Say Goodnight, New Democrats. It’s the Era of the New New Democrats.: There are about a thousand takeaways from a historic election like this one, the chief one being the thorough, and thoroughly gratifying, repudiation of you-know-who. But I’m going to focus on the one that gets at the heart of a key question for Democrats about what kind of party they’re going to be heading into 2028 and beyond. And the lesson is this: With Tuesday’s election results, particularly the Senate victories of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and James Talarico in Texas, the 1990s centrist rules about how you win a Senate race in a purple or red state are dead.
The ’90s gave birth to the so-called “New Democrats,” the centrists who’d jettisoned the old liberalism and adopted a more corporate-friendly aspect. For decades, you had to be a New Democrat to be taken seriously. But this week, we entered a new era.
El-Sayed and Talarico were never supposed to win these races. Talarico took positions in the past—notably on transgender rights, an issue that is supposed to be poison for Democrats—that the ’90s conventional wisdom would say there’s no way he could overcome, especially in deep-red Texas. El-Sayed was vehemently opposed by establishment Democrats, some of them because of his views on Israel, but many (and in my anecdotal experience most) of them on the grounds that he was too far left and absolutely unelectable in a swing state like Michigan. I had a number of conversations with Washington Democrats earlier this year in which I heard it said that if he was nominated, the party was just giving that Senate seat away.
But both candidates ran as aggressive economic populists, attacking billionaires and vowing to fight on behalf of working-class people. El-Sayed was ceaselessly on-message: money out of politics, money in your pockets, Medicare for All. And Talarico, while he did walk back some of his more progressive stands on cultural issues, never wavered on economics and delivered what for my money was the single most memorable riff of the campaign: “The only minority destroying America is… https://newrepublic.com/article/217524/new-democrats-end-era-centrism-2026-midterm-elections