Haley Stevens

In President Trump’s first midterm elections in 2018, Representatives Haley Stevens of Michigan and Angie Craig of Minnesota turned red House districts blue, vaulting themselves into a cohort of pragmatic moderates who wanted to go to Washington in an era of chaos and get things done.

Those Democratic majority-makers — many of whom were women who connected with voters in suburbs and exurbs — were celebrated in their party as models for winning tough races.

But that experience hasn’t given either Stevens or Craig an easy path to the Senate in 2026.

This week, Stevens narrowly lost her battle with the left-wing outsider Dr. Abdul El-Sayed. Next up, on Tuesday, Craig will try to prevail in a competitive primary against Minnesota’s progressive lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan.

The two races are very different, of course, and their outcomes may well diverge. But some Democrats believe the hurdles the two moderates have faced this summer reflect a bigger shift in the party as its voters wrestle with the question of what makes a winner in the second Trump era.

“Some part of the Democratic base is changing its theory of success,” former Representative Conor Lamb, a Pennsylvania Democrat, told me. He flipped a House seat in 2018 before losing a Senate primary in 2022 to John Fetterman.

“In 2018, the theory of success was: Elect good people who want to be good public servants and try to make our institutions work again,” Lamb said. Now, he added: “They’re changing it to, ‘We want people who fight. We want people who will never back down.’ They’re uncompromising.”

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