How progressives are taking over swing states – and driving fear into Democratic elites

In the run-up to last month’s mayoral election in Dayton, Ohio, candidate Shenise Turner-Sloss found herself up against it.

Her opponent, mayor Jeffrey Mims, was a 78-year-old local Democratic party doyen who had served on school boards and teachers’ unions in the city for decades. His campaign budget was three times hers and an incumbent hadn’t been unseated from the mayoral role in the city for over a decade.

But it wasn’t just money and status that stood in her way.

In 2021, when Turner-Sloss ran for a seat on the city commission as a Democrat, the Ohio Democratic party mailed out an attack ad against her and another candidate that included the text: “Don’t Trust Shenise Turner-Sloss.”

And yet, on 4 November, 44-year-old Turner-Sloss ousted Mims, marking a sea change in how local politics are run in the Ohio city.

“My candidacy was not in opposition to anyone. My candidacy was to usher in a new generation of leadership,” she says.

“The Democratic party is a big tent, and we don’t always agree on policy priorities, [but] I do believe that at this juncture this is an opportunity for us to build and to find that common ground because people are hurting.”

Dayton voters aren’t the only Americans in the midwest shunning establishment Democrats at recent polls. Voters in the Rust belt are increasingly turning to progressive and often inexperienced Democratic party candidates, in what some have termed a “Liberal Tea party” revolt.

From Detroit to Pennsylvania to Buffalo, New York, and here in Ohio, insurgent, progressive Democrats are defeating their long-established colleagues in dozens of school board, city council and mayoral races, throwing the already-divided national party into chaos, even as polls indicate it stands to potentially benefit at next year’s midterm elections due to the Trump administration’s divisive policies.

In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, one of seven swing states whose voters in recent years have decided the country’s presidential election, 37-year-old Jaime Arroyo was elected mayor on 4 November, becoming the first Latino mayor in the city’s 295-year history. In La Crosse, Wisconsin, another swing state, Shaundel Washington-Spivey, the city’s first Black and out gay mayor, beat a fellow Democratic party candidate with extensive local government experience last April.

Candidates such as Turner-Sloss, Arroyo and Washington-Spivey are campaigning on combating rising housing costs and providing better public transit infrastructure at a time when affordability issues and federal government policies are driving many working families into crisis.

“People [are] yearning for responsible policy,” says Turner-Sloss. “People really want to touch and feel what you’re able to do for them [and] we were able to build a movement.”

Democratic party leaders have been accused of a wave of poor performances that go back far beyond last year’s chastening presidential defeat.

The party elite’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians, have turned voters and donors away from the party. As have other incidents. In Illinois, Democratic US representative Chuy García’s plan to handpick his own successor upon his retirement next year, circumventing an open election, drew howls of criticism from all sides of the political divide.

Rightwing media outlets have gone after Democrats’ low favorability ratings and the party’s apparent refusal to integrate younger members into its leadership, at a time when the Republican party made JD Vance a vice-presidential candidate last year at the age of 40.

However, observers say that the Democratic party’s failure to secure the continuation of federal subsidies for health insurance for millions of Americans last month, a move that ended the 43-day government shutdown, could have the most lasting negative effect on the party going forward.

On 9 November, Senate Democrats folded to Republicans without securing guarantees to continue subsidized health insurance, a position likely to put the 13 Democratic senators who are up for re-election next year – one each in the swing states of Georgia and Michigan – under significant pressure in the coming months. Recent net favorability ratings for the Democratic party have languished at lows not seen in decades.

“People are tired of leaders who are disconnected from the pressures they’re dealing with every day. And they want to be able to choose their representatives without party bosses putting their thumbs on the scale,” says Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families party, an organization that is backing progressive political candidates in elections ranging from school boards to judicial and mayoral positions.

“The Democratic party serves two masters, and right now they’re caught between a donor class that wants a return to a broken status quo, and a voter base that wants to do things differently.”

Many of the more than 700 progressive candidates that the Working Families party backed this year have won influential local elections. Last month, it launched a campaign to support an opponent to run against Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman, one of those who voted with Republicans to end the shutdown, in 2028.

“Every Democrat – new and old – is going to have to make their case to voters about how they plan to fight authoritarianism,” says Mitchell. “If their plan is to act like it’s business as usual, they’re in for a difficult 2026.”

However, while progressives may be thriving in an environment created by what many voters see as an extremist Trump administration and a feckless Democratic party, upending the political establishment in places such as the midwest is no small task. No all efforts have succeeded.

In Minneapolis, Minnesota state senator, Omar Fateh, backed by the Working Families party, was defeated by a two-time incumbent in a much-publicized mayoral race last month.

Fateh, the first Somali American and Muslim to hold office in Minnesota’s senate, was targeted with an Islamophobic campaign, with rightwing activist Charlie Kirk claiming on X in July that Fateh was part of a so-called “Islamic takeover of America”. Fateh’s opponent also had the backing of some of Minnesota’s most prominent Democrats.

Nor is local success a guarantee of a national upswing in party fortunes.

That Trump swept all seven swing states – three of which are in the midwest – in last year’s presidential election, suggests that in a two-horse race for the White House, Democrats divided by voters who hold contrasting centrist and progressive worldviews could be in danger of losing out again in 2028.

In Turner-Sloss’s Montgomery county, Trump lost to the Democratic party’s presidential candidate Kamala Harris last year by just more than 1,200 votes despite it being home to Ohio’s fourth-largest metro region and a traditional safe harbor for Democrats for decades.

Still, she is positive about what progressives will be able to achieve.

While her mayoral election opponent campaigned in part on increasing the use of private company surveillance technology to curb crime, the backbone of Turner-Sloss’s successful election result, she says, rested on more than 60 “house parties” held in local homes throughout her campaign. At the gatherings, hundreds of would-be voters turned up to ask about and discuss her policies and politics.

“I really want to be able to move the needle and to address the ills in our community,” she says.

“My hope is that people are having that listening ear to address the needs that people have right now.”