Analilia Mejia, a former top aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign, is widely expected to defeat Republican Joe Hathaway on Thursday in the special election for New Jersey's 11th Congressional District, a race that would hand progressives their latest win in a string of Democratic primaries that has pushed the party further left.
The seat opened when Democrat Mikie Sherrill left it to become New Jersey's governor. Mejia won the Democratic nomination in February, beating a crowded field that included former Rep. Tom Malinowski, Essex County Commissioner Brendan Gill, and former Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way. Now, in a district that has become solidly Democratic, The Hill reports her general-election victory is treated as a near-certainty.
If she wins, Mejia would add another self-described progressive to the House Democratic Caucus, one who served in the Biden administration's Labor Department and who ran on a platform that includes abolishing ICE, canceling all student loan debt, a $25 federal minimum wage, and Supreme Court expansion.
Mejia's primary victory was itself a surprise. National Review reported that Malinowski had been widely expected to cruise to the nomination. "It looked as if the former representative from New Jersey's seventh congressional district, Tom Malinowski, was going to sail to victory," wrote Noah Rothman. Instead, an unanticipated surge of Election Day votes put Mejia ahead by less than one percentage point.
The margin was razor-thin. The New York Post reported Mejia led Malinowski by just 676 votes, 28.9 percent to 27.8 percent, out of more than 62,000 cast among an 11-person field. With fewer than 6,000 ballots left to count, the outcome was all but settled.
Mejia herself credited part of the result to AIPAC's super PAC, which attacked Malinowski during the primary. She told The Hill she believed the group's spending had an impact on the former congressman. But she also insisted she earned the win on her own terms.
In her words to The Hill:
"I had to run the kind of program that moved people to not only pause and consider me to go from zero to 60 with me, from an unknown entity to someone that they were willing to support above, you know, 10 other candidates."
New Jersey Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky, who worked on a super PAC supporting Malinowski's bid, offered a more measured read. She described Mejia as "a once-in-a-generation talent who also ran against a deeply, deeply, deeply flawed candidate."
Mejia's expected win does not stand alone. It fits into a broader pattern of progressive candidates outperforming, or outright defeating, establishment-backed Democrats across the country. The biggest progressive victory of the past year came in New York City, where Zohran Mamdani won the mayor's race in November against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
That race rattled the Democratic establishment. And since then, the left flank has kept up the pressure. In Illinois last month, Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss won the Democratic primary for a House seat over state Sen. Laura Fine, a more moderate candidate, and far-left social media influencer Kat Abughazaleh. Biss took 29 percent; Abughazaleh came in a close second at 26 percent; Fine, who opposed conditions on aid to Israel, managed only 20 percent. The combined progressive vote dwarfed the moderate lane.
Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, meanwhile, won her primary for the state's open U.S. Senate seat, despite, or perhaps because of, positions that would have been unthinkable for a statewide candidate a decade ago. Stratton said she would not support Chuck Schumer as Senate leader and called for abolishing ICE. She enjoyed endorsements from Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith, plus the backing and financial support of Gov. JB Pritzker. Roginsky noted that Stratton's ties to the Democratic establishment through Pritzker complicated any neat progressive-versus-centrist narrative.
Even in North Carolina, progressive Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam came within less than a point of unseating Rep. Valerie Foushee in a primary last month. In 2022, Foushee had beaten Allam by 9 points. The gap closed dramatically, a sign that progressive energy is rising even where it falls short.
The policy positions staking out this new progressive wing are not subtle. Fox News detailed Mejia's platform: abolish ICE, cancel all student loan debt, raise the federal minimum wage to $25, and pursue Supreme Court reforms including possible court expansion. On the campaign trail in January, Mejia was blunt: "I say abolish ICE now. You can't reform it. It's not fixable. Get it out."
Rep. Ro Khanna endorsed her enthusiastically, writing, "She stands for a progressive populist economic agenda. She is the future!" Khanna, of course, has also pledged that Democrats would move to impeach Trump if they reclaim the House, a reminder that the progressive wing's ambitions extend well beyond domestic policy.
Mejia was endorsed by Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Warren, a progressive trifecta that has become a reliable marker for where the party's activist base is headed. The Washington Times noted that her win reflected "the evolution of New Jersey's 11th District," a once-moderate suburban seat now firmly in progressive hands.
Not every race has gone the left's way. In Illinois's 8th Congressional District, former Rep. Melissa Bean beat back progressive tech entrepreneur Junaid Ahmed for her old seat. And the November elections of Abigail Spanberger as Virginia's governor and Sherrill in New Jersey showed that centrist Democrats can still win general elections.
But winning a general election as a moderate is a different question from winning a Democratic primary as one. The energy, the endorsements, and the small-dollar fundraising have tilted unmistakably leftward. Even the center-left think tank Third Way felt compelled to publish a memo in January warning that "every call to abolish ICE risks squandering one of the clearest opportunities in years to secure meaningful reform of immigration enforcement, while handing Republicans exactly the fight they want."
That warning has gone largely unheeded. Polling already shows 58 percent of Americans believe the Democratic Party is too liberal, and the numbers keep climbing. Yet progressive primary voters are moving in the opposite direction from the broader electorate.
Democratic strategists interviewed for the story offered a revealing window into the party's internal logic. California-based strategist Garry South said the motivation among Democratic voters is less about ideology and more about posture: "They do want a fighter, and they do want someone to get in Trump's face." He added, "I'm not sure the average Democrat really knows or even cares" about the distinction between progressive and moderate labels.
Georgia-based strategist Fred Hicks pointed to economic conditions. He argued that the "income inequality gap between the haves and have nots is really growing, and that creates the perfect environment for progressive candidates and progressivism." Roginsky agreed that voters are less focused on policy details than on finding "somebody who's going to stand up to Trump."
That framing, the "fighter" narrative, has become the through-line connecting Mejia, Mamdani, Biss, and Stratton. It is also the framework that lets Democrats avoid reckoning with the policy substance of what their candidates actually propose. Abolishing ICE, expanding the Supreme Court, and canceling all student debt are not mere postures. They are governing commitments that would reshape federal institutions.
The internal fractures are not limited to primaries. Texas Democrats recently tore themselves apart over race and identity in a chaotic Senate primary, and figures like Sen. John Fetterman have publicly broken with their own party over DHS funding and other standoffs. The progressive wing's answer to that disorder is not reconciliation, it is conquest.
Newsmax reported that political observers believe a Mejia victory could encourage similar progressive primary challenges against establishment Democrats in multiple House races. George Mason University's Mark Rozell put it plainly: "Right now, these voters are in no mood for establishment politics, policy moderation, or compromising."
Mejia herself framed the moment in expansive terms. She told The Hill that voters "in this moment are clear that what they want is someone that will stand up for them, that will be unbossed and unbought in the halls of power." She added: "And it so happens that many progressives are positioned to deliver exactly that."
Whether that is true depends on what "deliver" means. Progressive candidates have proven they can win Democratic primaries. They have proven they can generate enthusiasm, attract national endorsements, and mobilize activist networks. What they have not proven, and what the general electorate has not been asked to ratify, is whether abolishing ICE, packing the Supreme Court, and a $25 minimum wage constitute a governing agenda that Americans outside deep-blue districts will accept.
The Democratic Party keeps telling itself it wants fighters. It may discover, soon enough, that the fight its progressive wing picked is with the voters it still needs to win.
