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DEMOCRATIC VOTERS ARE FIRED UP  
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Ryan Cooper
August 12, 2026
The American Prospect
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_ 2018 was a historic blowout for the Dems. This year, primary
turnout is much higher. _

Supporters cheer during an election night event for Minnesota Lt.
Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Tuesday,
August 11, 2026, in Minneapolis. , Credit: Ellen Schmidt/AP Photo

 

It was a mixed bag for the left in Tuesday’s primary elections. In
Wisconsin, DSA candidate Francesca Hong, who was far ahead in the
polls and expected to win easily, instead lost in a squeaker
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to David Crowley. But in Minnesota, the state’s lefty lieutenant
governor Peggy Flanagan easily whipped
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the moderate Rep. Angie Craig in the primary for that state’s U.S.
Senate seat, by a nearly 20-point margin.

While the Wisconsin result was disappointing, if progressives had to
pick, it was likely more important for Flanagan to win than Hong. In
Wisconsin, what state Democrats can do will depend more on whether
they can take control of the state legislature in the upcoming
election and win total control of state government for the first time
since 2010. Moreover, by all accounts Crowley is a fairly
standard-issue liberal who would probably sign most progressive
legislation; he has already announced plans
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alongside Hong. Craig, by contrast, is a loud centrist who voted for
the Laken Riley Act
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which granted sweeping powers to ICE—which would, of course, go on
to mercilessly gun down two Minnesota residents—as well as for a
resolution thanking the agency.

Whatever these races say about the state of the left—I would call it
a story of gradual building success over time, with some unsurprising
setbacks—the polls and turnout numbers have some more reliable
lessons. They show that the Democratic base is boiling with energy and
champing at the bit to vote against Republicans.

The polls for the Wisconsin race were off by roughly 20 points
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the same amount they were off in Minnesota (though in that case, they
underestimated the progressive Flanagan
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in the Michigan race
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last week. Clearly, something is rotten in the state of cellphone
autodialers. Polling primaries was tough business even 30 years ago
when everyone had a landline and calls from strangers were not 95
percent spam, because one has to gather data and then estimate how
many people are actually going to turn out. That can vary wildly
depending on the state, the party, whether it is a competitive race,
the national environment, and so on.

Incidentally, the vaunted prediction markets also completely flubbed
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this one. They couldn’t even sort out who was likely to win when
votes started coming in and the political pros could guess with
increasing accuracy who was likely to win based on where the remaining
votes were located. They were quite obviously just swinging wildly
back and forth with the headlines. It turns out markets are not some
infallible distillers of Truth
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from the celestial ether.

I’d guess that the pollsters are not getting good samples for these
races, but they almost certainly missed the turnout. Let’s compare
this year to 2018, the last time there was a contested Democratic
primary in Wisconsin and an uncontested Republican one, to make it a
fairly apples-to-apples comparison. Six years ago
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about 539,000 people cast Democratic ballots, as compared to 455,000
Republicans. This year, with a few thousand votes still to count, it
was more like _825,000_
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Democrats and 490,000 Republicans.

It’s a similar story in other recent primaries, where 2018 is once
again the most recent similar year. In Minnesota in 2018
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about 584,000 Democrats and 320,000 Republicans turned out; this year,
the numbers were 700,000 and 405,000, respectively. In Michigan in
2018
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about 1.1 million Democrats and 990,000 Republicans turned out; this
year, the numbers were _1.5 million_ and 931,000, respectively.

The 2018 elections were nearly a clean Democratic sweep in these
states. They won the U.S. Senate seats and the governorships in all
three, and missed control of the Minnesota Senate by one vote. They
would have won the Wisconsin State Assembly too if Republicans
hadn’t rigged the district boundaries so egregiously that an
eight-point defeat
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in the popular vote became a nearly two-thirds majority in seats.
(Luckily, thanks to Democrats flipping the Wisconsin Supreme Court,
the state legislative maps are now reasonably fair.)

Primary turnouts are a decent, albeit imperfect, historical proxy
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for general-election performances. And if there is any major
difference between today and 2018, it’s that Donald Trump, with his
lunatic tariff obsession and unwinnable war in Iran, is substantially
less popular
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was back then. Unless something big changes, Republicans are liable to
be looking at a generational wipeout in November.

_RYAN COOPER is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author
of __How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest
Question in Politics_
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He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has
also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs._

* Democratic Elections
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* voter turnout
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* enthusiasm
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