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BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA – “My name is Randy Villegas, and I’m for Medicare for All.”
That was how Villegas, a 31-year-old Democratic candidate for Congress, opened a health care town hall in late August for close to 100 residents, most of them Latino. He was speaking at Salon Juarez, a dance hall that hosts quinceañeras and weddings in a historic section of Bakersfield known as Old Town Kern. Preceding him on stage was Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), the progressive House member who is flirting with filling the left lane in the 2028 presidential race. Sandy Reding, a president of the California Nurses Association (CNA), one of America’s most left-wing unions, spoke before Khanna. The Working Families Party, which supports progressive populists across the country, had a table along one side.
You wouldn’t know that this is one of America’s most hotly contested swing seats.
Donald Trump won California’s 22nd Congressional District, located in the state’s Central Valley, by 1.9 points in 2024. But Villegas, a local school board member, beat a sitting state legislator backed by the national Democratic establishment in the primary. He will face Republican incumbent Rep. David Valadao in November, and he hasn’t calibrated his message to fit the typical mold of how to win a toss-up race. “I will fight for health care as a human right in Congress,” he told the crowd. “I will not bow down to billionaires.”
Villegas’s pitch started to make sense after he polled his audience. “Raise your hand if you or someone you love relies on Medicaid,” he asked. Far more than half the crowd raised their hands; two-thirds of district residents (and 87 percent of all children) are enrolled in the government health insurance program for the poor, the largest percentage in the country.
The candidate continued. “Raise your hand if you or someone you love drive to Tijuana for drugs or medical care.” Tijuana, Mexico, is more than four hours away. About half the crowd raised their hands. Last year, Valadao vowed in writing to oppose any Medicaid cuts that would harm his constituents, then gave in and supported $1 trillion in cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The uninsured rate in California is expected to nearly double by 2030, according to state researchers. And while most of those cuts were time-released for after the midterms, local hospitals are already bracing for a projected $90 million in annual losses. Dignity Health in Bakersfield laid off 57 workers in July, including 33 nurses; Adventist Health issued another 22 layoff notices the same month.
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Driving around the city, I saw Dignity Health and Adventist emergency rooms that were packed. Cancer and asthma rates in the Central Valley are elevated, and the maternal mortality rate is 34 percent higher than any other region in California. Reding, who is a local operating room nurse, said that Bakersfield had the second-lowest rate of primary care physicians in the country, and was dead last in specialists; women drive two hours to deliver babies. “CNA supports Medicare for All,” she said. “We’re not going to do this incremental stuff.”
When I caught up with Villegas, I asked why he thought his message would work. “I personally don’t think that these are ideas that only resonate with the left end of the political spectrum,” he replied. “I have talked to Republicans at the door who agree that our health care system is broken and they would like to see health care for all. I’ve talked to independents who agree that we shouldn’t be wasting a billion dollars a day in this war in Iran that nobody asked for … We have to offer people a vision for something more.”
The conventional wisdom says that progressives can’t win swing seats, that they turn off too many independents and Republicans needed to build winning coalitions. But several insurgents will challenge that notion across the country this fall, from California to Maine, Michigan to Montana. The districts are each unique, and the issues being highlighted are diverse. But the common thread is a relentless focus on the working class and the economy, and a boldness often lacking in a Democratic Party that’s criticized for poll-tested caution and a deficit of principles.
The new majority makers perceive that voters who are frustrated with a system that doesn’t respond to their needs will embrace greater government intervention and solutions at the scale of their problems. They have welcomed in national figures like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who are supposed to be personae non gratae in swing-seat America. They have challenged the handpicked choices of the political establishment and beaten them; they are now receiving support from the same establishment. And if they win, they will have forged a different path to political success, and potentially a different path to governing.
“For too long, the strategy has been to recruit candidates with huge networks of money to win, and then leave the status quo in place to hold onto a shred of power,” said Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The real transformation will come if we win enough of these swing seats with progressive members who say we need to act if we want to win, instead of preaching inaction.”
I talked to more than 25 members of Congress, candidates, campaign officials, polling experts, donors, and constituents about whether progressives can win where it’s toughest. While leftists toppling incumbents drew headlines throughout primary season, whether people like Randy Villegas can subvert political stereotypes and defeat Republicans will more strongly define where Democrats go as a party.
MATT DUNLAP HAS BEEN A STATEWIDE OFFICIAL in Maine for nearly 22 years, first as secretary of state and then as auditor. (Both are selected by the Maine legislature.) Last year, he was approached to run for Congress in Maine’s Second District, where moderate Democrat Jared Golden has been holding down a seat that voted for Trump three times. Local Democrats had soured on Golden for supporting Trump’s tariffs and hyper-aggressive immigration enforcement; his favorability in the district had collapsed to just 16 percent.
“We got a lot of pushback from Washington folks, saying ‘Don’t do it,’” Dunlap told me. Four weeks after Dunlap entered the race, Golden decided not to seek re-election, despairing that “the most extreme, pugilistic elements” of the Democratic Party were “calling the shots.”
Before the primary, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the campaign arm of House Democrats, endorsed state Sen. Joe Baldacci, whose brother had served in Congress, in a rare show of muscle. Dunlap recalled one moment that exemplified the difference between cautious moderates and the new majority makers. “When we were debating … Baldacci said he would support Medicare over 55,” Dunlap explained. “I said JFK didn’t support sending someone halfway to the moon.”
Baldacci won a plurality in the first round, but under Maine’s ranked-choice system, Dunlap was able to prevail. He thinks the DCCC’s bigfooting played a role. “The thing that upset people wasn’t that DCCC endorsed Baldacci, but that they endorsed at all,” he said. “One of the questions I would get was ‘Can you be an independent voice?’ I’d say, ‘Look what [Democrats are] doing to me!’”
Dunlap and his team see him as a good fit for the district: a working-class northern Mainer who once ran the state’s Sportsman’s Alliance and chaired the Fisheries and Wildlife Committee in the legislature, while also being committed to economic populism. He’s running on Medicare for All, tax fairness, and job opportunity in a heavily rural district where paper mills and shoe factories have either closed down or gone overseas. He sees his message as returning to issues FDR and Lyndon Johnson fought for: lending a hand to people stressed over the high cost of living and anxious about the future.
“What people really bridle at, this is the political phenomenon, they feel left behind,” he said. “The Democratic Party once owned northern Maine, now there’s no Democratic representative or senator north of my town … I’ve talked to people, Democrats in the state legislature who left the party, and they say, ‘When did we stop fighting for working people?’”
Recent polling aligns with Dunlap’s perspective. The Working Families Party surveyed registered voters in 18 toss-up districts. The survey responses sketched an ideal candidate who is somewhat off the charts of the progressive-moderate factional fight; someone independent of the party establishment and willing to challenge it to push fundamental change over incrementalism. That result held for political independents and even self-described moderates. A separate poll looked at issues that would motivate swing voters into choosing Democrats: They responded most favorably to taxing the rich and Medicare for All. Blue Rose Research asked people about their ideal political party; even self-described moderates chose moderate ideas only 8 percent of the time.
“Election result after election result, poll after poll suggests a majority in this country across background, region, even ideology that are decidedly disgusted with a decadent elite and political and corporate establishment that is making their lives harder and less affordable and isn’t offering any relief at all or speaking to our aspirations,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party.
While in previous cycles, WFP has tended toward solid-blue seats, this year it branched out into toss-up districts. It has primarily backed candidates from the working class, like Villegas in California, alongside several with union backgrounds.
“If you know what it’s like to work three jobs at a time and take classes and still come up short on rent, you might fight harder on housing.”
Sam Forstag
Brian Poindexter is an ironworker and local city councilmember from the Cleveland area who drew a political gift when incumbent Republican Rep. Max Miller faced an array of allegations of spousal abuse and refused to drop out. Bob Brooks in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania heads the state firefighters’ union. “I think the system has been rigged for the rich for a while,” Brooks said in an interview. “People are tired of billionaires, millionaires, and lawyers who don’t represent them.”
Another working-class candidate is Sam Forstag, who served as a smokejumper with the U.S. Forest Service. Smokejumpers parachute into forests during active wildfires, cutting down trees to create a barrier that stops the advance. Forstag decided to run for Montana’s First Congressional District, in the western part of the state, after Donald Trump fired thousands of workers at his agency, where he was union vice president. “Some of the folks I work with, my union members, voted for the schlubs taking away basic services I needed,” he told me. “I didn’t feel like anyone was running to reach these people who swung to the right.”
Forstag is running on reversing government cuts, taxing the rich, ending Medicare privatization, ensuring affordable child care, raising the minimum wage, and making it easier to join a union. He believes that increasing representation in Congress must include economic representation from across the income spectrum. “If you know what it’s like to work three jobs at a time and take classes and still come up short on rent, you might fight harder on housing,” he said. And when he needed assistance to win the primary, he reached out to an unlikely figure in a district Trump won by 11 points: AOC.
“What she and I have in common, we both know what it’s like to be a working person struggling to get by,” Forstag said. “In our last election, we had low turnout, a lot of young people didn’t come out, we didn’t give people cause for hope … When she came out, that got a lot of people excited.” Turnout rose 17 percent, and Forstag beat the Democrats’ 2024 gubernatorial candidate, Ryan Busse.
Welcoming progressives to the district didn’t end with the primary: CPC chair Greg Casar stopped by to campaign in late August. But Forstag also has the support of four former Republican state legislators and is running “civil discourse” town halls to bring together people from both parties. He thinks the core beliefs that people from parties share aren’t getting heard in Washington. “The next fight is changing the priorities of the Democratic Party so it speaks to me and my co-workers and union members,” he said.
RO KHANNA LIKES TO TELL A STORY about meeting Randy Villegas. He held a town hall in Bakersfield last year, as legislation to extend the Trump tax cuts and slash Medicaid was being written. Hundreds of people showed up, appealing to their congressman, David Valadao, to fight the cuts. “This guy introduces me, and I say, ‘Who is this young guy, so eloquent?’” Khanna explained. It was Villegas. Khanna remembers telling him, “If you ever run for office, you have my endorsement.” Valadao voted for the cuts, Villegas entered the race, and Khanna backed him.
Villegas’s parents, who were at the recent town hall in August, migrated to America from Mexico. They opened an auto repair shop in Bakersfield and made extra money at a swap meet on the weekends. Like most kids in the district, young Randy depended on Medicaid, food stamps, and free school breakfasts. “The same programs I grew up on are all under threat from this administration, because David Valadao is being a spineless coward,” he told me last year.
While at college in 2016, Villegas met Bernie Sanders as he ran for president and got hooked on the political revolution. He obtained a Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz and returned to the Central Valley, teaching political science at a community college and helping run the family repair business. He later joined the Working Families Party as a member representative, an organizing position. The WFP’s bread and butter is local politics; when a seat came up on the Visalia Unified School District Board of Trustees, Villegas got himself appointed and then won the seat twice.
“When you hear the Democratic establishment claim what they want, they couldn’t have made [Villegas] in a lab,” said Mitchell, the Working Families Party leader. “They say we need working-class Latino folks to come back to the Democratic Party, we need young men … He’s all of those things.” Yet in the 22nd District primary, the establishment bet on Jasmeet Bains, a moderate doctor who served two terms in the state assembly. In California, the top two primary vote-getters advance to the general election. Only three were running: Valadao, Bains, and Villegas. So it really was a head-to-head matchup about what kind of candidate can appeal to Valley voters.
Before the primary, the DCCC again intervened, adding Bains to its “Red to Blue” program that opens access to polling and financial resources. It even funded a joint ad buy with Bains on local cable. It was a curiosity in a district that is 74 percent Latino but in which Democrats had never run a Hispanic candidate. “We made very clear when the DCCC started to invest against Villegas in the primary that we thought it was a big mistake,” said Casar. “We should let Democratic voters pick who wins the primary.”
Read: Greg Casar is organizing to win
The race was one of the most expensive House primaries in the country, and Villegas turned the millions in attack ads against him into an asset. He highlighted how Bains and Valadao took corporate PAC money from the same 53 companies, including pharmaceutical, oil and gas, utility, and railroad interests. Bains was so thrown by this that she compared the claim to political violence. The message fit a political moment where both parties are increasingly seen as too close to corporate interests; one volunteer told me she used Bains’s PAC donor list to flip voters.
Villegas beat Bains handily, by nearly six points, and Valadao took less than 41 percent of the vote in the first round, a sign of weakness. It was the first DCCC loss of the primary cycle. Members criticized the organization for using their money to intervene in local decision-making, and not even well. “I communicated to the Democratic leadership that if Randy won, he’ll have proved himself,” Casar said.
Within a week of the primary, Villegas got on Red to Blue. House Majority PAC, which is run by the Democratic establishment, funded a poll in July showing Villegas leading Valadao by four points, and the group has already aired preliminary ads in the district, with millions more dollars planned. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) held a retreat for Red to Blue candidates in La Jolla, California, in August that Villegas attended, and party regulars have repeatedly raised money for him in nearby Los Angeles. (At one fundraiser, Villegas showed off his experience as a high school snare drummer, sitting in with a jazz band.)
Mike Vorhaus, a Democratic donor who worked in the Clinton and Obama White Houses, has supported Villegas from the beginning. “I come at it as what Zohran’s people would call an establishment liberal,” he said. “A lot of people said I was wasting money on Randy … [but] I believe that transportation, health care, child care are good issues, winnable issues.” He believes that this year, being perceived as progressive “will help in more districts than not.”
For decades it has been ingrained in Democratic voters’ minds that the most electable candidates are moderates.
It may also benefit Villegas to have not been the establishment choice. “We had to beat the establishment in our own party in that primary election,” he told me. “And I think what that shows folks [is] I’m not here to bend the knee to party leadership or to a president, or to even the party itself. I’m here to fight for the Central Valley.”
THERE JUST AREN’T THAT MANY EXAMPLES of progressive candidates running in swing seats, let alone winning. (Outliers include former Reps. Katie Porter in Orange County, California, and Matt Cartwright in Scranton, Pennsylvania; former Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio; and current Sen. Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin.) That’s because the dominant conversation in toss-up seats is always about whether the Democrat can win, and for decades it has been ingrained in Democratic voters’ minds that the most electable candidates are moderates.
In fact, there’s a cottage industry dedicated to proving this empirically. At the website Split Ticket, Lakshya Jain has constructed a candidate quality model that takes its name, WAR, from a baseball statistic that judges players by how much they contribute to a team’s success (WAR stands for “Wins Above Replacement”). The model, which Jain has run for all federal races since 2018, controls for the partisanship and demographics of a particular seat, candidate incumbency, and the quality of the opponent to determine the expected vote spread in a race. Then it compares that to the outcome, to see whether candidates exceed or fall short of the benchmark.
Jain’s analysis finds that members of the Blue Dog Coalition, a small group of moderate House Democrats, perform 5 percent higher than members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and 9 percent above members affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America. The data shows some progressive success stories—Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) in Detroit, or longtime populist Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) in Toledo—and the delta between mainstream progressives and mainstream moderates (like from the larger New Democrat Coalition) is relatively slight. But Jain insisted that the advantage for moderates is real and important.
“Moderation is generally beneficial,” he told me. “That’s not to say that progressives can’t win tough elections. It’s to say they are generally starting from a slightly harder task.”
My first question was about how we generate meaning from elections that are not seriously contested. This year, the Cook Political Report lists 366 of the 435 House races as either solid Republican or Democrat, with another 31 seats likely to go to each party’s nominee. Those races, about 90 percent of all House elections, see little or no media attention, outside advertising support, debates, or any other trappings of a real contest. Many members campaign more elsewhere than in their own districts, and often give away campaign donations to candidates who need the money more.
Anything—a randomly high-spending but doomed opponent, a nagging hyperlocal issue, the weather—can impact margin of victory in elections where the outcome is predetermined. Isn’t ranking high and low performers in these seats like evaluating the Los Angeles Rams’ Super Bowl hopes based on its preseason record? Jain responded that the trend holds even if you limit the analysis to competitive races, control for fundraising and outside party support, or apply any other factor. “I don’t like this thing where you throw your hands up,” he said. “You can show overperformance.”
Jain’s model has defenders and critics. Some, like pollster Elliott Morris, say that moderation could have added 1 to 1.5 points to a Democrat’s vote share, with substantial uncertainty. At the high end, that’s not nothing; it would make a difference in several seats. But Morris believes other factors—incumbency, fundraising, previous election victories—play a bigger role.
Others see claims about moderate electability as an ideological cudgel to cement status quo politics in an anti-establishment moment. “The question is predicated on the idea that what we’ve been doing has been working, but it hasn’t,” said Jenifer Ancona, chief strategy officer at Way to Win, which advises candidates.
The most aggressive rebuttal to Jain came from political scientists Jake Grumbach and Adam Bonica, who allege that adjustments in the Jain model magnify the moderate advantage. (Jain explains this by saying his model is about what’s left over after accounting for common overperformance factors like incumbency, and that moderation is “a finding of the model.”) Bonica and Grumbach’s own paper, which surveys 2016 to 2024, finds “no clear evidence of an extremism penalty for congressional candidates.” To them, candidate performance is subject to far too many variables, such as an individual reputation or “brand” that may not be transferable to alternative candidates taking the same positions. While it would be ignorant to say that candidate quality cannot be perceived at all, what that search may unearth, in their reading, is the logical yet unusable fact that good politicians are good politicians.
“We’re pushing against the consultant class idea that, in an era of quantitative analysis, pushes a scientific number that candidates buy,” Grumbach told me. “Any credible commentator should say the answer is uncertain. People who have a strong answer on this are selling something … But it’s incredibly hard to sell uncertainty to mass audiences.”
One thing that’s more certain is that we’re in a time of wild swings in the national political mood. Congress or the presidency has changed parties in 10 of the last 11 elections. A red or blue wave can wash over any ripple in candidate quality, but the swings show that public opinion has veered strongly anti-system, with lost faith in institutions both political and economic. While economic concerns amid rising inflation are paramount now, the broader sentiment is one of having their needs unmet, lacking a voice in their future, and feeling subjugated by elites. Candidates who speak to that, regardless of where they fit on an ideological spectrum, have the potential to connect with today’s voters.
“I think what we’re talking about is the center position,” Forstag said. “The majority of Americans think they have been left behind by both parties.”
This makes a quantitative approach of left vs. center seem like a relic of the past. “You can ask people if they want more moderate or more progressive candidates, but they don’t really care. They want a fighter,” Ancona said. “We have to recognize that we’re in a new moment right now.”
IN PAST CYCLES, IN THE RARE INSTANCES when the party campaign arms failed to install their favorites, progressives have grumbled that resources would be denied to the victor, leaving them unprotected in the general election. Adam Green, who heads the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, calls this getting “Mandela Barnes-ed,” named after the Democratic nominee in Wisconsin’s U.S. Senate race in 2022.
Barnes, then the state’s lieutenant governor, survived a tough primary against two wealthy opponents, only to face an onslaught of right-wing attack ads after winning. Barnes was broke and had no support from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) in those early post-primary days; he ultimately lost by a single point. Not being defined as a radical in August could have made a difference in November.
There are other examples, like Kara Eastman, a progressive running for Nebraska’s purple House seat around Omaha, who was outspent 2-to-1 in 2018 and saw House Majority PAC pull planned ads for her in the homestretch. Even before the election, centrist group Third Way boasted that her imminent loss showed that left-wing candidates can’t compete. Progressives funded a late ad, and Eastman lost by only two points. In 2022, resources were similarly denied to Jamie McLeod-Skinner in an Oregon swing seat, and she also lost by two.
Jain said that Eastman underperformed in those years and more money wouldn’t have helped. “Eastman doesn’t fairly represent what progressives can look like electorally,” he said. But the broader question many progressive organizers had was whether party organs routinely created a self-fulfilling prophecy by denying resources and support to progressives in tight races, “proving” their ineffectiveness. It’s hard enough to win a swing seat; it’s harder when you’re running against both parties.
Despite this record, the DCCC seems to be mostly playing nice this year. Primary voters have disagreed with the DCCC on the most electable candidate three times this year: Villegas, Dunlap, and Amish Shah in Arizona’s First Congressional District. All three are now on Red to Blue; Dunlap got named the day before I spoke to him, after two months of conversations. House Majority PAC communications director CJ Warnke said the PAC would “without a doubt” be spending in those three battleground seats.
Working-class candidates Poindexter, Forstag, and Brooks are also on Red to Blue. An analysis of ad reservations by House Democratic groups shows little difference based on ideology, though those reservations can always be pulled.
“I credit the House leadership and progressives for coming together in those partnerships,” said Casar, who has worked with more moderate members on an agenda that can play anywhere. “We’re going to show that progressives can not only win in red areas but overperform in areas that are disillusioned by both parties.”
The DSCC’s embrace of progressives has been more tense. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer angered many by off-handedly telling The Washington Post that Democrats “have a whole bunch of different paths” to retake a majority without Michigan, where his favored candidate Rep. Haley Stevens lost to left-wing populist Abdul El-Sayed.
El-Sayed’s main slogan—money in your pocket, money out of politics, and Medicare for All—matches the positions of other progressives. But the salience of the Israel-Palestine issue in Michigan, and the importance of that topic to Schumer, has made the partnership more fraught. Senate Majority PAC did immediately run ads attacking El-Sayed’s opponent Mike Rogers as a shill for endless war, and sources indicate both sides are working together. In Maine, where Schumer’s choice, Gov. Janet Mills, also failed, Schumer warmed to former state legislator Troy Jackson, a replacement after Graham Platner’s campaign imploded, even though Jackson is running on essentially the same platform as El-Sayed.
In the primary, El-Sayed underperformed in some rural areas and inner-city Detroit, as older Black voters stuck with Stevens. But Stevens quickly moved to endorse her primary opponent, as the usual united front works in a progressive’s favor this time around. And the real electability question in the midterms is whether Republican candidates like Mike Rogers can survive the lead weight that is his lockstep support for Donald Trump.
AIPAC funding against El-Sayed is a potential factor, but Rogers took the extraordinary step of asking AIPAC not to run super PAC ads during the election, fearing that they would lead to blowback given the unpopularity of Israeli military aid.
Some see El-Sayed’s bid as the clearest test of progressive strength in swing areas. “We heard so many people in 2020 say I love [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren, but she can’t win the presidency,” said Green. “The only way to create conditions where that doesn’t happen again is to prove the point in 2026 … if a guy named Abdul promoting Medicare for All, promising to shake up the system, can win, voters can follow their heart.”
THE NEW MAJORITY MAKERS believe Medicare for All has crossover appeal at a time of Medicaid cuts and skyrocketing insurance costs after subsidies expired for millions of Americans. “The only reason Medicare for All is progressive is we haven’t done it yet,” Dunlap said. “Before we did Medicare that was progressive; now it’s a bedrock of the American system.”
Some lawmakers insist that the public is ready for change. Rep. Susan Wild (D-PA) recently posted on social media, “[I]n one of the most challenging purple districts in the country, I signed on to Medicare 4 All the first week I got there … Not once did I get shit for it from voters, and the Rs never even attacked me for it, which sums up how popular it is.”
In a place like the Central Valley with so many constituents already on public insurance, there’s little stigma attached to government-run health care. A popular line from Villegas is “Nobody should have to fight cancer and their congressman at the same time.” And after Hakeem Jeffries, whose campaign messaging has otherwise been pretty progressive this year, disavowed a Medicare for All bill he had co-sponsored in the past, it gave people like Villegas a golden opportunity to distance himself from the establishment and hit another topic: the role of big money. “I think the biggest problem is corporate influence in politics,” he said at the town hall when someone brought up Jeffries’s statement. “They don’t care who you are as long as you do their bidding. We need to get corporate money out of politics, and then see who takes those positions.”
Other swing seats demand other priorities. Montana has had a housing crisis for years, and Sam Forstag can talk about finding his first apartment in Missoula for $300 a month, while his sister had to negotiate her landlord down to $1,500 a month some years later. Dunlap stressed that Maine is a big heating oil state, and that the stalled war in Iran is driving prices to uncomfortable levels. “I know people who sit under blankets during the day because they can’t heat their homes,” he said. “That’s when heating oil was $2.50 a gallon and now it’s $6.”
The progressive majority maker with the most unique and influential pitch this election cycle has been Will Lawrence, running in Michigan’s Seventh District around Lansing. A co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, Lawrence wasn’t given much chance in the primary against two establishment opponents with national security credentials. But he was one of the first candidates nationwide to prominently feature opposition to data centers in his advertising, which spoke to a broader narrative about whether tech billionaires should decide the future of local communities.
“It’s not something I expected to talk about when we got in the race last August,” Lawrence said on a press call recently. “It became clearly obvious to me that this is a totally cross-partisan rebellion happening from the bottom up.”
The data center discussion dominated the primary, became the sleeper issue of the entire election, and defined Lawrence as a candidate. It brought support from Trump voters and people less inclined to choose a progressive. Energized volunteers knocked on over 100,000 doors. And Lawrence won his primary by nearly 15 points on high turnout.
He’s kept up the data center focus in the general election, and his Republican opponent, incumbent Rep. Tom Barrett, is scrambling to align with constituents angry about the facilities, even as he voted to strip local control from cities and states through a moratorium on artificial intelligence regulations last year. Lawrence’s crusade has pushed his fellow majority makers: Villegas recently announced his support for a data center moratorium.
Lawrence decided to let his DSA membership expire over the summer, shedding a label perceived to be a drag in competitive races. But from the beginning, he made the strategic choice to elevate issues with cross-partisan appeal, like the unpopular war in Iran, the rising cost of living, or the rise and abuse of Flock cameras that read license plates and can track individual movements.
“I find the whole national discourse around ideology and labels to be so reductive and counterproductive,” he told me. “We’re here for the values we’ve been talking about throughout the campaign and the policies that are most urgent for people in the district: stopping data centers and surveillance, stopping outrageous and expensive wars, and getting rid of money in politics.”
Lawrence is the only Democratic candidate in a toss-up race not on the DCCC’s Red to Blue list as of late August. But party officials told the Prospect that they were impressed with Lawrence’s campaign and grassroots volunteer base. Before the primary, Warnke of House Majority PAC said that it “plans to support the Democratic nominee and flip this district blue,” and several million dollars in ad time has been reserved. Plus, House Majority PAC released a poll after the primary showing Lawrence up by two points on Barrett.
That’s at least the fifth race with polling showing progressives winning swing-seat general elections, including Dunlap, Brooks, Poindexter, and Villegas. A poll Forstag released in June had his race tied.
We’ll see what happens after all the attack ads and debates. But it does not appear yet that voters are shrinking from candidates who allegedly are too out of step to win in the battlegrounds. I asked Jain about this, and he still expects Blue Dogs to overperform this year. But Split Ticket’s election forecast projects Villegas, Brooks, Poindexter, Lawrence, and even El-Sayed to win. “The progressive movement is not inherently unelectable,” he said. “I think progressives have latched onto ideas that are less toxic … [they] will do better in 2026 than they did in 2020.”
AT THE END OF THE PRIMARY, when Lawrence needed a financial boost, fundraising juggernaut El-Sayed sent an email pitch on his behalf. Poindexter started a joint fundraising effort called the Blue Collar Brigade with Brooks, Forstag, and Villegas. There is a sense that these new majority makers are running as a kind of slate, with a coherent philosophy of delivering results for constituents who have long been overshadowed in Washington by the wealthy and well-connected.
While traditional media that speaks primarily to establishment sources likes to paint instances of progressives running in swing seats as a “collapse” or a “mess,” that perspective will change if they win. Majority makers get listened to by the Democratic leadership. They’re the ones who secured leadership those fancy offices and new titles. They are given a voice in setting the party’s direction, ensuring it fits their conception of how to get re-elected. Sometimes they’re simply used as an excuse. “When Democrats don’t want to do something, they argue front-liners won’t tolerate it,” said Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party. “The answer is they’re compromised by donors. The acceptable excuse is, ‘I’m listening to front-liners.’”
Therefore, if swing-seat Democrats are urging to get as much accomplished as possible, instead of counseling to go slow, avoid confrontation, and tinker around the edges, it diffuses that excuse and creates a virtuous cycle for action. “We can’t just get elected and come back with the same scenario when we left,” Dunlap said. “They’re going to vote us out.”
For years, all-consuming discussions about electability created a trapdoor that made gaining power the point of politics, rather than improving people’s lives. The new majority makers could put those two things into alignment.
“I think Randy [Villegas’s] race is so important nationally because he comes from a swing district that we’ve been unable to win,” said Khanna at the Villegas town hall. “If he can win on Medicare for All, which is his central issue, health care, that’s an enormous statement, especially given that we’ve had candidates who haven’t been from this progressive wing lose and lose.”
Khanna took a 6 a.m. flight from Las Vegas to make it to Bakersfield for Villegas’s town hall. He introduced Villegas as an embodiment of the American dream, a kid who relied on Medicaid running for Congress to save it. “The day he gets there, he is going to be a national star,” Khanna said.
Villegas stayed on message, repeating that Valadao had been bought by corporations to deliver tax breaks for billionaires while the people he represents suffer the consequences. He noted that, like an increasing number of Republicans, Valadao hadn’t held an in-person town hall in a decade. “How does [he] have time to meet corporate lobbyists but not the people he wants to represent?”
Questioners asked about the use of AI in approving Medicare treatments, support for promotoras (community organizers who connect low-income residents with public health resources), and maternal mortality. But questioners also wanted to know about the war in Iran (“Congress should have the power to declare war,” Villegas said), data centers (“We should decide, not billionaires from Silicon Valley”), and Supreme Court reform (he recalled FDR’s court-packing scheme, which caused the justices to wave through his policies).
Erin Clerico, a Bakersfield resident, was impressed. “He’s talking specifics,” he told me. “Go along to get along hasn’t gotten us anywhere.”
There’s no question that Republicans are going to call Villegas and the other new majority makers socialists and communists—in fact, they already have. Republicans did some minor expenditures to boost Villegas in the primary, suggesting their operatives have also bought that conventional wisdom about progressives in swing seats. Villegas shrugged it off. “I think it’s ridiculous,” he told me. “But I’m not interested in political labels, I’m interested in actually fighting to deliver results for people here in the Central Valley.”
When I asked him about the stresses people here were facing, he talked about high gas and grocery prices and the health care crisis. A city called Earlimart in Tulare County had no running water for over two weeks after holes were found in an area well; Villegas’s campaign delivered water bottles there, and distributed meals with the United Farm Workers to residents hurt by nutrition assistance cuts, voted for by Valadao in the same bill with the Medicaid cuts.
So how important was it to get these residents tangible results that match his promises? “It’s going to be extremely important,” he said. “I’m not politically naïve, I know that Medicare for All is not going to happen overnight. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t fight for immediate actions now.”
“We can’t just offer people not Trump, not Valadao,” he continued. “We have to be willing to fight for more, because our communities deserve more.”
This article appears in Oct 2026 Issue.
