Organizing Beat Out Democratic Conventional Wisdom
Democrats’ sweeping victory in the midterms showed why the old playbook should be thrown out of the window—and that the Left is on the march.
Hamilton Nolan
A decade ago, I went to Texas to write a profile of the Democratic candidate running in the reddest congressional district in the United States. He was a local gadfly, and had been given no resources from the national Democratic Party beyond a handshake. The story was meant to be a lark — a farcical, lighthearted tale of mankind’s capacity to forge ahead into impossible tasks.
Yet that is not the lesson I found. As I wandered the dusty neighborhoods of Amarillo, I began to wonder why this place was assumed to be intractably, unchangeably Republican. This was a town with a lot of immigrants and working people trying to stay on the right side of the poverty line. It was a place where you could imagine plenty of people being attracted to the Democratic platform. The folly I saw was not the man who took on the uphill task of running, but the party that had written this place off as a lost cause, unworthy of any effort. What that deep red Texas district needed was not resignation — it needed organizing.
This is why political consultants will never change the world. They look at the seething ball of humanity that makes up a political district — a writhing mass of hopes and dreams and desperation, covered in fluctuating layers of repression and ignorance and inspiration — and they see a neat column of numbers. They see a set of fixed quantities. They see politics as the art of running towards the favorable numbers and away from the bad ones. They do not see that that entire grand edifice of numbers can be reversed. It can be smashed, with breathtaking speed, if the real people in the real places change their minds.
The data-driven model of politics that rules the United States, that governs the spending of the Democratic Party, that starts with the status quo and cautiously wonders if it can move a single space on the policy chessboard, is vulnerable to those who understand that all of that data can be changed. It is vulnerable to those who know how to organize.
The Democrats’ sweeping victory in the midterms was, in one sense, no surprise — President Donald Trump is historically unpopular and dismissive of political advice, and he carried his entire party to doom like an insane mother who jumps off a bridge with her baby clutched to her chest. Democrats have taken back control of both the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, where they will hold firm majorities, and a new class of socialists and progressives is headed to Congress.
The most striking element of the whole thing, to me, was the natural experiment that was carried out between the states of Texas and Florida. Both are huge states that have been Republican strongholds for so long that they became deep red-coded in conventional wisdom, despite the fact that their populations are racially and economically and culturally diverse. They are both places where the raw material of Democratic political power has been suffocated by a lack of adequate resources and organizing.
Last night, we saw what adequate resources could do. James Talarico turned Texas blue by winning his Senate race against Ken Paxton after the most expensive non-presidential race in U.S. history. Talarico’s campaign raised nearly $150 million and took advantage of maximal support from the national Democratic Party to overcome an even more grotesque sea of spending by Tesla CEO (and world’s richest person) Elon Musk in support of Paxton, his debased opponent. In Florida, by contrast, former union organizer and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member Angie Nixon upset the party’s handpicked candidate in the primary, and then came within three points of winning the general election (the best performance by a Florida Democrat in a Senate race since 2018) by pursuing nonstop ground-level organizing while being significantly outspent the whole time.
In Texas, deemed by conventional wisdom to be a macho Republican stronghold, a decidedly non-macho Democrat won with the help of a flood of national resources. In Florida, deemed by conventional wisdom to be a stronghold of Trumpian racists and rabid anti-communists, a Black woman DSA member who knew how to organize came shockingly close to winning. What’s the difference there? The difference is that one candidate got the resources and the other didn’t. Angie Nixon did not win, but with time we may admit that she performed an even greater service for the Democratic Party by proving that their idea of what is and is not possible in red states is wrong.
As soon as Election Day is over, the battle to write the narrative begins. Whoever is able to persuade the bulk of the party and the public of their own narrative can take control of the direction of the party as we turn towards the next presidential election. This battle for control of the Democratic vision is more pronounced right now than it has ever been in my lifetime. Now, for the first time in decades, the left wing of the Democratic Party is not a bunch of fringe outsiders begging for scraps. The Left is surging and ascendent. The next two years will not just be about thwarting the deranged and retrograde ambitions of MAGA world; they will be a fight for the steering wheel of the Democratic steamroller.
For centrists and moderates, there is always the same narrative: Centrism was vindicated. We must run to the middle. The path to victory lies in extending a hand to disaffected Republicans. This is the story they will tell about what just happened. But in fact, the real narrative, the one that follows the surges of political electricity, is this: Trump squeaked into office after the last Democratic president seemingly went senile and withdrew his candidacy abruptly. Two years of raving lies, fascist insanity, blatant corruption, and a violent racist purge carried out by Nazi-esque White House officials has left people pissed off. The need for real change, deep change, structural change, is obvious.
Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor in New York City has energized a socialist movement inside of the Democratic Party that is getting stronger, more widespread, and better organized with each passing day. This group arises not from the business world or the consulting world but from social movements, from unions, from activism — and it therefore approaches politics with an organizing model that the “raise corporate money and pour it into negative advertising” model of campaigns struggles to defeat. More than any time in living memory, The Political Left as broadly understood is organized, popular, smart, and determined.
The Left is not confined to coastal big cities. It’s everywhere. The legacy of the wheezing Democratic establishment is that they lost to Trump and got us here. The Left is cleaning up their mess — thanks in large part to a capacity for ignoring conventional wisdom and doing things that politicians are not supposed to do, lest they isolate the fabled suburban swing voters who seem to grow less and less real with each passing election.
The real problem for the Democratic establishment is that U.S. democracy requires deeper changes than they are willing to countenance, and their failure to support the pursuit of those changes will ultimately result in the further erosion of Democratic power. The 2026 midterms were worthy of celebration for all of us. They were a sign of hope for America’s future. But for the Left, they are not going to be a ceiling. They are going to be a trampoline.
Thank you for reading this story. At a time when corporate media is dominating the web and our airwaves, independent journalism is more important than ever, and that’s what we provide at In These Times. We offer some of the best reporting, investigations and analysis on the growing movements for justice in the U.S.—and our work is firmly pro-labor and anti-fascist. To continue producing it, we need your support.
If you believe in the power of an independent press, please make a donation to In These Times today. By becoming a sustaining member, you can ensure that our work reaches even more readers.
And if you become a sustainer right now, you'll get a free year-long print subscription and a special subscribers-only print from artist Molly Crabapple.
Thank you.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor writer for In These Times. He’s the author of the book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor. More of his work can be found at HamiltonNolan.com.
