Courtney Subramanianin Washington
A year after the Democrats found themselves out of power and without a leader, the party is standing at a crossroads.
After months of downbeat introspection, three election races this week gave them a much-needed burst of momentum.
In New York, there was the unlikely victory of a 34-year-old democratic socialist as mayor of the nation’s biggest city, while it was a former CIA agent who won in Virginia to become the state’s first female governor.
And in New Jersey, a former Navy helicopter pilot who made opposing Donald Trump a focal point of her campaign delivered a decisive victory over a Republican candidate backed by the president.
These three candidates – New York state assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, Virginia’s law-and-order moderate Abigail Spanberger and New Jersey congresswoman Mikie Sherrill – each ran a different race.
Their victories have spurred a debate on how Democrats chart a path forward, and whether the centrists or the party’s left wing will prevail as they head into the critical 2026 midterm elections – and beyond.
But without a standard-bearer until the presidential race and the 2028 election, Democrats are grappling with how to land on a clear message, rebuild their brand and retool their strategy to win back voters.
Some believe that will happen through refining their focus on the affordability crisis while others believe it’s a matter of pushing back harder against Trump.
“This was a repudiation of President Trump and the Republicans, not an affirmation of us,” former US ambassador to Japan and Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel told the BBC.
“The first lesson for Democrats was we didn’t trip over our shoelaces. We stayed focused on what people needed to hear from us – that we were concerned about it, and we didn’t get into some cultural war debate that we can’t win.”
The Democrats have been adrift.
The party not only lost the White House last year but also both chambers of Congress, every battleground state and even some support among key demographics including working class, racial minorities and young voters.
The party has lost 4.5 million registered voters to Republicans from 2020 to 2024, according to the New York Times.
And though Trump remains under water in approval ratings, hovering in the low 40s, Democrats plummeted to a 35-year-low in popularity this summer.
A Wall Street Journal poll in July found 63% of voters had an unfavourable view of the Democratic party, the highest since 1990.
But the off-year elections could signal a tide is turning as Democrats begin to clarify their message of addressing economic pain. Party officials, operatives and strategists say the common thread in the races in New York, New Jersey and Virginia was a disciplined focus on lowering costs, despite the candidates’ ideological differences.
Mamdani ran a left-wing populist campaign that focused on a rent freeze, free buses and universal childcare, paid for by new taxes on the wealthy.
Sherrill drilled into lowering utility costs while Spanberger underscored the rising costs in Virginia where Trump’s government cuts have upended life for many of the state’s federal workers.
“Voters want their elected officials to be spending essentially all of their time and energy trying to come up with policy solutions to the affordability crisis,” said Simon Bazelon, author of a yearlong 2024 postmortem autopsy on why Democrats lost, released last week.
The expansive, 58-page report, backed by political action committee WelcomePac, which supports centre-left candidates, provides a searing analysis of the party’s leftward drift, on both economic and cultural issues, since the days of Barack Obama’s presidency.
After polling more than 500,000 voters, Mr Bazelon said the prevailing theme was Democrats focused too much on democracy, abortion and identity and cultural issues instead of cost of living, border security and public safety.
The Biden administration was slow to recognise inflation, telling voters the economy was better than they thought despite the day-to-day hardships, Mr Bazelon said. The “Bidenomics” rallies fell flat. The economic data talking points rang hollow. Prices increased, and people noticed.
“Stop trying to tell them that what they think is wrong, and instead recognise that in a democracy, if we don’t take public opinion seriously, then we are going to lose to people who don’t take democracy seriously,” Mr Bazelon added.
Following Tuesday’s Democratic sweep, Republicans – and even Trump – appeared to acknowledge they’re behind on the battle over economic messaging. Trump summoned Republican senators to the White House early Wednesday morning to discuss ending the stalemate over the government shutdown, now the longest in US history.
“The president is very keyed into what’s going on, and he recognises, like anybody, that it takes time to do an economic turnaround, but all the fundamentals are there, and I think you’ll see him be very, very focused on prices and cost of living,” James Blair, a deputy White House chief of staff and Trump’s former 2024 political director, told Politico on Wednesday.
Like his predecessors, Trump faces stiff political headwinds in next year’s midterm elections, which typically serve as a referendum on the party in power. Though Trump won the election in part due to his promise to bring prices down, inflation continues to bedevil the White House.
Democrats say Trump’s economy will be the prime focus during the 2026 midterms, when the party hopes to retake at least one chamber of Congress. The Republican-led Congress has helped Trump push through his policy agenda, and largely ignored his expansion of executive power which includes circumventing Congress’s power of the purse to cut federal programmes.
Trump’s global tariffs, which have largely fallen on US importers, have contributed to inflation, accordng to experts. Meanwhile, healthcare premiums are spiking just as food stamps are being interrupted for millions of Americans during the government shutdown.
“It’s not one economic hit, it’s a snowball of economic hits that people are feeling all at one time,” said Libby Schneider, deputy executive director of the Democratic National Committee.
“It’s a really important lesson that we have taken post-2024 and that other candidates have too, which is to really localise the economy and, unfortunately, Trump and Republicans have given us infinite opportunities to do that.”
But localising the economy has its limits. While it’s a big tent party, embracing both the left-wing and centrist models won’t necessarily work in 2028, when Democrats have to select a standard-bearer and a platform that will force them to choose one ideological path over the other.
Republican strategist Matt Gorman said that path will be determined by who gets through the primary elections both next year and looking ahead to 2028.
The party’s money and energy, he noted, has been focused on the left and Republicans will be hoping the nominee fighting a general election comes from that wing. He urged his party to respond by making affordability their message, and by courting the voters Trump was able to reach, even without him on the ballot.
Left-wing Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, who campaigned alongside candidates in New Jersey, Virginia and New York, said that means moving beyond the generic conversation on affordability and championing a bold economic message on a national level with specifics on tackling inequality.
“The vibes are not going to be enough,” he said, adding that Democrats should establish basic pillars around Medicare for all, a tax on billionaires and universal childcare. “And local candidates can adopt what they see fit for their communities.”
Republicans have already seized on Mamdani’s victory to try to shape the narrative of the Democratic party as being taken over by a Soviet-style communist. Following the election, in a speech at the America Business Forum in Florida on Wednesday, Trump said the difference between the two parties was a choice between “communism and common sense”.
“We are going to have a fight in our party about how to prosecute the case against Trump and how to beat the right-wing populists,” said Matt Bennett, co-founder of the centrist think tank Third Way. “And the fight is going to boil down to, mostly but not entirely, do you fight right-wing populism with left-wing populism?”
He credits Democrats for taking a more disciplined tack in pushing back against Trump, pointing to the shutdown battle during which they held firm in focusing on healthcare and rejected pressure from climate change groups to attach more demands to the fight.
“They have started to learn how to fight Trump,” Mr Bennett said.
Still, Mr Bennett and others in the party say there’s much to learn from left-wing figures like Mamdani, a skilled campaigner who focused on his constituents’ lives.
The 34-year-old mayor-elect, along with Spanberger, 46, and Sherrill, 53, represent a younger bench of Democrats at a moment when generational divide has upended the party. Though Joe Biden’s age was a major point of contention in the 2024 election campaign, four House Democrats also died in office over the last year.
After Trump’s victory last year, 39-year-old Saikat Chakrabarti listened as his state representative, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, argued on a New York Times podcast shortly after the election that nothing needed to change.
“I just thought that was unacceptable,” Chakrabarti, former chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said of his decision to challenge Pelosi in San Francisco, though she has since announced her retirement.
“Part of my motivation to run is to try to recruit people to run across the country to create a Democratic party that actually stands for working people, that stands strongly against corruption and big money in politics and has a real vision for how to build an economy that will restore the American dream.”
Many Democrats welcome the idea of ushering in fresh candidates but say it’s not the only answer to winning back voters. The majority of Democrats interviewed for this piece agreed that earning back the trust of the voters following the tumultuous 2024 campaign was the first step to winning at a national level.
But what was less clear is whether the party needs to show more contrition about how they arrived at such a low point.
The DNC’s own analysis of the disastrous election reportedly does not address the question of whether Biden should have listened to public unease about his health and dropped out much earlier.
“I think people don’t trust us. They don’t trust that we’ll keep our promises,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits new Democrats to run for office.
The group launched a $50m plan to rebuild faith in Democrats in parts of the country where they have lost ground with voters.
“The long-term mission is to try and fix the party brand by attaching a new face to it.”
Whether that face is one looking left or looking centre-left is the big question.