The Progressive Movement’s Fatal Flaw: Why We Keep Winning Elections But Losing Power

An open letter to the 2026 progressive candidates

I’ve been on the losing side of the political revolution for a decade now. I’ve seen the holes in our strategy. I’ve seen the missing links. And unless something changes—fast—2026 is shaping up to be another wasted opportunity.

We have a few critical issues. One is that we don’t have a unified vision. We don’t have an articulable vision for what would happen if voters turned out for progressive challenges. Two is we don’t do teamwork. We don’t run or govern like a team. All politics may be local but most solutions are national.

Politics and campaigns are very lonely existences. You get isolated. You spend so much time on the trail you don’t have time to build connections with other candidates. You don’t make time to develop relationships and bonds that would help not only increase your viability but would also show that you understand that one victory alone, no matter how shocking to DC and the DC press, won’t build power.

One, two, or even five victories does not build a movement unless they are already united.

I worked on the national team on both of Senator Sanders’ campaigns. After the first loss I cofounded Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats. We recruited more than a dozen candidates to run for office. AOC, Jamaal Bowman, and Cori Bush all won. I was AOC’s communications director.

In every single one of these instances we failed to incite a movement that rose to the level of the Tea Party let alone MAGA.

Bernie didn’t back Justice Democrats’ candidates. He didn’t even back AOC. It’s not done, you see. You don’t back insurgent candidates that will more than likely lose. It’s bad politics. You’d burn bridges and make your job harder. On top of that, people will say you aren’t a REAL Democrat.

But that isn’t the way the Tea Party rolled. That’s not how MAGA or Trump do things. They seem to understand power way more than most progressives.

The goal when AOC made her historic win over Joe Crowley—a 10-term incumbent who was poised to become the next Speaker of the House—was to replace failed leadership within the Democratic Party. To transform it from the inside. Her victory was supposed to be the beginning.

We came out swinging. When an AIPAC rep called to set up a meeting with AOC we not only rejected it but she talked about it publicly. She participated in a sit-in at Nancy Pelosi’s office applying pressure for a Green New Deal. She didn’t pay DCCC dues. She campaigned for other Justice Democrats. This was all before she was actually seated.

The failing was not building a team or a vision with others before she won.

That’s what is happening now. We have tons of progressives running. Deja Foxx in Arizona. Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois. Saikat Chakrabarti going after Nancy Pelosi. Donavan McKinney challenging Shri Thanedar in Michigan. Abdul El-Sayed and Mallory McMorrow both running for Michigan’s open Senate seat. Zohran Mamdani, who already won his primary for NYC mayor.

The list goes on.

But they are all running siloed campaigns. They are all insulated and not cross-endorsing. They aren’t making clear what they would do if one, two, or ten of them won. They aren’t calling for primaries against Torres and Jeffries—or Richard Neal, the ranking Democrat on Ways and Means who’s been in Congress since 1989. Neither Bernie nor AOC are trying to build a countervailing movement to compete politically with MAGA. It’s the Dems as they are or bust.

Yes, I’m talking to you, Zohran, Kat, Saikat, Abdul, Deja, Donavan—all of you running these crucial races. The only one I can see making an effort at movement building so far is Saikat, who’s actually asking people to run with him on his website. But we need more than that.

And we’re missing so many races. Where are the primaries against the corporate Democrats who are really holding the party back? The New Democrat Coalition has 115 members pushing us toward that theoretical moderate middle that doesn’t exist. The Blue Dogs may only have 10 members left, but they punch above their weight.

These are the people who will fight any transformative agenda tooth and nail.

I’m sure our progressive heroes will endorse a few of these folks towards the end of their races, but it’ll be too little too late to transform the party into one that meets the moment. We need a party that can repeal laws, impeach Supreme Court justices that are corrupted, one that can solve problems facing our nation. We need supermajorities of people willing to shake things up, and they need to share a vision and be part of a team. Willing to risk political capital.

Let me be concrete about what 5-10 coordinated progressive victories could accomplish. In the House, that’s enough to shift the balance of power in the Democratic caucus, force leadership elections, and control committee assignments. A couple in the Senate could block any corporate Democrat nominee and demand real progressive priorities in exchange for votes. Victories like Mamdani’s as mayor, backed by a coordinated slate in Albany, would create an entire progressive governing structure that could actually implement policy instead of just making noise.

Voters know that one or two elections isn’t going to change things. That’s why they go for moderate Democrats—because they know moderates are part of an existing team. At least they’ll stop Trump and his insanity, but they won’t transform the country. They won’t transform the party, and they won’t stop this anger and hatred that is brewing.

The movement needs to be seen as capable of winning a governing majority, and that means you have to have a lot of candidates that have each other’s backs. Incumbents have that—they stick together through thick and thin.

Even somebody like Zohran in New York isn’t going to be able to pass his agenda without showing political power, and that political power is going to have to extend beyond him. It needs primaries against state assembly, state senate. And it would probably help if he went after people like Torres or Jeffries, because these are going to be the people fighting him tooth and nail.

There is just a real aversion to taking political risks among elected officials. Ro Khanna, a pretty bold incumbent, has not endorsed Saikat, for example. You don’t see any of these candidates hosting joint live streams, planning shared media strategies, or coordinating on how to block legislation that the president would be putting up, or how to wrestle away the Democratic Party from the incrementalism and “everything is OK” crowd that has driven us to this point.

The Tea Party figured this out early. They created a story about what the post-primary Republican Party would look like. Trump did the same thing—he created a vision of transformation that made every individual race feel like part of something bigger.

Progressive politics has become very good at identifying and supporting individual candidates, but terrible at creating the connective tissue that makes those candidates feel like they’re part of the same project.

The difference between winning elections and building power is the difference between a talent agency and a movement. Right now, we’re running a very effective talent agency.

To all of you running these campaigns—your individual victories pale in comparison to a group of unified winners with an agenda.

Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her earth-shaking, earthquake victory in 2018 and all of her media exposure and talent that came with it wasn’t enough to transform the party. That task can only be accomplished with unity.

We preach about unity all the time, but we can’t get unity among the candidates, among the campaigns, among the mission—that’s where we need the unity. It has to start with the leadership. If the leadership of our movement can’t come together, then how can the voters?

Cross-endorse each other. Do joint fundraisers. Host shared media events. Create a common platform that voters can see stretches across districts and states. Show people what coordinated progressive governance would actually look like instead of asking them to imagine it.