In one of the more surprising developments in this election cycle, former Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia both appear to be cruising to victory in states that are normally very hard for Democrats to win. Polls show them with leads close to or above double digits. Perhaps an even stronger indication of Cooper’s and Ossoff’s positions is that Republican campaign committees have shifted spending away from their states, essentially conceding defeat.
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.
Unless you live in North Carolina (and maybe even if you do), you probably don’t know much about Cooper’s campaign against former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley. That’s by design. Cooper has run a campaign straight from the center-left playbook: boring, safe, centrist, local. He talks about making groceries cheaper, reversing Medicaid cuts, and other standard, relatively uncontroversial ideas at small events around the state. He emphasizes his ability to work with Republicans. He then takes a few questions from state-based reporters.
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.
If you’re enough of a junkie to be reading a TNR article, you’ve probably heard about Ossoff’s campaign against Representative Mike Collins. Liberal pundits, we at TNR included, are delighted by his approach and keep praising it. We love that he calls out Republican politicians for their radicalism and racism and attacks Trump in memorable ways, famously accusing the president of being obsessed with “travel with Natalie” (Harp, the president’s personal aide).
“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.
It sometimes feels like Ossoff is running a national campaign, so much so that he has had to repeatedly deny that he is running for president in 2028. He regularly does interviews with MS NOW, Pod Save America, Axios, and other media outlets that aren’t based in Georgia. He gives speeches at huge rallies with lines that seem almost intentionally written to be clipped and go viral on social media.
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.
In fact, there are at least five different approaches to Democratic/liberal/anti-Trump/anti-MAGA politics on the ballot on Tuesday in purple and swing states. Several candidates are using the Manchin playbook of explicitly distancing themselves from the Democratic Party and adopting some conservative stands on issues. That group includes gubernatorial candidate Rob Sand and Senate hopeful Josh Turek of Iowa and Senate candidates Mary Peltola of Alaska and Dan Osborn of Nebraska. Osborn is running as an independent; Turek has emphasized his conservatism on transgender rights in particular.
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.
Ossoff is doing something a bit unique, blending populism with aggressive anti-Trump rhetoric.
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.
If there is no obvious tactical or strategic lesson from the midterms, that will be a lesson itself. Having lost the intraparty debate on policy, the center-left is now fixated on tactics and strategy. Instead of leaning into the merits of centrist positions, center-left Democrats these days argue that Democrats must sound more like Cooper and less like Jackson to win in swing states. Progressives are now trying to win these arguments by claiming that candidates must adopt more left-wing stands, such as opposing data centers to win in purple areas. I am hoping (perhaps futilely) that election results that don’t clearly vindicate or undermine a particular campaign strategy can allow the party to move back to disagreements about policy, which is the right battleground. We can’t ever predict who will win Wisconsin; we can figure out which candidate’s position on wealth taxes is closest to our own.
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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