Most of the “if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere” vibe in the midterm elections has revolved around Michigan and its Senate race. The idea is that if a pro-Medicare For All, anti-war, anti-corruption candidate like Abdul El-Sayed wins a purple state, then that brand of center-left populism is competitive in other swing states. That argument would be further bolstered by wins in Maine, Ohio, and Georgia, where Democratic nominees are embracing anti-oligarch politics.

But as important as those races are, populist victories in three other even-longer-shot states — Texas, Florida, and Nebraska — would prove something perhaps even more profound, something that a few have been eyerolled for saying for decades: namely, that such economic populism is actually the only way for Democratic candidates to ever defeat MAGA in America’s most Republican bastions. If this cycle’s top-ticket Democrats win there, they will show not just that populism can win — but that it is required in order to even have a chance to compete.

That theory being clearly proven on Election Day would be a seismic shift. It would destroy the Democratic establishment’s claims that their party must always elevate corporate-friendly, oligarch-coddling, norms-loving, status-quo-venerating moderates and always reject Bernie Sanders-style populists who focus on anti-corruption, economic inequality, and corporate power.

Wins in Texas, Florida, and/or Nebraska would say exactly the opposite of that prevailing wisdom — especially considering how the political and economic environments inside these particular GOP states are fueling voters’ appetite for anti-oligarch candidates.

For example, it is almost certainly no coincidence that Texas and Florida are in play, as the pair just so happen to be near the top of two lists: the list of states that have the most billionaires and the list of states that are the most economically unequal. Similarly, it is no coincidence that Nebraska’s Senate election is up for grabs now that the race is literally a binary battle between capital and labor, pitting a billionaire heir against an actual union leader.

If (as I’ve argued ) Sanders is to left populism what Barry Goldwater was to modern conservatism, then this trio of states is where the left-populist version of a Reagan Revolution could find its fuel to go truly national — both changing America’s electoral map, and shifting the way Democrats believe they must run in order to compete in GOP strongholds.

Is Texas Populism Making A Comeback?

For decades, Texas Democrats have followed the post-New Deal political strategy being pushed most recently by Rahm Emanuel and his corporate faction. In top-tier statewide races, they have often discarded the anti-corporate populism of onetime state agriculture commissioner Jim Hightower and instead promoted business-friendly moderates. Even at the congressional level, it was much the same: For every center-left firebrand like Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D), the state seemed to produce a steady stream of conservative Blue Dog Democrats.

The trend coincided with Republicans gaining an unprecedented hammerlock on power in the Lone Star State.

But after former Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s spirited runs for Senate and governor — in which the Democrat directly tangled with billionaires — things may be changing.

Today, Democrats’ Senate candidate, state Rep. James Talarico, and gubernatorial candidate, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, have picked up the baton and are running explicitly anti-oligarch, anti-corruption campaigns. Talarico is closing his campaign by pointing out that billionaires are trying to outright buy the race for his cartoonishly corrupt opponent, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Hinojosa has been pointing to data centers and corporate subsidies as proof that Texas is owned by rapacious moguls.

“To the billionaires who have taken over our state and taken over our country: your unchecked power is coming to an end,” Talarico has said . “Your days dividing working people are numbered.”

“People understand that we are fighting a fight where it’s all of us in the same boat versus like 15 billionaire tech dudes,” Hinojosa told The New York Times last week, as she has been spotlighting incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s ties to Elon Musk.

Polls showing Talarico ahead of his GOP opponent and Hinojosa closing in on hers suggest these messages are working. That is nationally significant not merely because a few more Democrats could end up elected to powerful offices in a large state, but also because the messages are landing in a place that Republicans have been proudly transforming into a Galt’s Gulch for billionaires.

Recall that Texas has no personal income tax, and in the last decade, conservatives there engineered the passage of state constitutional amendments preemptively protecting the super rich from wealth taxes , capital gains taxes , and inheritance taxes . At the same time, Texas Republicans led by Gov. Greg Abbott have used state government to give their data center and industrial-polluting donors ever-larger, taxpayer-funded gifts. Texas Republicans have also changed state laws to enhance corporate management’s power over shareholders, and they have even given corporations a special court system that governors can effectively pack on behalf of their donors.

Much of this is why some big corporations have relocated to Texas, and probably why Musk moved there and is building his own city there .

Talarico and Hinojosa’s campaigns are now harnessing public disgust with this entire oligarchic trajectory. What’s more, Hinojosa is outlining how anti-oligarchy represents a break from corporate Democrats’ economically moderate, socially liberal politics that has been more associated with culture-war appeals — and that has been rejected in the reddest of red states.

“The one fight in this country is about economic power, and populism is about economic power. We see that things are so stacked against working people in this country,” she said when The New York Times pressed her to label herself. “If I were to pick a label to describe my politics, it is economic populism. It happens to be a type of politics that is rooted in our Texas history. It was L.B.J.’s grandfather, who was part of the Farmers’ Alliance, that organized farmers against big railroads that were taking advantage of them. Now we have working Texans who are up against big tech. And so I chose this title to define my politics because I think this has to be the politics of the moment to meet the challenges of the moment.”

This kind of crusading politics may have once seemed like a fool’s errand in archconservative Texas, but it may not be anymore thanks to an electorate that may have quietly shifted.

In recent years, polling data has confirmed that even in anti-tax Texas, most voters there actually want higher taxes on the rich, and fewer tax loopholes for corporations. One survey even showed that most Texans want their state’s billionaires to face wealth taxes. Meanwhile, Texas’s most famous billionaire, Musk, is now wildly unpopular in the state. Last year, a poll showed Musk’s approval rating plummeted in the state, with 53 percent of Texas voters having an unfavorable view of him. This year, a separate poll showed a similarly negative view of the billionaire, with Musk particularly unpopular among independent and moderate voters likely to swing the race. This might explain why Talarico is ending his campaign by slamming Musk for trying to buy the election.

Texas oligarchs are clearly freaked out. So freaked out that less than three years ago, one of them filed a lawsuit that seemed designed to criminalize Texas politicians’ criticism of billionaire influence in politics — or to at least scare Texas candidates out of ever making anti-billionaire populism central to their campaigns.

The gambit failed. And now Talarico and Hinojosa are betting that same kind of populism is a new form of majoritarian politics that can politically realign the whole state.

Is Florida Radicalized?

Florida also offers the possibility of a realignment — only it would be even more pronounced because the 2026 election choice is even starker. Whereas Talarico is a white-guy choir boy wrapping his populism in moderate-coded religiosity , Florida’s Democratic Senate candidate, state Rep. Angie Nixon, is promoting the same kind of populism, but without such a veneer. She is a Black female Democrat in a place that has never elected one statewide at the top of the ticket; she is a member of the populist Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America; and she is campaigning for Medicare For All and a wealth tax on billionaires .

“These corrupt billionaires, these greedy corporations, are determining all avenues of our life, all types of policies,” Nixon said during the primary . She then rejected the traditional Democratic move of moderating during the general election, declaring in August: “We need to make sure that these politicians in Washington, D.C. are no longer beholden to these big corporations and these billionaires and these special interest groups.”

As in Texas, this kind of populist politics has been largely absent from Florida — a place with lots of billionaires, plenty of economic inequality, and a Republican chokehold on power as Democrats there have largely eschewed populism and embraced election-losing Third Way-style corporatism.

In recent years, Florida Republicans have used that power to mimic Texas and tailor its laws to be a gated community for the super rich. Indeed, as the state’s beleaguered public schools , infrastructure and social services face privatization and budget austerity, Florida has quite literally advertised itself as the place America’s rich people should flee to for lower taxes — and never-ending tax cuts for the wealthy, big corporations and data centers .

When she first announced her Senate candidacy in this cauldron of MAGA-led oligarchy, Nixon was laughed off by national Democrats and big donors, who lavishly funded a more conservative candidate with almost no economic message. When Nixon nonetheless won her party’s primary, the national party continued to ignore her.

That many polls show Nixon’s unabashed ultra-populist campaign is now competitive against incumbent Republican Senator Ashley Moody is not just a reflection of Nixon’s skills as a campaigner and organizer. It is also a reflection of a Florida electorate that might be far more radicalized than it was even in the recent past, when Sanders’ presidential primary campaigns struggled there .

A new poll from the super PAC A Fight Worth Having illustrates that potential radicalization: nearly three-quarters of the electorate has an unfavorable view of health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and corporate landlords. That includes nearly two-thirds of self-identified Republican voters. As important: a far larger share of Nixon’s voters hold those unfavorable views than do Moody’s voters.

Is Nebraska Finally Going Prairie Populist?

If Nebraska has been known for anything in Democratic politics, it is producing some of the party’s most impactful anti-populists. The state produced Bob Kerrey, one of the creators of the corporate Democratic faction who helped marginalize single-payer in the health care debate of the mid-1990s and who then pushed to privatize Social Security. Nebraska also gave us insurance-executive-turned-Democratic-senator Ben Nelson , whose major accomplishment as a federal legislator was killing a public health insurance option.

But mostly, Nebraska hasn’t produced Democrats at all — a Democrat hasn’t won a statewide race in two decades.

So it is not entirely surprising that after twenty years, Nebraska’s first competitive non-Republican candidate in a top-tier statewide race isn’t even a Democrat — it is an independent union mechanic named Dan Osborn, who casts his campaign against billionaire scion Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) as a crusade against the entire billionaire class.

“Billionaires have bought up the country and are carving it up day by day,” Osborn said when he announced his campaign. “The economy they’ve built is good for them, bad for us. Good for huge multinationals and multibillionaires. Bad for workers. Bad for small businesses, bad for family farmers. Bad for anyone who wants Social Security to survive. Bad for your paycheck.”

A tattooed Navy veteran, Osborn first made a name for himself in politics by leading a successful strike against Kellogg for better pay and benefits. His current campaign has picked up his 2024 Senate campaign’s emphasis on the corrosive influence of money in politics, only this time his laser-focus on corruption is enhanced by the fact that he’s running against a bona fide fat cat fit for a political cartoon.

Osborn’s political ads tell the story of an incumbent “born on third base” who “thinks he hit a triple,” and who bought his past gubernatorial and Senate elections. Much of his platform is torn right out of the pages of Sanders’ playbook: overturn Citizens United , pass campaign finance reform, break up monopolies, and end corporate subsidies , especially for data centers.

There is no track record of this kind of scorched-earth politics winning in Nebraska in recent history. But survey data show an electorate that appears to be getting more and more enraged at the oligarchy.

In 2018, two years after Sanders’ populist presidential candidacy won Nebraska’s caucuses — a poll found 80 percent of Nebraskans wanted higher taxes on those making more than $1 million a year. In 2023, when voters were asked how they personally think about problems afflicting Nebraska, the issue of highest and most universal concern was “state government's focus on providing more corporate and income tax cuts to the most wealthy instead of giving tax relief to middle class families.” Then this year, another poll showed the state’s electorate is apoplectic about the affordability crisis, and about the whole direction of the state under Republican leadership.

Osborn has been the beneficiary of some of that angst not only because Ricketts is the human personification of unearned wealth, but also because Ricketts was one of the governors who most recently went full oligarch — both with a regressive tax cut for the wealthy and with his massive subsidies for data centers that were so loathed that the subsequent Republican governor was forced to halt them .

Red State Wins Would Be A Nightmare For Corporate Democrats

Of course, there is no guarantee that any of these Democrats win in any of these states. Texas and Florida have consistently been where Democrats’ dreams have gone to die, and Nebraska has been a place where Democrats didn’t even bother to dream at all. So in these states, I wouldn’t exactly be surprised if election night goes as red as it has gone for the last few decades.

It is also possible that if some of these candidates pull off a win, they will quickly turn right around and behave like the corporate shills they deride on the campaign trail. Some of them might become merely go-along-to-get-along Jon Testers. Some may become full-on John Fettermans. There’s a long history of Democrats campaigning like hope-and-change populists and then assuming high office and delivering more of the same, or worse. That’s always a risk.

But what’s important here is what these spirited campaigns in Texas, Florida, and Nebraska already say about the shifts in America’s political topography. While polls are notoriously untrustworthy, these candidates appear to be competitive in these states specifically by running as center-left populists. That is what signals the potency of a very different formula for Democrats trying to compete in these and other dark red states in the future.

It is a formula I once wrote about two decades ago after working on one of the very few successful Democratic red-state campaigns in the otherwise Republican-dominated 2004 election.

It is a formula of anti-oligarch populism that the Democrats’ corporate wing and its donors have convinced their party to avoid. But it is unavoidable now that these campaigns have been competitive, and it should become dominant if they actually win.

That outcome is almost certainly what corporate Democrats most fear on November 3rd. Not their party losing Congress to MAGA, but their party actually winning Congress with the decisive help of red-state populist victories.

Such a result would be the final blow debunking corporate Democrats’ absurd claims that their donor-coddling “centrism” — rather than populism — is the way to win.