Alarm bells have rung in the halls of power as vibrant, progressive candidates have swept Democratic primaries in recent weeks. Now, members of the center-left political establishment, desperate to cling to the sclerotic approach which has driven the Democratic Party to its electoral nadir, are joining hands with Republicans to decry the upstart winners as an existential threat.
“Democrats are in a civil war – and the far left is gaining ground,” Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal penned last week after progressive primary victories in New York furthered a pattern established in California, Maine, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Donald Trump referred to the victorious New York progressives as “godless communists,” and a hapless gaggle of centrist Democrats did their best to parrot the president by signing onto a letter condemning “socialism” and claiming to “value persuasion over purity.” Notable signatories to the unintentionally ironic purity test include Democratic Representatives like Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Adam Gray (D-CA), and candidates like Jessica Killin, who is running to unseat Republican congressman Jeff Crank in Colorado Springs.
The centrist rallying cry has been scattered and frazzled, but has begun to take shape as vague concerns about electability, overpromising, and creating a Democratic equivalent to MAGA. And amid all that hand-ringing, they have coalesced around one descriptor: far-left.
There’s only one problem with that description: according to issue polling, there’s nothing far-left about the progressives winning primaries around the country. In fact, almost all of the positions for which they have been tagged as radicals are – unlike MAGA policies – overwhelmingly popular with the American people.
Medicare for All, one of the tentpost positions of the progressive movement, has shown surprisingly durable favorability in polls for years. Even in 2016, when Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy brought the idea to the mainstream conversation, polling found that most Americans responded positively to both the term and the actual idea. In the decade since the proposal entered the conversation, it has become more popular, and less vulnerable to opposition messaging.
A November 2025 survey by Data for Progress found 65% of voters have a favorable view of Medicare-for-All. And the response is not based on fuzzy phrasing: in the survey’s wording, Data for Progress specifically mentioned that the plan would involve phasing out most if not all private sector healthcare plans, describing it as “national health insurance program…that would cover all Americans and replace most private health insurance plans.” That phrasing received positive responses from 78% of Democrats, 71% of independents, and 49% of Republicans. The proposal’s popularity is reflected in the fact that roughly 54% of current House Democrats have signed onto the Medicare for All Act as co-sponsors – despite which, they have never managed to advance the bill.
In December 2025, a Pew Research Center survey found similar results. Rather than asking respondents specifically about Medicare-for-All, though, Pew asked more generally about the government’s role in healthcare. They found that 66% of respondents say that the government has a responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare. 35% said that they supported a government-run single-payer system replacing all private health insurance, while 31% support a combination of government and private sector programs.
Likewise, the proposal to abolish ICE, the Immigrations & Customs Enforcement agency, is increasingly popular. Though many centrist Democrats flinched away from the proposal when it first became a topic of discussion around 2018, abolishing the barely 23-year-old agency is now a majority position in most polls.
In January, after the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Data for Progress found that a majority of voters held unfavorable views towards ICE, but were divided on what “abolish ICE” meant. Even at that point, though, the largest group of respondents (42%) interpreted it as meaning that “ICE should be fully eliminated as a federal agency, along with all of its functions.” That same month, YouGov produced similar findings. After polling ICE’s favorability for a number of years, January 2026 was the first time they found more respondents in favor (46%) of abolishing the agency than opposed (41%) to it. By March, YouGov found more than 50% of respondents in favor of abolition. Only 39% of respondents opposed abolishing ICE. A more recent tracking survey by Civiqs placed support for abolition at just 44% with opposition at 49% – which, if accurate, would still show that abolishing ICE is a definitionally mainstream, not far-left, position.
A number of the progressives who have emerged victorious from primaries this year have also run on newer positions, like universal childcare, which have not been the focus of as much polling, but still show signs of mainstream popularity. A January poll by the First Five Years Fund – one of the only nationwide polls conducted on the topic of childcare – found that 80% of voters agree that the availability and affordability of childcare has reached a crisis point. 82% believe that federal funding for childcare would lower costs, and 74% say that federal childcare funding would be an “important and good use of tax dollars.”
On a topic of much contention, the genocide in Gaza – a designation endorsed by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, Amnesty International, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, B’Tselem, and many more – the recently victorious progressives also stand on popular footing. According to recent numbers from Pew, 60% of Americans have a somewhat or very negative view of Israel, including 80% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. A separate Economist/YouGov poll released in April found that 67% of respondents who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 say that the United States should decrease or outright end military assistance to Israel, a position also held by liberal zionist organization J Street. 65% support increasing humanitarian aid to Palestine.
In April, perhaps in response to the palpable shift in sentiments among the party faithful, a supermajority of Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted to block arms sales to Israel. The effort was defeated by Senate Republicans and the 7 Democrats who joined them.
All of this to say, despite insistent henpecking from the transient center, the policies most prominently embraced by the recent wave of progressive primary winners are not “far-left,” they’re mainstream. They are also all significantly more popular than the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, or the institution of Congress, indicating that some of the effort currently being expended on angst might be better dedicated to taking notes.
What’s being portrayed as a lurch to the left is simply a mode-shift, from an unresponsive politics which demands obedience from voters it does not serve, to a responsive politics which understands serving the voters as its end.
I’m sure some of the centrists fretting over progressive primary victories earnestly believe that embracing these popular positions will somehow hurt the party, that what they see as the progressives’ inevitable failure to deliver on their promises will lead to blowback — but I think those concerns are both belated and misplaced. The progressive uprising within the party does not risk blowback, it is blowback: against a party leadership which cares more for its own seniorities and sinecures than for our shared society; against a common wisdom which has spent years lecturing that the only way to win is to avoid giving voters what they ask for, and then losing anyway; against a party establishment which has been either unwilling or unable to deliver on even the few meager promises it deigns to make.
But I don’t believe that most of the loud voices decrying progressive victories are actually concerned about the party’s electoral fortunes, that they actually worry that a responsive politics which embraces popular positions will doom the Democrats and aid the Republicans. They’re just worried about keeping their high-paying jobs at the status quo factory; terrified and appalled that the public might come to the conclusion that the mavens of moderation have been useless all along, just a klatch of careerists LARPing as people who care.
Like anyone who actually holds progressive politics, I prefer when Republicans lose. If I thought that the recent wave of primary winners risked that ultimate objective, I’d be concerned. In my 15-plus years in and around politics, though, I’ve learned at least this one lesson: holding popular positions is rarely a liability.
