During the midterm election next year, the Democratic Party hopes to regain lost ground on Capitol Hill by running a new crop of “service candidates” — men and women whose campaign bios stress their past experience in the military and national security agencies.

One booster of this approach is Elissa Slotkin, a business-friendly Democrat who won a US Senate seat in Michigan last year. She first entered politics as a successful candidate for the House in 2018 after three tours of duty in Iraq as a CIA analyst and then working as a top-level Pentagon official, whose responsibilities included “ensuring Israel’s qualitative military edge.”

In a candid interview with Politico, she urged Democrats to ditch their reputation for being “weak and woke” and field more candidates like herself, who have “goddamn Alpha energy” and can “fucking retake the flag.” In pursuit of this objective, her mainly male ex-colleagues in the House who served in the military have created a Democratic Veterans Caucus (DVC), cochaired by Representatives Ted Lieu (D-CA), Pat Ryan (D-NY), and Chris Deluzio (D-PA).