There’s a lot of excitement about and interest in the leftward movement of the Democratic Party base. I think it is very much a real development. The election of Zohran Mamdani, the mass turnout for the No Kings protests over the last year, and the growing majority of Democrats supporting progressive economic positions and Palestine all suggest as much.
But much less attention has been given to the shifting composition of the congressional Democratic Party, and here the story actually runs in the other direction. As of 2025, a majority of House Democrats now belong to the party’s center-right caucus, the New Democrat Coalition (NDC).
New Democrats owe much of their strength to their rapid growth between 2015 and 2019, when the caucus grew from a quarter to close to half of the party’s congressional membership. The combination of the anti-Trump swing among center-right Republicans and the party’s own strenuous efforts to put down roots in suburban America (a development I wrote more about last year) in these years no doubt helped reconfigure the congressional party.
But until last year, New Democrats were about evenly balanced with their counterpart on the party’s center left, the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC). It was only after the 2024 elections that New Democrats emerged as the majority faction in the party, while the Progressives shrunk.
Membership in Congress’s ideological caucuses should be taken with a grain of salt. Congressmembers often join these caucuses less out of an ideological commitment and more as a means to boost their reputation with party activists in their home districts. That’s also why a decent number of Democratic members of Congress, for example, belong both to the CPC and the NDC (based on the most recent membership lists, thirty-one House Democrats are members of both caucuses).
So, to get a better sense of the balance of power in the congressional party and how it’s changed, I pulled lists of caucus membership…
Auteur: Neal Meyer
