On Tuesday morning, the Justice Democrats—the group that helped usher in a wave of progressive candidates during the first Trump presidency—announced they’re actively recruiting candidates to primary centrist Democrats. The PAC, which started in 2017, became known for backing “the Squad” and other left-wing Democratic candidates, some of whom ousted incumbents with decades of experience.
In 2024, the left flank of the Democratic party took some hits. Only one of the new candidates Justice Democrats supported this past year, Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), won her election. Multiple Justice-Democrat veterans lost. Prominent among them were Cori Bush (D-Mo.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.). Both candidates were targeted for their outspoken calls to cut United States arms to Israel.
Now, with Republicans set to soon assume control of the House, Senate, and White House next week, Justice Democrats leaders are asking Americans nationwide to search for, and nominate, working class people as potential candidates for Congress two years from now.
“This cycle, we want to kind of put all corporate Democrats on notice,” the group’s executive director Alexandra Rojas said last month.
Coming off a cycle in which corporate money mattered and Democrats swung right, such a move will be hard. But the hope is to run candidates close to the ground, who know the communities they come from. “The Democratic Party can only win back working-class voters with real working-class leaders,” Rojas said.
The announcement isn’t being met with much glee by the establishment wing of the Democratic party. “If the so-called Justice Democrats are serious about this effort, they should start in New York’s 8th congressional district,” Justin Chermol, a spokesperson for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), told Axios—implying they should try to oust Jeffries.
Immediately after the election, there was a mass debate about why Democrats lost. Many pundits said that Democrats lost because they pandered too much to the perceived interests of poor voters and voters of color pushed by elites who are “politically correct” or “woke.” (Former John Fetterman staffer Adam Jentleson, in a widely-discussed New York Times piece, was quick to blame Justice Democrats in particular for supporting candidates who want to defund the police, thereby alienating the theoretical average voter.)
Usamah Andrabi, the group’s communications director argues that it’s the opposite: Democrats are losing because they don’t have anything to offer to the working class voters who have traditionally supported them. “Last Congress ended with fewer than 2 percent of members of Congress coming from working-class backgrounds,” he said. This year, that percentage will be even smaller. “When we let working class communities represent themselves and their interests, then we have a better shot of actually having leaders who understand the priorities of everyday people,” he said.
The Democratic establishment, Andrabi declared, “is a failure.” So Justice Democrats is gearing up, he said, to recruit a new round of progressive candidates to run against incumbent Democrats.
“They brought us another Trump administration and a trifecta of Republican leadership in Washington,” Andrabi continued. “We need to be clear that from the start of this Congress, this is not what Congress should look like two years from now.”
Left Democrats were also up against a particularly large surge of money in Democratic primaries in 2024. As a Sludge report revealed last week, one group—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC—spent more last year than any single organization has ever spent in any congressional campaign cycle in history.
The Justice Democrats don’t think they can win by outraising their opponents. “I don’t think we should be turning 20 million dollar primaries into 40 million dollar primaries,” said Andrabi. (The group spent just under $7 million in the 2024 elections.)
349 House members and senators—or 65 percent of Congress—received funding from AIPAC. The largest portions of that cash went to candidates who defended the state of Israel as loudly as possible. The Democrats who took down Bush and Bowman—Wesley Bell and George Latimer, respectively—received several million dollars each from AIPAC.
In total, AIPAC spent over $45 million across party lines. Crypto lobbying groups spent tens of millions. It is becoming increasingly normal to spend millions upon millions of dollars on winning a single congressional term—which makes running for office ever more inaccessible for those without cash on hand.
“It’s not gotten any cheaper for everyday people to run,” Andrabi said. “But our goal has always been to be the infrastructure and resources that working class people can use to run for office.”
