Congress
The battle for the future of a House Democratic majority is raging
The battle for the future of a House Democratic majority is already underway.
In phone calls, group chats and strategy sessions, competing wings of the party are jockeying for position, seeking to build unity, influence and governing agendas in advance of what they hope will be an Election Day romp.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus gathered incumbent and incoming members to Washington last month to prepare an agenda and discuss how they will use their leverage to advance it. Moderate Democrats are also scheming in behind-the-scenes conversations about how they can act as a counterbalance to the left with their own affirmative vision for the majority.
The early plotting sets up an inevitable clash between the factions — both of which are already arguing any midterm gains would be proof that their wing of the party should be standard-bearers ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
“There’s going to be some real tension, because we have to move,” progressive Rep. Delia Ramirez of Illinois said in an interview. “Preserving perfect relationships with colleagues who don’t feel the urgency the way that some of us feel it because we live it every day isn’t my top priority. Protecting people is.”
Both sides are courting potential incoming members with offers of mentorship and campaign resources as they attempt to shore up their ranks.
Ramirez is mentoring an incoming batch of ultraprogressives, including Darializa Avlia Chevalier and Claire Valdez of New York and Melat Kiros of Colorado, whom she recently hosted in Chicago to talk about shared priorities. All campaigned on ending U.S. aid to Israel, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement and passing “Medicare for All” universal health coverage, in addition to promoting economic populist policies like a minimum wage increase.
These presumptive members, many of whom identify as democratic socialists, have garnered outsize attention — some are calling them “The Bloc” — but the organizing effort has extended to a larger group of incoming progressives.
That outreach has included a September retreat run by the Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, as well as other senior progressives such as Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a former CPC chair. The group strategized about how to maximize their influence to advance their wishlist and to settle on what Ramirez described as “non-negotiables.”
In a session on Medicare for All, for example, the progressives discussed pushing for a committee vote and Congressional Budget Office fiscal estimate on the policy as ways to build momentum around the issue ahead of a possible post-2028 Democratic trifecta.
Jayapal said the conversations centered on developing an “inside-outside strategy” that identifies points of leverage in the House — such as procedural votes and the drafting of a caucus rules package — to reflect “the voice of many of our new members who are coming in on fire.”
Moderates, meanwhile, are already wary of seeing routine House business weaponized for factional warfare, potentially threatening the reelection prospects of swing-district members. Members of overlapping centrist groups, including the New Democrat Coalition, the Blue Dog Caucus and Problem Solvers Caucus have discussed how to serve as a counterweight to the left.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a veteran leader of the centrist wing, said he was eyeing “concrete steps to stop socialists trying to jam the extremist parts of their agenda.”
“Just like with the progressives, there have been conversations among moderates about our policy priorities, with a clear proactive agenda,” Gottheimer said. “As expected, there will be policy red lines that are too extreme and out of step with our democratic values. Many of us are already talking to each about the importance of countering those extremist positions and focusing on issues more representative of the majority of Americans.”
“The good news: there are plenty of issues, frankly, that most Democrats agree on,” he added. “But there are places where you’ll see tension.”
Precisely how moderates plan to neutralize the party’s left flank remains a topic of live discussion among members and aides, who say a specific plan will depend on the outcome of the midterms. They are banking on a bumper crop of new pragmatic members from traditionally Republican territory to simply outnumber the “Bloc.”
“There is a lot of angst among some moderates about this DSA faction and squad expansion,” a senior moderate Democratic operative said in an interview. “The size of the majority will matter a lot.”
Each side is getting support from outside groups who are helping to develop policy plans and marshal grassroots support for their respective positions.
On the left, for instance, the Justice Democrats have convened meet-ups and are working to establish lines of communication between members. Centrist groups like Searchlight Institute and Third Way, meanwhile, are hosting their own meetings and cautioning Democrats against taking up certain hard-left positions.
“We see our role as, frankly, being kind of the hall monitor of the situation,” said Searchlight spokesperson Tré Easton. “Let’s make sure that as Democrats are given the opportunity to govern, they remember why voters sent them to be there in the first place.”
Because fewer progressives are running in competitive races, the left has had more breathing room to begin organizing incoming members. But the centrist organs are hoping to quickly catch up and have already sketched out governing agendas that hew closely to the campaign messages coming from top party leaders.
The New Dems — the largest ideological bloc of House Democrats, with more than 110 members — published a 65-page dossier in May pushing broadly acceptable bills that target lowering costs.
Rep. Nikki Budzinski of Illinois, who is running unopposed to chair the group in the next Congress, said in an interview that the group’s size “will make us a force in determining the Democratic caucus’s agenda” — with an eye on delivering on the campaign promises that incoming members made.
“We want to make sure that we’re running and accomplishing the policy that they don’t have to run from themselves back home,” she said. “That these are things that they can run toward.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has already previewed an early slate of bills that align with the New Dems’ vision — rolling back Republican-led Medicaid cuts, restoring expired Affordable Care Act subsidies and ending President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Jeffries has also taken steps to get his left and right flanks used to talking to each other and seeking compromise. This summer, he established five working groups, each led by a progressive and a moderate, to develop proposals to lower health care, housing, energy, child care and grocery costs.
He told reporters earlier this month that Democrats had made an “ironclad” promise to “focus on the affordability crisis and to drive down the high cost of living.”
“We intend to keep it, and it’s what unites Democrats across the ideological spectrum,” he said.
Both moderates and progressives boast that they have Jeffries’ ear and have lobbied him in recent months to take up their priorities. But should Democrats fulfill internal expectations and win the majority, the speaker election looms as an initial flashpoint in the factional clash.
Although no alternative candidate has emerged, some incoming progressives have withheld commitments to supporting Jeffries as speaker, with many saying they want further “conversations” about the governing agenda — if not outright concessions.
For the centrists, support for Jeffries is a litmus test: Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, who leads the New Democrats’ campaign arm, said it is a prerequisite for candidates to win the group’s support.
Kiros, for example, did not say in an interview if she would back Jeffries for speaker but she described a “wonderful” conversation with him about her top priorities: Medicare for All, a data center moratorium and Israel arms embargo.
She and other progressives have offered an olive branch to moderates, acknowledging there will be ways to work across the caucus — and even across the aisle — to pass law. Members of both wings have repeatedly raised passing a minimum wage hike.
“A big part of what the Progressive Caucus has been committed to doing has been to reforming the image of the Democratic Party back into a party that puts working class people first,” Casar said. “It means doing important outreach work to other parts of the Democratic Caucus.”
But leaders on the left said that working with moderates should not be confused with ditching the values they campaigned on.
Voters, Ramirez said, “are tired of nice little words and statements and letters, and they want to see us fight like hell for them.”
Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.