# Democrats are heading into the 2026 midterm elections with the kind of political opening opposition parties usually hope for. Many Americans are uneasy about the economy, foreign wars and the direction of the country, giving Democrats a chance to make gains in November. Yet the party is becoming more liberal while many of the voters it needs to win remain somewhere in between.

That tension came into sharper focus in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed narrowly defeated Rep. Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination. El-Sayed won 48.5 percent to Stevens’ 47.5 percent, with another 4 percent going to state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who had suspended her campaign.

[Bridge Michigan](https://bridgemi.com/michigan-government/michigan-democratic-senate-primary-results-abdul-el-sayed-haley-stevens/) called the result a progressive “shockwave,” but Democrats in one of the country’s most important swing states were almost evenly divided.

# Michigan becomes the test

El-Sayed gives Democrats a chance to see whether the party’s progressive wing can carry its message from a Democratic primary into a competitive statewide election in the Midwest. A doctor and former public health official, he ran on Medicare for All, opposition to corporate political money and a tougher position toward Israel.

He has also called for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a position Republicans will almost certainly use against him. El-Sayed does not call himself a democratic socialist and argues that some positions described as radical are reasonable responses to today’s problems.

The stakes go well beyond Michigan. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to regain control of a Senate now held 53 to 47 by Republicans, and Michigan is a seat they already hold. Losing it would make that climb considerably steeper. [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/democratic-us-senator-peters-will-not-seek-re-election-2026-2025-01-28/) identified Michigan as a major concern when Democratic Sen. Gary Peters announced his retirement.

Republican Mike Rogers makes the test harder. Trump carried Michigan in 2024, while Rogers came within three-tenths of a percentage point of defeating Democrat Elissa Slotkin for the state’s other Senate seat. El-Sayed therefore needs many of the Stevens voters who opposed him in the primary, along with independents and other Michiganders outside the Democratic left.

El-Sayed believes his economic message can reach them. “In an era where our premiums are quickly pricing people out, I think being for Medicare for All is…the moderate position,” he told Bridge Michigan. His argument is that voters angry about health care costs, corporate power and money in politics may support ideas Washington still considers well to the left.

David Brooks put the opposing case bluntly during a discussion with Jonathan Capehart on PBS NewsHour. “If you want to win and defeat Republicans, nominate a moderate,” Brooks said.

If Democrats unite and El-Sayed wins, progressives will have evidence that their approach works beyond safe Democratic territory. If he loses after Democrats remain divided, progressives can blame the party establishment while centrists blame the nominee, leaving the larger argument unresolved.

# A party pulling in two directions

There is real evidence that Democrats are moving left. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 71 percent of Democrats now describe themselves as liberal, up from 55 percent in 2012. Large majorities of liberal Democrats also favor higher taxes on corporations and billionaires and government-provided health care for everyone.

Michigan provided another example on the same primary night. Democratic socialist state Rep. Donavan McKinney defeated incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in a Detroit-area congressional district after campaigning heavily on representing working people. BridgeDetroit reported that McKinney narrowly won, adding to the evidence of energy on the Democratic left. But the heavily Democratic district is very different from the statewide contest El-Sayed now faces.

Missouri offers a caution against reading too much into individual races. Rep. Wesley Bell decisively defeated former Rep. Cori Bush in their St. Louis rematch, winning 59.2 percent to Bush’s 36.9 percent. But Bush carried baggage unrelated to her progressive politics.

The Wall Street Journal noted several controversies and an unusually high number of missed votes during her years in Congress. Her defeat therefore tells us something about Bush, but much less about whether progressive Democrats generally can win.

Democratic voters remain divided. The Yale Youth Poll found them almost evenly split between moving toward the middle to attract more voters and emphasizing progressive policies to motivate the Democratic base. Younger Democrats leaned toward the progressive approach while older Democrats preferred moderation.

# The center is still there

The danger for Democrats is assuming dissatisfaction with Trump automatically means voters are ready to move just as far in the opposite direction. [Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx) found that a record 45 percent of Americans identified as independents in 2025. More began leaning Democratic during Trump’s first year back in office, but Gallup cautioned that Americans had not suddenly developed warmer feelings toward the Democratic Party.

The Pew Research Center identified a large group that favors many Democratic economic ideas while worrying more about crime and favoring tighter immigration policies than voters further to the left. Pew calls them the Order and Opportunity Left, and they make up 18 percent of the public.

That combination matters. A voter can favor higher taxes on wealthy corporations, protecting Social Security and bringing down health care costs while also wanting secure borders and effective policing. Democrats do not necessarily have to choose between addressing economic frustration and appealing to voters in the middle.

The evidence also does not support the simple claim that moderates always win and progressives always lose. Split Ticket found that moderate Democratic House members generally performed better than more progressive colleagues between 2018 and 2024. But election analyst G. Elliott Morris found only a small advantage in 2024 and argued that the strength of the candidate and circumstances of the race can matter just as much.

The 2024 results nevertheless contain a warning. Voters with college degrees favored Kamala Harris by 16 percentage points while those without college degrees favored Trump by 14 points, according to the Pew Research Center. Democrats cannot afford to become increasingly dependent on college-educated voters while continuing to lose ground among Americans without four-year degrees.

That is why Michigan has become more than another Senate race. The Democratic left has shown that it can win Democratic primaries. El-Sayed now has to show that a progressive can win enough voters who were never part of the left in the first place.

# The Union Is Still Worth Saving

A recent conversation with an friend left me thinking seriously about something I once would have considered almost unthinkable.

He is a lifelong liberal whose political involvement stretches back to the civil rights movement in Mississippi during the 1960s, and he contends that Americans may decide they no longer share enough common ground to remain one country.

What stayed with me was not simply what he said, but who was saying it. This was not someone on the political fringe cheering for the country to break apart. He is thoughtful, deeply patriotic in his own way, and genuinely worried about where America is headed.

His concerns reflect something larger happening as talk of a “national divorce” moves from something people say to get a reaction toward an idea some Americans are beginning to take seriously.

Author James D. Telfer has taken that possibility several steps further. After nearly 25 years with the Central Intelligence Agency, Telfer wrote [The National Divorce, A Story of a Fractured Superpower](https://books.google.com/books/about/The_National_Divorce.html?id=IpLX0QEACAAJ), a novel set in a near-future America that has broken into two countries.

His scenario does not begin with armies marching against each other. It develops through political violence, revenge attacks, outside interference and a government increasingly unable to keep political conflict from becoming something worse.

In a recent interview with Anthony Scaramucci on the [Open Book podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU0g3etLZ34), Telfer argued that Americans should stop assuming such things simply cannot happen here. “We’re not completely impervious to change and we’re not impervious to political violence,” he said.

His point was not that another civil war is inevitable. It was that assuming the country will always hold together becomes dangerous when citizens increasingly see people on the other side as enemies rather than political opponents.

That is where I part company with the idea of national divorce. I am and will always be a union man. By that I mean the Union itself, the belief that however bitter our disagreements become, the United States is worth keeping together.

Americans increasingly clash over immigration, religion, race, education, government power, history and even what democracy is supposed to mean. Political disagreement has become personal, fed every day by social media and a political culture that rewards anger. Too many Americans no longer merely believe the other side is wrong. They believe the other side is dangerous.

There is a dangerous step between believing your opponents threaten the country and deciding it is impossible to continue living in the same country with them. Once that line is crossed, losing an election no longer feels temporary. Compromise becomes surrender, and every election starts looking like a fight for survival.

The United States has already learned what disunion can cost. Modern estimates cited by the National Park Service put the Civil War death toll at roughly 750,000, with many more wounded and entire communities devastated. Nobody talking about national separation today expects another Gettysburg.

But that is exactly why we should be careful about treating “divorce” as though it were a harmless way of describing what would happen.

There is no divorce court here. Red and blue America do not occupy two tidy blocks of territory that can simply be separated with a line on a map. Democrats live in Texas and Republicans live in California. Families cross political and state boundaries, while electric grids, water systems, highways, railroads, military bases, banks and supply chains tie the country together in ways no political map could easily untangle.

Telfer’s fictional America confronts those problems after the breakup. The new countries must still cooperate on defense and other shared needs while dealing with the economic damage caused by separation. He also imagines foreign powers taking advantage of the split, and that concern is not far-fetched.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has warned that foreign governments use online influence campaigns to manipulate public opinion and stir political and social conflict. The intelligence community already understands why America’s adversaries benefit when Americans turn against one another.

A broken-up America would almost certainly be a weaker America. Separate countries would have smaller economies, different interests and less power abroad. China, Russia and other countries competing with the United States would have every reason to see an American breakup as an opportunity.

But the greater loss would be here at home. The American experiment has never depended upon Americans agreeing with one another. New England has never thought exactly like Appalachia, rural America has never looked quite like urban America, and the Deep South has long had a history and political culture different from the industrial North.

The country has survived those divisions because Americans have generally accepted that our disagreements ultimately have to be settled within the same country. That system has often failed people, sometimes terribly. The civil rights movement existed because millions of Americans were denied rights the Constitution was supposed to protect. Reform, protest and political confrontation are not threats to the country. They are part of how Americans force the country to fix what is wrong.

The greater danger comes when Americans decide the country can no longer fix its problems because the people on the other side are impossible to reason with or live alongside. Telfer made much the same point when he told Scaramucci that “the more we shut each other out and the more our families divide, the more we isolate ourselves.” A republic becomes harder to hold together when enough people stop believing they have a future together.

I still believe we do. I can disagree profoundly with the politics of millions of my fellow Americans while continuing to regard them as my fellow Americans. There is no political red line that makes breaking the country apart preferable to the difficult, frustrating and sometimes maddening work of governing it together.

The Union does not matter because Americans agree. It matters because we don’t, and for 250 years the challenge has been finding a way to remain one country anyway.

*Between Editions is a free weekly feature of* [The Rising Tide](https://barberd.substack.com/) *offering calm, independent analysis of the political forces shaping the United States and the wider world. Every edition is grounded in documented facts and open to all.*

Between Editions: Democrats Move Left