Ever since they were walloped in November, Democrats have been asking not just what they’re supposed to do next—but who they’re supposed to be.
With the first primaries of the 2026 midterm now coming into focus, the navel-gazing will soon come to an end, and the debate about the future of the party will stop being theoretical and start becoming reality as voters go to the ballot box.
At the heart of that debate is a crop of never-heard-of-before candidates, most of them under 40, taking on the old elite of a party that has never been more unpopular.
The newcomers come from a growing pool of younger, angrier, populist (or populist-adjacent) Democrats. They are revolting against a gerontocracy that, they say, has failed over and over—and, worse yet, seems content to fail. Almost all the candidates I spoke to have read or are reading the new book Original Sin, about the White House cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.
“So fucking cringe,” one candidate said, when I asked what he made of Kamala Harris’s 2024 “freedom and joy” campaign.
As of right now, there are 15 Democratic House members being primaried, and we’re still nine months out from the first votes. “I absolutely expect the House Dem primary challenge number to rise,” Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, a group that recruits young progressive candidates, told me in an email. “It’s still very early.”
The challengers, along with Senate candidates like Abdul El-Sayed, 40, in Michigan and New York City mayoral hopeful Zohran Mamdani, 33, are disproportionately male—in sharp contrast with the last time Democrats were heading into a midterm under Donald Trump. That was 2018, when women—including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Elissa Slotkin, and Abigail Spanberger, among many others—led the charge.