Beyond belonging to the same party and winning crucial Senate seats this year, Abdul El-Sayed and Adam Hamilton do not appear to have a lot in common. El-Sayed is a millennial, while Hamilton is a baby boomer. El-Sayed is an observant Muslim, while Hamilton is a Methodist minister. El-Sayed ran an aggressively progressive campaign, while Hamilton ran an aggressively centrist one. But though the two men have very different worldviews, they shared one key strategy in 2026: Both presented themselves as fundamentally more local than their Republican adversaries.
Hamilton built his career as pastor of a megachurch in Leawood, Kansas. He described himself as a “fifth-generation Kansan.” He also criticized his opponent, Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, for spending too much time at a home he owned in Sarasota, Florida. “You don’t live here!” Hamilton supporters chanted at Marshall when the candidates debated in September. Days before the election, the Hamilton campaign posted: “Roger Marshall lives in Florida. Just ask his neighbors.”
El-Sayed had a national following, but he, too, ran a campaign with strong local dimensions. He introduced himself to voters with an ad saying he’s “as Michigan as you get,” and he lambasted his opponent, former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, for having lived in Florida in recent years. “Mike,” El-Sayed said, “if you want to be a Florida man, go be a Florida man. If you want to golf in Florida, go golf in Florida.”
There are many theories about why the Democratic Party just had its best election in perhaps half a century, and much of the analysis has rightly focused on whether the center or the left should get the credit. But there’s another factor that mattered as well. The Democratic Party has long suffered from the perception that it is an excessively national party — one whose candidates sound to voters more like elite strangers than like neighbors. This year, the party appears to have made significant progress in reversing that perception. In race after race across the country, Democratic candidates campaigned as products of the places they sought to represent, while casting Republicans as the ones who were out of touch with local communities.
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Political success — especially when running for Congress — involves an elaborate exercise in code-switching. On one hand, politicians need to interact with a national elite that increasingly does not think or talk like they are connected to a particular place. Members of Congress must be able to speak with The New York Times editorial board or hold forth at a Washington think tank about the geopolitical implications of the Iran war or the economic implications of artificial intelligence — adopting an abstract and analytical voice. On the other hand, politicians also need to adopt a local perspective. They must be able to identify how policies affect actual people in specific places — ideally because they themselves have spent their lives immersed in those very places.
The local perspective still matters in U.S. politics — more than many people at the highest levels of power realize. The median American adult resides just 18 miles from their mother. The median college student is only 17 miles from home. Life for most people outside of the political establishment is relatively more defined by what’s happening across the street than across the nation.
The challenge of balancing the national and the local is not confined to the right or the left. Both parties are, at some level, run by elites who have moved around the country and become disconnected from their communities. In a two-party system, though, the relevant question is not whether either party is local enough, but which party is more local than the other party. And in this respect, the Republican Party long had the upper hand.
Some of the GOP’s advantage was ideological. It was always easier for Republicans to position themselves as local figures because they were criticizing a federal government concentrated in one single metropolitan area. In a 1964 speech supporting Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan urged voters not to “abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.”
MAGA has represented a continuation, and an intensification, of this approach to politics. The swamp that MAGA wanted to drain was concentrated in Washington. The legacy media it attacked was concentrated in New York. The technology industry it (maybe) wanted to target was concentrated in San Francisco. The MAGA view of the world made it perfectly natural for JD Vance to speak at the 2024 Republican convention about his Ohio hometown as “a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington.”
But the GOP’s success on this front wasn’t just ideological. It was also institutional. Republicans excelled at establishing mechanisms to bridge the gap between national elites and local communities. William F. Buckley Jr. founded Young Americans for Freedom, which at one point had 100,000 members. The group ensured that conservative intellectuals from New York and Washington were speaking to college students on campuses all over the country. During the Reagan administration, many of the group’s leaders transformed from local activists to White House staffers. More recently, Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — with almost 1,500 college chapters and over 3,000 high school chapters — has served a similar function.
These patterns extended to Republican politicians. In 2025, three academics released a study about the educational backgrounds of members of Congress. They found that the share of House Republicans who attended elite schools had dropped from 40% to 15% over the past half century. During the same period, the share of Democratic House members who attended elite schools increased from about 30% to almost 40%. No wonder Republicans were able to essentially sell themselves as America’s local party — and cast Democrats as out-of-touch national elites.
For Democrats, the core of the problem is that their party has become dominated by a professional-managerial class that is trained by, and works for, the knowledge industries — the arts, nonprofits, journalism, the legal field, academia and so on. Knowledge industries function by clustering people so they can more easily learn from one another; bringing together in a few places people from across the country and the world is a feature of their existence rather than a bug.
In this context, you can see why Ivy League universities like Columbia in New York and Harvard in Boston — the ultimate institutions training national elites with national worldviews and, not coincidentally, places that were strongly identified with Democrats and the left — made appealing targets for the second Trump administration. The same goes for the major New York and Washington law firms Trump targeted.
The electoral consequences of the Democratic Party’s national, disconnected image have been considerable. A report issued in 2025 by a pro-Democratic group found that 70% of voters considered the party “out of touch,” a substantial increase from 51% as recently as 2013. As of 2025, most voters in swing congressional districts thought that Democrats were “more focused on helping other people than people like me.”
One solution to this problem for Democrats has been hiding in plain sight: nominate more candidates who could be strong local messengers. In 2021, Charles Hunt of Boise State University and I conducted a study in which we asked participants from 19 states holding Senate elections in 2022 to evaluate fictional candidates with more local or less local backgrounds. The effect was substantial: Democratic candidates who were more truly local did 7 points better. They did not alienate their base voters and they appealed to a greater degree to crossover Republican voters. When we evaluated actual Senate elections from 1960 to 2020, we found much the same pattern: a significant advantage for candidates with strong local roots.
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Even before this year’s election, there were Democrats who defied the broad national image of their party and excelled at playing the local card. John Fetterman is now known mainly for being a pariah among Democrats, but in 2022, he ran a remarkably effective, and highly local, campaign. Fetterman — who had the zip code of the town where he was mayor tattooed on his arm — attacked his opponent, Mehmet Oz, for having lived in New Jersey (including through ads featuring Jersey celebrities Snooki and guitarist Steven Van Zandt). The strategy worked: In a year in which Democrats lost control of the House, Fetterman won a Senate seat in a purple state — even after suffering a serious stroke prior to the election. “Mehmet Oz’s Jersey ties may have sunk him in PA Senate race,” concluded CBS News.
Four years later, the Democratic Party drew on similar messengers with similar messages. In Kentucky, Democrat Zach Dembo won a House district that had voted for Trump by 15 points in 2024. Though he had lived all over the country, he described himself as a “ninth-generation Kentuckian” whose family had been farmers in the state beginning in the 1700s. And he highlighted the fact that his opponent, Republican Ralph Alvarado, had recently resigned as the commissioner of the Department of Health — in Tennessee.
In Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District, Democrat Teresa Benitez-Thompson claimed a seat that a Democrat had never won. She wrote a piece about herself titled “Your hometown candidate” noting that she was a long-time Reno resident — a contrast with her Republican opponent, David Flippo, who earlier in the election cycle had been running for Congress from Las Vegas, a seven-hour drive away in a different district. “Calling it home for me doesn’t mean just having a temporary address in the district,” Benitez-Thompson said. “It means having a commitment to the community that you’re gonna stay put longer than a Halloween Spirit store.” She predicted that Flippo would be “packed up and back in Vegas by November 15th.”
In the 11th Congressional District in western North Carolina, which Trump won by 10 points in 2024, Jamie Ager ran as a “Mountain Democrat.” The Republican nominee also had deep roots in the region — eight generations, in fact — but Ager was able to portray himself as every bit the local candidate his opponent was. He won by 16 points.
In Maine, Democrat Troy Jackson defeated five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins. His local credentials were impeccable: He is a fifth-generation resident of the state who started working as a logger at age 19 and later led loggers in a protest at the Canadian border that became a significant local event. To the national elite, Jackson sounded unpolished; to many Maine residents, he probably sounded like a neighbor — someone who addressed voters as “brothers and sisters.”
In Mississippi, Democrat Scott Colom surprised the political world by winning a Senate seat in a very red state. Colom is deeply rooted in Mississippi: Both his parents were prominent in local politics; he attended law school outside the state, but came back after declining an offer from a Chicago firm. “He said he could make a difference here,” his mother told the Times. During the campaign, he sought to create the impression that the Republican incumbent, Cindy Hyde-Smith, had grown distant from the state. Colom held a series of “Where’s Cindy” town halls and ridiculed one of her comments about the cost of beef by running an ad implying that she was clueless about Mississippi cuisine.
In Iowa, Rob Sand (who — full disclosure — I have known for several years) became the first Democrat to be elected governor in two decades. Sand was raised in a small town in northeast Iowa. He left the state to attend college at Brown University and to model in Europe, but when it came time to attend law school, he turned down Harvard and instead attended the University of Iowa. He married into a wealthy family — but one with Iowa connections. He worked as a prosecutor in the state government and was twice elected statewide auditor.
During his campaign, he emphasized cancer rates in Iowa more than MAGA in Washington. His signs were green and orange — colors that would resonate in Iowa because of its affinity for hunting — rather than the usual Democratic Party blue.
Sand made geography a major issue for his opponent, Republican Zach Lahn. Lahn had voted in Kansas in three recent elections, before registering in Iowa in 2024; he and his wife also had children from previous marriages who were living in Kansas. The Iowa Democratic Party labeled Lahn a “Kansas carpetbagger,” and Sand ran an advertisement calling himself a “proud Iowa public school dad.” “This is not about why you’re in Kansas,” Sand told Lahn during one of their debates. “This is about the fact that you’re not in Iowa.” In one town hall, Sand said, of Lahn, “93% of his money comes from outside the state of Iowa.” He added, “Out-of-state money for an out-of-state candidate.”
In Texas, Gina Hinojosa, now governor-elect, is the daughter of the former chair of the state’s Democratic Party. She went to the University of Texas as an undergraduate and for a semester in law school (though she later completed her law degree in Washington). She met her husband at UT. She served on a Texas school board and as a state legislator. She tried not to alienate Trump supporters while campaigning, but she did talk a lot about Mike Morath — the state education commissioner whom she promised to fire.
Meanwhile, Maggie Ellis was elected chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, becoming the first out LGBTQ+ candidate to win statewide office in Texas history. That result may seem shocking — but it probably helped that Ellis is a seventh-generation Texan who has lived in the state for more than 40 years.
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The late Tip O’Neill popularized the phrase “all politics is local” when he was the speaker of the House from 1977 to 1987. While he was always assumed to be right then, he is generally assumed to be wrong now. American elections have become competitions between national political brands — and until this year, Democrats especially have paid a price.
Now, with Democrats having enjoyed such success in 2026, the question is whether Republicans will adjust accordingly. Will JD Vance return to being the local author who wrote “Hillbilly Elegy” or remain the national figure who became friends with Donald Trump, Jr.?
Political elites today aren’t just more national in their outlooks than they were a half a century ago; they are also more national than people want them to be. Prioritizing a local approach to politics helped large-D Democrats come back from the political wilderness in 2026. If the Republican Party responds by moving in the same direction, then perhaps small-d democracy will start to come back too.
David Fontana is the Samuel Tyler Research Professor of Law and a political science professor (by courtesy) at George Washington University. He is writing a book titled “The Republic of Strangers,” about the need for political elites to be more connected to local communities.