Democratic Primary Winners Highlight Communities’ Different Challenges

As the 2026 campaign rolls on through primary season, the rise of the progressive left in the Democratic Party has emerged as a major theme.

From New York to Colorado, the progressive wing of the party seems to be scoring big wins. But that’s not the entire story. As the Cook Political Report recently noted, more centrist candidates are doing well in the races that will decide control of the U.S. House. The candidates from the most liberal parts of the party have mostly won in big urban centers: New York City and Denver.

Through the eyes of the American Communities Project, that’s not a surprise. As American politics goes through a mix of overhaul and realignment, both parties are “based” in a complicated blend of communities — wealthy and less so, urban and rural — that are going to lead to different ideas of where they should go next.

The Democratic Party’s base offers an excellent example of the complex terrain.

Different Shades of Blue

In the ACP, there are five community types that have been reliably Democratic in presidential races since Donald Trump’s arrival on the political scene. The African American South, Big Cities, College Towns, and Urban Suburbs have voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election since 2008.

Hispanic Centers have voted Democratic in all but one race, 2024. (And multiple surveys show President Trump’s support among Hispanics has declined sharply since that election.)

Those communities are all “blue,” but they are full of very different kinds of voters, and not only diverse by race or ethnicity or age. They are dealing with different kinds of challenges that are plainly visible when you poll them about their concerns.

The ACP did that in three yearly surveys about the fragmentation of American society, an effort funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Each survey asked people living in the 15 community types to rank their top concerns. Inflation was No. 1 everywhere, but after that, the main issues were different even in these reliably Democratic communities.

Homelessness/housing insecurity was a big concern in most of these places, but not all of them. Taxes ranked second in the Urban Suburbs, and crime or gun violence was No. 2 in the African American South.

And the differences in the chart above are not about how blue their vote is or where they are located. Other factors are key.

Big Cities and Urban Suburbs consistently have the biggest Democratic margins, and they often sit next to each other geographically, but they have different issues driving them. Hispanic Centers tend to be quite rural, but they have the same big concerns as the urban Big Cities — or they did in 2025. And the communities of the largely rural African American South are dealing with crime and gun violence, which is usually perceived as an urban problem.

What’s happening in these findings? These communities face very different realities on the ground.

Factors Beyond Politics

Consider a few basics: income and poverty. These communities that are “blue” on Election Night come from varied economic realities.

The contrasts are striking. The median household income in the Urban Suburbs is more than twice that of the African American South. The difference in the poverty rate is even greater.

Look at the College Towns; most people think of them as prosperous and they are, generally speaking. But they also have a lot of people between the ages of 18 and 25 who don’t have a lot of income, and they are dealing with rising housing costs.

While many people think the Hispanic Centers are primarily concerned with immigration, their lower incomes and high poverty rates mean they are more vulnerable economically.

Just this spring, the ACP wrote about the consistent concerns about crime in the African American South by digging into one community in South Carolina. Crime was high on the list of concerns for people living in the African American South in all three of our surveys on American Fragmentation.

There is a lot more. You could add figures for college education or leading employers to these measures, and you would see even more discrepancies.

Different Realities, Varied Approaches

The candidates that win in these places are almost necessarily going to be different from one another, and that is especially true when voters seem hungry for change. If voters in these varied communities reach for something beyond the status quo, they are likely going to come up with different answers.

None of this is to say that the leftward tilt of Democratic nominees means nothing. It may. There may come a point where the voters in these largely Democratic places make wildly different choices about what they think the future should look like, and that could create serious challenges for the Democratic Party.

But the idea that “the Democratic Party is becoming x” or “the Democratic Party is becoming y” misses the larger diversity within the party — socioeconomic and geographic as well as racial and ethnic.

Different places have different concerns and want different answers. And those differences are going to look sharpest in midterm elections, where the campaigns are more local than they are in presidential years.

There are some exceptions worth watching in 2026, of course. Michigan, for instance, is a big “purple-ish” state, and the Democratic Party there may end up selecting a much more liberal nominee than previously expected for this fall’s Senate race. That might end up being significant. (We’ll be visiting there in the next few weeks.) But the idea that voters in Big Cities are picking very liberal nominees is probably not the major news some experts believe it to be.

And it’s important to note that these differences are not limited to the Democratic Party. We can (and will) do a similar analysis of the reliable Republican-voting communities — a mix of blue-collar, faith-based, libertarian, agricultural, and military-focused places.

Currently, the Trump presidency seems to be holding that fragile coalition together. But Trump is already a lame duck, and after November that point of view should intensify. Splintering is not just possible, it’s likely.

The 2028 presidential race is poised to bring all these differences into sharper focus for both parties. The realignment impacting American politics is still in full swing. Looking at either party as a single entity misses the reality that both are coalitions of communities with different economic circumstances, priorities, and ideas about what change should look like. Expect the fight over those ideas to grow for both parties.