Take away the rough-around-the-edges neo-nazi bloodlust from a typical MAGA Republican and pretend that warmongering servants of America’s corporate overlords truly care about women who lost their right to choose a safe, legal abortion, and you could have Tom Malinowski, Rebecca Bennett, or Josh Gottheimer, three of New Jersey’s best-financed Democratic congressional candidates.
A political action group styling itself as a guardian of American democracy is throwing its weight behind a slate of congressional candidates who won’t make big changes to save the world or reasonably distribute the fruits of the world’s greatest economy.
A closer examination, however, reveals a roster heavily aligned with a donor-friendly neoliberal economic ideology that often sidelines the progressive priorities gaining voice within the Democratic Party.
Leadership Now Project, which calls its selection process “rigorous” and “nonpartisan,” has unveiled its endorsements for the 2026 cycle, and among their picks are some nearly-Republican Democrats.
“We are a membership organization of business leaders committed to protecting democracy as a foundation for a thriving economy and political stability,” says a description of the group on its website. “We take action—investing in leaders, influencing policy, responding to risks, and partnering to drive solutions.”
The seven Democrats who sided with Republicans to approve a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Laura Gillen (N.Y.), Don Davis (N.C.), Tom Suozzi (N.Y.) and Vicente Gonzalez (Texas).
Gillen and Gluesenkamp Perez appear on Leadership Now PAC’s official list of endorsed candidates. Davis, Golden, and other incumbents were recognized in a broader Leadership Now Candidates slate, but not all are necessarily listed as PAC-endorsed
The list is a who’s who of Democratic incumbents and challengers who frequently champion fiscal orthodoxy, deregulatory leanings, and hawkish foreign policy—tenets that have long defined the neoliberal wing of the party.
That “investing” and “influencing” often coincide with helping candidates who bolt from party positions when Republicans need a handful of votes to squash Democratic opposition.
These candidates, while often personally accomplished, exhibit a voting record and donor base that tell a familiar story. An analysis of campaign finance data shows a pronounced reliance on affluent individual donors and corporate PACs from the finance, technology, and defense sectors.
This financial bedrock consistently conflicts with the party’s stated ambitions for robust social welfare expansion, aggressive climate action, and challenging concentrated corporate power.
Take the matter of healthcare. While the progressive wing fights for a single-payer system, many Leadership Now-backed figures have favored incremental, market-based reforms that preserve the lucrative private insurance industry.
On education, their solutions often center on charter schools and student loan repayment plans, sidestepping calls for tuition-free public college.
Their trade stances are routinely pro-corporate, and their approach to Wall Street is one of management, not fundamental restructuring.
This isn’t about political pragmatism; it’s about philosophical capture. The group’s criteria of “academic and professional excellence” and “pragmatic leadership” often serve as code for an affinity with elite financial and institutional power. It is a worldview that sees the complex equations of the market as more reliable than the urgent demands of working-class voters.
The group boasts of its candidates winning in competitive districts. Yet this success frequently comes by appealing to affluent, college-educated suburbanites—a demographic shift that has reshaped the Democratic coalition while leaving its working-class foundation eroded. The strategy secures seats but dilutes the party’s economic agenda.
The implication is clear: Leadership Now is not simply defending democratic institutions. It is advocating for a specific kind of politics within that framework—one where democracy is protected procedurally but constrained economically. It elevates leaders who will uphold the system’s stability while ensuring the economic status quo remains comfortably intact.
In an era of widening inequality and profound climate crisis, this carefully curated slate offers competence without courage, stability without transformation.
They are presented as defenders of a democratic process that, too often, their own policy choices have made less responsive to the people it is meant to serve.
The bitter pill is this: some of the most hailed defenders of our democratic form are among the most reliable guardians of its unjust economic content.