Analilia Mejia, a progressive organizer who served as national political director on Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, won the Democratic primary for a special congressional election in New Jersey, edging out former Rep. Tom Malinowski and 10 other candidates. Malinowski conceded Tuesday after trailing by nearly 900 votes.

The seat opened after Gov. Mikie Sherrill stepped down from Congress following her gubernatorial win last November. Mejia now enters the April special election as the Democratic front-runner in the blue-leaning district — carrying the endorsements of Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rep. Ro Khanna.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Malinowski was the front-runner. He had the résumé, the name recognition, and the establishment lane largely to himself. Then a group affiliated with AIPAC battered him with attack ads over his stated support for conditions on aid to Israel, and the progressive lane swallowed the race whole.

The Left's victory lap

Progressive groups wasted no time framing the result as a mandate. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee declared to Fox News:

"Analilia Mejia's momentous showing proves that voters, when given a choice, want Democrats with an inspiring vision who will boldly challenge powerful interests on behalf of working families."

PCCC co-founder Adam Green, who knocked doors for Mejia and rallied with her and Sanders on primary eve, pushed further:

"[Primary voters] made clear they want Democrats who will shake up a broken political and economic system – not just be anti-Trump."

That last line deserves attention. The progressive wing is no longer content to define itself solely as the opposition to the right. They want to define the Democratic Party's identity — and they're winning the argument in primary after primary.

Khanna posted his endorsement of Mejia's trajectory on social media Friday:

"She stands for a progressive populist economic agenda. She is the future!"

Moderates dismiss the results — again

Matt Bennett, executive vice president of the moderate Democratic-aligned group Third Way, offered a different interpretation. He told Fox News Digital that Mejia won "because AIPAC blew up Tom Malinowski," and dismissed the broader significance of the race:

"[This was] a Thursday in February primary with very low turnout… It does not tell us anything even about the Democratic electorate, much less the general electorate."

He went further:

"So trying to argue that this is a lesson for Democrats is bananas. It doesn't tell us anything about what we need to do to win in tough places."

This is the moderate Democratic playbook in miniature: lose, then explain why losing doesn't count. Low turnout. Weird calendar. Outside spending. There's always a reason the progressive surge isn't really a surge — right up until the progressive candidate takes office.

The problem for the Bennett wing is that the pattern keeps repeating regardless of the excuses.

A pattern that won't quit

New Jersey isn't an isolated data point. Over the past year, the Democratic Party's left flank has racked up a string of victories that the moderate establishment has struggled to counter:

• Socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor in June 2025, then delivered a double-digit general election triumph in November.
• Transit advocate Katie Wilson narrowly edged out incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell in Seattle.
• Detroit City Council President Mary Sheffield, known for her focus on housing justice, won the Detroit mayoral race in a landslide, succeeding longtime Mayor Mike Duggan.
• In Arizona, Adelita Grijalva — backed by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez — cruised to election in the race to succeed her late father, former Rep. Raul Grijalva.

The one cautionary tale for progressives came in Tennessee, where progressive state lawmaker Aftyn Behn won a Democratic primary for an open congressional seat in a GOP-dominated district — then fell short in the general election. Third Way seized on that result, writing in a memo:

"If far-left groups want to help save American democracy, they should stop pushing their candidates in swing districts and costing us flippable seats."

Fair enough. But the progressive movement's response has been to stop bothering with swing districts altogether and consolidate power where Democrats already dominate — the cities, the safe blue seats, the places where winning the primary is winning the race. It's a strategy for ideological capture, not coalition building.

Republicans see an opening

NRCC national spokesperson Mike Marinella told Fox News  the trend amounts to a "full-blown battle for the soul of the Democrat Party," adding bluntly: "The socialist stampede is winning."

Marinella pointed to seven Democratic congressional primaries this year where the candidate on the left appeared to be out-hustling the more centrist or establishment pick. That's not a fluke. That's a movement with infrastructure, energy, and candidates who actually show up.

Sen. Tim Scott, chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, framed the shift in terms of what it means for the broader electorate:

"All across the country, what we're seeing is Jasmine is being repeated, replicated all across the country. Socialism is in vogue in the Democrat Party."

Scott was referencing Rep. Jasmine Crockett, the progressive champion and vocal Trump critic who made a late entry into the Texas Senate primary. She faces state Rep. James Talarico — a slightly more center-left figure — in an early March contest that has become the next front in the party's ideological war.

Liam Kerr, co-founder of Welcome PAC, a group that advocates for moderate Democratic candidates, laid out the stakes in Texas plainly:

"The Democratic Party's aspirations to win statewide in a red state like Texas simply don't exist without a centrist Democrat who can build a winning coalition of ideologically diverse voters."

He's right. And progressives don't care.

The coalition that isn't

DNC Chair Ken Martin tried to paper over the rift last autumn, telling Fox News Digital:

"We have conservative Democrats, we have centrist Democrats, we have progressives and we have leftists. And I've always said that you win elections through addition, not subtraction. You win by bringing people into your coalition and growing your party."

That's a lovely sentiment from a party whose progressive wing is systematically eliminating its moderates in primary elections. Addition through subtraction, apparently.

The Democrat Party's internal logic has become almost comically contradictory. The official line is big-tent unity. The operational reality is that the activist base, the small-dollar donors, the campus-to-campaign pipeline, and the grassroots infrastructure all belong to the left. Moderates can talk about coalition building. Progressives are the ones who actually build the coalitions — they just happen to be coalitions that can win primaries in safe blue districts and lose everywhere else.

For Republicans, this is a gift that keeps giving. Every Mejia victory, every Mamdani landslide, every Crockett candidacy pushes the Democrats' brand further from the median voter in the districts and states that actually decide control of Congress. The moderates see it happening. They write the memos, issue the warnings, and commission the polls. Then they lose another primary.

Mejia made rebuilding the Democrat Party a central pillar of her campaign. She may get her wish — just not in the direction the party's swing-district survivors would prefer.