At first glance, Graham Platner and Adam Hamawy share little in common. Platner, an oyster farmer and a United States Marine Corps veteran, carries his burly, tattooed frame with a gruff and outspoken attitude. It is easier to imagine him as a lumberjack swinging an axe in the woods of his native Maine than as a politician glad-handing for votes.

On the other hand, Hamawy, a New Jersey doctor, is soft-spoken, bookish, and modest. Both are Democrats who won their primaries and will be running for election this fall.

Despite their differences in appearance, they share one key qualification that reflects what American voters seem to be looking for this year more than any other: authenticity.

In an era of rambunctious politics on the right, the mainstream Democratic Party has struggled to offer its voters a compelling alternative. Joe Biden won the US presidential elections in 2020 by offering the comfort of a “safe hand on the tiller”. But his vice president, Kamala Harris, even before being promoted to the Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential race, exuded a phoniness that seemed stage-managed by back-room consultants.

The establishment’s leading candidate for the presidential nomination in 2028 is the greyest of grey men: California Governor Gavin Newsom. During his tenure, his policies and rhetoric have appeared carefully manicured, while his one recent foray into controversy – the secondhand observation that some commentators have described Israel’s actions as “sort of an apartheid state” – was quickly rowed back, with Newsom clarifying within days that actually he “reveres” the state of Israel.

In the face of such options, Democratic voters want politicians who are not afraid to tell the truth, and these days, there are few truths more obvious than what is happening in Palestine. That’s why the willingness of novice politicians like Platner and Hamawy to speak plainly about Palestine has made them leading candidates in their respective races.

Hamawy has taken his medical skills to Gaza, and speaks with deep empathy about the plight of children he operated on, and the conditions he was witness to. Platner, as a Marine veteran who served three combat tours in Iraq, has drawn on his military experience to criticise Israeli military tactics – often in very colourful terms. Both have called Gaza a genocide.

The party establishment has hardly been welcoming of either candidacy. In a rural and rugged Maine, whose politics are characterised by a fiercely independent streak, Platner is running for the US Senate against the five-term Republican incumbent Susan Collins, having pushed aside an effort spearheaded by Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to insert the current Maine governor, 78-year-old Janet Mills, as the party’s nominee.

Meanwhile, in the diverse suburbs of New Jersey’s 12th Congressional District, Hamawy won the Democratic primary to replace retiring Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman. He has gathered a range of endorsements, including from dynamic voices such as Senator Bernie Sanders and House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Back in Washington, DC, the main institution of the party, the Democratic National Committee, recently released its much-anticipated “autopsy” of Harris’s failed 2024 presidential campaign. Despite extensive evidence demonstrating that her unwillingness to separate herself from Biden’s unconditional military support for Israel was a central factor in her defeat, the DNC analysis fails to mention Gaza even once.

“Voters don’t care about that,” a senior Democratic staffer told me some months ago. “This election is going to be about Trump, and about the economy.”

Well, perhaps. But at the same time, turnout relies on giving voters not only something to vote against, but to vote for. Last year, in New York City, voters chose the vividly charismatic, undeniably authentic, and vocally pro-Palestinian Zohran Mamdani over the predictable and dull option proffered by the establishment, Andrew Cuomo.

The party has tried to brush off that election as an exception – a unique candidacy in a unique city that has no bearing on the national political picture. But voters in Maine and New Jersey seem poised to demonstrate that support for Palestine is not an aberration – it is a key indicator for something that, in this era of AI fakery and failed establishment dogmas, Americans prize more than ever: authenticity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.