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Democrats Unite on Economic Populism After Midterm Victories

Politics|For Democrats, Economic Populism Is Cutting Through Party Divides

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/12/us/politics/democrats-majorities-economic-populism.html

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News Analysis

Moderate Democrats and progressives have long feuded over who should drive their party’s economic agenda. But many newly elected members say they share the same big goals.

Claire Valdez, wearing eyeglasses, a black blazer, and a blue lanyard, walks outdoors near a metal fence.

Nov. 12, 2026, 1:00 p.m. ET

Claire Valdez, a democratic socialist assemblywoman from Queens, was listening to a campaign speech by Cait Conley, a centrist Army veteran from the Hudson Valley, when she felt a pang of recognition.

“She was talking about billionaires,” Ms. Valdez, who was elected last week in her solidly Democratic district, recalled of Ms. Conley, who flipped a Republican seat in a conservative-leaning area. “It’s like, this sounds like Bernie 2016.”

Now both women are headed to Congress after a Democratic sweep that handed their party firm control of the House and Senate but quickly gave rise to a debate in their ranks about whether progressives or moderates will have the upper hand in driving the agenda come January.

Unlike in the past, however, members of both factions — centrist Democrats who captured competitive districts and the most liberal members in safe seats — appear to have coalesced around a common theme many of them agree won their party the midterms and should be their focus: economic populism.

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Cait Conley at a campaign event in Peekskill, N.Y., last month. “She was talking about billionaires,” Ms. Valdez recalled about one of Ms. Conley’s campaign events.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

The last time Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., bitter policy disagreements between moderates and progressives over how expansive their legislative plan should be prompted intraparty feuds that threatened to derail their economic agenda.

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