Progressives aim to prove they can win in Congress — and at the ballot box

When John Fetterman this week urged President Biden to decriminalize marijuana, he received cheers from all corners of the Democratic electorate. 

For years, Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor and the party’s Senate nominee, has supported the reform he believes will create a fairer criminal justice system. While Biden didn’t address his request directly, Fetterman’s push is the latest way liberals are angling for more influence ahead of the midterms.

In November, they just might get it. Progressives may have had an overall disappointing primary season, but they did come out on top in a small number of races with outsized importance. Now they are looking to the fall as an opportunity to prove that they can be the safe choice for voters who care about electability — and, should they win, to elevate more of their signature issues.

“That’s exactly what we’re seeing,” said Naveed Shah, political director at Common Defense, a progressive group that endorsed Fetterman and several other liberal candidates this cycle. Democratic candidates are “taking on a lot of these same issues that progressives have been talking about for a long time, whether it’s student loans or expanding health care or anything else.”

“That’s a big shift,” Shah said. “Even for folks who aren’t progressives in name, they are taking on more of these progressive ideas. That’s exactly the goal. The goal isn’t just to get progressives that bear the title elected, it’s really to shift the party.”

A string of progressive Democratic candidates are inching towards winning their general elections from the Rust Belt to the South. In many cases, they have overcome centrist competitors under tough circumstances.

Moderates often say that the left will face a true test of power and longevity when waging the political war against Republicans, not more marginal battles within their own party. Indeed, there’s no shortage of Trump-aligned GOP aspirants flooding airwaves with messaging that progressive nominees will drive the country into a mess along with Biden. 

But their efforts have struggled to catch on in critical areas. Fetterman leads his rival, Mehmet Oz, a physician and television personality, in poll after poll, and Republicans have bemoaned their nominee as unsophisticated and disappointing in public and private. On Wednesday, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics moved the Pennsylvania race to “leans Democratic,” matching the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in the latest encouraging sign for the Fetterman camp.

Biden, too, sought to put his thumb on the scale in his home state this week.

“Fetterman’s a hell of a guy,” the president said during a speech on gun control in Wilkes-Barre. “A powerful voice for working people, and he’s going to make a great United States senator.”

In the Midwest, Democrats are also watching in close anticipation as Mandela Barnes, the progressive Senate nominee in Wisconsin, looks to unseat Sen. Ron Johnson (R) in the quintessential battleground. Despite being both controversial and unpopular, Johnson has been a mainstay in his party’s conservative establishment for years, tacking toward Trump in his fight against Barnes.

The Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss-up.”

“That’s going to alter the balance,” said Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of Our Revolution, a grassroots coalition aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), about Fetterman and Barnes’s races. “It’s going to put progressives in a more strategic position and it’s going to allow us to hold the line, which we tried to do but couldn’t because we didn’t have the numbers.”

To be sure, while Democrats are getting increasingly excited about holding the Senate, and see Fetterman and Barnes as key pieces of that plan, their path to victory is far from easy or guaranteed. 

But if the duo of Senate hopefuls win on Nov. 8, they would not only likely help Democrats keep their control of the chamber, but would also open the idea of what’s possible for the left wing in swing states and in the upper chamber itself, where moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have often set the terms throughout Biden’s administration.

“You know what, we may be able to get rid of the filibuster,” said Geevarghese. “We may be able to dilute the outsized power that Manchin and Sinema hold.”

Things are expected to be even more lively among liberals in the House. While many Democrats expect to lose the lower chamber, Biden’s uptick in approval has challenged the conventional wisdom about potential margins of defeat and has tamped down the idea that a red wave is coming. 

If Democrats lose by just a handful of seats, some are expected to argue that the party in power is still strong, and that they only need to make tweaks in key districts, rather than to their entire strategy and direction. 

“They win when they get things done and then talk about it,” said Celinda Lake, a lead pollster on Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. “Voters often haven’t known what Biden and Dems did.”

Progressives are already counting victories. And some are making the quiet argument that the Congressional Progressive Caucus, their collective bargaining bloc, is expected to expand by as many as nine seats, including adding to the most fervent members of the “Squad.” That, they say, will allow them to be better organized and continue to push the policy debate in their direction.

In Texas, Greg Casar, a former Austin City Council member, is on track to win the general election in the Democrat-safe 35th Congressional District, as is Becca Balint, a public school teacher in Vermont’s 1st Congressional District. Meanwhile, two state representatives, Delia Ramirez in Illinois’s 4th Congressional District and Summer Lee in the area surrounding Pittsburgh are also projected to win. And Maxwell Alejandro Frost, a young activist in Florida, won his primary for a safe Democratic district in a swing state. Many progressive Democrats likely to enter the House are candidates of color.

The enthusiasm on the left has coincided with Biden’s own ascent. Previously unable to break out of the low to mid 30s in approval ratings, many centrist Democrats blamed the left flank for encouraging him to take on policies that they saw as too aspirational and costly for most of the country to get behind. They pointed out that Biden won the election against Trump as a moderate and that voters expected him to govern that way. 

But as he alleviated some of progressives’ gravest policy concerns, his standing with the public started to change. He signed the Senate-passed Inflation Reduction Act into law and assuaged some of activists’ worries around climate change, taxes and health care. 

“It’s telling that in the closing period before the general election really kicks off in full post-Labor Day, Biden’s becoming more popular,” said Geevarghese.

Biden then went a step further by announcing he was going to forgive as much as $20,000 in student loan debt for the most vulnerable borrowers and $10,000 for millions of others, a move that exceeded even some progressives’ expectations.

“What really I think has been a huge shift, honestly, and I say this as a fan of President Obama, is that President Biden is becoming the most progressive president we’ve ever had,” said Shah. “A lot of his victories have been because of the things that he’s been able to get done with the Progressive Caucus and others on that side.”

Those policy wins have given progressives a jolt of momentum they hope to carry into the general election, where they are making the argument that they need to give Americans more reasons to vote Democrat over Republican. That, they say, can easily be done by delivering more policy achievements by the fall. And any pushback from moderates about the party’s rampant liberalism isn’t as important on the ground, these Democrats say, because voters don’t always choose based on ideology.

“Voters don’t pay attention,” said Lake about the possibility that the left growing in numbers could alienate some people. “Voters like the progressive agenda.”