Just a few thoughts for the 2026 Democratic primary cycles for the House and Senate. First Dan Nexon makes a very good set of points:
The primary challenges are coming. Some of them will succeed. It’s imperative that a) voters vet the challengers, lest we wind up losing seats because we nominate someone unelectable b) competent people run as challengers.
— Dan Nexon (@dhnexon.bsky.social) March 13, 2025 at 7:25 PM
If we think that 2026 will be a Democratic friendly wave year and if we also think that the base of the Democratic Party is pissed at party leadership for not leading, then we should be seeing a lot of primary challengers. The ideal targets are safe(ish) seat incumbents who think that somehow we can go back to the past. That’s done and gone. But the challengers need to be competent and not grifters as there are going to be a ton of grifters out there. If we think that 2026 could look like 2010 but in reverse, we also need to make sure that primary challengers are not inverse Sharron Angles and Christine O’Donnells that lost very winnable seats because they were goddamn weird.
We also need to figure out state ballot rules early. One of the first big netroots scalps was supporting Ned Lamont in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic Senate primary against Lieberman. Winning that night made a lot of sacrifices worth it. And then we had to deal with Lieberman running as a pseudo-Republican in the general. Let’s understand the ballot access rules.
PublicHealthGuy on BSky makes a good point too:
dems lost another seat in the house today after a very old rep who was in poor health died in office. second time this year. with razor thin vote margins, this is a problem
All else being equal between two primary challengers, we should seriously put a thumb on the scale to support a challenger against an incumbent who qualifies for Social Security versus an incumbent who is just starting to get letters to join AARP.
A lot more things to think about but these should be some basic questions and concepts to ponder….
Oh yeah — I’m seeing the space for someone like a Howard Dean to look at the Democratic party leadership and see a wide open lane as a huge portion of the party’s core voters are going WTF and no one in power addressing that WTFness.
Azhrie139
Thank you for the thoughtful forward looking post. Maybe tomorrow I can better take it to heard.
Baud
Fine. I won’t run.
Betty Cracker
Great points, and I applaud you for processing what seems to be happening right now so quickly that you can think about next steps. I’m still stuck in the “what the fucking fuck, are you fucking kidding me?!?!?” phase.
Trollhattan
We’re at Gillian Welch and this place is packed with HIPPIES.
David Anderson
@Betty Cracker: It is either going analytical or have too much good Scotch… and given that I have an R&R due tomorrow, the Scotch is reserved for Saturday.
David Anderson
@Baud: We just have to make sure you run in a can’t lose seat (D+45 it is)
geg6
Personally, I’m pretty much set on changing my voter registration to Independent. I no longer wish to be associated with the people running the party I have been a member of and for which I pounded the streets for almost 50 years. They tried to lie straight to my face over the last 48 hours and decline to use the only power they have left. I have no confidence there will even be an election next year or, if there is, if Democrats will be allowed to vote. Hell, I might be in a detention camp by then. I’m sure Chuck and his friends will make like Susan Collin’s and be very concerned.
New Deal democrat
This is from my go-to, on the ground Dem analyst, Dan Guild:
“ Do not underestimate how angry Democrats are at their leadership – and this is from people INSIDE the Party. In NH 9 County Chairs sent a letter to the head of the Party demanding change. It was an extraordinary letter – I have never heard of anything like it.”
“A reminder of how good the political instincts are of the Senate Minority Leader (which is ironic because he tells people his SAT score all the time). This is from 2017. Our leadership is clueless. [quoting Schumer in 2016 about how Clinton will win because, ‘ “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”]
Quoting another source: “News: House Dems so livid at Schumer that multiple members have directly urged AOC to primary him, according to a member with direct knowledge”, commenting “
I believe it. The Party is at War. And the head of the Senate Caucus doesn’t even see it.”
ETA: Schumer was very good at getting Biden’s bills passed in the Senate with a slim majority. But he is, to quote the seminal American political source, “a bad wartime consigliere.”
BTW, Guild saw this coming for a week, because if Democratic Senators were going to oppose this, they would already have been blasting out their message.
SpaceUnit
I think I was about thirteen when I started getting letters about joining the AARP.
Birdie
I agree that primaries are coming, it seems like the only place Democratic voters have any residual agency.
The challenge for me is identifying “competence”. In a world where years of political experience apparently result in spines made of jello, what does the resume of a competent candidate look like?
I’m afraid I’m coming around to the view that we need “outsiders” (I have really turned a corner in my opinion of AOC for example) but it feels like a high risk, high reward approach.
Citizen Dave
@Trollhattan:
Envious! Only saw them once many years ago now…
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@New Deal democrat:
I want to know what the fuck they’re thinking. Their phones must have been ringing off the hook from constituents all of this week telling them to vote no on cloture. Have they and their staffs just been ignoring them?!
eclare
@New Deal democrat:
Does Schumer really tell people his SAT score? If so, that is pathetic.
New Deal democrat
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Don’t know.
I just think it was a very astute observation from Guild.
If they weren’t planning on letting themselves be rolled, Senate Dems would have been shouting from the rooftops a week or two ago that they would only agree to a clean CR. That they didn’t was very telling.
Paul W.
I’m ready to primary both my Senators (NY) but won’t get the chance til 2028 so will help out moving the rest of our gerontocracy out of congress. Sorry olds!
Baud
@Paul W.:
I wonder if Schumer will run again.
hrprogressive
I don’t even turn 40 till 2026.
I keep considering something because these out of touch fucks just do not get it, and clearly do not give a shit about citizens who aren’t billionaires.
Kelly
Oregon Dem incumbents running in 2026 are young enough and liberal enough to support. In 2028 Wyden will be 79 and up for re-election. He’s been great but I hope he steps aside. Any Democrat vs Any Republican will be 60/40 in a statewide election. Recently Reps Earl Blumenauer and Peter DeFazio stepped aside in their mid 70’s setting a reasonable example.
RaflW
I was talking with my partner this evening that if Amy Klobuchar decides to run again in 2030, I suspect that it’d be difficult to get a quality Democrat to primary her. She’s got millions of dollars, loyal staff, I’m sure people in the state machine owe her favors (nothing corrupt, just party endorsements and crap like that).
I bemoan this, because a quality challenge is what’s called for. I joked that I could blow the retirement fund to put myself forward, but the truth is I’d be a crank candidate.
@heymistermix.com
Josh Marshall called this days ago and his Hill reporters were consistently right about it. He’ll be the news site I use to follow the inevitable division in the Democratic Party.
Gvg
@geg6: ah, back to 3rd party splits. This is why I didn’t agree with mister mix. He seemed to be going Bernie and weakening the party not the republicans. I am not against primarying specific officials when the time comes, but I think our system has never come up with a way to have any recognized public leader of a non presidential party. The minority leader is not always the non presidential party and they are elected by the house and senate to guide legislative votes not rally the public to pressure the opposing party. The leaders of a public outcry have to be selected by the masses. MLK for instance….or Union leaders. They then talk to congress. Sometimes it’s a Congress person, sometimes not. Usually not a majority or minority leader. So we need to start talking and picking leaders,to go talk to crowds and Congress. If we do enough, democratic leaders will support us. But right now they can’t tell if enough people realize what’s happening so that when they act way out of normal, it will be understood and not used to undermine democratic credibility again.
Remember apparently a lot of regular citizens don’t like democrats. They like our policies until they hear it comes from us.
Anyway before you change you registration, check your states voting rules. It may be a bad idea and cut you out of the primary process. If times have changed, we need a different set of democrats which means some primaries. You want a say in that probably.
yes I am assuming elections. If we don’t have them, advice will be different.
Salty Sam
David, thanks for this. I don’t often follow your insurance related posts because they are way too deep in the weeds for me. But this is a well thought out road map for the coming battles. Much appreciated.
Also, appreciate the dry humor.
Trollhattan
@Citizen Dave:
Yep. Been a long wait for this.
Salty Sam
And that is a problem, how?
NB- Gillian is a personal friend 😄
eclare
@Gvg:
Good point about primary voting rules. Here in TN primaries are open, which I don’t agree with. The voting clerks even make you point to which party primary you want to vote, so you don’t have to say it out loud.
humanadverb
I’m looking at Newsom cozy up to christofascists and take shots at trans kids while he positions himself for 2028 and it actually reminds me of 2008.
Clinton went right over the Iraq war, with her eye on 2008, but that turned out to be the mistake that let anti-war Obama take the nomination.
We’ll make em pay.
Salty Sam
Although I’ve almost always voted D, I cannot claim the sort of devotion you describe. It has always been a matter of “lesser of evils”.
The current emergency does not seem to be being met by Dems (certain members excluded), and my enthusiasm for them has taken a beating.
I would never vote for an R, but my hope that the Democratic Party as a whole might meet the challenges ahead is rapidly waning.
Timill
@eclare: If they make us register, I’m registering R. In E TN, that’s where the action is, as John Ragan found out…
Won’t make me vote differently in the actual elections.
Kelly
@Trollhattan: We saw her in Eugene several years ago. A lot of hippies there. We saw Lyle Lovett in Salem a couple weeks ago. My best guess is 80% of the audience was over 60.
Urza
@Baud: At this point i’d take pantsless candidate with balls over alot of what we have.
RaflW
I usually don’t bother with Axios, but they do get leaks from the usual D.C. swamps. New item up says that House Dems are furious, after taking a hard vote on the budget (excepting Golden of ME).
Claim is that some House members are talking about openly supporting Dem challengers of any Dem Senator who votes yes on cloture. It seems Chuck has not calculated what harm he is doing just to his own party mates across the Capital building. Ugh.
Omnes Omnibus
If Josh Marshall is right about the way this went down, Schumer should step down from leadership.
eclare
@Timill:
I saw Chris Wallace interviewed years ago, and he said he was a registered D in DC because that’s the only way he had any say in elections.
I’m in Memphis, so if they ever make us register, I’d register D.
But your approach makes sense for E TN.
Geminid
@eclare: Virginia primaries are totally open because we have no party registration.* I have little problem with this because there seem to be very few Republicans voting in Democratic primaries and viceversa. I think this is something that is talked about more than done.
Independents are a different story. I’m not sure enough of them participate in about primaries to have an effect, and I dont know that it would necessarily be a bad effect either.
* Christopher Newport University’s Wason Center for Politics polls likely Virginia voters fairly often, and regularly asks them to self-describe by party affiliation. The results are fairly consistent over time. The last couple years the numbers have been around 35% D, 32% R and 31% Independent.
Omnes Omnibus
@Salty Sam: Hold on, 99+% of the House and it looks like 80-ish% of the Senate is stepping up.
geg6
@Gvg:
Since I have been working with the local Dems for the last 50 years, I don’t really need condescended to about my decision. I am well aware that I won’t be able to vote in primaries if I change. If I go I, I won’t have to vote in primaries for assholes supported by the party and I’m fine with that because I will not be a part of any party, including third parties. So no, not a third party move as you seem to think. I don’t want to be associated with idiots and cowards, so I will not be Dem or a GOPer or a Socialist or a Democratic Socialist or a Green or a Libertarian. I will vote if there is an actual election or if there are any candidates worth voting for. If not, I simply won’t vote. Since that will get me exactly what voting got me (exactly nothing and an insulting lie), I don’t see a problem with it. I don’t mingle with MAGAs and I have no desire to mingle with anyone who thinks Chuck Schumer and Co. are leaders. The good news is I will no longer be wasting my fixed income (for now, but maybe not if Chuck Schumer gets scared again) on propping up these wastes of skin.
RaflW
Credit to Jeffries here. He & other Dem House leaders must be mad to put this out:
(italics added)
Eolirin
My god, y’all.
I honestly don’t know if shutting down the government would have been the better call here.
I’m not sure it’s knowable, even. It would have felt better, but I’m inherently skeptical of that feeling. It can too easily lead to short term thinking, at the cost of the long term.
But what I do know is that Democrats in congress were never going to be able to save us.
This is the core thing I feel a lot of people are not grasping about this. If members of congress did what was really necessary right now, they would be arrested, because what is necessary right now is illegal. Stopping the CR would not have fixed anything. It would just have shut the government down.
All of the organizers of the civil rights movement, and many of it’s participants, faced arrest and violence. So did those in the labor movement. So did the rioters at Stonewall.
Congress is not supposed to be trying to spin up a popular resistance movement. They’re supposed to be trying to maximize their electoral outcomes, and we won’t know if they’re succeeding or failing at that for another year and a half.
Can we run the counterfactual, where Dems refuse to allow a cloture vote and then the government shuts down and Republicans just let it stay shut down until they can pass their budget through reconciliation without any Democratic votes? Do we think this helps us or hurts us? And how high is your confidence you’re right?
Let me recount a story.
My congregation got Peter Yarrow, the Jewish member of the group Peter, Paul and Mary, to come out and do a concert as a fundraising event. And he’s going through his songs and talking about his life, and we get near the end he starts doing We Shall Overcome, and he has us get up and has us link arms and join in, and we, the audience, instinctively start to sway, so he stops.
And in the most gentle way possible asks us what the hell we think we’re doing, that this was a song sung in the face of violence, sung in memory of the brothers and sisters that they lost along the way, those who gave their lives to that struggle.
And then he started to sing again. We all stood still. And when we joined back in it was with the solemness that we had disrespectfully, in our ignorance, lacked.
And I understood, in a way that I couldn’t possibly have prior to that moment, just a fraction of the incomprehensible enormity of what going through that must have been like.
If Jim Crow is now a national problem this isn’t going to be solved solely by congressional or even judicial action. The cost of overcoming this will be paid for in blood and lives.
So if we’re going to question if our congressional leadership is taking the moment seriously enough, and you know what, who knows, maybe they’re not, I dunno, but if that’s something we’re going to spend all our time focusing on, I really have to ask, are we taking this moment seriously enough?
Democrats in congress do not actually hold enough power to result in good outcomes, period, end of story. Only Republicans currently have agency. They can stop this whenever they want.
They’re the only ones who can
And if we’re going to make it so unpleasant for them that they decide to use that power, it isn’t going to be through Congress.
VincentN
It makes sense to be mad at Chuck Schumer but it’s weird to be lambasting the Democratic Party as a whole when the House Dems delivered on their votes. Seems like the problem as always is with the Senate.
Kayla Rudbek
@Geminid:
I will be voting for anyone but Warner and Kaine in the primaries. Beyer is doing okay so far.
Edmund dantes
“if we get rid of the filibuster, you’ll miss it when it’s the gop in power.”
also
“Got to keep that powder dry!!”
facepalm
Jeffro
true
and yet…in close races (esp close primaries)…I can tell you from personal experience, it does make a difference!
gene108
@Eolirin:
Counterpoint: In 2009, the Democrats had their largest House majority in years, 59 seats in the Senate, with the possibility of getting to 60 depending on how Al Franken’s race turned out, and a popular president who won with the largest share of the popular and EC votes in decades.
Senate Republicans took a risk to oppose everything Obama and Democrats did*. They could’ve been blamed for sabotaging an economic recovery.
People got disillusioned with Obama and Democrats instead for a lack of progress on the economy leading to huge Democratic losses in the House and state elections.
At some point Congressional Democrats are going to have to take risks they may or may not win to try and drive up negative opinions Trump, Musk, and Republicans.**
Sticking to the status quo will only further discourage already discouraged Democratic voters.
*Edit: Fixed grammar
**Edit: Democrats need to define what they stand for clearly to the public. I mean drawing a line with this CR is taking the sort of stand Democrats need to define themselves.
Jeffro
@RaflW: that trio = my heroes
Eolirin
@Omnes Omnibus: I think Josh Marshall is delusional about our ability to slow down the damage the Trump administration is enough for it to matter. The government being broken to the point of unrecognizable was baked in the second Trump won in November. And Democratic leverage on this and the debt ceiling was always too weak to be capable of meaningfully slowing it down, even staking out a maximalist attempt.
We care about the consequences and they don’t. We cannot use harming the government to save the government. We cannot use defaulting on US debt to save the government. We care if the hostage gets shot and they don’t and they know it. Also they still have majorities and a reconciliation slot for their budget. The CR is only needed because they’re late getting their budget through the house. We can’t stop that budget if they can hold their caucus together. We need to bank on them failing to do so to have any real leverage.
Blocking it or not blocking the CR won’t change much in the long run in terms of preventing outcomes.
Right now we are all desperately looking for something to be done, but we’re not looking past that to what doing that something actually accomplishes.
Josh isn’t wrong that elections will come too late. He’s just wrong that we can do anything about that in the context of electoral politics or congressional action.
We should be planning for civil disobedience, though probably not here, and hope enough people are willing to put their bodies on the line. It was always going to be the only possible solution.
Eolirin
@gene108: Democratic and Republican electorates are fundamentally different and those lessons are not necessarily portable, and I think the wrong ones besides.
The midterms also weren’t just a matter of Dems growing disillusioned because the economy didn’t bounce back fast enough and that was where Republican opposition mattered most, sure, despite them opposing everything, but a coordinated disinformation movement funded by billionaires, with the door opened by citizen’s united to pour money into races.
We cannot duplicate that no matter what we do.
Omnes Omnibus
@Eolirin: I think we dismiss the importance of elections at our peril. We need to resist on all fronts.
Redshift
@Kayla Rudbek:
I don’t feel like Warner is meeting the moment generally, but he did respond in this case. He posted a video this morning coming out strongly against cloture and going into the harm the CR would do locally.
That said, I’d be happier if he decides to retire. He’s been good on some things, like Russia, and it was an important advance when he got elected, but we can do better now.
Eolirin
@Omnes Omnibus: A lot of people won’t live through the actions of the administration to the next set of elections the way things are going.
I’m not saying we should dismiss elections, but they aren’t going to stop that from happening; they can’t. We need to properly understand the context in which elections matter, and the limits they have in preventing a lawless executive from breaking the law.
And this CR vote isn’t a clear loser for elections vs the alternative anyway. I think on net I would prefer a shutdown, but I’m not sure that’s right. It’s possible it’s very wrong.
PatD
@VincentN: that might be what it takes to gin up enough backlash to primary some of these Vichy fools in the Senate.
PatD
@Eolirin: what? You think it’s going to take people risking their lives but draw the line at not voting for the debt ceiling or allowing the government to shutdown? We are unserious if we’re afraid to take legislative steps that Republicans have taken several times in recent years but think we’re going to put bodies on the line.
Betty Cracker
@PatD: Gotta agree with you. People are fucking pissed off and becoming radicalized by what’s happening right now. At least those who are paying attention are. Hell, look at the comments here. Most of us didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, politically speaking. We have a fairly good understanding of how this shit works, and we can see that it’s time to stick every stick within reach into the spokes. This is an emergency. Kabuki bullshit from our elected leaders isn’t appropriate.
BarcaChicago
@Kayla Rudbek: both Warner and Kaine came out and explicitly said they were no on cloture and no on the CR. Did that change? (genuine question)
mapanghimagsik
@Edmund dantes:
I’ve been think of “keep your powder dry” a lot as of late.
Glory b
Glory b
@Betty Cracker: Im going to have to disagree with the idea that so many of us know how this shit works.
Glory b
@gene108: ill say it AGAIN, people know who we are and what we stand for.
They don’t want to vote for the party with the black people in it.
I’ll add the LGBTQ people too.
Feckless
Nancy pelosi and her incompetent gerontocracy needs to go. Like yesterday.