Politics
Centrist Democrats are having their moment
Moderate Democrats are on a tear.
Democrats are overperforming at the state level, with centrist candidates flipping one seat and coming close in another in special elections in deep red parts of Iowa. Rahm Emanuel, who once orchestrated a takeover of the House by recruiting Blue Dog Democrats, is eying a 2028 bid for president. And leading Democrats like Gavin Newsom and Chuck Schumer are rebuffing the left — the California governor siding against trans players in women’s sports and the Senate minority leader veering away from progressive demands to shut down the government.
“Moderates are having their moment,” said Jonathan Kott, the onetime senior adviser to the former centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. “I think people are realizing that there were many reasons we lost in 2024, but an acquiescence to all of the liberal groups and fighting and dying on hills about 1 and 2 and 3 percent of the voting population seemed really dumb.”
A fresh batch of public polling over the weekend showed the Democratic Party is facing its worst image crisis in some time. A NBC News poll showed more than half of independents have an unfavorable view of the party — just 11 percent of independents have positive views of Democrats — which could explain why Democrats are pivoting to reach these voters.
Even their own polling sees a move toward the center. In the party’s latest internal survey in congressional battlegrounds, the vast majority of voters — 69 percent — say Democrats were “too focused on being politically correct,” while 51 percent said the party is “elitist,” according to a poll conducted by the Democratic group Navigator Research.
“It’s a reaction to what happened in the wake of the Trump victory in 2016 where the party did move pretty radically to the left on a whole bunch of things and the country sort of did, too, particularly after the murder of George Floyd,” said Matt Bennett, the vice president of Third Way. The centrist group that has called for banning “far-left candidate questionnaires,” pushed “back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,” and “own the failures of Democratic governance in large cities.”
The progressive and activist wing of the party isn’t rolling over. Populist champion Bernie Sanders is drawing large crowds in the Midwest, liberal activists are organizing against massive budget cuts and progressives are warning of a primary challenge to Schumer.
But the revolution is happening in a quieter way for centrists. Far from Washington, there are signs at the state level that moderate Democrats are doing extremely well in districts Trump captured only a few months ago.
In an Iowa state House special election last week, the Democratic candidate — though ultimately losing — outperformed Kamala Harris by 24 points. That performance by Democrat Nannette Griffin came on the heels of the party flipping a state Senate seat in Iowa and solidifying legislative majorities in Virginia. And it bolstered centrists’ argument that Democrats in the Trump era can motivate voters with meat-and-potatoes messaging around everyday costs.
The Iowa results build on Democrats’ string of successes in state legislative special elections this year, which the party is pointing to as a measure of enthusiasm ahead of the midterms.
“What I am noticing is just a rejuvenation within the Democrats across the state,” said Sen. Mike Zimmer, who picked up a GOP seat in rural Eastern Iowa in January that Trump won by 21 points. “If we work hard and we really come together and we have an organized plan, we can be much more competitive.”
And it isn’t just Iowa. Democrats are seizing on federal job losses as an issue in Pennsylvania special elections slated for the end of March, too, where they are pressing a more economic than ideological message.
In one state Senate district, where federal workers have been furloughed, “a lot of people have felt that it’s not being done in a gracious manner. A lot of people also just think it’s utter chaos,” said James Malone, the Democratic mayor of East Petersburg, Pennsylvania who is hoping to flip a GOP district.
Monroe called Zimmer the day after his victory to learn his playbook, and has adopted a similar economic message in his own campaign.
“As chaos reigns in Washington, Democrats have meaningful and winnable opportunities to push back on the MAGA agenda through state legislative special elections,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which is focused on electing Democrats to state legislatures.
The political implications for Schumer or Newsom are far from clear. And the results of a handful of special elections hardly foretell a Democratic comeback in Iowa. Democrats have historically done well before in the part of the state with a dense population of blue-collar workers. And Republicans maintain a tight grip on power in Iowa.
“These special elections can be, you know, not always the harbinger or the canary in the coal mine that you know that folks want them to be,” said GOP strategist Tyler Campbell.
Still, Democrats are flexing their muscles — convinced that an economic message and the use of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to cutting government as a cudgel can lift the party across the map.
“It’s the energy factor,” said Iowa State Rep. JD Scholten. “Our side is very energized, because we’re irate with what’s happening. We’re seeing this as a national trend – people are fed up and disgusted with what they’re seeing out in D.C. and they’re trying to do something about it.”
In Washington, Schumer has shifted to the left since the years when he described himself as an “angry centrist,” and the criticism of him from within the party was not limited to progressives. But his vote last week was a repudiation of the protest politics of the party’s activist class.
“We have to reckon with the fact that young people, working class people, people of color – the backbone of the Democratic Party are moving away from the party,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, political director of the Sunrise Movement.
O’Hanlon said, “I think Chuck Schumer is part of that reason.”
But for some in the party, provoking the left may be the point. In challenging party orthodoxy on trans rights, Newsom joined Emanuel in tacking to the center, saying he was done “with the discussion of locker rooms” and “done with the discussion of bathrooms” and wanted instead to have a “conversation about the classroom.”
All of this is in line with a kind of cultural war retrenchment for which the party’s most pragmatic voices are practically pleading.
“There was an enormous shift in the culture and in our politics and some of that was very good and some of it went too far,” Third Way’s Bennett said. “And I think what we saw in 2024 was voters saying, ‘Whoa, we don’t think that the shift that the Democratic Party has taken was calibrated correctly. It went too far on a whole bunch of things.’”
Emily Ngo contributed to this report.
Byron Donalds says he is not a ‘yes man’ to Trump
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The progressive political action committee Justice Democrats has appointed Rev. Hodari Williams as its new executive director. The change sets the organization up to hone a civil rights message ahead of the 2028 election cycle, Williams told Blue Light News.
His appointment, shared first with Blue Light News, comes at a time when self-proclaimed progressives (and socialists) are flooding the scene. The PAC has had its most successful election cycle ever, helping seven candidates — including Donavan McKinney in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York — defeat incumbents in the primaries. While those candidates are heavily favored to win on Election Day, the fates of three other Justice Democrats candidates, including Tennessee’s state Rep. Justin Pearson, remain less certain going into November.
At one point, the group tried to get Williams to run for office. Though he declined, Williams said now is the right time to force change.
“America and its present-day politicians, from my experience, have a high blood pressure of promises and anemia of political courage,” Williams said in an interview, using a common Kenyan political expression. “Right now, JD is producing candidates who have the political courage to deal with the crises that are existing in marginalized and disenfranchised communities, and I want to be a part of that.”
Williams, 46, was born and raised in Lakewood, New Jersey. His parents were activists and community organizers who raised him on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. After graduating from Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina, with his bachelor’s degree, he joined the NAACP as a field organizer for voter rights and empowerment while pursuing his Master’s of Divinity at the Interdenominational Theological Center. In his time with the NAACP, Williams traveled across the Black Belt, where he said he witnessed poverty and inequity up close.
“Civil rights traditionally has been something that people have tried to separate from progressivism … but these movements are inseparable,” said Williams. “What I witnessed in the South as a worker in voter rights and voter empowerment and education, and as a regional representative for the NAACP, was that the conditions that created inequity still existed and needed to be confronted and challenged.”
His work took him to Kenya, where he served as a program coordinator with the Presbyterian Church USA. In Nairobi, he supported the Green Belt Movement’s work against deforestation and its mission to highlight environmental justice as a tool for economic empowerment and self-determination.
Now, as some Black and brown voters express concerns of being tokenized by traditional Democratic candidates, Williams plans to bring his experience working in racial justice circles to his new role.
“I have worked in communities that have borne the brunt of failed promises from the current Democratic leadership,” Williams said. “I have opened the doors of my congregations to politicians and have experienced the absence of those politicians after the elections.”
He continued: “Black communities have become destinations for environmental hazards and data centers. Unemployment has risen. Black federal employees have been targeted. The list goes on. I’ve pastored these people. I’ve prayed with them. I’ve listened to them as they’ve shed tears. Now I’ve decided I want to move from triage work to really transformational work.”
Some of that work will require challenging other Black leaders.
“Unfortunately, many of our Black politicians have become victims of corporate capture, and their voices have been taken by entities like AIPAC,” said Williams, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. “They have not really been able to stand for the issues that are affecting the communities that that many of us are fighting for, and JD candidates are free from that, and they’re free to take bold and significant action to move forward legislation.”
But with the 2026 election cycle nearly over, the PAC is already brainstorming how to establish a strong progressive coalition for the 2028 presidential election. That will mean convincing the mainstream Democratic party that Justice Democrats have built a lasting coalition of the party’s base, said Williams.
“We hope that the Democratic Party would see that we’re developing a blueprint to show them how the base is being energized around the issues that are kitchen table issues that people want us to deal with,” said Williams.
“It’s not enough for us just to have a call to defeat a fascist president. We don’t want a fascist president. We want him out, but we also want a vision of what America could look like when affordability, healthcare, civil rights, housing, and livable wages — all of those things are at the top of the political agenda,” he added.
Williams succeeds current executive director and co-founder Alexandra Rojas, who will become president of Justice Democrats’ board and will support Williams as a senior adviser.
Iowa Rep. Ashley Hinson took a swipe at the savings habits of millennials as she fielded a question Wednesday about Social Security during a Senate campaign debate.
Hinson, the Republican candidate facing off against Democrat state Rep. Josh Turek, was asked about ensuring the solvency of Social Security when she raised the broader prospect of savings by millennials, the demographic consisting of people born from 1981-1996.
She said the country needed to have a “serious conversation” about “how young people are saving money,” as part of the discussion about the future of Social Security.
“We also need to be talking about millennials saving money,” she later added. “Millennials are the worst group of savers in the country right now and have the least amount of savings. So those are ways where I think we can help have a bigger conversation around saving in general, planning for retirement, and making sure we’re all able to experience a robust retirement.”
Hinson faces a tough race in Iowa against Turek amid a difficult political environment for Republicans. Voters are overwhelmingly pessimistic about the state of the economy and their own personal finances, and they support Social Security while being concerned about the program’s future.
Hinson said she would not support cutting benefits and suggested creating a bipartisan commission to present suggestions to Congress to save the program. When pushed on her statement that “all options should be on the table,” she turned her attention to young people.
“I think my dad and I had this discussion when I was in sixth grade, looking at a ledger book and trying to figure out, hey, how are we going to make sure you’re set up for your life?” she said. “So we need to be having a conversation simultaneously to all solutions on the table, to make sure that it can stay solvent, while we’re also talking about, how do we get more young people to save?”
Hinson’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for clarification.
Turek, when asked about Social Security, said he supports removing the payroll tax cap.
“The best way we can keep this solvent is by taking off the cap,” Turek said. “Let’s make sure that billionaires and large corporations are paying their fair share. That will move the needle in a very serious way to keep Social Security solvent.”
Hinson disagreed. “The only thing I’m hearing from him is that the only solution to everything is to raise taxes,” she said.
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