Opinion | The Democrats Aren’t in Tea Party Territory — Yet

Former Senator Jim DeMint, a prominent Tea Party figure, often said he’d rather serve in a small but ideologically conservative Senate minority caucus than a majority Republican coalition made up of moderates. Better, he would say, to have 30 Marco Rubios in the Senate than 60 Arlen Specters.

When the Tea Party emerged in 2009, it shocked the Republican establishment and transformed the next decade of politics. It shifted the G.O.P. ideologically, prioritized a combative temperament and looked askance at traditional notions of electability.

Sound familiar?

Today, as heated Democratic primaries have pitted more moderate, establishment candidates against progressive insurgents, it can feel a bit as though Democrats are experiencing their own Tea Party moment. From Zohran Mamdani’s meteoric rise in New York City to the victory of Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate primary this month, normie Democrats are looking over their shoulder at the far-left Democrats and democratic socialists coming for them. Establishment Republicans of the Tea Party era will remember that feeling well.

But there are two key differences between what happened to the Republican Party in the 2010s and the revolution happening in the Democratic Party today that have at least temporarily delayed the Democrats’ own Tea Party moment: the nature of the party’s recent defeats and the longstanding makeup of the party’s voter base.

On the issues, Tea Party voters were well to the right of non-Tea Party Republicans, and Tea Party voters’ higher turnout rates in primaries coincided with a moment when the number of swing seats in Congress declined, in many instances making primaries, not general elections, the more important contests. In these races, being perceived as the “true” conservative who refused to compromise was seen as essential. Groups like the Republican Study Committee and House Freedom Caucus created frequent headaches for congressional leaders who sought to cut deals and govern. During Barack Obama’s presidency, government shutdowns never gutted Obamacare or brought about what the movement saw as fiscal sanity, but holding the line was seen by many Republicans as preferable to compromising with Democrats.

The Democratic Party of today is beginning to experience some version of this transformation. The strongest signal involves the question of temperament and the desire for a party that puts up more of a fight. In March 2025, shortly after President Trump’s second inauguration, 81 percent of Democratic-leaning voters in my polling said they wanted the Democratic Party to be more combative, including 50 percent who wanted the party to be much more combative. Roughly a year later, that figure rose to 62 percent.

At the same time, evidence of a sharp ideological left turn in the party is more mixed, at least for now. My data does show the ideological left is an expanding bloc within the Democratic electorate and that Democratic voters are amenable to democratic socialism, loosely defined, over capitalism. Younger Democrats and more highly educated Democrats have shown an appetite for candidates who get a stamp of approval from Senator Bernie Sanders or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a dynamic on display in the Michigan Senate primary.

But many of the voters holding back this progressive drift are in the older, working-cl***, more racially diverse precincts that remain decisive in Democratic primaries outside deep blue areas. Candidates like Dr. El-Sayed and the democratic socialist Francesca Hong — who lost in last week’s Wisconsin Democratic primary for governor — saw lackluster support in these areas. The same cohort of voters that delivered Joe Biden the Democratic nomination in 2020 is the one keeping the Democratic Party’s leftist impulses in check — for now.

While the Republican Tea Party moment saw alignment of the party’s activist cl*** with its most reliable voters, the Democratic Party does not yet show such clear overlap. Leftist Democrats and democratic socialists may make way-out — frankly, ridiculous — statements about abolishing prisons or canceling Thanksgiving (of the kind that Ms. Hong tried to walk back), but many Democratic voters aren’t on board. In my surveys, only one-quarter of Democratic voters said they wanted their party to move to the left; more than four in 10 wanted it to move to the center. And while there were some clear leftward turns in Democratic voter policy preferences, like rising support for Medicare for all, most Democratic voters said they opposed the more out-there proposals from hard-core progressives like allowing noncitizens to vote.

The biggest difference so far between the G.O.P. Tea Party and whatever is happening in the Democratic Party is that the Democrats haven’t yet thrown away a winnable seat as a result of their intraparty convulsions. Several progressive candidates who defeated establishment inblockbents in this cycle have done so on safe Democratic terrain. (Keep an eye on the general election in Michigan, where Dr. El-Sayed and the former congressman Mike Rogers have been separated by only a few percentage points.)

For Republicans, the Tea Party era showed no such limitation. Tired of being told which candidates had what it took to win, many Republican activists and voters in those years chose unelectable candidates in otherwise winnable races. In 2010’s red wave midterm elections — a rout that Mr. Obama called a “shellacking” — the party left pickup opportunities on the table. The Republican Senate nominees Christine O’Donnell, who eventually declared “I’m not a witch,” and Sharron Angle, mostly remembered for her reference to “Second Amendment remedies,” wound up losing.

This dynamic percolated during the era of Republican losses in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, in which the party’s activists were frustrated that the establishment candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney lost to Mr. Obama. As Rush Limbaugh put it in 2015: “Every time they nominate one of these guys, one of the people they really like, they end up losing. And they lose big!”

Democrats certainly wish their party were better at winning. They lament the debacle of Mr. Biden’s late exit from the 2024 race. But recall that at the time, it wasn’t just the party’s establishment wing encouraging Mr. Biden to stick around; Mr. Sanders was among the most vocal defenders of Mr. Biden between the president’s disastrous debate and his withdrawal.

Like Republicans in 2010, Democrats are quite likely to do well in 2026, possibly taking control of one or both chambers of Congress. Though much of Democrats’ success will be thanks to Mr. Trump’s sagging approval ratings, success has a hundred fathers, as they say. Potential 2028 Democratic contenders of all stripes will probably claim it is their brand of politics that is the sure recipe for success.

If the Democratic Party gains control of Congress, its voters will demand a fight. And results. They want to see their party restrain Mr. Trump. If that fails to materialize, Democrats may find themselves where Republicans were a decade ago.