Democratic Voters Just Fired the Establishment

By Buck Buckhorn · August 12, 2026

Opinion

Funny how every time Democratic voters throw out an incumbent, the brain trust in Washington sits down and writes a paper explaining why it really means something else.

Seven House Democrats have lost primaries this year. Seven. Luke Bronin just beat John Larson, a man who has been in Congress since 1998, in Connecticut. Larson is 78. Bronin is 47. A 73-year-old voter named Dan Schnaidt said he appreciated Larson’s service but “it’s time for new blood, for new ideas.” That’s not a focus group talking. That’s a man who has been watching the same face on TV for 27 years and finally said enough.

In Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan demolished Rep. Angie Craig, who had the backing of Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and a pile of senators from battleground states. Flanagan was outspent. She won anyway. “The many just won,” she told her supporters in Minneapolis. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed knocked off a sitting member of Congress with party leadership backing. He’s 41. She’s 46. He’s 40. These are not ideological purists. They are people who are not 78 years old and have not been in Washington since the Clinton administration.

Luke Bronin, a 47-year-old Democratic candidate who won a Connecticut primary.

But ask yourself who benefits from making this about left versus center.

Enter “Deciding to Win,” a study by Simon Bazelon, Lauren Harper Pope, and Liam Kerr that says Democrats must move to the center. Nancy Pelosi endorsed it. James Carville endorsed it. The same Nancy Pelosi who has been in House leadership since 2002. The same James Carville who ran a campaign in 1992. These are the people telling you the answer is to move to the center. The center they happen to be standing in.

Stanley Greenberg, a pollster who actually has been around long enough to remember what working-class Democrats used to sound like, tore the study apart in The American Prospect. He pointed out that the authors divide the world into a bad “left” and a good “moderate” camp and then ignore their own data when it doesn’t fit. Their own survey shows that over half of voters want Democrats to prioritize raising taxes on the wealthy. Three-quarters want them to talk about lowering everyday costs. But the study’s recommendation is to move to the center, which in practice means: keep doing what we’re doing, just say it differently.

Here is what the study’s own platform analysis found. Between 2012 and 2024, mentions of “middle class” in the Democratic platform dropped 79 percent. “Economy” dropped 50 percent. “Tax cuts” dropped 67 percent. Meanwhile “White/Black/Latino/Latina” surged 1,137 percent. “LGBT/LGBTQI+” surged 1,044 percent. “Equity” surged 766 percent. The party stopped talking about your paycheck and started talking about your identity. And then they lost. And then they wrote a study saying the problem is they weren’t moderate enough.

John Larson, a 78-year-old incumbent Congressman from Connecticut.

No. The problem is the party became a vehicle for people with graduate degrees to talk to each other about each other, and everybody else got the bill.

David Axelrod, of all people, said it out loud: “This is not about culture, it’s about economics. It’s about corruption.” When the guy who sold Barack Obama to America tells you the issue is corruption, maybe the issue is corruption.

A 20-year-old Michigan voter named Jordan Snyder backed El-Sayed because she wanted someone she could trust, “rather than someone who I feel could be bought and sold.” A 61-year-old Wisconsin voter named Sarah Atkins Hoggatt said she agreed with Francesca Hong on the issues but voted for the moderate because she was afraid the socialist couldn’t win in November. “I didn’t vote my heart,” she said. That is a woman voting out of fear, and the party that made her afraid is the same party now telling her the solution is to move closer to the people she was afraid of.

Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota Lt. Gov. who won a Democratic primary.

The voters are not confused. They know exactly what they want. They want the people who have been running things to stop running things. The establishment’s response is to commission a study, hand it to Pelosi, and explain that the real problem is the voters who just fired them weren’t asking the right questions.

Ask yourself who benefits from that answer. It is never the person holding the ballot.

Sources

Editor’s note. The column's outrage that the party is now writing papers about its own losses conveniently forgets that the authors are also, at this very moment, writing papers about why the party should have moved left to avoid those exact losses. (W.K.)