"You either fight for a future or you don’t": Progressives get early jump on Democratic primaries

Democratic primaries are heating up with progressive candidates generating early hype and centrist candidates who lost their 2024 bids announcing new campaigns in the hopes that conditions in 2026 can deliver them a win. Despite both wings of the party gearing up for competitive races, the two factions aren't clashing — yet.

Since the Democrats' defeat in the 2024 elections, the 2026 primaries have loomed, with both the party’s progressive and moderate wings seeking to pull the Democrats in a direction that they believe will lead them back to the majority in 2026 and potentially to the White House in 2028.

So far, progressive candidates have had the jump, often criticizing the party for its limp opposition to Trump and Republicans and promising a more robust resistance to the administration.

While firebrands like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have packed stadiums in western states, challengers like Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, and Katherine Abughazaleh, a political commentator, have launched House campaigns reminiscent of insurgent campaigns from the 2018 cycle.

Chakrabarti is currently running in California’s 11th District, which has been represented by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the former speaker of the House, for the past 37 years. In his campaign, he’s criticized current leadership for failing to acknowledge a “completely new era” in American politics and subsequently failing to rise to meet the threat the Republican Party poses to the United States, its democratic institutions and the material wellbeing of Americans.

“You know, they're playing a different game. And the Republicans, unfortunately, are going faster. They're moving too fast for them,” Chakrabarti told Salon in an interview.

Abugazaleh announced a primary challenge in Illinois’s Ninth District against Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who has represented the district since 1999. With Schakowsky being one of Congress’s more progressive members, Abugazaleh has focused on generational change and honing a new type of campaign strategy, focused on helping people in the district with the campaign infrastructure.

“I think that this strategy, yeah, it might, we might not be blanketing every single second of TV commercial space, but people will actually know me and will either be helped by this campaign and by the groups in their community who are doing the work or will know someone who has been,” Abugazaleh told Salon in an interview.

The Justice Democrats, which have backed progressive primary candidates since 2018, are also promising to field a slate of candidates in 2026, both in blue districts and swing districts.

In the Senate, Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator, has announced a bid for the U.S. Senate, criticizing the leadership of Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and telling Politico in an interview that it was time for him to step down from leadership, in the wake of his capitulation to Republicans on their recent government funding bill. She is running to replace Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., who is retiring.

“The checks and balances no longer exist. So you either fight for a future or you don’t. And that isn’t about whether a party moves left or right or center,” McMorrow told Politico.

With establishment critical primary candidates cropping up across the country, centrist Democrats are also promising to pull the party in a more conservative direction, with California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom hosting right-wing activists like Charlie Kirk and former advisor to President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, on his podcast. Other self-fashioned moderates like the former House speaker and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel are hinting that they plan on returning to public office.

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However, it looks like progressives and moderates are playing on different turf, for now. Matt Bennett, a vice president of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, discussed the candidate recruitment strategy of centrist Democrats and, as it stands, he said they’re focused on swing districts currently held by Republicans.

Bennett said centrists were getting excited about candidates like Rebecca Cooke, who announced a campaign for Wisconsin’s Third District, which is currently represented by Rep. Derrick Van Orden, R-Wis. Centrists have also recruited Janelle Stelson to run against Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., in Pennsylvania’s 10th District and JoAnna Mendoza, a former drill instructor, to run in Arizona’s Sixth District, which is currently represented by Rep. Juan Ciscomani, R-Airz. A big part of the centrist push, Bennett said, is backing candidates who had performed well in 2024, even if they didn’t win.

“Occasionally, we, the party, nominates people from the farther left in those districts, and they lose, and when we nominate people from the center, they win. It happened in my hometown of Syracuse, where, you know, for two cycles in a row, we nominated somebody who was too far left in the district, and then we nominated John Mannion, and then he won,” Bennett said. “So and there's plenty of examples of that all over the country, so we are very much hoping that moderates will run in as many of the purple and even red districts as possible, and we're already seeing that.”