Chris Rabb and the Democrats’ ‘double wave’ could change America for good
Progressive Chris Rabb's Philly primary win reveals a Democratic Party moving left and back into power at the same time.
It was anything but a normal campaign rally when New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the fiery leader of a movement to push the Democratic Party farther left — stepped up to a North Philadelphia church podium Friday night to endorse fellow progressive Chris Rabb for the city’s open congressional seat.
AOC was carrying the flaming torch of a movement that is changing that party today, and could change America tomorrow.
“What kind of Democrat is going to represent the bluest district in America?” the 36-year-old democratic socialist asked Rabb’s supporters. “Is it going to be a Democrat who collaborates with special interests and lobbyists? Or is it going to be a Democrat who puts everything on the line to deliver for the people and communities that they love?”
The answer in Tuesday’s primary was resounding. Rabb, an iconoclastic left-wing state lawmaker for the last decade, won a landslide victory over both the candidate of the city’s dying Democratic machine, state Sen. Sharif Street, and first-time candidate Ala Stanford, a renowned physician with significant early funding. In Philly’s 3rd Congressional District, Rabb is all but assured of heading to D.C. next January to join AOC’s progressive “Squad” amid what looks to be a Democratic takeover of the House.
For long-time locals, the apparent knockout blow that Rabb delivered to a Democratic machine that’s mostly controlled city politics since 1949 is a big deal, but the significance of his victory extends well beyond the 215 area code — even if the national media didn’t pay as much attention to the race as it should have.
Rabb, AOC, and their allies are on the knife’s edge of what the pundits need to start seeing as a “double wave” in U.S. politics.
And what exactly is the “double wave”? It’s very much akin to the African American push in the early 1940s for what they called the “double V” — a military victory overseas against the fascist forces threatening Europe, in tandem with the defeat of Jim Crow segregation here at home.
Eight decades later, equally powerful forces are brewing in America. We’ve all seen “wave” elections, typically in the midterm contest of an unpopular president, whether that was Bill Clinton in 1994 (a GOP gain of 54 House seats) or Donald Trump in 2018 (41 Democratic House pickups). With Trump’s approval as low as 34% in some polls, and still shrinking, a Democratic tsunami is looking increasingly likely for 2026.
Getting less attention is the kinetic energy of a second breaker fueling that giant wave — a revolution within the Democratic Party itself. Rabb is symbolic of a new breed collecting their one-way tickets to Washington in the party’s primaries — in full-on rebellion against the corporate donor class and Dems’ sclerotic leaders (like Philly boss Bob Brady, now 81). They are promising new approaches on everything from universal healthcare to stripping aid from Israel’s right-wing war machine, and not afraid to be tagged as an advocate for a kind of socialism.
“Somehow, in Washington, and I will tell you first-hand, there is always money for conflict and war and military escalation in the interest of the powerful,” Ocasio-Cortez said Friday, in a mission statement for this revolution. “And yet...there is never enough money for healthcare, housing, child care, wages, infrastructure, bridges, water, air, power, electricity, none of them!”
Rabb’s victory may have shattered the conventional wisdom about Philly’s famously transactional old-school ward politics, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Progressive-minded candidates are pulling off upsets from elsewhere in the city — a state House race where Sierra McNeil backed by the leftist Working Families Party beat a veteran incumbent who often voted with the GOP — to around the nation.
By now, we shouldn’t be surprised when an outsider like Maine’s Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and Iraq War veteran, drives an insider like incumbent Maine Gov. Janet Mills out of that state’s Democratic Senate primary before the voting even starts. Rank-and-file Maine Dems seem to care much less about Platner’s many red flags and more about Mills’ advanced age (78), her backing from increasingly unpopular Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, or her support for new data centers, fast becoming the third rail of American politics.
» READ MORE: Why the ‘Nazi tattoo guy’ is winning in Maine | Will Bunch Newsletter
Nor should anyone be stunned at the looming August Senate primary race in Michigan, where the leftist, Bernie Sanders-endorsed candidate, physician Abdul El-Sayed, has surged ahead of the party establishment pick, Rep. Haley Stevens, and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a darling of the more traditionally liberal Trump resistance.
Again, the conventional Beltway pundit wisdom is that nominating Platner to oppose vulnerable longtime GOP incumbent Sen. Susan Collins, or going with El-Sayed in a state that Trump won in 2016 and 2024, is bad for the Democrats. But a new poll this week shows Platner leading Collins by 7 points. You should expect that in a climate where the last 30 seat flips in state legislative races have been for Democrats.
You should expect that when a double wave is about to swamp the political terrain.
Is this the Democrats’ “Tea Party,” as some have written? Yeah, sort of. The GOP’s 2009-10 backlash (which I immersed myself in) was fueled by the election of America’s first Black president but turned against any moderate Republicans who didn’t match their rage. Nearly a generation later, millions of voters seem just as mad at Democrats who aren’t doing enough to resist Trump’s dictatorial style as they are at Trump himself.
Savvier talking heads have spun the raging war within the Democratic Party as less about “left vs. right” and more about “floppers vs. fighters” — and the anger goes well beyond some primary elections. In Colorado, members of the state Democratic Party just voted 90% to condemn their own Gov. Jared Polis after the governor commuted the prison sentence of a prominent pro-Trump election denier. Here in Pennsylvania, Sen. John Fetterman’s increasingly pro-Trump votes and rhetoric have former Democratic allies lining up to challenge him in 2028.
The cheers for Rabb’s primary win were still echoing Thursday when the New York Times released a new poll of Democratic-minded voters — party stalwarts but also left-leaning independents — which brought a stamp of confirmation to the uprising.
Overall, a 53% majority of these liberal-minded poll respondents say they are dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, with even larger numbers among the independents. When it comes to what they want in policy, these mostly angry voters are all over the map, but some desired changes would mean a radical new direction.
It’s no coincidence that nearly three-quarters of the Democratic-minded voters polled by the Times now oppose military aid to Israel, and that Rabb — the only one of the three Philly frontrunners who labelled Israel’s actions in Gaza as “a genocide” (as does AOC) — won going away. For many Democratic primary voters, a candidate’s stance on Israel matters, but it also represents a kind of code for a politician who is willing to do things differently from how the party elite has always done things.
To be clear, the rise of Rabb, Platner, El-Sayed and the others isn’t the only political earthquake taking place. Indeed, another reason for Democratic optimism is the arrival in deep red states of a different new breed, like Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico or Iowa gubernatorial wannabe Rob Sand, who offer a brand of liberal spirituality that confronts the Christian nationalism that dominates today’s GOP.
Meanwhile, that Republican Party is in the middle of its own “Night of the Long Knives” as Trump and his MAGA minions work assiduously to purge their party of any dissenters and finish the GOP’s conversion into a full-blown cult of personality.
This all means a new Congress next January that will look like nothing the United States has ever seen before — with two hopelessly divided political parties that don’t reside on the same planet. But the odds are that Democrats will be in the majority, and that AOC’s “Squad” of allies like Rabb or Pittsburgh’s Rep. Summer Lee will be driving the train.
I still believe Trump’s third impeachment (and maybe his fourth, fifth, and sixth) is a done deal. Meanwhile, legislation — from a halt in military assistance to the Benjamin Netanyahu regime to expanded health insurance, a livable minimum wage, and a moratorium on new data centers — is likely headed for the veto pen of an embattled lame-duck president.
Those two years of constant conflict will set the stage for a 2028 election that could forever change America, for good. Does it surprise you that AOC — who by then will be a 39-year-old Latina would look nothing like any chief executive America has ever seen before — is near the top and even leading in some presidential polls?
It shouldn’t.
I was about 90% done writing this column Thursday morning when the Democratic National Committee’s suppressed “autopsy” of why Kamala Harris lost to Trump in 2024 was leaked to CNN. Again, no one should be gobsmacked that the project led by a crony of party chief Ken Martin was never even finished, nor that it avoided hard questions like ignoring the base’s growing anger over the crisis in Gaza. The leak felt like the last straw not only for Martin but for the arrogance his leadership embodies.
When the “double wave” tsunami hits, it won’t only be Trump that gets swept away by the current.
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