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Decline of Progressive Congressional Challengers in 2024 Suggests there Won’t be Another AOC
by Amelia Malpas, Harvard University
A significant development in the 2024 congressional cycle was the decline of progressive challengers. In the three congressional elections following Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, numerous progressives running on similarly bold platforms contested Democratic primaries. Almost none ran in 2024.
In a working paper, I study the emergence, election, and policy impact of the post-Sanders progressives who ran for Congress on the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. The paper relies on interviews with 42 former progressive candidates and causal estimates of progressive challengers’ impact on Democratic incumbents’ behavior.
Progressive Challengers and the Democrats
Between 2018 and 2022, about 90 progressive insurgents contested Democratic primaries each election cycle. A third of these candidates challenged Democratic incumbents. Except for a handful like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Ayanna Pressley, and Jamaal Bowman, nearly all lost. Progressives won more frequently in open primaries in Democratic districts.
Progressives ran in swing and safe Republican districts too, especially in 2018. After the 2016 election, pundits and politicians were preoccupied with the causes of white working class Trump support. Progressives hoped their economically left platforms would help them win voters mainstream Democrats lost in 2016 and before. This proved elusive.
Around seven progressives won election to Congress in each of the 2018 to 2022 elections, the most prominent of whom are known colloquially as the “Squad.”
Through winning elections and exerting pressure from unsuccessful primary challenges, progressives made policy inroads into the Democratic Party. Congressional Democrats who were primaried substantially increased their support of progressive priorities rhetorically on Twitter and legislatively via cosponsorship relative to their past and other Democrats. Via progressives’ inclusion on the Biden campaign’s Unity Task Force and the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ heightened bargaining power, progressives exercised some influence on Biden’s expansive proposals for new social and industrial policies in the first two years of his presidency.
With few new candidates, why did the movement end in 2024?
Loss of Funding
The first challenge for the progressive movement was reduced funding from closely allied advocacy groups.
The organizational successors of the Sanders campaign, Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and Brand New Congress, and a selection of preexisting groups from the professional Working Families Party to the membership-based Democratic Socialists of America provided progressive campaigns with critical support. I find that challengers to incumbents did significantly better electorally the more supported they were by these groups. Candidates in interviews credited them with the relative cohesion of their platforms.
Without Trump as president, many Democratic groups failed to adequately fundraise. The progressive movement benefited from the surge in Democratic activity in response to Trumpism. This occurred even though progressive insurgents were distinct from the broad anti-Trump Resistance. In interviews, few candidates said they ran because of Trump’s victory while many ran to enact specific policies or because of Sanders’s loss. Nonetheless, funds to these progressive insurgent groups were linked with the tides of Democratic group fundraising.
In the 2024 primaries, only the Working Families Party endorsed new candidates. Brand New Congress folded. Even Justice Democrats, particularly prominent for its role in Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory, suffered fundraising woes and stayed out of the election. The infrastructure that guided three election cycles of progressive insurgent contestation essentially collapsed.
Party and Group Pushback
A second factor in the decline of the progressive challengers is pushback from the Democratic Party and affiliated groups.
This pushback has taken multiple forms, including smear campaigns. In 2020, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) blacklisted firms that worked with primary challengers. Candidates understood the blacklist to be in response to their movement’s defeat of two incumbents the previous cycle. After grassroots pressure and a primary season where only three Democratic incumbents lost despite the pandemic and Black Lives Matter mobilization, the DCCC repealed the blacklist edict.
After repeal, formal party arms did not intervene. Instead in 2022, Democratic groups like Mainstream Democrats and bipartisan groups like AIPAC spent heavily via their PACs and super PACs against select progressives. Some spending protected Democratic incumbents from progressive challengers. A substantial amount was in open primaries where progressives did not threaten sitting Democrats.
In 2024, these groups pledged support for primary challengers to Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad over their positions on the Israel-Hamas war. Most maintained their seats, although this marshalled limited progressive resources to protect incumbents rather than expand their numbers. Two progressives in Congress lost primaries to moderate challengers, likely over this issue and their votes against Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a failed tactical maneuver.
Coalitional Fracture
A final contributor to progressive demise is the dissolution of the Sanders coalition and with it, part of the left’s engagement with Democrats.
Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns allowed a wide array of Americans from committed leftists to disgruntled Democrats to unite around one shared political goal. That haphazard coalition has since fractured along multiple stress points. For example, Hispanic voters were strong Sanders supporters within the Democratic Party, swinging dramatically toward Trump in 2024 as a group. In interviews, progressive candidates were prescient in 2021 about Democrats’ need to secure the support of the multiracial working class via economic policy.
The Israel-Hamas war tore the coalition’s final threads. Biden’s minimal conditions on aid to Israel to minimize civilian deaths in Gaza irretrievably lost some left voters, especially after the “uncommitted” presidential primary campaign failed to achieve greater concessions. Blatant antisemitism on the left and allegations of it to stifle criticism of the Israeli state and US support also accelerated coalitional disintegration.
The end of this truce was evident in Marianne Williamson’s and Cenk Uygur’s vanity challenges to Biden’s renomination that prioritized personal brand-building over getting on the ballot. These campaigns marked a return to an earlier left Green Party-style approach that is more about posturing than securing policy gains for working people—opposite Sanders’s and progressive insurgents’ contestation within the Democratic Party as a means to policy ends.
The progressive congressional movement that began in 2018 appears to be over. These explanations of demise are not meant to insinuate that 2024 heralds the end of progressive politics. Similar candidates have had decent success in state legislative and municipal elections. But this is likely the end of a particular progressive movement in Congress. There probably won’t be another AOC.
Amelia Malpas is a Government Ph.D. student at Harvard University. Her research focuses on political parties with attention to factional conflict within party coalitions over distributional issues.
Follow on Bluesky: @malpas.bsky.social