The primaries on August 4 were closely watched by the entire political apparatus of the United States. With important races in Missouri, Michigan, Kansas, and Washington, these contests were a crucial barometer in the power struggle between the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party, as well as Democrats’ chances of taking back either the House or the Senate.
In the days after the primaries, the analysis has been mixed. Mainstream media has published article after article saying the “progressive wave” was a flop, while Bernie Sanders called Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan “the most extraordinary victory that I can think of in modern American politics.”
What’s behind these results? We present four takeaways from Tuesday’s elections.
Anti-Trump Sentiment Continues to Express Itself at the Polls
With the war on Iran raging on and popular opinion of the economy reaching new lows, Trump’s approval ratings are the lowest of his second term. Though the tensions (civil war? crisis?) within the Democratic Party take center stage in the primaries, the results of Tuesday’s primaries also express an energetic rejection of Trump’s policies and a thirst for a real fightback against his administration’s policies and threats to democratic rights.
While all of the Trump-backed candidates won their primaries handily in the Republican races, candidates who are vocal against Trump’s hated policies are consistently racking up wins in the Democratic primaries. This does not just, or even primarily, include so-called “domestic” or local issues, but reflects intense opposition from below to the administration’s actions in the international sphere as well. People in the United States are searching for alternatives to war abroad and war on their neighbors at home.
The war on Iran is a determining factor driving opposition to Trump and has been a key campaign point in the Democratic primaries. Democrats across the spectrum are united in supporting the War Powers Act and denouncing an unpopular war, but the anger at Trump and Netanyahu’s onslaught in the Middle East goes much deeper. The candidates that won their races on Tuesday reflect this. Rashida Tlaib, who easily won her nomination, has been outspoken in her opposition to the war. New Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed echoed the common refrain among the insurgent populist/progressive Left wing of the Democratic Party on the campaign trail, calling the war “illegal and unjustifiable,” one that is being used “to torch our tax dollars, to destroy other people’s lives rather than using them to make our lives better.”
Similarly, the administration’s anti-immigrant policies continue to be a politicizing factor. Just as in New York, Washington, D.C. and across the country, candidates who not only oppose Trump’s immigration policies but explicitly call for ICE to be abolished are winning their races. This is a key element of the progressive insurgency’s program. This stood out particularly starkly in Michigan, which has been the site of increased ICE activity since early this year, including the attempted opening of a new detention center to imprison immigrants in brutal conditions that the movement successfully stopped. El-Sayed won openly calling for abolishing ICE while Haley Stevens’s timid calls for increased oversight fell flat. Donavan McKinney — who won the primary for a House seat in Michigan — also led his campaign with a call to abolish ICE and supported the anti-ICE movement.
This theme was also reflected in the campaigns of establishment candidates who won their primaries in Washington, Missouri, and Virginia’s Congressional races. This anti-Trump sentiment does not only spell out a tougher road to victory for GOP candidates, however. It touches the Democratic Party as well. Just as in 2016, 2020, and 2024, the establishment center is banking on the fact that being the oppositional party to Trump can carry them to victory — in this case, winning back Congress in the last two years of Trump’s second term and trying to Frankenstein back together sectors of its now-defunct coalition toward a coherent presidential run in 2028.
The problem is that the Democratic Party’s leadership has proven time and time again that it will not stand up to Trump and the Far Right — not as it abducts people in the night, takes away the rights of trans people, gives tax breaks to the ultra wealthy, or continues to give carte blanche to Netanyahu’s project of Greater Israel. Further, the primaries showed that tepid anti-Trump sentiment alone is no longer enough to save the Democratic Party from its adherence to a set of politics that working people have resoundingly rejected.
Progressive Candidates Gain Momentum and the Establishment Pushes Back
Michigan was a closely-watched race precisely because it was a test of the Democratic Party establishment’s desperate hope that the progressive/populist wave would not extend beyond a few coastal cities and firmly Blue states. While its analysts and media downplay progressive successes across the country, the truth is that DSA and Sanders-backed candidates won five out of six of their races in Michigan and progressive challengers won state government races in Missouri, Washington, and Kansas. Tuesday’s primaries continued the trend of DSA candidates winning about half of their races nationwide.
As we wrote earlier in the summer, the Democratic primaries represent a rejection of the Party’s establishment. Progressive candidates are winning with an anti-establishment, anti-rich, anti-war, pro-worker rhetoric, coupled with policies that seek to rebuild the social safety net funded by taxes on the ultra-wealthy. A new layer of activists — in the Palestine movement, the immigrants rights movement, against police brutality, against AI data centers, and the labor movement — are increasingly appealing to voters across the country by going on the offensive against the leadership of their party in an effort to drag working people back under its wing. With that leadership struggling to come up with its own vision that can both address the decline of U.S. imperialist hegemony and deal with a working class that is struggling under the weight of its chains, the path is open for progressive-populist candidates to make the most of the moment.
Nevertheless, establishment successes in Washington and Missouri, coupled with El-Sayed’s narrow victory in Michigan, show that the leadership of the Democratic Party is flexing its muscles and hoping to contain progressive momentum ahead of the midterms. An incredible amount of money was spent in Stevens’s attempt to beat El-Sayed — this is why Sanders has called his victory “literally unprecedented in modern American history.” Stevens was backed by $60 million in AIPAC and super PAC money, outspending El-Sayed nine to one. The establishment went on the offensive against a candidate who was outspoken about war, Palestine, and the ultra-wealthy and it lost. But the fact that Stevens performed better than expected, including in rural areas and among sectors of Black voters (though El-Sayed carried the vote among young people, including people of color), shows just how formidable the apparatus of the Democratic Party can be when it is weaponized against candidates that even in limited ways challenge the pillars of its politics.
Analysts are already using the results to paint a picture of a Left that only appeals to college-educated young people while alienating people of color — but this flies in the face of the fact that the aspirations underpinning El-Sayed’s policies — from universal healthcare to housing rights and an end to the genocide in Palestine — enjoy majority support across the country. It says more about the way the Democratic Party is able to deploy its resources when it feels threatened; as well as the objective challenges progressive candidates face when they use the Democrats’ ballot line.
With mixed results across the country — neither a progressive “sweep” nor the dominance of the establishment — the Democratic Party is rushing to seize on the opportunity to try to both embrace and check its progressive wing. The Democratic Party’s leadership is forced to reckon with the fact that progressive candidates won across a swing state like Michigan; in El-Sayed’s case, he won with the entire machinery of AIPAC and the Democratic Party against his candidacy. Now Democrats are trying to make the case that its left flank needs the center just as much as the center needs the left. Backing El-Sayed after his win, Senator Chuck Schumer said, “What people don’t understand is that a big tent is a strength, not a weakness. It’s how you build a majority.”
Of course this has long been the refrain of the Democratic Party as it checks progressive tendencies within its ranks — benefitting off of the enthusiasm for progressive policies as it forces its members into line in Washington. The difference now is that the establishment of the party is weaker, without a compelling vision to convince working people that better conditions for profit-making and imperialism are in the interests of the working class. The progressive/populist wing offers a way out, one that has shown itself capable of winning working people back to the ranks of the Democratic Party’s ballot line.
But as the primaries have already shown, the devil’s bargain of coalition politics in a capitalist party means little more than moderation for the progressive wing. This played out clearly in Tuesday’s races. El-Sayed walked back his criticism of the police and hailed the wonders of capitalism to distance himself from DSA. William Lawrence, a co-founder of Sunrise Movement, stopped short of calling to abolish ICE and left DSA to be more appealing to his party’s leadership. Writing for Jacobin, Branko Marcetic praises these concessions, arguing that El-Sayed acted “wisely” in moderating his policies, while DSA members chose well in campaigning for him even after he distanced himself from their program and organization. But winning the primary is only the first step. The pressure to moderate and fall in line with the rest of the party for the sake of “unity” or compromise will only increase exponentially if these candidates win their races in November and the Democratic Party retakes either the House or Congress by a slim margin.
Support for Palestine Is a Litmus Test, but AIPAC Is Not Dead Yet
The strength of the Palestine movement and the widespread criticism of the United States’s relationship to Israel loomed large in Tuesday’s primaries. AIPAC’s stranglehold on American elections took center stage in the contest between El-Sayed and Stevens; in a now infamous moment during the campaign, Stevens refused to admit during a debate that she was supported by AIPAC despite the fact that she received $30 million from the lobbying group (and other funding from pro-Israel groups) to prevent El-Sayed — who denounced the genocide and opposes military aid to Israel — from winning the nomination.
Rashia Tlaib easily won her nomination again, gaining nearly 74 percent of the vote in her district, which covers much of Detroit and Dearborn. The re-election of the Palestinian Congressperson — who has often stood alone in Congress in denouncing the genocide and the vicious backlash against the pro-Palestine movement — is a clear sign of the weight that pro-Palestine sentiment has in the United States. It goes beyond the fact that Tlaib represents a majority-Muslim city; Tlaib — and figures like Zohran Mamdani and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York — represent the massive change across the United States on the question of Israel’s colonial project in Palestine and the United States’s role in the continued genocide and apartheid of the Palestinian people.
Of course, the other big news of this week’s primaries was Cori Bush’s defeat to Wesley Bell in a race for a House seat in Missouri. Bush lost for the second time to Bell, who was backed by AIPAC and received more than $2 million in funding from the group. Bell was also the favored candidate of the establishment, pro-Israel sector of the Democratic Party; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the Congressional Black Caucus PAC endorsed him.
This tells us two things. First, it’s clear that AIPAC continues as a formidable force in U.S. politics, one that will act to stop progressive challengers in favor of business-friendly politicians who support Israel. Second, it is a clear sign of the relationship between not only the Democratic Party and AIPAC, but between the party and the Zionist project itself. AIPAC is the quintessential example of how Israel’s project is integral to U.S. imperialism and the maintenance of the most brutal exploitation and oppression of capitalism. It shares this objective with the Democratic Party — they are allies in trying to contain working-class anger and burgeoning anti-imperialism in the United States.
But it’s clear that candidates relationship to Israel and AIPAC is increasingly toxic for candidates running in the midterms; denouncing AIPAC and refusing their funding is seen as an anti-establishment marker. If the midterms are any indication, this will be a factor in future elections as well, including the presidential race in 2028. Even mainstream commentators, like those of Pod Save America, have said that breaking with AIPAC will likely be a requirement for any competitive candidate.
A Revolutionary Socialist Got 15% of the Vote Running Independent of the Democrats
Kshama Sawant came in third place in Washington’s 9th District — getting 16,408 votes as of the time of writing. She ended up behind only the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees, who in Washington’s top-two primary system will face off in November.
Sawant ran as an open revolutionary socialist and an independent candidate, building on her time as a councilperson in Seattle. Her campaign billed itself as “working-class, antiwar, anti-genocide.” It centered demands to tax the rich to fund healthcare for all, to end U.S. military aid to Israel, to stop layoffs as a result of AI and the growth of data centers, to put Big Tech and the energy giants under democratic public ownership, to build millions of affordable homes, and to stop deportations and close detention centers.
Crucially, Sawant won these votes without running on the Democratic Party ballot line. She used her campaign to speak out against the capitalist class without sparing both parties of capital. About her decisions to run independently of the Democratic Party, Sawant said:
[B]oth the Democratic and Republican parties [are] the political representatives of U.S. capitalism. They are the representatives of the billionaires and multimillionaires, but they have some superficial differences to obscure the idea that regardless of which party you’re voting for, you are ultimately voting for the agenda of the billionaire class […] [T]here is no way that a party of the billionaires is going to allow you to carry out a political revolution against the billionaire class.
Sawant’s campaign stands in stark contrast to the overarching strategy guiding DSA’s electoral project, which is tying its politics — and its fate — to the Democratic Party. This is not only a matter of using a ballot line to gain access to elections, but joining the ranks of an imperialist party of the capitalist class. We’ve already seen how the Democrats have responded to a wave of progressive wins across the country — from attempts to co-opt this energy to open hostility and calls to expel anyone who takes up the moniker “socialist.”
Though Sawant’s run for the Senate came to an end on Tuesday, the overwhelming lesson from her campaign is that there is immense space for openly socialist politics that can touch the lives of the working class in the United States. Her campaign brought attention to the struggles of the working class and oppressed, drawing class lines and centering the need for mass movements to win our demands and build the fight for socialism. But the question of political representation beyond this or that campaign looms large; a single campaign brings visibility, but the working class needs its own organization to put its struggles front and center and collectively decide how to carry them forward.
Beyond the Midterms, the Working Class Needs a Solution of Its Own
The main theme of the primaries has been the civil war in the Democratic Party between its establishment and an insurgent progressive wing. How much will the Democratic Party be forced to embrace populism? How much will it be forced to embrace DSA? This is certainly part of the picture, but the primaries tell us something else: there is immense energy to fight for the interests of the working class and against the exploitation and oppression of the U.S. empire in its decline. It shows a willingness to organize to fight against the Far Right and to reject leaders who have only paved the way for Trump and further attacks on our rights and living conditions — among the Left and beyond.
But Tuesday showed that the establishment will not go down without a fight. Once again, we must face the reality that a deal with the Democratic Party doesn’t make the road easier for policies that empower working people and gradually builds momentum for the fight for socialism. Instead, it re-inflates hopes in a capitalist party to represent working people as we watch our aspirations get watered down and negotiated away. The pragmatism of concession becomes a virtue when in reality it demobilizes our movements and our ability to organize for our interests, on our terms, in our workplaces, schools, and in the streets. If we are to carry our struggles forward — to put a stop to Israel’s genocide in Palestine and U.S. imperialist intervention in Latin America, for full rights for immigrants, for trans rights and reproductive rights, for guaranteed housing and healthcare for all, and for an entirely different society — we can’t waste our energies fighting for space within a capitalist party.
The post August Primaries: Progressive Challengers Continue to Threaten Democratic Party Establishment appeared first on Left Voice.
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