The wrath of Democratic voters has reached a boiling point.
Anti-establishment fury within the party’s base has been rising for some time. It announced itself with a startling overture in Maine, reached a crescendo in New York, and returned this week with a deafening fanfare in Colorado.
In Maine’s Senate primary, heterodox outsider Graham Platner was trouncing the DSCC-favored Janet Mills, the state’s governor, so badly that she exited the race early. In New York, three Democratic Socialist candidates, backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, defeated incumbent or establishment-endorsed candidates. And this week in Colorado, Senator Michael Bennet lost in a shocking upset to State Attorney General Phil Weiser, who ran as an anti-Washington outsider. At the same time, 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros won a commanding victory over Representative Diana DeGette, a 30-year incumbent.
The success of this internal revolt within the Democratic base is highly unusual. While Republicans are much more prone to sweep out their old guards, the usual pattern within Democratic politics is that establishment candidates face fierce contests from progressive challengers, only for those challengers to fall short. For every Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who knocked off Representative Joe Crowley, the Democratic House Caucus Chair in 2018, there are countless progressive insurgents, such as Jesse Jackson, whose campaigns move the party’s policy center of gravity but fail to overturn the apple cart themselves.
So, what has changed?
The answer is a confluence of overlapping forces. Vibecession or no, record inequality, stubborn inflation, high housing costs, and generalized technology-driven uncertainty over the fate of entire industries have made many Americans—especially young Americans—sour on unfettered capitalism and more receptive to the stronger social guarantees offered by Mamdani-style Democratic Socialists. If you were raised amid the Financial Crisis, the pandemic, Elon Musk’s trillionaire status, the Trump Family’s enrichment, and the Roberts Court’s dismantling of protections against polluters, Scandinavian socialism has a certain appeal.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is another obvious factor. As social media and news reports continue to deliver fresh evidence of atrocities committed by the Likud government in Israel, establishment Democrats have been far too slow to put themselves at arm’s length from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and demand restraint in exchange for continued support. Democratic voters now support Palestine over Israel by a 48-point margin, and Democratic leadership has not reacted accordingly.
Perhaps most importantly, Democratic voters are furious with their own party for not standing up more forcefully to Trump or showing more outward alarm at the threat to liberal democracy itself. Historic low approval ratings for the Democratic Party as an institution have been driven in large part by Democrats furious with their own party’s perceived weakness and ineffectuality. All too often, Democratic legislators have behaved as if the Trump presidency were business as usual: approving wholly unqualified Trump cabinet nominees and triangulating to appease MAGA sentiments on immigration, trans rights, and fighting as if democracy were merely another issue rather than the condition that makes all other issues possible. To some degree, this is a bad rap. Without control of the House or Senate, Democratic options are minimal in Washington.
Still, the party’s communications can feel tone deaf to the base. When the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the birthright citizenship clearly and unequivocally stated in the 14th Amendment, party leaders responded with a widely mocked bland celebration instead of hair-raising alarm that we are one justice away from total far-right legal Calvinball.
The connective tissue running through all of this is a sense, shared by many Democratic and independent voters, that the powerful now face almost no accountability for wrongdoing in any sphere of American life. In contrast, average Americans face a rigged system.
They have a point. The Justice Department under Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, failed to act quickly enough to prosecute Donald Trump and his cronies for their many crimes, allowing the convicted felon to evade legal consequences by waltzing into the White House. (That and decisions by the long-delayed special counsel Jack Smith to try key cases in Florida instead of Washington, D.C. proved disastrous. Similarly, the Biden Justice Department failed for four years to do anything to hold Jeffrey Epstein’s associates (including, famously, Trump!) accountable even socially, much less legally. Now Trump’s slavishly politicized Justice Department is engaged in an active cover-up on the 47th president’s behalf.
The rich and powerful are also evading accountability on social media. While imperfect, the old Twitter struck fear into the hearts of politicians and media celebrities who engaged in poor behavior by subjecting them to social shaming. Then Elon Musk removed that nuisance by buying the place and turning it into a cesspool of hate, bots, and misinformation. Even algorithms on Facebook and YouTube are a slog of far-right propaganda, and Trump allies recently acquired TikTok.
The accountability found in journalism has been similarly destroyed. Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post and, despite building it up substantially under Editor Marty Baron, then turned it into a mouthpiece for conservative viewpoints favoring the wealthy. Larry and David Ellison, through Paramount mergers, acquired CBS, which has now taken a sharp rightward turn under Bari Weiss. With Paramount’s impending takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery and CNN, one of the most iconic brands in news is likely to suffer the same fate.
Business scams seem ubiquitous, with no social or legal consequences. Cryptocurrency rug pulls that would be illegal in any normally regulated environment are now treated as standard operating procedure even by the president of the United States. Prediction markets and unregulated sports betting are fleecing susceptible young people with little accountability. The artificial intelligence industry could kill millions of jobs and benefit a handful of billionaires without any form of social guarantee in exchange, even as those same companies functionally stole the combined knowledge output of all humankind without remuneration. The government seems too slow to react, if it reacts at all.
Even elections seem to deliver little relief. The Republican Party appears impervious to correction, whether in victory or defeat, leaning ever rightward regardless of the consequences. Vast spending by dark money and lobbying groups (given near impunity by ever more permissive Supreme Court rulings and a toothless FEC) shields unpopular industries and interests from normal forms of small-d democratic accountability.
It is no surprise, then, that normally forgiving establishment-friendly Democratic voters are rising in panic and fury. If legislators refuse to respond to the moment, the people will make sure they get the message.
