Most of the news these days about Democratic candidates for public office focuses on a singular figure, Zohran Mamdani, running for mayor of New York. The suddenly popular 33-year-old member of the state legislature captured 56% of the vote in the Democrats’ ranked choice primary in June. He has drawn such descriptors as “socialist” or even “communist,” attracting the sobriquets after media-magnet comments on the abolition of the New York Police Department and the creation of city-run grocery stores and free public transit. Mamdani’s stances continue to draw new contenders into the mix as November’s election looms little more than 10 weeks away.
Whatever term fits best, and as senior Democrats wrestle with the question of whether Mamdani’s big government philosophy will hurt the party in more moderate locales in 2026, candidates in the nation’s handful of closely contested races are going out of their way to strike a temperate tone. Next year’s House, Senate, and state (most of them) elections are still 14 months away, but the narratives are already shaping up as appeals to everyday concerns in a national and global economy whose defining shape isn’t completely clear. One thing, however, does seem to be acquiring clarity — that is, will the 2026 Democrats amend their views on social policies like abortion and transgenderism? The answer so far appears to be no.
Mamdani is a New York progressive on these issues. On July 9, Planned Parenthood of New York City endorsed him and detailed his platform. It is hard to imagine more “access” to abortion in NYC, where more than half of all minority pregnancies end in prenatal death, but Mamdani has pledged to accomplish it. According to PP-NYC, “His platform calls for doubling funding for both New York City’s Abortion Access Hub and the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF), ensuring that anyone can access abortion care regardless of income or immigration status.” Even more ominously, Planned Parenthood says, Mamdani will include an “investment” of $65 million in public clinics that provide abortion and “gender-affirming” care, while “confronting private health care institutions that have refused to provide this critical care.” Whatever confronting private institutions means, it is not freedom of conscience or religious liberty.
Democrats around the country are unlikely to champion government grocery stores, and some may even join the chorus calling for disallowing purchases of candy and soda with food stamps and other subsidies. But the evidence that moderation is about to occur on the sanctity of life and the redefinition of the sexes is scant. One example is House candidate Jamie Ager of North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District. An article in The Smoky Mountain News last month hailed the fourth-generation farmer’s entry into the congressional race in familiar and bucolic terms, citing his life “rooted not in ideology but pragmatism, problem-solving and shared values across party lines.” Where is Ager on abortion then? He’s “pro-choice and pro-family.” He will support families after children are born, he says. He embraces LGBT rights.
Sean McCann is running for Congress out of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Clearly a family man who has roots in the community, McCann is emphasizing issues like Medicaid, because, he says, “he knows Washington needs to focus on what matters to regular people — like protecting health care and Medicaid, not cutting it; getting costs down, not exploding the national debt; helping small businesses grow[.]” McCann is no Mamdani. On abortion, however, he is with his party, for “letting women make their own health care decisions, instead of politicians making it for them.” On transgenderism, his campaign site is silent, but in 2022, his Twitter page took the occasion of the “Transgender Day of Visibility” to proclaim, “Today is Transgender Day of Visibility. I see you and I’m proud to stand with the trans and gender-nonconforming community.”
Perhaps the most intriguing candidacy of this kind is that of Rob Sand, who has announced his campaign for governor of Iowa. While the next presidential campaign is far off and the order and importance of presidential primaries can change, Iowa’s historic role in selecting the major party nominees is huge. Today, the state is led by Governor Kim Reynolds (R), as stalwart a voice for life as America has to offer. The Democratic entrant getting so much attention is a young attorney with a grassroots vibe, who has compiled a record of combating corruption as the state auditor. A new Wall Street Journal profile waxes poetic about him: “Rob Sand could almost pass for a Republican: He frequently quotes the Bible, owns two SIG Sauer handguns, goes deer hunting each fall and asks audiences to sing a few verses of ‘America the Beautiful’ at the start of campaign events.”
Sand is not by any means an Iowa Republican on social issues. He recently stated on Twitter, “As Governor, I’ll use whatever tools I have to protect Iowans’ reproductive rights.” The statement is especially significant as Iowa, with Governor Reynolds’s strong endorsement, has a six-week (heartbeat) abortion limit in place. The state’s latest abortion report showed a near-32% reduction in abortions in 2023, one of the largest declines in the country. Sand has, however, drawn some fire from trans activists for saying in a May interview that he did not support allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports. He was hasty to state that he still supported civil rights legal protection for people who are LGBT. Elsewhere, Sand told The Des Moines Register that he thought social issues were a “distraction” from “pocketbook stuff that’s making Iowans hurt.”
Another angle on the Democrats’ maneuvers to project moderation but not change the party’s substantive policies is Rep. Ro Khanna (Calif.), who has been near-ubiquitous of late. Khanna recently combined forces with the Kentucky maverick Thomas Massie (R) in pushing for House action on the release of the judicial and investigative record on Jeffrey Epstein. Khanna went where few other Democrats have by appearing in a podcast last year with Bishop Robert Barron, a Catholic clergyman and scholar who has experienced an explosive growth in popularity and now serves as an appointee on President Trump’s religious liberty commission. The two found agreement on religious liberty and order at the border, but on abortion, Khanna’s statements were standard party fare. Khanna’s office issued a press release on the interview that quoted him, “Now, my view is that that decision [abortion] should be for the woman and her doctor in getting that healthcare. But I think the challenge is that we also start to talk about these exceedingly rare cases that then become the conversation — where that’s not the majority of the abortions by any stretch, probably less than one or two percent.” On transgenderism, Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley in Congress, told the gay magazine The Advocate last February, “[O]ur community has to make sure that we provide a full-throated defense of trans rights.”
The long and short of these discourses, for the moment, is that the Democratic Party sees itself as losing ground with the American middle (at least outside of New York City). In response, many of its rising candidates are seeking themes and issues that reposition themselves, substantively or thematically, within the American heritage of work, family, and neighborhood. For now, at least, whether these candidates are socialists or farmers or city councilmen or anti-corruption crusaders, they remain wholly committed to legal abortion and nearly as committed to an understanding of transgenderism as a civil rights banner. The rest of 2025 and 2026 should prove very interesting.
Originally published at The Washington Stand.
Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.
