But Democrats may not be able to draw many lessons from Cooper’s and Ossoff’s expected victories. Why not? While Ossoff and Cooper have similar leads in similar states, they have taken completely different paths to get there. And other candidates are also succeeding with divergent approaches. The story of the 2026 cycle may not be brilliant individual candidates or strategies but rather an unpopular president and partisan polarization creating opportunities for a wide array of Democratic candidates running in disparate ways across the country. That’s an important, positive story, though it will mean that none of these candidates or their consultants should necessarily be hailed as geniuses.
This is the way the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee encourages candidates to campaign. But they probably didn’t have to spend much time pushing Cooper to this approach—it’s what he did during his previous six successful runs (and zero losses) for attorney general and governor.
“Mr. Ossoff hasn’t moderated his votes or his message … as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South,” The New York Times’ Robert Jimison wrote in August.
I don’t want to overstate the differences between Ossoff and Cooper. They have similar stands on most issues. Ossoff isn’t running on Medicare for All or other progressive policies. Cooper, despite his moderate branding, isn’t leaning into conservative positions like former Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia used to. But the last decade has featured a continuous debate among Democrats over whether the party should be defined by fighting Trump and the right—as party activists and groups such as Indivisible prefer—or tamping down partisan tensions, the approach favored by President Biden and many other party officials. A feisty Democrat (Ossoff) and a conciliatory one (Cooper) both easily winning in Southern purple states leaves that quandary unresolved.
Elsewhere, the populist style of not being particularly conservative or progressive for a Democrat or sharply criticizing Trump personally but bemoaning the power of the wealthy and corporations is being deployed by James Talarico of Texas and Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Gubernatorial candidates Keisha Bottoms of Georgia and David Crowley of Wisconsin are running as nonideological pragmatists like Cooper. Senate hopefuls Troy Jackson of Maine and Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan are testing out a swing-state version of Bernie Sanders’s politics, touting stands like their support of Medicare for All.
The results next week might suggest that one of those five approaches is clearly worse or better than the others electorally. But it will be hard to draw sweeping conclusions. Elections are complicated and multifaceted. El-Sayed’s biggest challenges probably aren’t his ideology but being Muslim in a country with a lot of Islamophobic people, and the resistance that he has faced from fellow Democratic politicians. Being safe and boring probably works better for Cooper—who has been previously elected statewide several times and is white and male—as compared to Bottoms or Crowley.
I suspect that the biggest lesson will be that “parties are electable, not candidates,” in the words of Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica. Democratic candidates having a chance in states that Trump won comfortably in 2024 (Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas) and being well ahead in states that are normally close (Georgia, North Carolina) suggests the story of 2026 isn’t about individual candidates. It’s notable that polls suggest that Cooper, despite his tempered rhetoric about Trump and Republicans, is winning less than 10 percent of the GOP vote, similar to Ossoff. Democratic and independent voters are broadly rejecting Trump and the Republican Party. That gives Democrats with different backgrounds, policy views, and strategies chances to win.
There will be a flood of analyses after the midterms crediting a particular candidate or strategy for a win in a given state and suggesting that Democrats must embrace that politician or tactic in 2028. You should read that stuff very skeptically. Jon Ossoff, Roy Cooper, and the other Democrats who will win next week are talented politicians with smart advisers. But the real story of 2026 is that everybody who’s not a hardcore Republican hates Donald Trump. And by far the most important factor two years from now will be if everyone still hates Trump.
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