The New Wave Democrats

My favorite televised election-night reaction to last Tuesday’s Democratic sweep came from the redoubtable Chris Hayes on MS NOW. Contemplating all the unheralded Democratic victors in races that virtually no one thought would be in play, or even could be in play, the happily gobsmacked Hayes remarked, “I’ve never seen these people’s names before … I’m like, ‘Who’s this dude?!’”

Wave elections are “Who’s this dude” elections. They not only bring into power hitherto unheard-of candidates; they also extend a party’s majority into what has been thought of as alien, perhaps even enemy, terrain. And by so doing, they bring into a party’s ranks elected officials whose constituents likely have different concerns and needs than the party’s longtime voters.

That is exactly what happened in the immediately post-Watergate midterm election of 1974, when the Democrats’ clean sweep was even more extensive than this year’s. That year, the Democrats took 48 Republican House seats, and with a new generation of Democrats also replacing a host of Democratic old-timers, the party’s freshman class came to 76 newbies.

At the time, Democrats had already held for many decades most urban districts and most of the seats from the still largely Democratic South. The freshmen, by contrast, came disproportionately from affluent suburban districts that had long been Republican strongholds. And for better and worse, they came with priorities that were not entirely those of the big city or Southern Dems.

As two excellent studies (John Lawrence’s The Class of ’74 and Tom Edsall’s The New Politics of Inequality) both documented, the new Democrats weren’t avidly seeking to raise the minimum wage or boost union power. On the plus side, they raised environmental concerns not previously heard on Capitol Hill; they ended the residual funding for what still remained of our Vietnam War; and they enacted party reforms that weakened the seniority system that had cemented aging Southern fossils atop some key congressional committees.

On the minus side, they backed a deregulatory agenda, to the point that some of them ended up joined at the hip with big business. By the early 1980s, one California congressman, Tony Coelho, had been so successful at soliciting corporate donations for centrist Democratic candidates that Tom Edsall reported the ratio of right-wing contributions (which included those from businesses) to left-wing contributions (which included those from unions) to every Democratic congressional candidate in 1980 was 1-to-1. That was the statistical way of saying the party had an identity crisis, or, if you prefer, no particular purpose. Anyone looking for the seeds of the Democrats’ estrangement from America’s working class might find some embryonic evidence in the party’s shifting politics of the 1970s and ’80s.

Like the gang of ’74, today’s Democratic freshmen hail from strange and new terrains, including the formerly Republican expanses of Montana, North Carolina, and Texas. But I’m not terribly anxious about the Democrats reviving the sins of their Coelho-class fathers, and here’s why: the economy.

The year 1974 might have marked the apex of the post–World War II 30-year period of broadly shared prosperity, during which, for the first and only time in American history, the real wages of American workers had doubled, thanks to union power and the ongoing strength of New Deal reforms. Under those conditions, it’s understandable that the Class of ’74 and their successors infused their work with post-materialist perspectives. America appeared to have created the world’s first majority middle class; it was time, they said, to turn our to-do lists elsewhere.

Today, of course, we’ve gone from peak broadly shared prosperity to peak economic inequality. The majority of Americans struggle with the costs of health insurance, child care, and housing. Compared to 1980, the percentage of the national wealth owned by the richest 200 Americans—the top 0.0001 percent—has increased by more than a factor of seven. The majority of Americans are well aware of the huge influence that a new generation of oligarchs wield over not just our economic life but our political life as well. (On the networks’ midterm election exit poll, voters were asked whether the American economy favored the wealthy or was generally fair to all. Seventy percent said it favored the wealthy.)

These concerns aren’t limited to liberals, much less socialists. If they were, there would not have been so great a wave—if, indeed, a wave at all. Fortunately, those concerns were addressed by virtually every Democratic candidate over the past year, the newbies no less than the veterans. The Republicans’ reliance on the same oligarchs who’ve been madly building data centers, who’ve been Donald Trump’s last line of political defense, whose clout, conjoined to Trump’s rule and the GOP’s unitary executive nuttiness, poses a threat to American democracy—all this has been grist for Democratic candidates’ mills this year, whether they’ve been running in lefty college towns or Republican farm belts where the price of diesel fuel has stilled the occasional tractor.

That doesn’t mean that the class of ’26 will have all the same concerns and priorities as AOC or Jamie Raskin or Maxine Waters or Greg Casar. They won’t—just as they won’t agree among themselves on a host of issues. But it does mean that expanding Democratic representation to new and strange terrains won’t put the expanded party at cross-purposes with itself when it comes to the need for greater popular economic control. Like Chris Hayes, I don’t know who all these dudes are, but I know they all represent a slice of a public suffering under an unfair and dysfunctional economy, and share at least some ideas for how to make it more fair and more functional. Some won’t go as far as I’d like in reforming the economy, but their increased numbers mean that they’ll have the power, if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, to make some of those reforms. For now, that’ll do.