Justice Democrats is out today with a new threat to primary Democrats, epitomized by a prominent newsletter headline The Left is Ready to Rebel.
This looks suspiciously like the threat to primary Joe Manchin from this time four years ago, launched by the same team.
Like that threat, this is not going anywhere (as we predicted).
The moment has passed by the group that recruited AOC and laid claim to a “Squad” that would grow to reshape the Democratic Party leftward (recently AOC said she will no longer back primary challenges, a view shared by the Congressional Progressive Caucus).
Justice Democrats epitomized the energy and ambition that powered the ascendant progressive movement of the early Trump years. Founded by far-left political entrepreneurs who cut their teeth on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, the upstart group burst onto the scene in 2018 with primary challenges to establishment Democrats — including a threat to knock off Hakeem Jeffries.
The post-2018 surge of far-left energy catalyzed by Justice Democrats, their “Squad,” and a small but organized ecosystem of Bernie-linked groups like Our Revolution wasn’t built to last. Like a prairie fire, the far-left spread fast and soon exhausted its primary fuel supply. Justice Democrats and Our Revolution quickly burned through the handful of deep-blue districts where they could win primaries before smoldering in the face of their incredibly narrow appeal.
We have spent much of recent years investigating “whether the groups and individuals who built the entrepreneurial infrastructure to power the far-left momentum surge from 2016-2020 were past their peak.” With each passing review, the answer is an increasingly resounding “yes.”
In 2023, Justice Democrats announced a four-day work week and laid off half its staff.
In 2024, Justice Democrats lost more incumbents in Democratic primaries (two) than seats picked up.
Third Way’s Matt Bennett has noted that it would take 45 years for Justice Democrats to match the centrist New Democrats in numbers… if they continue to add two to four per cycle.
What rings most true about this insight is that the growth of far-left candidates was linear, at best. We wrote in NBC that many leftist political entrepreneurs — including the founder of Justice Democrats — have backgrounds in Silicon Valley and for-profit startups.
Justice Democrats looked like a unicorn in 2018. But they were not built to replicate, much less scale. By 2022 it was clear they were only on pace to win one or two races per year in the 435-member House. And many of those were duplicate candidates - in their second cycle of 2020, they only elected 1 candidate who was not on their 2018 slate.
They started recruiting candidates in 2017, and today - with much fanfare - they started recruiting for 2026.
After a decade, they have ten incumbents (a number of whom won office before they even existed).
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