Left-wing Democrats have exulted after democratic socialists emerged victorious from House primaries in deep-blue New York districts this week.
But centrist Democrats have reacted with a very different tone. Alarm.
“We are capitalist, not socialist,” reads a letter, titled “The Promise to America,” signed by a group of moderate House Democrats two days after the primaries.
With four months until the midterm elections, the outcomes in New York have deepened divisions in the Democratic Party, threatening to unleash a renewed internal debate about electability and how Democrats speak about capitalism. In Congress and elsewhere, some moderates have quickly distanced themselves from the victorious far-left candidates, worrying Republicans will use them to paint the entire party as extreme.
Organizers of the letter, which had been released earlier this month, unveiled the first 15 signatories on Thursday — two days after primary results that put democratic socialists on track to double their ranks in the House.
“Politics forces false choices between extremes on right and left,” the letter said. “We reject them.”
The letter is led by Representative Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat who flipped a swing district on Long Island two years ago. He said the group aimed to secure signatures from 20 Democratic candidates, 200 state and local officials, and 2,000 activists — and to “build a movement.”
He is contending with an ascendant left-wing movement growing in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, endorsed a slate of three House primary candidates who identify as democratic socialists. Those candidates swept their races, empowering the activist left and alarming moderate Democrats.
In an interview, Mr. Suozzi said “that message from Tuesday is not the message that I embrace” and that his party needed to do a better job making clear “what we do believe in.”
“The bottom line is that you have to give the D.S.A. and you have to give MAGA credit, because they’re organized,” Mr. Suozzi said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization. “And the people that don’t agree with their philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized.”
Mr. Suozzi said democratic socialists were tapping into “real economic anxiety” and were “right in their diagnosis of the problem.” But he argued that Democrats should pursue policies grounded not in socialism but in a pro-union form of capitalism.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, Dora Pekec, pushed back on the letter, saying in a statement that the “only thing extreme is defending a status quo where working families can’t afford to live.”
And a representative for the Democratic Socialists of America, Priscilla Yeverino, said in a statement that the group was gaining popularity because it was pursuing policies that Americans support, and that “Red Scare tactics are no longer working.”
“Ending wars, passing Medicare for All, forgiving student loan debt, abolishing ICE and taxing the rich — those are all popular policies” said the statement.
Other prominent voices in the party made clear they were unimpressed by some of the candidates who had won primaries in New York.
Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, told CNN that “We as a party need to find our way toward candidates who actually can deliver for people.”
Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said the outcomes in New York were “dangerous” for Democrats nationally.
“What we’ve seen Republicans do very successfully before is weaponize the craziest ideas of the activist left,” he said. “And now the ammunition they’ve got is much, much more powerful.”
Brad Lander, who is not a member of D.S.A. but is a self-described democratic socialist who beat Representative Dan Goldman in a New York primary on Tuesday, said that he hoped the party would “spend more time building a unified Democratic message” than on “factional infighting.”
Voters had made clear that they “want to see people who fight harder for working families,” Mr. Lander said Friday.
“And that should unify the Democratic Party — that’s not progressives versus moderates, that’s fighters versus folders,” said Mr. Lander, a Brooklyn Democrat.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, has downplayed the disagreements in his party.
“We’re seeing tremendous energy from all different areas of our party,” he told reporters on Wednesday, according to his office. The Democratic nominee for mayor of Washington, D.C., is also a democratic socialist. She defeated a centrist in a primary this month.
Republicans have appeared pleased with the ascent of such candidates, moving quickly to reprise a favored strategy: casting Democrats as outside the mainstream.
“They want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” President Trump said in a speech on Friday. “Communism is very easy to sell. It destroys everything.”
Andrew Yang, a former Democrat who ran for president in 2020 and for mayor of New York in 2021, seemed to marvel at the divisions in the Democratic Party, which he left five years ago.
“The Democratic Party,” he wrote on social media, “really is at least two parties in one at this point.”
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