During the mid-term election next year, the Democratic Party hopes to regain lost ground on Capitol Hill by running a new crop of “service candidates”—men and women whose campaign bios stress their past experience in the military and national security agencies.
One booster of this approach is Elissa Slotkin, a business-friendly Democrat who won a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan last year. She first entered politics, as a successful candidate for the House in 2018, after three tours of duty in Iraq as a CIA analyst and then working as a top-level Pentagon official, whose responsibilities included “ensuring Israel’s qualitative military edge.”
In a candid interview with Politico, she urged Democrats to ditch their reputation for being “weak and woke” and field more candidates, like herself, who have “goddamn Alpha energy” and can “fucking retake the flag.” In pursuit of this objective, her mainly male ex-colleagues in the House who served in the military have created a Democratic Veterans Caucus (DVC), co-chaired by Representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA.), Pat Ryan (D-NY.) and Chris Deluzio (D-PA).
The DVC wants to create “a pipeline for the next generation of veteran and national-security-expert elected leaders.” Its favored candidates will get much financial help from the wealthy donors behind VoteVets, a DP-aligned Super PAC which showered $30 million on candidates like Slotkin last year. (Slotkin has also benefited from more $650,000 in campaign spending by AIPAC.)
The DVC is rightly concerned about MAGA threats like President Trump’s “politicization” of the military and unlawful multi-state deployment of the National Guard for domestic policing purposes. According to Deluzio, a former Navy officer, it’s now a very “powerful thing for us to organize, as Democratic veterans, on some of those issues where we can’t reach compromise, and nor should we. We should fight for our values where we can.”
Failing Its First Test?
That “fight for our values” did not last long. In a vote taken soon after the DVC was formed, a majority of its members--including Deluzio—folded completely when House Republicans pressured them to back a resolution honoring “a fierce defender of the American founding and its timeless principles of life, liberty, limited government, and individual responsibility.”
The recipient of this official praise was a deceased non-vet from Arizona named Charlie Kirk. In the same Orwellian language, Kirk was lauded by 85 other House Democrats as a model citizen engaged in “respectful, civil discourse,” who “worked tirelessly to promote unity.”
Three DVC members voted “present” and two were recorded as not voting at all on this mis-representation of Kirk’s “life and legacy” as a right-wing bigot, 2020 election results denier, and defender of January 6, 2021 rioters. Only 46-year old U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton—now an announced primary challenger to 79-year old Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) next year—and two others had the courage to vote against the measure because of Kirk’s long history of being an openly racist, misogynist, and homophobic immigrant basher.
This revealing performance was the latest reminder that most successful service candidates quickly become part of the bi-partisan status quo in Washington. Whether elected as “moderate Democrats” or, more often, as MAGA Republicans, veterans on Capitol Hill rarely challenge U.S. foreign and military policy.
Instead, they regularly rubber-stamp ever-bigger Pentagon budgets. They have voted, nearly unanimously, for $22 billion in military aid for Israel, during its genocidal assault on Gaza. And too many have been past supporters of privatizing essential services from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which Ivy League-educated officer class vets like Moulton or DOD Secretary Pete Hegseth, rarely need themselves.
Captives of Crypto
Another “service candidate” short-coming, in both major parties, is a shared dependence on corporate funding. Consider, for example, the recent career trajectory of Ruben Gallego, an Iraq war vet from a working-class Latino immigrant background in Arizona. As a House member, he was a defender of the VA and signed a Sanders-Warren backed “End the Forever War” pledge, circulated by Common Defense, the progressive veterans’ group.
When the former Marine geared up for his successful run for the Senate last year, he let his membership in the House Progressive Caucus lapse (claiming that its dues had become too high!) After that drop out, Gallego’s votes on anything related to US support for Israel’s war on Gaza got progressively worse.
Gallego ended up winning his Senate race with the help of wealthy backers seeking less regulation of crypto currency; their “independent expenditures” on him alone exceeded $10 million last year. Total crypto industry spending on his campaign, Slotkin’s, and others involved in tight 2024 races was $130 million.
That industry investment paid off this year when Gallego and Slotkin joined sixteen other Senate Democrats in voting for the “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins (GENIUS) Act.” As Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren warned, this Trump-backed legislation provides inadequate protections for consumers and the banking system, while allowing tech companies to issue their own private currencies and “take control over the money supply.”
A Paycheck Populist
Fortunately, heading into the 2026 mid-term elections, there are some military veterans, from working class backgrounds, trying to challenge big money in politics by ousting some of its most devoted servants.
With plenty of “alpha energy,” they are promoting what Nebraska Senatorial candidate Dan Osborn calls “paycheck populism.” In five red or purple states, they are appealing to blue collar voters (including those with Trump voter remorse). They are trying to recruit a grassroots army of volunteers and raise enough “small dollar” donations to beat corporate Dem opponents in 2026 primary races and then well-funded Republican incumbents in the general election.
Osborn, a Navy and National Guard veteran from Omaha, Nebraska, has already proven it’s possible to become a viable candidate without a professional-managerial class background. The former local union president and Kellogg’s strike leader by-passed his state’s 2024 Democratic primary and ran as a labor-backed independent. To the shock and awe of many, Osborn garnered 47% of the vote in a red state that Kamala Harris lost by 59 to 39 percent last November.
Osborn’s challenge to Republican Deb Fischer, a corporate-funded, two-term Trump-loving incumbent, was initially given little chance of success--even without a Democratic Party vote-splitter on the ballot. When Osborn recently announced his second run for the Senate, as an independent, the state Party again wisely and helpfully bowed out of the race (although any Nebraskan could still grab its November, 2026 ballot line by entering and winning an otherwise uncontested primary).
Osborn’s new sparring partner is “Wall Street Pete” Ricketts, a former governor and ultra-rich Republican businessman who voted for President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” in July. According to Osborn, that second term legislative triumph provided an “historic tax cut for the 1 percent,” while taking billions “away from social services and healthcare for hard working people” dependent on Medicaid.
On the campaign trail, Osborn is again blasting both major parties for being “bought and paid for by corporations and billionaires.” And like other progressive, labor-oriented vets profiled below, he’s highlighting the gross under-representation of workers in a Congressional “country club full of Ivy League graduates, former business execs, and trust fund babies.”
A Citizens United Critic
Osborn’s campaign did not go unnoticed in neighboring Iowa by 40-year old Nathan Sage. He’s a working-class veteran of the Marines, the Army, and three tours of duty in Iraq who went to college on the GI Bill. Before anyone else thought MAGA Republican Joni Ernst, might be vulnerable at the polls in 2026, Sage declared his candidacy for her Senate seat.
Raised in an Iowa trailer park by a factory worker father and nursing assistant mother, Sage began hammering Ernst even before her infamous April, 2025 town hall meeting comment about federal budget cuts not being such a threat to the longevity of the poor since “we all are doing to die.” After a popular backlash about that, other Iowa Democrats--holding current state or local elected offices— joined the fray, making for a crowded primary field in 2026, for what is now an open seat, because Ernst decided not to run for re-election,
None of Sage’s rivals for the nomination share his singular orientation as a “voice for every Iowan who struggles to get by.” The former radio station news director and now small-town economic development promoter is a fierce critic of big business. His campaign platform targets insurance industry rip-offs, big pharma abuses, price gouging by private equity owned healthcare providers, and VA privatization.
“People understand that government's not working for us,” Sage told us. “We're the richest country in the world, and over 60% of our population lives paycheck to pay-check…We’ve got to get big money out of politics, by over-turning Citizens United, so elections are not just a pay-to-play scheme and more working-class people actually have a chance to win.”
A Gaza War Foe in West Virginia
Like Osborn, former Marine Zach Shrewsbury launched his second campaign for the Senate, after losing to a different Republican in 2024. Like Sage, he decided to take the Democratic primary route. If successful on that hostile terrain, he would be up against incumbent Senator Shelley Moore Capito whose family, he says, “has ruled West Virginia for decades like feudal lords passing power down like heirlooms while our towns crumbled and our people suffered.”
Shrewsbury’s grandfather was a union coal miner but he grew up in a Republican family. After military service abroad, he became an organizer for Common Defense and got involved in progressive electoral politics and then environmental justice campaigning in a state long plagued by poverty and pollution. His current project is Blue Jay Rising, which integrates voter registration and community engagement with much-needed mutual aid initiatives.
As a Senate candidate, Shrewsbury will again draw on his military background to speak truth to power about how billions of tax-payer dollars that could be better spent at home have helped fund Israel’s “illegal, immoral, and massive attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure…to drive Palestinians out of Gaza.”
The Oysterman Against Oligarchy
As part of her “war plan” to elect more like-minded corporate Democrats next year, Michigan Senator Slotkin has sternly advised candidates not to use the term “oligarchy.” In Maine, one Marine Corps and Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, did not get that memo from party headquarters.
When 41-year old Graham Platner, who works as an oyster farmer, announced his challenge to incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins, he declared that the enemy of the vast majority of Americans “is the oligarchy.” Like Osborn, Sage, and Shrewsbury, Platner is taking direct aim at the big money in politics deployed by “the billionaire class” to thwart much needed change.
“Why can't we have universal healthcare like every other first-world country?" he asks. "Why are we funding endless wars and bombing children? Why are CEOs more powerful than unions? We've fought three different wars since the last time we raised the minimum wage."
On his campaign website, Platner has pledged to support Medicare for All, protect Social Security, push for a "billionaire minimum tax," a regulatory crack-down on polluters and "urgent action on climate change.” "Nobody I know around here can afford a house," Platner says. "Healthcare is a disaster, hospitals are closing. We have watched all of that get ripped away from us…”
At a Labor Day Rally in Portland, Platner welcomed the endorsement of Senator Bernie Sanders and told a cheering crowd of 6,500 that “our taxpayer dollars can build schools and hospitals in America, not bombs to destroy them in Gaza.” In a social media post the next day, he doubled down on that message, saying: “It’s not complicated. Not one more taxpayer dollar for genocide.”
This did not go down well with 75-year old Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer. He strongly urged termed out Maine Governor Janet Mills, a 78-year old ready for retirement from politics, to join the Senate primary race. Despite a corporate Dem/Maine Republican Party effort to discredit him, Platner is polling well against Mills so far. He’s also drawing large and enthusiastic local crowds of people who want to send someone to Washington who is not another geriatric “moderate,” like the nearly 74-year old Collins (who embraces that same label as a Republican).
The Union Defender in North Carolina
Richard Ojeda began his twenty-five-year Army career as an enlisted man and then went through officer training after completing college; he retired with the rank of major. In 2018, Ojeda became the West Virginia politician most supportive of the pay and benefit demands of the twenty-five thousand public school teachers who staged an illegal statewide walk-out.
He spoke on the strikers’ behalf at many rallies and, inspired by their “red state revolt,” decided to take his own populist working class politics to Congress, via an uphill 2018 fight against a right-wing Republican. After his defeat, Ojeda started a PAC called “No Dem Left Behind,” to aid other candidates, like himself, running in rural, conservative districts, with not much support from the DNC.
He moved to North Carolina, where he has now launched a political come-back as a Democratic primary candidate in that state’s deep red 9th Congressional district. In his current campaign against Rep. Richard Hudson, a well-connected House Republican, Ojeda defends the rights of immigrants and workers, supporting public education and Medicaid expansion, rather than cuts, and rallying fellow vets against DOGE-driven threats to VA jobs and services.
On the veterans’ affairs front, Ojeda took an unusual step for a political candidate. He collected 90,000 signatures on a petition protesting Trump Administration attacks on VA patients and their unionized care-givers. Then, he personally delivered it to agency officials in Washington and demanded that VA Secretary Doug Collins “reject the unlawful executive order by Trump which rips out long-standing civil rights protections and opens the door to denying VA care based on marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or even voting for a Democrat.”
On the campaign trail, Ojeda finds encouraging signs that others who once voted for Trump (as he did in 2016) are having second thoughts as “they look around at the wreckage so far, the ICE kidnappings, the censorship, and the economic pain.” More people, he believes, “are realizing that they were pawns in the oldest con in the book—blame immigrants, blame workers, blame anyone who doesn’t look or pray or live the day you do.”
“People are waking up,” Ojeda says. “They’re fed up that they’ve been lied to. They’re angry and they damn well should be. Our job now is to meet that anger with something stronger than shame, because mocking people who got conned won’t win anything. The only way to defeat a movement based on fear and division is to build one rooted in courage and care.”
Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon are the co-authors of a forthcoming book called The Betrayal of Veterans: How the Broken Promises of MAGA Republicans and Corporate Democrats Put Working Class Americans (and all of us) At Risk. They can be reached at [email protected].
