know how to listen, we can take the pulse” of the people, Lawrence said.

Other progressive winners in swing seats included firefighter Bob Brooks (D-PA) and ironworker Brian Poindexter (D-OH), along with Sens.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-MI) and Troy Jackson (D-ME). CPC members Reps. Nellie Pou (D-NJ) and Darren Soto (D-FL) were running in Trump-won districts—in Soto’s case, a gerrymandered seat Trump won by over 17 points—but both won re-election with giant swings above the national average; Pou won by a whopping 35 points, while Soto squeaked by in a swing of close to 19 points.

CPC leaders also noted that candidates who pitched themselves as moderate ran on working-class and progressive issues virtually everywhere, including ending the Iran war, opposing oligarchs, and fighting corruption that has an impact on people’s wallets. Candidates attacked Republicans repeatedly for taking corporate money, and numerous ads called for pausing data center development.

“Nobody thinks this election was about going back to status quo or being the party of nervous lawyers that tinker around the edges,” Casar said. He offered a similar rebuke to Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), who said in a media interview last week that Democrats shouldn’t pass anything that Donald Trump would be sure to veto.

All of these candidates agreed that what they need to hold the seat in the next election is a bold agenda that they can take to voters to prove that they worked in their interests. “We can’t just offer people ‘not Trump,’ we have to offer people a vision for something more,” Villegas said. “We are the majority makers in this Congress that helped flip these seats.”

Frost mentioned the usual dilemma for Democrats seeking a bolder agenda: The leadership often calibrates whether to pass pieces of legislation by what it would mean for those “majority makers” in tough districts. With the new majority makers, that calculus could change. “It’s part of the reason why CPC PAC put in the time and effort to help expand the front line with progressive members who will be very valued,” Frost said.

Some of the kinds of bills progressives talked about needing to pass included increasing the minimum wage, dealing with super PAC money, and making health care a human right. Lawrence added that ending the endless wars in the Middle East had to be a primary focus. “I heard across this district that no more weapons or tax dollars should be going to Israel,” he said. “People are desperate and hungry for change, they don’t want to see this happening on our dime.” Anti-war sentiment was a key message taken up by winning candidates across the ideological spectrum.

Casar, who said that the caucus has a “productive relationship” with incoming House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, said that oversight would be a key priority, and that artificial intelligence CEOs should be brought in for questioning. Casar has been an aggressive leader on AI over the past year, calling for an AI tax to assist working people and writing a resolution to reject any bailout of AI companies if they get into financial trouble. “This is an earthquake that’s upending American politics,” he said. “We have to be on the right side of this issue.”

The overall message from chair Casar and his lieutenants is that winning fancier offices and nicer titles cannot be enough. The purpose of politics is to govern, not to win power. And they want to do something with that power.

“We have all the ingredients we need to make sure we’re delivering on rooting out corruption, lowering prices, raising wages, and taking on corporate greed,” said Casar.