Moderate Democrats are on a tear.
Democrats are overperforming at the state level, with centrist candidates flipping one seat and coming close in another in special elections in deep red parts of Iowa. Rahm Emanuel, who once orchestrated a takeover of the House by recruiting Blue Dog Democrats, is eying a 2028 bid for president. And leading Democrats like Gavin Newsom and Chuck Schumer are rebuffing the left — the California governor siding against trans players in women’s sports and the Senate minority leader veering away from progressive demands to shut down the government.
“Moderates are having their moment,” said Jonathan Kott, the onetime senior adviser to the former centrist Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. “I think people are realizing that there were many reasons we lost in 2024, but an acquiescence to all of the liberal groups and fighting and dying on hills about 1 and 2 and 3 percent of the voting population seemed really dumb.”
A fresh batch of public polling over the weekend showed the Democratic Party is facing its worst image crisis in some time. A NBC News poll showed more than half of independents have an unfavorable view of the party — just 11 percent of independents have positive views of Democrats — which could explain why Democrats are pivoting to reach these voters.
Even their own polling sees a move toward the center. In the party’s latest internal survey in congressional battlegrounds, the vast majority of voters — 69 percent — say Democrats were “too focused on being politically correct,” while 51 percent said the party is “elitist,” according to a poll conducted by the Democratic group Navigator Research.
“It’s a reaction to what happened in the wake of the Trump victory in 2016 where the party did move pretty radically to the left on a whole bunch of things and the country sort of did, too, particularly after the murder of George Floyd,” said Matt Bennett, the vice president of Third Way. The centrist group that has called for banning “far-left candidate questionnaires,” pushed “back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging,” and “own the failures of Democratic governance in large cities.”
The progressive and activist wing of the party isn’t rolling over. Populist champion Bernie Sanders is drawing large crowds in the Midwest, liberal activists are organizing against massive budget cuts and progressives are warning of a primary challenge to Schumer.
But the revolution is happening in a quieter way for centrists. Far from Washington, there are signs at the state level that moderate Democrats are doing extremely well in districts Trump captured only a few months ago.
In an Iowa state House special election last week, the Democratic candidate — though ultimately losing — outperformed Kamala Harris by 24 points. That performance by Democrat Nannette Griffin came on the heels of the party flipping a state Senate seat in Iowa and solidifying legislative majorities in Virginia. And it bolstered centrists’ argument that Democrats in the Trump era can motivate voters with meat-and-potatoes messaging around everyday costs.
The Iowa results build on Democrats’ string of successes in state legislative special elections this year, which the party is pointing to as a measure of enthusiasm ahead of the midterms.
“What I am noticing is just a rejuvenation within the Democrats across the state,” said Sen. Mike Zimmer, who picked up a GOP seat in rural Eastern Iowa in January that Trump won by 21 points. “If we work hard and we really come together and we have an organized plan, we can be much more competitive.”
And it isn’t just Iowa. Democrats are seizing on federal job losses as an issue in Pennsylvania special elections slated for the end of March, too, where they are pressing a more economic than ideological message.
In one state Senate district, where federal workers have been furloughed, “a lot of people have felt that it’s not being done in a gracious manner. A lot of people also just think it’s utter chaos,” said James Malone, the Democratic mayor of East Petersburg, Pennsylvania who is hoping to flip a GOP district.
Monroe called Zimmer the day after his victory to learn his playbook, and has adopted a similar economic message in his own campaign.
“As chaos reigns in Washington, Democrats have meaningful and winnable opportunities to push back on the MAGA agenda through state legislative special elections,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which is focused on electing Democrats to state legislatures.
The political implications for Schumer or Newsom are far from clear. And the results of a handful of special elections hardly foretell a Democratic comeback in Iowa. Democrats have historically done well before in the part of the state with a dense population of blue-collar workers. And Republicans maintain a tight grip on power in Iowa.
“These special elections can be, you know, not always the harbinger or the canary in the coal mine that you know that folks want them to be,” said GOP strategist Tyler Campbell.
Still, Democrats are flexing their muscles — convinced that an economic message and the use of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn approach to cutting government as a cudgel can lift the party across the map.
“It’s the energy factor,” said Iowa State Rep. JD Scholten. “Our side is very energized, because we’re irate with what’s happening. We’re seeing this as a national trend – people are fed up and disgusted with what they’re seeing out in D.C. and they’re trying to do something about it.”
In Washington, Schumer has shifted to the left since the years when he described himself as an “angry centrist,” and the criticism of him from within the party was not limited to progressives. But his vote last week was a repudiation of the protest politics of the party’s activist class.
“We have to reckon with the fact that young people, working class people, people of color – the backbone of the Democratic Party are moving away from the party,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, political director of the Sunrise Movement.
O’Hanlon said, “I think Chuck Schumer is part of that reason.”
But for some in the party, provoking the left may be the point. In challenging party orthodoxy on trans rights, Newsom joined Emanuel in tacking to the center, saying he was done “with the discussion of locker rooms” and “done with the discussion of bathrooms” and wanted instead to have a “conversation about the classroom.”
All of this is in line with a kind of cultural war retrenchment for which the party’s most pragmatic voices are practically pleading.
“There was an enormous shift in the culture and in our politics and some of that was very good and some of it went too far,” Third Way’s Bennett said. “And I think what we saw in 2024 was voters saying, ‘Whoa, we don’t think that the shift that the Democratic Party has taken was calibrated correctly. It went too far on a whole bunch of things.’”
Emily Ngo contributed to this report.
