The invisible faction that dominates the Democratic Party

Meet the Progressive Establishment

There is a lot of commentary about factional divides inside the Democratic Party that flattens everything into a single “left-wing insurgents against the moderate establishment” frame that I think is much too simplistic. Today, I’m going to talk about an important distinction between two different strands of progressivism. Tomorrow, I’ll talk about a divide in the moderate camp.

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Most of the many Democratic primaries this summer have featured a moderate-versus-progressive split.

And, to an extent, that’s just what you’d expect from a primary. When candidates run against each other, they need to differentiate themselves in some way and the result is typically a bit of an ideological divide, even when that’s not strongly supported by the candidates’ records.

Less typical, though, was this primary season’s marked and fairly coherent left-wing insurgency: Graham Platner in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado, and Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander in New York, all of whom upset the apple cart.

It’s tempting to shorthand everything that happened over the course of the primary season in terms of this insurgency — not only are those races scored as progressive victories over moderates, but so are wins by Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota and Phil Weiser in Colorado.

But I think that’s a little perverse.

Flanagan and Weiser were both statewide elected officials who were arguably “next in line” for the races they won. What’s more, while I think you can really say that the candidates they beat (Angie Craig and Michael Bennet, respectively) are more moderate than your average Democrat, that’s actually not true of a lot of the candidates the insurgents beat. In particular, many of the House incumbents who got knocked off, if anything, had political profiles very similar to Flanagan — they were Medicare for All proponents, ICE abolitionists, etc.

In fact, I think a lot of these simplistic characterizations of the 2026 primaries elide the existence of what I’d argue is the largest and most important faction in the Democratic Party.

Let’s call it the Progressive Establishment.

What is the Progressive Establishment? Think of those who favored Barack Obama’s second term leftward pivots or the people who supported Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders in 2016 but were glad that his presence in the race held her feet to the fire and forced her to tack left on policy. The people who thought Elizabeth Warren in 2020 offered the best of both worlds.

In the House, there are almost 100 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Most of these people do not have the fame and personalistic following of Bernie Sanders or second-generation Berners like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But they have dramatically more formal institutional clout grounded in a big network of progressive foundations, donor tables, and grant-funded NGOs. And if you can’t conceptualize them as a distinct force in Democratic Party politics, you can’t understand the party today.

The left’s intense policy-demanders

National party leaders are much fonder of the Progressive Establishment than they are the Insurgent Left, but in many ways, I find the Progressive Establishment more problematic.

But the leaders and I have an opposite view of this precisely because we see the same thing: the Progressive Establishment is made up of really intense policy-demanders. They care a lot about getting leadership to agree that the Keystone XL pipeline is bad or that voter ID laws are racist or that infrastructure investments have project labor agreements attached. The Progressive Establishment wants members to sign on the dotted line, and when they do, those members become kosher.

The Progressive Establishment also more or less plays by the rules of friendly politics.

Tina Smith’s retirement opened up a Senate seat in Minnesota, so Peggy Flanagan ran for it. She’s more progressive than Amy Klobuchar, but there’s no universe in which Flanagan would have challenged Klobuchar in a primary. In the open seat primary that emerged, Flanagan ran to Angie Craig’s left and hit Craig hard for not being as dogmatic a progressive as she is. But if, instead of retiring, Tina Smith had resigned and Craig had been picked for the vacancy, it’s again impossible to imagine Flanagan running against her. Flanagan is essentially a regular normie Democrat. She’s left-wing, but she doesn’t see that as inconsistent with being a regular normie Democrat because the Democrats are a left-wing party.

You also see this in the contrast between Graham Platner and Troy Jackson, who replaced him on the ticket.

When Jackson was running for governor, Platner endorsed him. They’re generally like-minded, and it’s tough to spot concrete policy differences between them. But Jackson is an experienced Democratic Party politician who mostly gets along with his colleagues. He’s running a banal partisan campaign against Susan Collins and it’s being received as such. Platner’s whole campaign was both a breathtaking exercise in line-jumping and also full of Bernie-style hostility to the institutional Democratic Party. It was a rhetorical mode that was well-suited to the audacious job of running against a sitting governor, but it also rubbed lots of Democrats the wrong way.

Jackson is the Progressive Establishment; Platner was part of the insurgency.

These two groups obviously work together and collaborate at times, but the opposite is also true.

The chief of staff to the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus went on to run the Biden administration’s Office of Presidential Personnel. As a result, C.P.C. elected officials got a lot of say over domestic policy staffing. At the time, many people remarked on the large influx of Warrenite personnel into the Biden administration. Bernie supported that, but there were no senior Bernie staffers or vocal Bernie 2016 endorsers in the administration, because the insurgency is fundamentally about the idea that the insurgents should take over the party, while the Progressive Establishment is much more about scoring specific policy wins.

It’s easy to conceptualize the insurgents as simply being “even further left,” but in a lot of ways they’re just more flexible on policy. As far as the Insurgent Left is concerned, Mamdani can be as tough on crime as he feels like, because he’s one of them and they trust his judgments — criminal-justice-reform groups might complain, but he can blow them off. The Progressive Establishment is much more of a leaderless, networked phenomenon, an endless logroll that can’t really move off its demands.

The dominant faction

Part of what’s frustrating to moderates right now is that the drama over the Insurgent Left has managed to largely erase the existence of the Progressive Establishment, creating a sense that party leadership, incumbent officeholders, and the Democratic Party status quo are all aligned around moderation.

I will happily concede that the Biden-Harris administration was not, on a personnel level, an administration of insurgents or Bernie Sanders loyalists. And on foreign policy issues in general and the Israel-Gaza war in particular, Biden hewed very much to a line that was in keeping with his whole long personal identity as a fairly hawkish moderate Democrat. But much of the current discourse has consisted of the Insurgent Left and the Progressive Establishment teaming up to insist that voter discontent with Gaza was the main problem the Biden administration faced, when the bad issues for him were clearly centered on the economy, on border/immigration issues, and on the diffuse sense that his administration was not the return to normalcy that he promised.

The surprisingly sweeping nature of the Biden policy agenda reflected the circumstances of the pandemic and the ideas of the Progressive Establishment. The agenda came from the progressive think tanks and the progressive advocacy infrastructure and was driven by the insertion into key roles of personnel who believed that being responsive to progressive advocacy infrastructure was the most important thing.

It’s not, of course, that the Progressive Establishment got its way on every single issue. But I do think that with Biden’s domestic policy, the question was always whether ideas emanating from the Progressive Establishment would be adopted.

The Biden administration undertook no significant moderate or reformist initiatives of any kind. There was no equivalent to Bill Clinton’s welfare reform or Barack Obama’s push for performance pay for K-12 teachers.

The Progressive Establishment, to be fair, did the work. They did the organizing, built the media infrastructure, persuaded elites, and basically called the tune. It’s embarrassing for them that it didn’t work well, but objective observers of the scene should acknowledge that this is what happened. The Insurgent Left augurs a new approach to Israel, involves running some perhaps-unwise electoral risks (there’s way more downside to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan than to less-edgy Peggy Flanagan in bluer Minnesota), and threatens to make life uncomfortable for incumbents. But it’s an insurgency against a set of party leaders who already embraced the bulk of the progressive agenda in large part because (except on Israel) the donors party leaders listen to are very progressive.

Conversely, I think moderates are excessively focused on complaining about the insurgents.

It’s true that as a matter of causation, a big reason that Democrats have moved so far left over the past 10 or 15 years is the activity of the Insurgent Left. But in terms of what specifically is happening, the story is that party leaders keep ceding more and more decision-making to the Progressive Establishment, not that insurgents have won all the primaries and taken over. If people who want Democrats to be more willing to say “no” to the groups want to win the argument, we need to make the right argument. The Progressive Establishment dominates the legislatures of almost every blue state. Someone like Abigail Spanberger who’s trying to chart a prudent course for Virginia and keeps clashing with progressives in the legislature as a result isn’t battling with a small band of insurgent leftists; she’s dealing with mainstream progressive advocacy infrastructure.

The insurgent future

When it comes to the future of the Democratic Party, a major known unknown is the actual future of the Insurgent Left.

If Bernie Sanders were younger, the answer would be obvious — he would run again in 2028 and try to win this time. But he’s not younger.

Many assume Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is next in line to be Bernie’s successor as the insurgent leader, but she seems somewhat ambivalent about running. Ro Khanna more obviously has the mix of ambition and egomania that it takes to run for president, but he’s not nearly as well liked as A.O.C. Zohran Mamdani seems to have all the right attributes, but he’s constitutionally ineligible.

The Insurgent Left is very specifically defined by Bernie Sanders. He is the dominant figure, and he has a strong personalistic following that lets him flip-flop from insisting that Biden stay on the ticket even after his disastrous debate performance at the very height of the fighting in Gaza to making Israel the dominant factional issue of 2026. If he passes the baton to A.O.C. in a very clear way, then maybe she just takes this role over. And obviously if he passes the baton and she runs for president and she wins the nomination and then she beats JD Vance, that’s the end of the story — the insurgency will be over because it will have won.

But if she doesn’t run, then it seems like the movement will probably fragment and be absorbed into the larger Progressive Establishment as its members amass seniority.

I think that would be a shame.

Because for all I disagree with the Insurgent Left, I do think their strong leader model and appetite for risk mean they have more upside. Mamdani had a bunch of bad beliefs about housing policy, but he was persuaded of the merits of zoning reform and market-rate construction and as a result he has a good team running those issue areas and is trying to make constructive changes. The Progressive Establishment is structurally incapable of doing anything other than endless everything bagels and really can’t be fixed because its core advocacy infrastructure exists to perform coalition management rather than analyze issues.

The one Insurgent Left figure in a really key race, Abdul El-Sayed, is currently down in the polls in a way that is remarkable given the fundamentals in Michigan. That’s a big problem. But it’s a problem that I think is fixable if he digs in and tries, and the only real question is whether he’ll be adequately motivated to try.

I have no idea what’s in his heart or what he’ll do. But I do think the insurgent movement understands that if he wins his race, that will be a serious coup for them, while if he loses, it’ll be a serious setback.

And for a movement that’s more focused on personalities than on policy minutiae, that means there’s a powerful incentive to try to do what it takes to win — their approach stands in contrast to a Progressive Establishment mindset, which holds that the highest value is to stay on the good side of an endless array of advocacy groups. Ideally, of course, I would just like politicians I agree with to win all the primaries. But failing that, I’d rather have self-confident insurgents than an endless parade of interest group goo.