Democrats’ midterms sweep didn’t solve their ideological civil war — but a number of the party’s potential presidential contenders hope it lets them call a truce.
In the days since Democrats’ sweeping midterm victories, several likely White House aspirants have argued that their party’s factional feuding needs to take a backseat heading into 2028.
“What was clear, no matter where you go, [is that] people are frustrated,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters last weekend at Crooked Media’s post-election conference. “They’re not thinking about whether this is about left or middle or right. They’re thinking about how to get problems solved.”
“I don’t know if the takeaway should be what ideology that people wanted. I think people want results,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at the same event.
Democrats’ midterm tidal wave was powered more by voters’ anger at high costs and the Trump administration than by any one ideology. Candidates won tough races by positioning themselves not as progressives or moderates but as anti-Washington populists and pragmatists — some of them even scoring dual endorsements from both the moderate Blue Dog Democrats and progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“If you see … an elected leader spending valuable time duking it out on whose team won, moderate or progressive, they are missing the actual message of this election,” Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, a moderate who campaigned hard for progressive Abdul El-Sayed, told POLITICO. “It’s about people who are wanting to work together as a team on issues like the American dream in the middle class.”Many of the party’s rising stars embraced an ethos like Shapiro’s “get stuff done” and, like Slotkin, called to reject progressive-versus-moderate politics in favor of combative candidates.
“It helps take away the most annoying question that has split our party, and that is the question of electability,” progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) said in an interview last week. “It turns out that progressives were electable, and centrists were electable. The moderates were electable, and people who were affiliated with the DSA were electable.”
Now, as they pivot into 2028, Democrats are broadly seizing on last week’s results as license to avoid traditional labels as they look to appeal as widely as possible to voters more interested in easing the pinch in their pocketbooks than the political philosophy to which their leaders subscribe. Interviews and conversations with more than a dozen potential Democratic presidential candidates, advisers and operatives reveal that rhetorical shift is as much a rejection of the ideological litmus tests that dominated the 2020 primary as it is a calibration toward the dynamics that will drive the 2028 contest.
“We all lived through the purity tests,” said Adrienne Elrod, a Democratic strategist who advised Joe Biden in 2020, Kamala Harris in 2024 and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run. “What people are now yearning for is authenticity. And they want a fighter and someone who can deliver more than someone who perfectly aligns with them ideologically.”
There are tells in the flurry of postelection memos from potential presidential contenders. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s team positioned her not as a progressive firebrand but as “one of the most effective voices in the country for America’s working class.” Teams behind Moore and Shapiro pushed messages of “common-sense governance” and “delivering results.”
“There has been a reckoning in the Democratic Party, and people in all lanes frankly have come to realize the government in Washington has not delivered for working-class people and they need to,” said Jeff Weaver, a Khanna adviser who managed Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign.
Or, as one adviser to a potential candidate said: Voters “do not live in the binaries that a lot of political operatives do.”
While last Tuesday’s wave swept Democrats of all stripes into office, it also created openings for each wing of the party to argue that its vision is the way forward. That all but guarantees more proxy battles to come as the party moves from running a raft of candidates across diverse districts to selecting just one to try and win the White House.
The left has seized on strong performances by unabashedly progressive candidates to push Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez to run for president and Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to challenge Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) for Senate majority leader.
Ravi Mangla, a spokesperson for the Working Families Party, said it’s “undeniable the populist candidates … can win in swing states that are going to be critical in 2028” — and the left lane is “wide open.”
But the centrist group Welcome argued in a new memo shared first with POLITICO that there’s a clear pathway for candidates willing to embrace a more moderate posture.
“In a very large field, you need a base to get you to 15, 20, 25 percent. And it’s very clear in the data you can get there with voters in the middle — center-left voters,” said Welcome co-founder Liam Kerr.
And even as he called for a primary that would battle test a diverse set of ideological views, Khanna, who co-chaired Sanders’ 2020 campaign, leaned into his liberal bona fides: “It would be an honor to be called a Bernie Sanders Democrat; I embrace being a New Deal Democrat with pride.”
“Obviously, I’m a progressive Democrat. I believe that the progressive vision is the best vision. But there should be someone who’s in the center or center-left. Then they can argue for their vision,” Khanna said. “And then it’s for the American people and the primary to decide.”
A version of this article first appeared in POLITICO Pro’s Morning Score. Want to receive the newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories.
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