When a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot Renée Nicole Macklin Good multiple times on January 7, killing the thirty-seven-year-old mother of three on a street in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the reaction from rational people across the United States was a combination of horror, justified anger, and urgent hope for accountability.
Local officials were enraged after viewing videotaped evidence of the deadly violence that had followed President Donald Trump’s decision to surge gun-toting ICE agents into another American city. And they were furious when Trump’s cowboy-hat-wearing Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, made a wholly unsubstantiated claim that Good was a “domestic terrorist.” With a bluntness that was, at once, striking and entirely appropriate, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, “Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody directly: That is bullshit. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.”
Frey’s words were refreshing because his blunt honesty contrasted with the scripted responses Americans have come to expect from elected leaders in volatile moments. Rejecting calculation and compromise, he spoke with a moral clarity that cut through the cruelty of Republican rhetoric and the barrenness of Democratic “messaging” to say something that actually mattered. And it did not stop with Frey.
In a striking measure of the shifting politics of what historians will identify as “The Age of Trump,” leading Democratic contenders in the 2026 midterm election cycle were just as blunt as the Minneapolis mayor. Already agitated and outspoken about Trump’s illegal assault on Venezuela, and the many other administration policies that have caused chaos in communities across the country—and that have eroded Trump’s already dismal approval ratings—candidates who, a year from now, may well be sitting in House and Senate chambers controlled by the Democrats, signaled that they will not sit quietly by as the President and his minions go off the rails.
“What we saw today in Minneapolis is what happens when you send undertrained amateurs with guns into American communities with vague orders and no accountability,” declared Graham Platner, a Maine Democrat who is challenging senior Republican Senator Susan Collins in a race that could decide which party controls the Senate for the last two years of Trump’s second and final term.
“Republicans, including Susan Collins, have voted to exponentially increase ICE’s budget,” he continued. “But we did not get from that a professional service. What we have gotten are thugs who are terrorizing our communities. Dismantling ICE is the moderate position now. We need to pull the people responsible for the killing of Americans in front of the justice system. And we also need to hold accountable those that empowered this madness. It needs to come to an end. ICE needs to get out of Maine. ICE needs to get off American streets.”
Platner, a forty-one-year-old military veteran and harbormaster who has been endorsed by U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, is running against Maine Governor Janet Mills, a more centrist Democrat, in what polls indicate is a tight primary race. If Platner is nominated, polls suggest that he could beat Collins in what will likely be one of the most intensely watched contests of 2026. Yet, he has refused to soften his rhetorical edges in responding to the U.S. assault on Venezuela, the ongoing crisis in Gaza, and the need for a single-payer health care system. And he certainly did not do so in his response to ICE’s latest attacks. Nor did other high-profile progressive contenders.
More than 1,000 miles from Minnesota, in historically Republican Bell County, Texas, U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico—a state representative who, along with U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett, hopes to be the Democratic nominee for the seat currently held by senior Republican U.S. Senator John Cornyn—spoke to a packed town hall on the night of the shooting. Instead of the empty answers that campaign consultants for years have counseled red-state Democrats to mumble on the campaign trail—especially on issues like immigration policy—Talarico declared: “When we win, we will launch a full investigation into ICE, and we will haul these masked men in front of the U.S. Senate, so the world can see their faces. We will pass a law requiring ICE agents to identify themselves; we will pass a law banning them from wearing masks; and we will pass a law banning them from kidnapping people off our streets without a warrant.” As a wave of applause rose from the crowd, Talarico announced, “No more secret police! No more disappearing people! This is the United States of America. We’re not supposed to be afraid of our government. Our government is supposed to be afraid of us.”
In Illinois, where several Democrats are competing to fill the seat of retiring U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, one of the most outspoken contenders, U.S. Representative Robin Kelly, announced that she would seek to remove Noem from office. “I am impeaching Secretary Kristi Noem, who is an incompetent leader and a disgrace to our democracy,” Kelly wrote on X. “She wreaked havoc in the Chicagoland area and has brought her reign of terror to Minneapolis. One of her rogue ICE agents shot and killed an innocent woman today. It must come to an end.” One of Kelly’s Democratic primary rivals, U.S. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, immediately announced, “I’ll be your first co-sponsor.”
While Democratic Congressional leaders have taken impeachment off the table in recent years, Kelly and several other 2026 contenders in major races are putting it back. In San Francisco, for instance, Scott Wiener, state senator from California and one of several progressive contenders to replace retiring former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, responded to the early January attack on Venezuela by saying, “Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela isn’t about drugs, and it isn’t about helping the people of Venezuela . . . . Yes, [Venezuela’s dictatorial president Nicolás] Maduro is awful, but that’s not what the invasion is about. It’s all about oil and Trump’s collapsing support at home. Trump must be impeached and removed from office immediately.”
Pelosi eventually came around to supporting Trump’s impeachment during the last years of his first term as President, but she resisted initial appeals for action. Wiener’s message suggests that he’ll be less constrained. That goes for many Democrats who could prevail in special elections and primaries and win the fall races that will decide whether Trump’s MAGA Republicans or a reconstituted Democratic opposition will control the U.S. Congress.
In New Jersey, Analilia Mejía, a former national political director for Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign who is now a top contender for an open U.S. House seat, responded to Trump’s strike on Venezuela by noting that “the American people did not vote for another regime change war.” She added on social media, “We need an immediate war powers resolution vote . . . . Congress needs to assert itself and restore the balance of power.”
While it surely will be resisted by many Democratic Party leaders and donors, the shift toward bolder approaches and policies has the potential to shape a more genuine and consequential politics—for the party and the nation. That’s not a turn of events that will come easily for a Democratic Party that is famously resistant to change—and too frequently lacking courage. But it is a necessary change.
Several years ago, in my book The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, I argued that the electoral success of Trump and his extremist MAGA allies had less to do with their cruel and unusual politics—or even with their disinformation, misinformation, and related social media abuses—than the deliberate emptiness of Democratic Party communications in recent decades. Certain that voters would be put off by the lies and the incompetence of the Republicans, Democratic strategists argued that their party should campaign cautiously, with vague stances that were designed to sound good but offered little in the way of vision.
Afraid of offending corporate campaign donors, Democrats diminished their appeal to working-class voters who were struggling to get by, and to a rising generation of young voters who wanted to see the party take bolder stands against Republican racism, xenophobia, and anti-LGBTQ+ policies, and who were furious over the genocide in Gaza. A few prominent Democratic figures have always been outspoken—Sanders is one, along with progressive “squad” members like U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who said after the Minneapolis shooting that “what we saw today is a murder, and murders in cold blood need to be prosecuted.” But caution has tended to prevail in high-profile contests for Senate and House seats. Not anymore. A new generation of top contenders, many of whom are proving to be effective fundraisers and are leading in the polls, are jettisoning caution, with arguments—based on polling data and turnout for campaign events—that people are ready for a politics of clarity and conscience.
They find evidence that voters want a braver and bolder Democratic message in the victory of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who beat the Democratic establishment in his city’s primary last June, and then beat the efforts of Democratic centrists, billionaire donors, and even Trump to elect disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo last November. Mamdani recognized this reality when he explained in his January 1 inaugural speech that “I have been told that this is the occasion to reset expectations, that I should use this opportunity to encourage the people of New York to ask for little and expect even less. I will do no such thing. The only expectation I seek to reset is that of small expectations.” To that end, Mamdani declared, “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist.”
Mamdani has already endorsed the progressive primary challenge by former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander to wealthy Democratic U.S. Representative Dan Goldman, who continued to support arms sales to Israel even as that country indiscriminately attacked Gaza, killing tens of thousands of Palestinian children and other civilians. Goldman is identified as a “liberal” in media reports. Yet, Lander points out that “only I, of the two of us, recognize that [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s leveling of schools and hospitals and the destruction of Gaza was a war crime. It’s an ongoing war crime.”
Lander’s bluntness extends to every issue. He was arrested standing by immigrants facing legal threats, and, after Good was killed in Minneapolis, declared, “We can never accept this violence as normal or accept anything short of justice for these victims.” When Trump sent U.S. troops to Venezuela, Lander warned, “We’ve seen what happens when a reckless American President tries to run a foreign country on behalf of rich oil executives. Trump’s corrupt and illegal actions jeopardize the lives of Americans, the stability of the region, and the rule of law. Congress must put a stop to the unchecked war-making of this off-the-rails presidency.”
As with the ICE shooting, the attack on Venezuela—which saw U.S. troops seize Maduro—prompted a new wave of bold Democrats speaking up in language that was a far cry from the past. Platner told a crowd in Portland, Maine, that “we must not be fooled by the childish lies being used to justify this illegal aggression,” and said voters should “be wary of the establishment voices in media and in politics who over the next few weeks will work tirelessly to manufacture consent.”
Speaking of U.S. policy toward Venezuela, Platner also declared that the illegal attack on Venezuela “is not foreign policy; this is gangsterism on an international scale.” That’s tougher language than most leading Democratic contenders have been inclined to employ in recent decades. The same goes for calls to “dismantle ICE” and for proposals to dust off the impeachment power to remove Noem—and, yes, for talk of impeaching and removing Trump.
That will, undoubtedly, scare Democratic insiders and donors. It always does. But the savviest and most successful Democrats recognize that their party must be more than a “kinder, gentler” version of the GOP. It must promise Americans a bracing alternative to compromises of the past, and to the cruelty of a present where Republican politicians lie about the gunning down of an American mother on the streets of an American city. If a new generation of Democrats comes to the fore in 2026, they have the potential to begin winning more than primaries and fall elections. They could win the future.