Today’s elections will push us past the midpoint of primary season, and I talked to the great Ronald Brownstein about what the first half says about the state of the Democratic Party for this CNN story. Zooming out, there are four major trends that primaries have accelerated:
Party organs continue weakening as power shifts to outside entities like PACs & advocacy nonprofits. This shift heightens factional conflict.
Factional conflicts advantage high-agency actors with tolerance for risk. That disproportionately favors leftists today, not centrists.
Changes in technology, media, and campaign finance laws allow Republicans to aid leftists in amplifying intraparty tensions and hurting the most electable Democrats.
Racial dynamics of intra-Democratic Party factional conflict has flipped since the 1990s. Minority voters are disproportionately moderate and a bulwark keeping the party from following highly-educated white leftists “off the rails.”
1. Weak Parties & Strong Partisanship
Via CNN, here is How the 2026 primaries are reshaping the Democratic Party:
The struggle over control of the Democratic Party’s direction has roared to new heights this year, with New York’s primary on Tuesday looming as the next major battlefield between left and center.
From Maine to California, progressive and centrist forces have collided in an unusual, even unprecedented, number of primaries for local, state and congressional offices that have divided the party along ideological, and often generational, lines.
“The formal party structure is getting weaker and outside groups are getting stronger,” said Liam Kerr, co-founder of Welcome, a group working to support Democratic centrists, in a judgment echoed by many progressive activists. “We have not been in a place (before) where entire ecosystems of groups are effectively running parties within the parties in explicit, direct, factional warfare.”
We are in an era of “weak parties and strong partisanship”. The latter - the phenomenon by which the country, communities, and even families are torn apart by toxic polarization and deeply held partisan identities - is well-documented.
The former is both counterintuitive and rarely stated. The literal parties themselves - formal infrastructure like the DNC - are increasingly weakened relative to the interlocking nonprofits, PACs, firms, and influencers who profit off division to the tune of billions each cycle.
After the 2024 election, there was a widespread recognition that the party has moved too far left. But “The Democrats” are not a single empowered entity that can make such a change.
The incentives have not changed.
Read How the 2026 primaries are reshaping the Democratic Party here on CNN.
2. High Agency & Conflict
In The New York Times last week, Matthew Yglesias wrote about the (suddenly) much-profiled recruiter of Maine senate candidate Graham Platner:
Mr. Moraff is not a Democratic insider or a strategist. To use a term popular with the Silicon Valley types whom he doubtless hates, he is high agency. He saw a void and moved into it. He doesn’t accept the view that good candidates need to have traditional résumés or that to be the guy behind the guy in a critical Senate race, you need to pay your dues by managing House campaigns or toiling for multiple cycles at the national party committees.
Yglesias highlights efforts to recruit nontraditional candidates from across the ideological spectrum, including by our friends at The Bench and several WelcomePAC-supported candidates. He notes that while it is possible to eschew ideological divisions - candidates are endorsed by both leftists and more pragmatic groups - factional conflict in modern politics is unavoidable and will likely increase:
For the most part, though, moving in the direction of fresher faces is going to necessarily mean more ideological conflict rather than less. The process will be contentious and will make existing party leaders uncomfortable.
In seeking out something better, Democrats will also run the risk of ending up with something worse. But they can no longer argue that their fundamental problem is Mr. Trump or the Republicans — at least not only them. It is the low regard in which they themselves are held by the American people. So even if it gets messy, the Democratic Party needs this process.
Read all of The Democrats Need a Candidate Shake-Up in The New York Times here, and a companion piece in The Wall Street Journal from Ravi Gupta, titled Meet the Political Bosses Who Brought You Graham Platner: The Democratic Party’s New Establishment is less interested in winning than in remaking the party.
3. Off The Rails
“The New Establishment” of upscale leftists face one clear obstacle in taking over the Democratic Party. As Tom Edsall writes in The New York Times on The Voters Who Can Keep Democrats From Going Off the Rails, the left vs. center factional battle has reversed since the rise of the DLC in the 1990s:
40 years later, the racial and ideological split in the Democratic Party has been flipped on its head.
White, well-educated liberals are the leading proponents of cultural and identity policies that often alienate swing middle-class voters. Black and other minority Democrats are a strong force for moderation.
Edsall quotes Lanae Erickson from Third Way:
Today’s white Democratic voters bear little resemblance to the white Democrats of Jesse Jackson’s era. They are wealthier, more highly educated and more socially liberal. Meanwhile, the Black voters who make up the consistent base of the party have held steady while the rest of the coalition has shifted around them.
Jackson used to say that parties need two wings to fly. He was right, but it turns out that voters of color are now leading the moderate wing of the modern Democratic Party.
And Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute:
the nonwhite working class has emerged as a force for moderation in U.S. politics. They are leery of the left’s cultural agenda — open borders, permissive prosecutors, the obsession with identity politics and “equity.” They express higher levels of national pride and patriotism. And they aren’t agitating for the replacement of a market economy with democratic socialism.
4. GOP Meddling Helps TNE
The New Establishment has risen with help from its symbiotic relationship with the GOP, who benefits from both internal division and the rise of a leftism that damages the Democratic Party brand. Such mutual assistance has broken new ground this election cycle, with Republican SuperPACs running campaigns amplifying candidates backed by Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, and the Working Families Party.
In CA-22, mailers sent by GOP groups were virtually indistinguishable from those sent by David Hogg’s PAC.
Many Ways To Lose
There are three levels of conflict in modern American politics:
Can Democrats beat Republicans?
Can factional leftists win enough primaries to take over the Democratic Party?
Can factional leftists dominate the perception of the Democratic Party?
All three are intertwined, but distinct. Each has evolved over the past decade. In this cycle’s primaries and beyond, some trends benefitting The New Establishment are accelerating - weakening parties, stronger partisanship, more factional conflict, more opportunities for high-upside risk-taking from high-agency people, and more direct intervention from meddling Republicans.
Admitting this uneven terrain is the first step to changing it. Centrists can win the majority of primaries and flip nearly all the majority-making seats, but leftists - working with the GOP - will still claim momentum.
That is the lesson of the first half of primary season. Democrats cannot rely on “the party” to save itself, because the party does not have the capability. The choice is not between unity and conflict. The conflict is already here. The choice is whether the centrist side of the conflict has the agency and risk tolerance to empower voters who can keep this thing from going off the rails.
What To Watch For Tonight
The NYC-centric media will focus on candidates in districts where Harris got 65% (NY-14), 71% (NY-7), and 80% (NY-12) of the vote. While there will be some lessons in those, particularly regarding the strength of the Democratic Socialists of America, we suggest looking at two other races tonight:
NY-17: Cait Conley is running in a GOP-held seat, and has faced GOP meddling. This is the type of NewDem & Bench supported candidate who will determine if Democrats win durable majorities - and the GOP knows it.
UT-01: as this now-blue seat was being redistricted last year, we made a big push for former Rep. Ben McAdams, a top-1% overperformer in 2018 and 2020. He has been under relentless attack from a(nother) Bernie Sanders endorsed boarding school alum, but holds the potential to defend a tougher redraw when the GOP redistricts again.
Good luck to everyone participating in our democracy today, especially the centrist candidates getting whacked from both sides.