What Democrats talk about when they win

On election night in 2006, Sherrod Brown told a Cleveland crowd what his upset had meant: “Today in Ohio, in the middle of America, the middle class won.” On Tuesday, twenty years later, Brown won his way back to the Senate with a sharper diagnosis. “Corporations, billionaires tried to buy this election,” he said in Columbus. Working people, he said, pay for the corruption: “Higher utility bills, higher grocery prices, higher drug prices.”

In 2006, Brown’s speech was an outlier among Democratic winners. This year it was the template. We read the election-night speech of every Democrat elected to the Senate for the first time since 2006, plus Brown’s return, 64 in all. This year’s class talked about the cost of living where earlier winners promised jobs. It named billionaires and corporations as the enemy, which none of the 16 Democrats elected from 2017 through 2024 had done. It all but dropped the language of identity politics that defined the party’s message in the Trump years. And it sounded more alike than any class in twenty years.

That looks like Bernie Sanders’ party. It is not quite: the new senators took up Sanders’ enemies, but not his argument about inequality.

The 2026 class is the 13 Democrats who gave election-night speeches as Senate winners or apparent winners. Mary Peltola’s race in Alaska and Scott Colom’s in Mississippi were still uncalled as of Thursday, according to the Anchorage Daily News and The Washington Post. Colom’s speech survives only in news quotes and a 50-second clip, so he is left out of every average.

Every era had its own vocabulary. This year’s was about prices and power.

A party’s message depends on whether it holds the White House, so we grouped the speeches by the president in office while each winner campaigned. That splits twenty years into five periods that alternate between Democrats running as the opposition (under George W. Bush, and twice under Donald Trump) and as the governing party (under Barack Obama and Joe Biden). For each period we looked for the words and phrases used far more often than in the others, after setting aside the thank-yous, the families and the words every speech uses.

Bush-era Democrats ran against a war and an energy policy: Iraq, foreign oil, jobs sent overseas. Obama-era winners spoke for “the middle class” and promised “equal pay for equal work.” In Trump’s first term, they talked about “pre-existing conditions” and beating “this pandemic”; in the Biden years, about democracy, January 6th and hope. This year the words were the cost of living, billionaires, tax breaks, insurance companies, union halls and, from three winners, a promise to “end this war” with Iran.

Prices replaced jobs as the Democratic promise

For most of two decades, a Democratic victory speech promised jobs: creating them, bringing them back, protecting them. Jobs and the economy came up 3.7 to 5.3 times per 1,000 words in every period through Trump’s first term. Under Biden, that fell to 2.3; this year, to 1.4. Talk about the cost of living (groceries, rent, gas, child care) held at about one mention per 1,000 words for nearly two decades and roughly tripled. The speeches followed the voters: nearly nine in 10 told NBC News’s exit poll that the cost of living was a major factor in their vote, The Hill reported, with inflation above 3.5 percent and the Iran war pushing up fuel prices.

The people the promise was for got a new name. “The middle class” was the phrase of the Bush and Obama years, in 9 of the 19 Obama-era speeches. This year two of 13 used it. “Working people,” “working families” and “the working class,” absent from the speeches between 2017 and 2024, came back in seven of the 13. Brown’s two speeches make the switch in miniature: in 2006 the middle class won; in 2026, “working people pay for this corruption.”

For eight years, no winner named an economic villain. This year, almost all did.

In the Bush and Obama years, 12 of the 35 winners named someone to blame for the economy, usually oil or drug companies, Wall Street or “special interests.” Then the villains disappeared. Not one of the 16 Democrats who won Senate seats from 2017 through 2024 named billionaires, corporations, an industry, Wall Street, special interests or corruption on election night. Their adversaries were abstractions: division, “political games,” threats to democracy.

This year, 12 of 13 named at least one, and most named several. Billionaires and “the rich” appeared in 11 speeches, corruption or a “rigged” system in nine, corporations in six. The targets were often specific: drug and insurance companies, private equity, “corporate landlords,” big data centers, members of Congress who trade stocks. Peltola promised to get Alaskans’ food “out of the clutches of corporate greed, and back into our freezers and our fish racks.” And seven named the president. No Bush-era winner had named Bush, and one of the eight in Trump’s first term had named him. Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota opened with him: “Minnesota, you just beat Donald Trump again.”

The speeches were the closing argument of a campaign built this way. After the party’s 2025 wins in New Jersey, Virginia and New York City, which Derek Thompson called an “affordability election,” House Democrats organized their midterm message around lowering costs, a plan Semafor’s David Weigel compared to the party’s “Six for ’06” agenda. Democrats also spent about $173 million on ads about corruption, according to AdImpact figures reported by CNN, in what End Citizens United called the biggest anti-corruption election “at least since 2006.” On election night the two strands became one: prices are high because someone rigged the system.

Foreign policy entered the same frame. In a year of war with Iran, nine of the 12 speakers with full transcripts talked about war, and some treated it as a cost: Talarico promised to “end these corrupt forever wars that are driving up prices.” El-Sayed’s was the only speech in twenty years to mention AIPAC or the Palestinians, and he put the pro-Israel lobby on his list of opponents: “To AIPAC, who spent $42 million against us, thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice.” The pro-Israel group had backed his primary opponent with nearly $30 million, Michigan Public reported. He cast U.S. military aid in the terms his speech used for everything else: “We want our taxes spent here, for schools here, and healthcare here, and infrastructure here.”

The 2026 class read from one script

The class was not uniform. It included a former governor, a pastor, a pediatrician, a seminarian, a Paralympic gold medalist, a union member who led the Maine Senate and a former public health official who beat a congresswoman backed by his state’s senior senator and governor. Eight of the 12 with full transcripts ran in states Trump carried in 2024.

They reached for the same words. Nine said “groceries,” a word that appeared in four of the 51 earlier speeches combined. Nine said “billionaires.” Six used the word “corruption,” which no earlier winner had. By the vocabulary they share, two 2026 speeches overlap about 1.5 times as much as two speeches from any earlier period. The speeches also spent less time on ceremony: thank-yous fell from 17.5 per 1,000 words in 2006–08 to 6.6, and the median speech ran 1,892 words, 2.0 times the Bush-era median and longer than in any earlier period. The extra time went to the argument.

The language of identity politics nearly vanished

In February 2016, campaigning in Nevada against Sanders, Hillary Clinton asked a crowd: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” (as quoted at the time). The point was that economic reform alone would not address the injustices many Democrats cared most about. For the next several years, the party’s message gave those causes equal billing. Critics inside the party have since argued that the emphasis cost Democrats working-class voters. In 2025, Gavin Newsom said Democrats were “getting crushed” on transgender athletes, and the new Searchlight Institute argued that progressive advocacy groups “prevent Democrats from thinking clearly about how to win.”

The victory speeches show that era’s language rising and falling. We counted the vocabulary of identity and social justice: race and racism, diversity and inclusion, gender and LGBTQ rights, immigration framed from the left (dreamers, the undocumented, abolishing ICE) and policing. It was rare before 2016 and after 2020. In between, it filled whole passages. Tammy Duckworth called the 2016 result “a repudiation of the vile politics of fear and xenophobia that have sought to marginalize women, people of color and immigrants, our LGBTQ brothers and sisters.” Kamala Harris promised to fight for immigrants “documented and undocumented,” for “Black Lives Matter,” and for the right to marry “the person they love.” This year the vocabulary nearly disappeared, to 0.1 terms per 1,000 words: none of the 2026 speeches used the language of diversity and inclusion, and only El-Sayed’s spoke about race.

Positions on cultural issues did not disappear with the vocabulary. We read every passage that touched immigration, guns, abortion, LGBTQ rights, or race and policing, and recorded whether the speaker took a position. Seven of this year’s 13 did, 54%, more than in the Obama years (32%) or Trump’s first term (38%). But they narrowed, mostly to two issues, and shrank to a line or two. Five speeches mentioned abortion, most often as “reproductive freedom” in a list of promises. None took a position on guns, one on LGBTQ rights and one on race or policing.

The other issue was immigration, and it ran left, not toward the center. Five of the seven immigration statements this year were about ICE, after a campaign in which immigration came up in 29 percent of pro-Democratic Senate ads through August, often to criticize the agency, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. Troy Jackson of Maine said, “I will fight to abolish ICE and win.” Flanagan promised, “We will rip ICE apart.” The one position at odds with the party line came from Kansas, where Adam Hamilton, a pastor, said: “I support ICE for doing what they were commissioned to do … but they were not commissioned to arrest preschool teachers in front of their children.”

What replaced the culture war was an argument about it. Clinton had asked whether breaking up the banks would end racism. Several of this year’s winners answered from the other direction: the cultural fight, they said, is how the powerful keep working people from noticing the economic one. David Barker of the Brookings Institution saw the same shift in this year’s primaries, which he called “less a story of left versus center than of insurgent versus establishment,” won on progressive economics with the cultural positions of the early 2020s dialed back.

The villains are Sanders’. The argument is not.

Billionaires, corruption, a party establishment to be shaken up: the obvious ancestor of this message is Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. So we measured thirteen of Sanders’ and Clinton’s 2015–16 primary speeches the same way, from their launches through Iowa, New Hampshire and Super Tuesday to their conventions.

By one measure, the 2026 class is more populist than Sanders was: 76% of its economic talk was about prices, wages, workers and the people blamed for them, against 61% of his. But the idiom is different. Sanders’ subject was inequality: income and wealth, millionaires and billionaires, Wall Street, “the top one percent.” He used those words 8.0 times per 1,000 words. This year’s winners used them 0.3 times, about as rarely as every class before them, and nine of the 12 with full transcripts never did. Their populism ran on prices and corruption instead, and on both they out-talked Sanders himself.

Populism itself is nothing new for these speeches. After the 2006 midterms, Christopher Hayes wrote in The Nation that “the hidden story of the election was the appeal of economic populism” (republished by CBS News), and Elizabeth Warren won in 2012 promising that “millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share.” Studying Democratic presidential nominees from 1932 to 2012, the political scientists Jesse H. Rhodes and Kaylee T. Johnson found that hostile references to the wealthy grew more frequent over time, and concluded that class populism was “alive and well” in the party’s rhetoric (Presidential Studies Quarterly, 2017). What is new in 2026 is the target and the unanimity. The 2006 populists talked about trade, wages and Wall Street, and they were a minority of the class. This year’s talked about grocery bills and corruption, and nearly all of them did.

Red-state winners talked about faith. Blue-state winners talked about Trump.

The economic message did not change with the map. The eight candidates from states Trump carried in 2024 talked about prices and corporate power even more than the four from states Kamala Harris carried. What changed was everything around it. The Trump-state candidates spoke about faith 3.5 times as often, and about farms and small towns 3.7 times as often. The Harris-state candidates spoke about democracy 2.9 times as often, and they named Trump, 3.0 times per speech against 0.4. In the states Trump won, the Democrats ran against prices and the people they blamed for them, not against the president.

The outlier became the average

Twenty years of speeches come down to a few numbers. Mentions of jobs and the economy fell from 4.5 per 1,000 words in 2006–08 to 1.4 this year; mentions of the cost of living rose from 1.0 to 3.6. None of the 16 winners from 2017 through 2024 named an economic villain; 12 of this year’s 13 did. The vocabulary of identity and social justice ran at 1.8 terms per 1,000 words in the 2016 speeches and 0.1 this year. And two speeches from this year’s class share about 1.5 times as much vocabulary as two from any earlier period.

The chart at the top of this article tells the same story in one line of dots. Brown’s 2006 speech scored 14.4 on its measure of prices, corporate power and working people, the highest of the 47 earlier speeches we could measure and 3.5 times the average of its period. This year the average speech scored 9.9, and Brown’s own scored 19.2.

These are 13 speeches from one night, two of them from races still being counted and most transcribed by machine. They measure what the winners chose to say, not how they will vote. The new Senate’s first votes, on prices, stock trading and the insurers and corporations these speeches named, will be the next measurement.