Are The Democratic Socialists Winning or Losing?
Episode
29 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Fundraising & VC
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Geographic expansion benchmark: Democratic socialist candidates now compete statewide in presidential battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin, not just in heavily Democratic, young, highly educated urban enclaves. This represents a measurable shift from their baseline over the prior decade, though large rural portions of both states still reject these candidates by wide margins.
- ✓Age as the primary fault line: Precincts on flagship university campuses show progressive candidates winning 80–95% of the vote, while older voters back establishment candidates by comparable margins. Analysts and campaign strategists should treat age, not income or race, as the single strongest predictor of progressive primary support in 2025 battleground states.
- ✓Income as the second dividing line: In neighborhoods where median household income exceeds $150,000, establishment candidates won by roughly two-to-one margins in both states. Progressive candidates perform more competitively among lower-income voters, but heterogeneity within that group — driven largely by age — prevents a clean working-class coalition from forming.
- ✓Coalition shift since 2016: Bernie Sanders won rural white working-class Democrats in Michigan and Wisconsin; today's democratic socialist candidates do not. They compensate by gaining mainstream suburban progressives — MSNBC-watching, Biden-voting liberals disillusioned with establishment Democrats — who are now open to candidates they previously rejected on ideological grounds.
- ✓General election structural ceiling: A democratic socialist primary coalition combining activist progressives and disillusioned mainstream liberals cannot win a general election without moderate independents and conservative-leaning swing voters. Cohn argues these candidates will inevitably run a conventional general election campaign, making their rural working-class reconversion strategy largely unrealistic in practice.
What It Covers
NYT political analyst Nate Cohn analyzes two Democratic primaries in Wisconsin and Michigan, where progressive left candidates finished nearly tied with establishment rivals, signaling a meaningful geographic expansion of the democratic socialist movement beyond its traditional stronghold in deep-blue urban areas.
Key Questions Answered
- •Geographic expansion benchmark: Democratic socialist candidates now compete statewide in presidential battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin, not just in heavily Democratic, young, highly educated urban enclaves. This represents a measurable shift from their baseline over the prior decade, though large rural portions of both states still reject these candidates by wide margins.
- •Age as the primary fault line: Precincts on flagship university campuses show progressive candidates winning 80–95% of the vote, while older voters back establishment candidates by comparable margins. Analysts and campaign strategists should treat age, not income or race, as the single strongest predictor of progressive primary support in 2025 battleground states.
- •Income as the second dividing line: In neighborhoods where median household income exceeds $150,000, establishment candidates won by roughly two-to-one margins in both states. Progressive candidates perform more competitively among lower-income voters, but heterogeneity within that group — driven largely by age — prevents a clean working-class coalition from forming.
- •Coalition shift since 2016: Bernie Sanders won rural white working-class Democrats in Michigan and Wisconsin; today's democratic socialist candidates do not. They compensate by gaining mainstream suburban progressives — MSNBC-watching, Biden-voting liberals disillusioned with establishment Democrats — who are now open to candidates they previously rejected on ideological grounds.
- •General election structural ceiling: A democratic socialist primary coalition combining activist progressives and disillusioned mainstream liberals cannot win a general election without moderate independents and conservative-leaning swing voters. Cohn argues these candidates will inevitably run a conventional general election campaign, making their rural working-class reconversion strategy largely unrealistic in practice.
Notable Moment
Cohn notes that black voters consistently back establishment candidates in these primaries, partly because the black Democratic electorate contains a higher share of moderate and conservative voters than other groups — since conservative voters of other races simply vote Republican — creating a structural disadvantage for progressive candidates that polling often obscures.
Episode Transcript
From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroleff. This is The Daily. The left wing of the Democratic party has now faced key tests in two swing states, and the results were mixed. On Tuesday, Democratic socialist Francesca Hong lost the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin in an upset after leading by double digits in the polls. And last week in Michigan, despite being heavily outspent by his opponent, Abdul El Sayed won the Democratic nomination for senate by a slim margin. Today, my colleague, chief political analyst Nate Cohn, helps make sense of those conflicting outcomes and explains what they tell us about the state of the populist left in Democratic politics. It's Thursday, August 13. Nate, welcome back to The Daily. It's wonderful to have you here. Thank you for having me. Great to be here. So we wanna talk today about what this moment means for the Democratic Party. For the past ten years, it feels as though we've been talking about this divide in the party between the progressive left and the moderate establishment. And it feels like the story of this primary season for Democrats is to what extent is that progressive flank ascendant in the party and in national politics. In the last two weeks, one of those candidates narrowly won in Michigan, and another narrowly lost in Wisconsin. I don't totally know what to make of that. It feels a little confusing to me, but, fortunately, that's what we have you for. So, Nate, what should we make of that? Fortunately, I think it isn't very confusing. It's pretty clarifying. Oh? We've had two races in two weeks in states that are presidential battleground states, reasonably representative of the country politically in different ways, where the progressive left has essentially been tied a little bit ahead or a little bit behind with their establishment rivals. This is pretty different from what we've seen over most of the last ten years when the progressive left has basically only been reliably competitive in heavily democratic, young, highly educated urban areas. Now that can happen twice in two weeks after all, in presidential battleground states, and therefore, perhaps even nationwide that still comes with limits. There are large parts of these states where the progressive candidates aren't fairing very well, and that suggests there are also large parts of the country where the progressive left wouldn't fare very well. But this represents a really significant improvement in their standing within the Democratic Party compared to where they seem to stand just a few years ago. Okay. I wanna dig deeper into what you actually mean by the limits that these candidates are facing and what they've actually gained. But before we do, can you just spell out what we mean exactly when we talk about the left here? Like, who are these candidates? I heard a sigh. It's it's a little challenging to define. We don't just mean progressives after all. Right? Progressives have been …
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