No Kings! But what kind of candidates?
US-Democrats have no time left. A year ago, the party lost the Presidency for the second time to Donald Trump. On this November 4 they will have to win some important gubernatorial and mayoral races decisively to get back into political shape and contention. In November 2026 they need to win at least the House of Representatives to overcome the de-facto one-party state the US have become under Donald Trump. And by November 2028 they must present a Presidential candidate who can take over the reign of what, by then, will be left of America’s democracy. But taking a closer look at the state of the Democratic Party today you wouldn’t know all of this.
Of course, there have been the large “No Kings” demonstrations of October 18th when between four and seven million protesters peacefully gathered at 2.650 location across the country. But that was just a repetition of similar countrywide protests in April and June: massive, patriotic and good-spirited. Or in the word of a cynical observer: “Large anti-Trump rallies attended exclusively by NPR listeners in blue cities do not impress rural voters”. Indeed, looking at the crowds and their placards of protests there were few sightings of new recruits with “buyer’s remorse” after having voted for Donald Trump; and no cohorts of citizens coming back from political absenteeism. In short, the mass demonstrations served to uplift the already converted, but those voters the Democratic Party needs for new political gains must still be convinced to sign up for the opposition.
Why is that after all the dramatic, dangerous, outrageous, scandalous, harmful, illegal, vile, vicious and anti-democratic acts the Trump-Administration has unleashed on the population over the last year? It is because the Democratic Party is still in shock and has been showing few signs of reinventing itself. Yet with two promising women candidates running for Governor in New Jersey and Virginia and the young upstart Zohran Mamdani destined to become mayor of New York there are at least some stirrings of change.
Both women candidates, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, were elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 where they have established themselves as moderates. As a former CIA officer and as a helicopter pilot both have, in their resumes, a security background. The Financial Times labels them “pugnacious centrists” and, indeed, words like “defund the police” or “democratic socialism” have never crossed their lips. Together with two other women in the US-Congress they have been called the “mod squad (for moderate)”; as opposed to “the squad” of four progressive women representatives in the House who have been prominent voices in all left political causes from LGBTQ to Gaza.
But when Spanberger and Sherrill were being asked in townhall meetings if transgender girls should play on girls’ sports teams, they have struggled with their answers. They do not want to offend anybody or get a shitstorm from the progressive wing of their party. Still, with Elon Musk’s DOGE-Operation, which has sacked many federal employees in Virginia and Donald Trump cancelling a new commuter tunnel in New Jersey their chances of winning in their states on Tuesday are pretty good.
And there is the 34-year-old Uganda-born Muslim candidate Zohran Mamdani who came out of nowhere to win the primaries in the very democratic city of New York against two compromised candidates of his own party. The state assembly man from Queens has done everything the Democrats failed to do at the last election: he excites young and new voters, he communicates well, he comes across as dynamic, risk-taking, optimistic and authentic; and he focusses on the affordability issues of housing and childcare in an exorbitantly expensive city.
The son of prominent Ugandan-Indian parents calls himself openly a “democratic Socialist” promising a rent freeze, free childcare, free buses, tax increases for the rich and a few city-run groceries for the poor. He has also dared to speak out for Palestinians in a 12% Muslim and 20% Jewish city. The TikTok videos about him meeting New Yorkers from all walks of life have become legendary. His media campaign has been brilliant, called exemplary by his party’s strategists and grudgingly acknowledged as decisive by his adversaries.
With a poll lead of almost 10 % the charismatic and tireless Zohran Mamdani is likely to be the new mayor of America’s largest city, with a workforce of almost 300.000 and a budget of $ 115 Billion. And that without any administrative experience. He is the darling of progressive Democrats who will see his victory as a powerful argument for moving their party to the left; and “a gift” to Trump’s Republicans who will build him up as a “commie” and democratic bogey man in their future election campaigns. “100 communist lunatic”, Donald Trump has called him.
The gubernatorial and mayoral elections of November 4 will test the enthusiasm of the MAGA electorate, of those who came out of political hiding in 2016 and 2024 or felt betrayed and neglected by the Democratic Party. But it will also be a test run for the democratic brand.
How the US-Democrats will deal with the voting results will determine their future at the mid-term elections and beyond. And here, given the total lack of leadership and the history of the party, they are running the risk of falling back into the old controversies shaped by binary political thinking: between those who favour semi-conservative candidates leaning to the right on issues like immigration, security and abortion and those on the party’s left who argue for radical representatives focussing on more daring economic policies. As if only one of those avenues could lead to a political realignment.
Looking at the leadership of the Democratic Party today one should not be too optimistic. Neither the large demonstrations nor the emergence of some attractive candidates have been due to strategic thinking, professional organizing or well-managed recruiting of candidates. Rather the opposite. Zohran Mamdani’s candidacy was initially fought tooth and nail by a gerontocratic party establishment beholden to donor billionaires and corporate lobbyists, advised by a self-serving army of consultants and communicating via legacy media.
The image of the Democratic Party is still shaped by the Clintons, Obamas, and the hapless leaders of Congress whose risk-averse culture of premanufactured talking points and elaborated policy proposals is totally out of place in today’s attention economy, which is so well understood und driven by President Trump. And there is the reckless loser Kamala Harris whose self-serving memoirs, titled “107 Days”, and her recent announcement to consider another run for the Presidency in 2028 are more damaging to the democratic brand than any Republican manoeuvre. With leaders like this you do not need political enemies. The current Democratic leadership of figures from the past has not realized how deep their party has fallen, given or not given the effects of Donald Trump. The rot had started in the 1980s when Democrats began to draw as much money from corporate Political Action Committees as Republicans. It was followed by the electorally successful 90ies when President Bill Clinton preached and practiced free trade policies which would soon lead to the loss of manufacturing jobs. Then followed the financial crisis of 2008.
As a result, between 2009 and today the class alignment of both parties has changed: it is now wealthier Americans with above-average incomes who vote mostly for Democrats. Even the leftist Zohran Mamdani in New York got more rich than poor citizens routing for him at the primaries. Today, the Republican Party represents more districts in middle-class and poor regions of the country than the Democrats. “If Democrats don’t reverse the course”, writes the investigative reporter Brody Mullins in the New York Times, “they may soon find themselves unable to win presidential elections.” That is because in the electoral college system of the US rural votes are more significant than those of the numerically fewer high-income urban voters concentrated in coastal states.
According to a Gallup Poll from July the Democratic Party’s favorability rating has dropped to 34%, the lowest since the firm started measuring this category in 1992; with unfavorability at 60 percent and negative ratings among both men and women, whites and Hispanics and among every age and income group. The negative comparison to the G.O.P extends to some issues like the economy, immigration, and crime.
This correlates to what the researcher and pollster Jared Abbot calls “the double-digit Democratic penalty”, which he has measured as the difference between the actual political platform and its association with the Democratic Party. Which means that among working class voters in the Rust Belt the image of the party is much worse than the merit of some of its actual policies proposed. Abbot is writing about those people who told me on my journey that they would never ever again vote Democrat, no matter what. And there were many of them.
What would be needed to start changing this negative image? And how could Democrats build on their prospective victories in Virginia, New Jersey and New York? By not claiming victory for your camp inside the party but by analysing which candidate has won where and why. There might be little the party can learn from Mamdani’s unique situation in New York, but how to run a successful media campaign is surely one of the lessons.
By allowing more “heterodoxy”, argues Adam Jentleson of the new think tank “Searchlight Institute”, and by running more candidates who sound more like political independents than coming from the democratic establishment. And by not immediately calling it “betrayal” of rightful causes if they take more conservative positions.
Because not all Republicans are racist fundamentalists. They will not agree to President Bidens indeed negligent border policies, but many are also against sending troops to the cities to arrest immigrants. Most opinion surveys over time suggest that Republicans voters have also been moving to the left, just not as fast as Democrats, even if the impression from the respective media bubbles suggest otherwise. On some issues the country is less polarized than it seems.
What would that mean for the Democrats? It would mean that during their campaigns candidates like Spanberger and Sherill should have answered what they really think about transgender girls in sports – being authentic instead of evasive. But would it also mean to put up pro-life candidates in very conservative districts, as some have argued? Probably not. “Trump’s genius is to keep pushing Democrats into reactive conservatism”, writes the columnist Ed Luce in the Financial Times. The genius of the Democratic Party should be to turn the reaction into something different and of their own.
A functioning democratic leadership could provide some guidance about the fine line between political expediency and moral values. But to be less ideological and more pragmatic would be a good place to start. Because it can’t and shouldn’t be that whilst Donald Trump is dismantling the American democracy populist democratic candidates must be afraid to be pragmatic, authentic and controversial. The prominent political comedian Jon Stewart has put down the success of Donald Trump to being able to channel people’s grievances and “reading the room”. That is what Democrats have to learn, to read the room of their district and the political environment.
This points to the basic flaw in Democratic thinking: that there are still normal rules of engagement, that they can run against Donald Trump without a narrative and vision of their own and win. The last decade shows that they can’t and won’t. The new attention economy, the alternative media system, economic shifts and a changed class structure, the electoral geography and the archaic constitutional system are all up against a normal and natural change of power.
The old political order is gone, and the Grand Old Party has – over the last 40 years – mutated into a MAGA-movement which must be fought with new tools and means. Even conservative thinkers have understood that the times have been changing, when the Republican stalwart Bill Kristol is routing for Zohran Mamdani and the conservative columnist David Brooks writes that “America needs a Mass Movement” and “counterculture” against MAGA. Yet the Democratic Party is still working along within a system that is broken. Instead, it would need to defend what is left of the political order without being seen as part of its establishment. A tall order indeed.
Just hoping to win the mid-term elections next year with a crop of carefully vetted contenders is illusionary. And putting up a presidential candidate from the Californian party establishment like Kamala Harris or Gary Newsom in 2028 will be suicidal for a party which to this day steadfastly refuses to come to grips with the new social, economic, political and media realities.
However, November 5, 2025, could be a start, IF…