“Kamala is for they/them,” the narrator says in the advertisement. “President Trump is for you.” The spot ran during the 2024 presidential campaign, and it is credited with helping to fuel Trump’s return to the White House — in part by highlighting Harris’s support for transgender Americans. Two years later that argument is being conducted by Democratic candidates, in Democratic voices, in the districts that will decide control of Congress. Following years of attacks from Republicans, Democrats in tightly contested House and Senate races have downplayed, or outright dismissed, support for the transgender community — mostly on a single question, the participation of transgender students in school sports. In Ohio, Representative Marcy Kaptur ran an advertisement featuring her saying: “Boys should not play in girls’ sports.” In North Carolina, Representative Don Davis released a television commercial in which he says there “should always be a safe and fair space for women and girls in sports”. In South Carolina, Annie Andrews, a doctor running for the Senate, said in a newly released advertisement that she opposes “biological men playing in women’s sports”. Three states, three phrasings, one direction of travel. Each advertisement stays inside a single practical question. None of them argues about rights in the abstract. That restraint is the political work: a broad and contested argument about who belongs where is replaced by a narrow argument about who plays on which team. The three candidates are not addressing the same electorate. Kaptur runs in Ohio, Davis in North Carolina, Andrews in South Carolina, and each must assemble a majority from a different mixture of voters. What they share is a reading of 2024 — that the party’s national position on transgender Americans cost it votes it could not spare. Whether that reading is correct is a separate question, and one the party has not settled.
Not every part of the coalition accepts that reading. On a Thursday in Portland, Maine, at a town hall billed as “Students vs Billionaires”, a transgender college student told Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that they felt “abandoned” by Democrats. The congresswoman’s answer was immediate. “They’re wrong,” she said of the members of her party who had moved. [1] She then apologised on their behalf: “First and foremost, I want to just let you know how shameful and sorry I am that there are people out there that scare so easily after an election.” That sentence rejects the premise behind the advertisements: that an election result is a verdict on a minority. Then she stated the principle she set against it. “The moment you compromise the rights of a trans person in America, you compromise the rights of every citizen.” The claim can be read as being about contagion: a right conceded in one institution does not stay contained in that institution. It can also be read as a claim about coalition arithmetic, because a party that trims one group’s protections teaches the next group what to expect. The two positions now sit inside the same party, in the same cycle, sometimes in adjacent states. One is calibrated to a district and the other to a principle, and neither folds into the other without loss. The distance between them measures how little agreement exists about what actually happened in 2024. That Ocasio-Cortez chose an apology — “shameful and sorry” — over a rebuttal is itself part of the story. She was not defending a party line. She was conceding that no single line exists.
The absence of a line is not a failure of message discipline. Since Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, the party’s divisions have deepened rather than closed. Establishment figures and self-described moderates have struggled to hold back a rising tide of progressive populism, as voters increasingly demand stronger and bolder policies. That demand pulls the party’s energy leftward while its most exposed candidates step rightward on social questions. Groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America have powered the leftward movement and forced a reckoning over what it means to be a Democrat in Trump’s second term. The reckoning surfaces as significant differences among candidates on policies that often depend on where they are running. A Senate candidate in South Carolina and a Senate candidate in Michigan can carry the same label and answer entirely different questions. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has spent months telling donors to put money into a sleeper race in Mississippi, which points to a leadership strategy built on widening the map rather than narrowing the message. Both strategies can run at once, and in 2026 they do. The cost is coherence: a national party whose candidates can sound like members of different parties, because they are speaking to different electorates. Some voters have found the changes reassuring. Others have read them as abandonment, which is precisely what the student in Portland said out loud.
A Cracked Consensus on Israel
The sharpest movement inside the party is not on domestic policy. It is on Israel. Three years after Israel launched its war in Gaza, and after more than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed, American opinion has shifted. The war followed Hamas’s attacks of October 7, 2023. A Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year found that 60 percent of US adults held an unfavourable opinion of Israel. Among US Democrats the figure was 80 percent. The gap between those two numbers is the space in which candidates now operate. A view that is merely a majority nationally is close to a consensus inside the Democratic coalition, and the polling has moved in one direction across three years of war. The shift has been led not only by the party’s left but by some of its longest-standing supporters of Israel, including Chris Coons. Public opinion does not write policy by itself. It sets a price for holding a position, and the price of the old position has risen. In this reading, candidates read prices before they read briefings. What has changed is not the existence of criticism of Israeli military conduct but its acceptability inside the party’s mainstream. A position that once required a primary challenger to voice now requires an explanation to decline. The polls do not tell a candidate what to propose; they tell a candidate which proposals will be cheap and which will be expensive.
The test case is Chris Coons of Delaware. A moderate, and the Democrat likely to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if his party retakes the Senate next month, Coons said this month that he wants a “thorough reexamination” of the US-Israeli relationship. He has also said he is willing to impose sanctions on Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. For a senator who has spent years inside the party’s pro-Israel wing, that is a marked change in tone. The timing carries more weight than the wording. Two years ago the same party declined a far smaller gesture. Before the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Harris rejected calls to feature a Palestinian American speaker on the programme. A refused speaking slot and a floated sanction on a head of government are not decisions of the same order, which is exactly what makes the comparison useful. One is symbolic and was declined. The other is material and is being discussed. As a matter of Senate practice, the chairmanship matters because a committee chair controls the calendar: which nominees get hearings, which sales get scrutiny, which questions are asked on the record. A promise to reexamine costs a senator nothing until it is attached to a schedule, and a schedule is what the gavel buys.
The shift registers in votes as well as in interviews. Earlier this year, 40 Democratic senators voted in support of a motion that disapproved proposed military sales to Israel. Only seven Democratic senators voted with Republicans to block it. The ratio — 40 to 7 — is the most concrete available measure of where the caucus now sits on arms transfers. A disapproval motion does not by itself halt a sale. It does something narrower and harder to undo: it attaches every senator’s name to a specific transfer and makes the question countable. Forty votes is a significant number, not a gesture. Seven is a small remainder. Both numbers are now part of the record that future nominees, future sales and future hearings will be measured against. A caucus that splits roughly six to one on a recorded vote has changed the baseline for what its leaders can promise a foreign government in private.
Any further movement would meet resistance from inside the leadership. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has said the US “commitment to Israel’s security and defense must be ironclad”. He would likely become majority leader if Democrats retake the Senate. That combination — a base that has moved, a leader who has not, and a chamber whose arithmetic rewards discipline — is the structure of the dispute. The next Congress may include more progressive voices demanding that Washington rethink the relationship outright. They would be negotiating with a leadership that has already published its bottom line. The distance between those 40 votes and that one sentence is the distance a Democratic foreign policy would have to travel in the next Congress. Whether it travels depends on the size of the majority, and the size of the majority depends on the districts, which is where the domestic arguments re-enter the room.
Pocketbook Politics Meets a Sinking President
Immigration is the issue on which the party’s two wings have moved in opposite directions. US Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 8 million encounters at the US-Mexico border between 2021 and 2025, a number Republicans used throughout Joe Biden’s term to argue that the administration had lost control of the border. In Texas’s closely watched Senate race, candidate James Talarico has positioned himself as a “border security Democrat”, advocating stronger border enforcement and comprehensive immigration reform. Third Way, a US-based organisation that pushes for moderate policies, argues that stances of that kind travel better because they are proactive rather than reactive. Its senior political adviser, Lucas Holtz, points to the 2024 convention. “I remember very clearly when Harris came out and spoke at the DNC in 2024; she… said we need order at the border and to have a strong immigration system,” he said. [1] “The problem is, after that, the Harris campaign really did not stick with that line in the sand… They stopped taking a stand on these issues, and more voters thought that she was too far to the left.” Holtz’s reading of Talarico is that his advertisements argue that the Biden administration failed on securing the border, and that the approach has put Republicans on their back foot in some races. The other wing moved the other way. After several high-profile incidents earlier this year, including federal immigration agents in Minneapolis shooting dead US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti, calls to abolish or drastically overhaul Immigration and Customs Enforcement gained momentum. Left-leaning groups and politicians united behind “abolish ICE”, a demand to dismantle the agency and end its enforcement authority. One party, one issue, two directions, and no mechanism for reconciling them before November.
On health care the party agrees on direction and disagrees on instrument. As cost-of-living concerns remain paramount for voters, Democrats of all stripes have coalesced behind the need for more government intervention in the system. How to deliver it is contested. Some progressives, including Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, have championed Medicare for All, which would expand the federal health insurance programme for seniors so that all US citizens are guaranteed health care. Others running in more conservative states, such as Andrews in South Carolina, have called for the return of Affordable Care Act subsidies that lapsed during Trump’s second term, and for limits on health insurance companies’ profits. Polling released by the independent health organisation KFF found that 66 percent of US adults now support Medicare for All, a 13-point increase from October 2020. Holtz’s summary is that “everybody’s going to have their own approach to this, but by and large, all Democrats want to move to a universal healthcare system in the best way possible”, and that the party agrees it needs to do better than the Trump administration has done. That is a coalition held together by a shared destination and divided over the route.
The national environment is why the district-level recalibration matters at all. A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll puts Trump’s approval among US adults at 33 percent, with 66 percent disapproving and 52 percent disapproving strongly. That is four points lower than in July and eight points lower than at this point last year, and lower than at any point in his first term. Among likely voters, approval is 38 percent and disapproval 62 percent. For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats are seen as more trusted to deal with the economy. In the contest for control of the House, Democrats hold an eight-point lead among registered and likely voters, up from a three-point lead among registered voters in July. Asked whether they would rather have a Democratic-led Congress acting as a check on Trump or a Republican one supporting his agenda, 58 percent of registered voters chose the Democratic option and 39 percent the Republican one — roughly double the margin of a year earlier. Seventy-two percent say the country is heading in the wrong direction, five points more than in April. Turnout remains the unknown that decides individual races: 75 percent of Democratic registered voters say they are certain to vote or already have, against 67 percent of Republicans. Among Democrats who support the Democratic Socialists of America, 79 percent say they are certain to vote; among non-socialist Democrats, 73 percent. Among Republicans who back the MAGA movement the figure is 75 percent, and among non-MAGA Republicans it falls to 57 percent.
Mississippi is where that environment meets a map. Scott Colom, a 43-year-old district attorney, is running against Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith in a state Trump won by 22 points, and both parties’ major Senate super PACs — the outside committees that pool money for advertising — have put more than $1 million into the race in the past few days. Kamala Harris, the former vice president, has campaigned in the state. Trump is due to campaign there for Hyde-Smith. Colom is unambiguous about his own forecast: “I think I’m gonna win. I really, truly believe I’m gonna win.” [1] Cook Political Report, one of the most prominent election forecasters, still rates the race “likely Republican” rather than lean or toss-up, and Hyde-Smith has so far declined to debate him. Her campaign manager, Jake Monssen, points to billions brought home for infrastructure and rural health care, conservative judges confirmed and liberal ones blocked, tax relief, a secure border and votes that keep men out of girls’ sports and locker rooms, and casts Colom as bankrolled by the radical left. Colom’s case against the president is built on broken promises. “He promised the people of Mississippi ‘America First.’ He’s delivered ‘Mississippi Last,’” he said, arguing that tariffs have been terrible for farmers and that the country is back at war with no end in sight. “You lied,” he said, before accusing Trump of making 2.2 billion dollars on a crypto scheme and of receiving a private jet from Qatar. He has challenged the president to a debate while he is in the state. If Colom wins, he would be the first Black senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction. The rating says he probably will not. That is what a 22-point state looks like when a president’s approval sits at 33 percent: a live possibility and a clear underdog at once.
Sources
Mentioned organisations (context, not sources)
- Democratic Party — Organisation (homepage)
- Republican Party — Organisation (homepage)
- United States Congress — Organisation (homepage)
- United States House of Representatives — Organisation (homepage)
- United States Senate — Organisation (homepage)
- Democratic Socialists of America — Organisation (homepage)
- Pew Research Center — Organisation (homepage)
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee — Organisation (homepage)
- US Customs and Border Protection — Organisation (homepage)