Twenty years ago, the last time an unpopular second-term Republican president faced a midterm reckoning, the Democratic Party relied on moderate and even conservative-leaning candidates to reclaim control of Congress.
Heath Shuler, the former NFL quarterback, won a North Carolina House seat as a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat. Jim Webb, the former Reagan Navy Secretary and tribune of the Scots-Irish, won a Senate seat in a then–more Republican Virginia. A young politician named Kirsten Gillibrand captured an upstate New York House seat with an “A” rating from the NRA.
If the Democrats win the Senate next Tuesday, it will reflect the success of a modified and limited version of that strategy. Yes, the 2026 campaign has featured big progressive bets, like Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy in Michigan, and big progressive fiascos, like the process that yielded Graham Platner and then Troy Jackson in Maine. But in the end, the expectation that angry Democratic primary voters would turn this into a progressive Tea Party year, with a hyper-ideological cast of candidates, hasn’t matched the reality of the Senate races. Instead, Democrats are competing in swing states and reddish states because they mostly turned to nominees who could present as moderates.
Those presentations are not the same thing as an authentic ideological independence. A lot of the Democratic candidates are tap-dancing around issues like immigration and transgender sports and surgeries rather than staking out clear differences with the base. There are no notable pro-life Democrats anymore. Mary Peltola, the Democratic Senate candidate in Alaska, and Josh Turek, her counterpart in Iowa, are the only prominent contenders who would qualify as anything close to pro-gun by 2006 standards. Figures like James Talarico in Texas and Adam Johnson in Kansas are leaning hard on a religious identity, and Talarico has done his best to disavow his past woker-than-thou litanies. But their worldviews are still well to the left of the typical religious voter in those states. Ohio’s Sherrod Brown is trying to reclaim his Senate seat based on a long-standing reputation as a blue-collar populist, but as a senator he never meaningfully challenged his party’s leftward shift on immigration.
Then again, the Republican Party in 2026 is hardly a bastion of moderation. And when polarized conditions create an unmet public appetite for centrist candidates, it can be satisfied even by politicians who merely talk as though they aren’t prisoners of the party line. (This is something Trump himself demonstrated in both his winning presidential campaigns, which featured various moments of symbolic separation from GOP orthodoxy.)
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