Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) speaks with reporters outside the U.S. Capitol last November.
Democrats—voters and politicians alike—were left reeling by their stinging defeat in November 2024. The initial shock was common to both groups, but the two have diverged in how they’re approaching the Trump administration now that it’s been sworn in.
Democratic voters plainly crave a fight—indeed, they report higher dissatisfaction with their congressional leaders than Republican voters reported at the same time in 2009, at the dawn of what would become the Tea Party movement. By contrast, most Democratic politicians, at least those in Congress, are running their usual playbook: laying low, waiting for Trump to screw up, and getting annoyed with the increasingly frantic demands of their base.
This strategy worked fine in 2005, but Donald Trump is not George W. Bush. We don’t have time to wait and hope for Trump and Musk to defeat themselves—that may not happen, and even if it does, by that time they may well have broken American democracy.
The Democrats need loud, aggressive brawlers, and there’s no better way to get some than by primarying some of the party’s most feckless benchwarmers in Congress. I’ve been analyzing party politics for many years, and here is my list of the top ten targets.
1. Dan Goldman (NY-10)
Rep. Dan Goldman spent his way into Congress in 2022, tapping into nearly $5 million of his personal wealth as an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune. He limped past a badly split field of progressives and won with about a quarter of the vote. Goldman has taken a somewhat antagonistic stance toward the Democratic base in office, on issues ranging from U.S. policy toward Palestine to how Democrats should fight back against the second Trump administration—and this is not a district where that makes any amount of sense. Joining downtown Manhattan to brownstone Brooklyn, the district has a deep bench of progressive elected officials, like New York City Councilmembers Shahana Hanif and Alexa Avilés, who could probably give Goldman a run for his money even if he wasn’t a wealthy heir whose quality as a politician is well below replacement level for a House Democrat. In his 2022 run, he accidentally came out in favor of abortion restrictions in an interview—since taken offline—with the Jewish publication Hamodia and had to be hastily corrected by a staffer mid-interview. Goldman performed atrociously in his 2024 primary, garnering a weak 65 percent against a pair of protest candidates, and he hasn’t changed his tune since then. He may not be a relic of a bygone era like many of his colleagues, but the energy for a primary is already there, just waiting to be harnessed by the right candidate.
2. Seth Moulton (MA-06)
Seth Moulton is a tone-deaf incumbent who is unlikely to receive much help from national Democrats. As polls increasingly show rank-and-file Democrats dissatisfied with their federal legislators’ passivity, bipartisanship, and muted rhetoric, Moulton has made the baffling choice to double down on banning trans kids from school sports, prompting angry rebukes from local Democrats in his district. His ill-fated 2020 presidential run and his habit of picking very silly fights with House leadership make it somewhat unlikely that Moulton could count on the full force of the national Democratic establishment coming to defend him.
3. Shri Thanedar (MI-13)
Thanedar, a wealthy businessman who spent millions of his own money to break into politics, is a weak, eccentric incumbent with notoriously poor constituent service. He’s strongly disliked by the local establishment, who opposed his initial congressional bid in 2022 and largely backed Detroit Councilwoman Mary Waters’s ill-fated, underfunded primary challenge in 2024. Many in Detroit politics are sore over the fact that since Thanedar’s 2022 win, the city now lacks Black representation in Congress; Detroit’s other representative, Rashida Tlaib, has proven herself resilient against primary challenges, leaving Thanedar as the obvious target.
4. Danny Davis (IL-07)
Danny Davis is a weak, old incumbent who has struggled against past challengers. Had Justice Democrats–backed activist Kina Collins had more resources, she might very well have toppled the congressman in 2022, and his performances against weaker, split fields of challengers have been little better. His low-effort 2022 campaign produced one of the worst, cheapest TV ads this writer has ever seen—it literally consisted of unedited Zoom footage, apparently filmed in one take, if the congressman’s halting delivery was any indication.
5. David Scott (GA-13)
David Scott is another weak, old, conservative incumbent who has struggled against past challengers; additionally, he has received considerable media attention for his advanced age and health troubles, notably yelling at a photojournalist for taking a picture of him in a wheelchair in the halls of Congress. He just suffered a demotion as well; formerly the top Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, Scott was dumped by his colleagues—not even in favor of Nancy Pelosi’s preferred successor, California Blue Dog Jim Costa, but in favor of Angie Craig, a Gen X Minnesotan from the House class of 2018. He already faces one primary challenge from state Sen. Emanuel Jones—but at 65, Jones may not be the best contrast.
Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto via AP
New Jersey Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer
6. Josh Gottheimer (NJ-05)
Gottheimer is the single most needlessly antagonistic centrist in Congress. There are other Democrats who sit ideologically to his right—Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Jared Golden, for example—but none relish picking a fight with their own team the way Gottheimer does. Gottheimer is currently running for governor of New Jersey, but his bid is struggling as machine bosses who might like his fairly conservative politics find him too personally loathsome, and back his colleague Mikie Sherrill. His antics earned him a serious primary challenge back in 2020, and—despite being protected by a gargantuan financial advantage and New Jersey’s now-abolished ballot line system—Glen Rock Borough Councilor Arati Kreibich held the congressman below two-thirds of the vote. Since 2020, Gottheimer has only gotten worse, becoming an obnoxious crusader against Manhattan’s congestion pricing program, singling out pro-Palestinian high schoolers from his district for investigation by the U.S. Department of Education, voting for the hideously anti-immigrant Laken Riley Act, and taking a leading role in the team of House Democrats termed the “Unbreakable Nine”—nine hardcore centrists who tried to kill Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation in the House before Joe Manchin even got the chance. Grassroots liberals in his district were already far more dissatisfied with Gottheimer than your average Democratic representative, and the national mood now appears to be turning decisively against Democratic incumbents—just as Gottheimer’s gubernatorial campaign draws even greater attention to one who already wasn’t shy about his conservatism (or his stock trades, for that matter).
7. Stephen Lynch (MA-08)
Lynch got into politics way back in the ’90s, motivated by his opposition to LGBT groups participating in Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. I could stop there, but I won’t; in the state House, Lynch was the author of a provision that would have added a “gay panic” defense to the state’s hate crimes law, and he remained an opponent of abortion rights until he ran for U.S. Senate in 2013, losing the primary to Ed Markey. More recently, at a February rally against Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s purges of federal workers, he refused to commit to voting against Republican bills, getting into a testy exchange with a rally attendee who argued that opposing the GOP at every turn was “in the best interests of our country and our democracy.” Lynch’s response? “I get to decide that! I get to decide that! I get to decide that, I’m elected! I get to decide that! You wanna decide that, you need to run for Congress!” Point taken.
8. Gerry Connolly (VA-11)
Have you seen the job he’s doing on Oversight? The cancer-stricken septuagenarian centrist, who defeated AOC in a contest to lead the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee with the help of backroom maneuverings carried out by Nancy Pelosi from her hospital bed, is sending stern letters and advising federal workers to comply with Elon Musk’s reply-or-you’re-fired email to federal workers, while some of his colleagues are leading protests and attempting to gain access to federal buildings. This Fairfax County district is full of pissed-off federal workers, too.
9. Ro Khanna (CA-17)
Elon Musk’s biggest Democratic simp will almost inevitably have a target on his back if he keeps that routine up. His progressive act is a fairly transparent fraud, but it’s irritating enough to national Democrats that they might not help him anyway. His own Democratic colleagues already blame him for the failure of an attempt by Democrats on the Oversight Committee to subpoena Elon Musk; Oversight Dems aimed to catch Oversight Republicans off guard by calling a surprise vote on the subpoena without warning, potentially allowing Democrats to outvote Republicans if enough Republicans missed the vote. Khanna, three Democratic sources tell Politico, was notified of the subpoena vote in advance—and he failed to show.
10. Rob Menendez (NJ-08)
The son of convicted Sen. Bob Menendez survived a tough, well-funded primary challenge from Ravi Bhalla in 2024, but Bhalla had baggage from his tenure as mayor of Hoboken and faced the added challenge of being a non-Latino, non-Spanish-speaking candidate in a predominantly Latino district with a large Spanish-speaking population. The district, which strings together working-class Latino neighborhoods in Newark, Elizabeth, and north Hudson County as well as trendy, left-leaning Jersey City and Hoboken, bears more than a passing resemblance to AOC’s Bronx-to-Astoria turf.
There are some honorable mentions we might add, from Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, a colorless centrist who has been in bed with corporate interests for decades; to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who is clearly not up to the task of leading the party caucus; to Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who is simply 85 years old. Thousands of other positions at the state and local level are also available—some of them not having had a contested election for decades.
But this will do for now. Democratic officials have taken their base for granted for far too long. Like some peacetime army led by elderly generals who have never seen battle, fresh blood is needed at the top. And even if primary challenges don’t succeed, they are still worth doing to put some fear into electeds, and force them to stand up to Trump.
