Here’s a Shocking Idea: Democrats Don’t All Have to Sound Alike
Four candidates in wildly different races show the value of being yourself.
WILL DEMOCRATS EVER STOP ARGUING over what they should say, how they should say it, and where they should say it? They really should, because the answers are obvious: It all depends—on who you are, where you live, and what you believe.
‘Authenticity’ is an overused word in politics, and ‘diversity’ is under assault, but they are both underappreciated assets in the Democratic party. Four Democrats in the news right now prove the worth of these concepts in the nonconceptual, hardball realm of aiming to win elections. They are as different from each other as the states and cities they call home:
Virginia gubernatorial nominee Abigail Spanberger, 46, is a former congresswoman who has three daughters in public schools. She’s also a former undercover CIA case officer who wrote her childhood diary in code, and a self-described pragmatist who pressed President Joe Biden for tougher border control in 2022.
Maine native Graham Platner, 40, competing in a Democratic primary to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins next year, is a brash, blunt oyster farmer, harbormaster, and military veteran who says he doesn’t need lessons in talking to Donald Trump voters because they’re his neighbors and coworkers. “I know how to connect with them.”
New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, 33, a former housing counselor, campaign manager, and (his words) “B-list rapper,” is a democratic socialist and state assemblyman running a cheerful, upbeat campaign on a platform that includes fare-free buses, no-cost child care, and a handful of new city-owned grocery stores with low prices. His hallmarks are personal contact and fun stuff—like inviting his hordes of social media followers to a scavenger hunt (thousands showed up).
Iowa state senator-elect Catelin Drey, 37, a Sioux City advertising account supervisor and founder of Moms for Iowa, scored a 10.5-point win in a special election last month. The chef’s kisses: Trump carried this state senate district by 11 points last year, and Drey’s victory breaks a Republican supermajority in the chamber.
Drey ran on concerns about housing, health care and child-care costs, and state funding for Iowa public schools. In fact, all four of these Democrats are talking about affordability. But their pitches and solutions vary in scale, cost, specificity, and the role they envision for government, and they don’t have much else in common. It’s hard to imagine a group more disparate than this political quartet.
Spanberger and Platner are peak personifications of establishment vs. populist. She’s the badass former spy and relatable suburban mom who got to Congress by flipping a sprawling area long represented by Republicans. She was the first person to hold a new leadership job in the House Democratic Caucus—making sure top Democrats heard the voices and messaging preferences of moderate Democrats from competitive swing districts (item one: ditch “defund the police”).
Platner, meanwhile, is the no-holds-barred outsider who recently told Redditors in an ask-me-anything session that “I stand right in the fucking way of anyone who’s going to try to come after the freedoms of the LGBTQIA+ community,” and “Susan Collins is a tool of the billionaire class.” The Marine and Army veteran, who emerged from four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with herniated discs, traumatic brain injury, and PTSD, says he enlisted in the Marines because “I read too much Ernest Hemingway in high school. I wanted to be Robert Jordan.”
Platner and Mamdani are both viral sensations. Platner reported raising $1 million in his first nine days as a candidate, while Mamdani had over 50,000 campaign volunteers even before he won the Democratic primary, some traveling from Ireland or Hawaii to help. They both have beards, they share an admaker, and both appeared with Sen. Bernie Sanders—like Mamdani, a democratic socialist—at high-energy Labor Day rallies. Sample applause lines at the Platner event included “Symbolic opposition does not reopen hospitals,” “Weak condemnations do not bring back Roe v. Wade,” and “Maine deserves better than Susan Collins.”
But the pair’s personalities and occupations are light years apart, and so are their backgrounds. Mamdani, the son of a professor and a filmmaker, was born in Uganda, moved to South Africa at age 5, and then to New York City (population: over 8.4 million) at age 7. Platner returned in 2018 to his hometown of Sullivan, Maine (population: 1,219). He was once a teenage “contrarian” with “conservative leanings,” he says. It was a phase he chalks up to rebellion against his liberal parents.
Spanberger and Mamdani are at opposite ends of the Democratic ideological spectrum. She has an “affordable Virginia” plan that includes lowering prescription drug prices, improving hospital price transparency, increasing flexibility to build more housing, and investing in incentives for affordable small and starter homes, eviction-prevention programs, and solar- and wind-energy production.
Mamdani is taking incoming from other Democrats, including an emphatic no-confidence vote from Tom Suozzi, a moderate House member from an affluent, suburban Long Island district that borders the city. “I’m a Democratic capitalist, not a Democratic socialist,” Suozzi said in a recent interview. “Zohran Mamdani and every other Democratic socialist should create their own party. Because I don’t want that in my party.” He concedes that Mamdani is talking about the right problem, economic anxiety, but disagrees with his solutions.
Mamdani would raise taxes on corporations and the top 1 percent to pay for rent freezes, free or low-cost services, and a new Department of Community Safety. The department would complement police work with evidence-based “prevention-first, community-based solutions” to address problems like gun violence and mental illness.
When Biden pursued his similarly aspirational “Build Back Better” agenda, Spanberger complained that “Nobody elected him to be FDR.” But Biden dropped some ideas and compromised on others. And while Spanberger will never be an FDR, she voted yes on those compromises—including 2022’s Democrats-only Inflation Reduction Act that invested in clean energy and launched Medicare negotiations on prescription prices. Late last month, she called out Trump for a “reckless” executive order she characterized as “stripping federal workers of their right to negotiate for fair treatment and join a union” and said his “continued attacks on Virginia’s federal workforce” are threatening its economy.
An estimated 320,000 Virginia residents are civilian workers on the federal payroll, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey showed that Virginia had the largest job losses in the country in the second quarter. Spanberger noted Virginia’s “skyrocketing” unemployment claims in her first ad, in May, and said she’d “work to lower costs, let people keep more of their money, and make Virginia schools the best in the nation.”
A SIMILAR PITCH clearly struck a chord for Iowa’s Drey, who also may owe some of her success to deft use of humor. When a Republican ad attacked “kooky Catelin Drey” as “too far out for Iowa” and depicted her with the bright pink hair she had years ago, this was her response ad: “Why are politicians so obsessed with me? I think I looked great with pink hair, but the upkeep was exhausting.”
Her “kooky ideas,” she added, are “fully funding our public schools, making housing and child care more affordable, and putting more money back in the pockets of working Iowans.” Also, according to her website, she is a believer in bodily autonomy—which is far from kooky in the post-Roe era.
Drey’s race was a test for a first-time candidate. Spanberger and Mamdani will be tested in November, when Virginia chooses a governor and New York City, a mayor. Platner, also a political novice, faces several competitors and his first electoral hurdle in the Maine primary on June 9, 2026.
Will Platner and Mamdani maintain the excitement and appeal of their candidacies? Will Virginians decide to move on from Republican leaders aligned with and under pressure from Trump or MAGA or both, and elect Spanberger?
Win or lose, these races will be telling, because these candidates are not pulling punches about who they are.
 | A guest post by
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The bigger the tent, the bluer the wave.
Thank you for making this point, which I’ve personally been banging the drum about during all the hand-wringing about the Democrats’ lack of a real platform and national cohesiveness. The various Trump-supporting congressional creatures have no platform either, other than blindly following their Dear Leader. Opposing Trump’s policies can be the Dems unifying cry, but the specifics of alternative policies can and should be decided at the district and state level. And that approach also has the advantage of forcing Trump to attack a host of differing policies—a moving target as it were. Of course, come 2028, the Dems will need to coalesce around at least some meaningful national policies. But that’s for later. Now they just have to win seats.