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As we approach the 2026 midterm elections, the Democratic Party is on the eve of their own “Tea Party” moment.
After its resounding defeat in the 2024 elections, the Democratic Party sits at their lowest approval rating in recent memory. The public is furious with a party that was insistent President Biden was fit to govern and run for a second term, only to hastily coronate Kamala Harris to replace him after refusing to entertain a competitive primary.
Despite their unpopularity, the party’s old guard seems dead set on continuing in their old ways. By resisting the will of the base, they invite a hostile mutiny that will reflect the Republicans’ evolution in the Tea Party era.
Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party in 2016 didn’t occur in a vacuum; it built on the legacy of the Tea Party movement. In the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, Americans grew mistrustful of institutions. Millions had lost their homes and livelihoods, while the Republican Presidency was busy keeping us in an unjustified and costly war. The country was ready for systemic, populist change that it elected an unconventional candidate: a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama, to the presidency (who even carried Indiana!) on a platform of saying “Yes We Can” to bold, structural and systemic change.
Despite any effort to see that systemic change through, the Obama administration failed to restore waning trust in the financial and governmental institutions. Wall Street banks that had gambled away the economy received a bailout while the politicians who had facilitated the crash stayed in power. Frustrations began to brew among Republican voters not only at the Obama administration’s “big-government” approach to the crisis, but at their own leaders who had allowed him to win. Reacting to Obama’s newly announced government stimulus package in 2009, Rick Santelli, editor for business news network CNBC, reflected this mounting frustration and called for a “Chicago Tea Party,” giving a name to the nascent movement live from Chicago’s Mercantile Exchange.
Post-recession economic anxiety had voters desperate for an explanation, and the Tea Party echoed that anxiety while providing the government as a scapegoat. The anxiety manifested in the Republican base as grassroots anger toward a heavy tax burden to fund a government, run by elite bureaucrats, that seemed more attentive to the needs of illegal immigration than of its own people.
Tea Party stars like Sarah Palin reflected the base’s anger with crass and impolite rhetoric aimed at a leadership who saw bipartisanship and civility to be the proper route to progress. Palin led numerous grassroots candidates to primary election victories over established incumbent Republicans. Rather than embracing this newfound passion among the base, leadership worked to stifle it until it boiled over at the start of the 2016 election season.
By June 2015, when Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator to announce his candidacy for president, the party was ready for a coup d'etat. While the Party aligned itself with corporate donors towards “comprehensive immigration reform,” Trump got crowds to chant “Build the Wall.” Trump was met with cheers when telling Jeb Bush, the establishment favorite, that his brother’s legacy-defining Iraq War was a “big, fat mistake” to his face.
Trump won not because he possessed some unique political superpower, but because he was rewarded for bridging the disconnect between the party base and leadership by mirroring voters’ contempt for establishment politics.
Following the 2025 election cycle, it’s clear that the Democratic base is ready for an analogous culling of the metaphorical herd. According to conventional wisdom, Zohran Mamdani shouldn't have won the NYC mayor’s race, yet he won precisely by flouting that very wisdom. In the heart of global capitalism, Zohran didn’t run from the "socialist” label.” He embraced it. He didn’t court the endorsement of establishment leaders. He didn’t apologize in the face of perpetual controversy, nor did he moderate his radical platform to appeal to the general electorate. In both cases, he doubled down. His atypical strategy yielded him an atypical victory.
Through his open rejection of establishment politics, Zohran reshaped the electorate. In the general election rematch against Andrew Cuomo, Zohran didn’t moderate his message to win by improving his margins in neighborhoods that Cuomo won, as conventional wisdom would prescribe. Instead, he won by persuading non-voters that the movement he had built was worth their time and energy, setting a modern turnout record in the process. Zohran’s campaign became a cultural spectacle. It overcame apathy by speaking to the issues that people face in their day-to-day lives and refusing funding and support from the monied interests he’d identified as the culprits. This strategy earned him the trust of a city to implement bold structural change.
The national Democrats could earn similar trust from the country, if only leadership would allow it. Across the country, populist candidates like Graham Platner are running Mamdani’s populist strategy in federal races. Despite high interest, small-dollar fundraising, and poll numbers, Chuck Schumer is hell bent on crushing candidates like Platner in favor of his geriatric recruited establishment protogees.
Figures like Schumer are calcified in a bygone era of politics defined by decorum, bipartisanship, and corporate fundraising. The Republican party did nothing to steal the reputation of being the “party of the workers,” elite Democrats willingly ceded it. Under their leadership, Democrats lost their former stronghold in the industrial Midwest as a matter of explicit strategy.
Even “conservative” Indiana until recently had a Democratic Senator, governor, and competitive house races. Since leadership will not yield the reins of power to the base willingly (see the current shutdown fight), Democrats must stage a mutiny. The times have changed, and corporate Democrats must made to choose between adapting to the new order or losing their job.
Eivin Sandstrom is a senior studying Political Science and Spanish. He can be found on social media @UplandSandy on all platforms.
