The Justice Democrats, the group behind many of the insurgent progressive Democratic challengers who pulled off shocking upsets in recent years, are putting the party’s establishment on notice, telling Salon that they intend to back primary challengers in the 2026 midterms.
In the wake of the Democrats' total collapse in the 2024 election, losing the House, the Senate and the presidency, the party has erupted into infighting between its establishment and and more populist wings.
Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for the group, told Salon that “it’s time to clean up shop in the Democratic Party frankly” and that “progressives and the left warned” about the looming failure for Democrats “for months and years prior.”
“Every district that is a deep blue Democratic district has no excuse to not represent the needs of working-class people,” Andrabi said. “Every district that is a deep blue seat we are looking at to see if the communities in that district are being served by people in that district.”
The group first grabbed national attention in 2018 when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., defeated former Rep. Joe Crowley, D-N.Y., in the Democratic primary in what was then New York’s 14th District. The primary upset was viewed as a political earthquake at the time as Crowley was then the fourth highest-ranking congressional Democrat, serving as the chair of the Democratic Caucus.
That same year, the Justice Democrats backed a slate of seven primary challengers who went on to become winning congressional candidates, all of whom remain in Congress, including Reps. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz.; Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.; and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.
The next cycle, in 2020, the group backed three winning candidates — Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri and Marie Newman of Illinois —none of whom will remain in the incoming Congress. In 2022 the group backed two winning congressional candidates — Greg Casar in Texas and Summer Lee in Pennsylvania — and in 2024, the group backed just one winning candidate, Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. All told, the incoming Congress will feature 10 Justice Democrats, two fewer than the outgoing Congress, which had 12 representatives that the group backed.
While the group has backed off of aggressive primary challenges to incumbent Democrats in recent years, Andrabi said that the Democrats’ failure to deliver any major victories in 2024 showed that the preferred electoral strategy of the party’s establishment is ineffective.
“For so long the Democratic Party has tried to be a big tent that somehow includes the working class and the billionaire class and that says it fights for the interests of the working class,” Andrabi said. “We continue to allow our party to align ourselves with the wealthiest few and everyday people are beginning to take notice.”
Although the group has not yet identified where it plans to run primary challengers in 2026, Andrabi said that they would be watching for opportunities to oust Democrats who are not serving their district or representing their working-class base and encouraged people to nominate strong candidates for primary challenges.
The Justice Democrats’ plan is being formulated amid significant Democratic finger-pointing. Much of the party’s establishment and its more conservative members have taken to blaming factors out of their control, like inflation, and cultural issues, like the party’s advocacy for transgender rights, for the party’s loss.
The centrist Democratic polling firm Blueprint released an election postmortem squarely pinning the loss on inflation, the perception that “Too many immigrants illegally crossed the border under the Biden-Harris Administration” and the notion that “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.”
Blueprint is bankrolled by billionaire LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman who, early in Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, supported Harris while also pressuring her to abandon populist economic messaging that featured prominently in the first days of her campaign.
Hoffman’s specific ask was to have Harris fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who has been hawkish on antitrust enforcement. Other billionaires, like Mark Cuban, also became Harris surrogates while promising that she would abandon populist policies, like increasing taxes on billionaires.
Andrabi told Salon that, from the Justice Democrats’ point of view, the party’s establishment is pointing to cultural issues as the reason their efforts failed to avoid having to choose between representing billionaires and representing working-class people.
“There are members of this party that we are not going to be able to convince to actually stand up for working people,” Andrabi said. “There are a lot of Democrats who are pushing for us to tack right.”
