Before the 2022 midterms, most observers were expecting a red wave to sweep Democrats from power on Capitol Hill. President Joe Biden’s approval rating had plummeted thanks to his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the highest inflation in 40 years and the worst border crisis in U.S. history, among other disasters. The only question seemed to be: How big would the GOP victory be?
It didn’t turn out that way. Biden had one of the best midterm performances of any president since John F. Kennedy. What happened? The GOP saddled itself with a slate of unelectable Senate candidates — such as Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire — who lost winnable races.
Now, four years later, the reverse might be happening. The Democratic Socialists of America and their far-left allies are engaged in a hostile takeover of the Democratic Party, and they are busily putting together a slate of candidates to rival those 2022 Republicans.
Some Democrats dismiss the hard-left threat, saying that all they’re doing is making blue states and districts bluer. But Michigan is not a blue state. It is a purple state that President Donald Trump won twice. Democrats need a net gain of four seats to win back the Senate. If they don’t hold on to the Michigan seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, their chances could slip out of reach.
So, who did Democrats turn to for this critical task? On Tuesday, they nominated Abdul El-Sayed — a radical leftist who campaigned with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and other prominent democratic socialists, champions Sanders’ Medicare-for-all socialist agenda and attended or headlined many DSA events since 2017. El-Sayed implausibly denies affiliation with the DSA, and he spent time before his narrow primary win at a pool party with Hasan Piker, a leftist influencer who once said “America deserved 9/11,” who supports Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, and who declared “the fall of the U.S.S.R. was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.” Now El-Sayed will face former representative Mike Rogers (R), who nearly beat Elissa Slotkin two years ago, losing by just 20,000 votes. Rogers surely can’t believe his good luck.
Or take Maine. To win back the Senate, Democrats need to unseat Sen. Susan Collins (R). But instead of choosing a moderate, the party nominated Graham Platner — a radical leftist with a Nazi tattoo. After Platner’s candidacy imploded over an allegation of rape, Maine Democrats replaced him with Troy Jackson — an equally left-wing former state senator who finished third in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. You can’t make this stuff up.
In Texas, Democrats were given a gift when GOP voters ousted Sen. John Cornyn, a safe incumbent, in favor of Attorney General Ken Paxton — who was impeached by Republicans in May 2023 and whose wife filed for divorce last year over adultery charges. But instead of choosing a Texas-friendly centrist to take on Paxton, Democrats nominated state Rep. James Talarico — who once claimed that “God is nonbinary,” declared that the story of the Virgin Mary justifies abortion and promised in 2022 to run a “nonmeat” campaign in one of the biggest cattle-ranching states in the country.
Despite these self-inflicted wounds, Republicans are doing their best to bail Democrats out. In addition to nominating Paxton, the GOP may have handed North Carolina’s Senate seat to Democrats when Trump drove incumbent Republican Thom Tillis to retire. And once reliably red states like Alaska and Ohio are rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report.
Democrats are testing what I’d call the “Mamdani fallacy” — the idea that, instead of moving to the center to attract moderate voters, the way out of the political wilderness is to find more candidates like New York’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani who can energize the party’s increasingly radical base. That approach may work in deep-blue New York. But will it work in Michigan and Maine?
And while some Democrats bemoan the rise of DSA and DSA-adjacent candidates, they have unquestionably paved the way for the left’s hostile takeover of their party. Biden won the White House in 2020 by campaigning as a moderate — but instead of ushering in a golden age of bipartisan cooperation, he governed from the left. And today, the divide between so-called mainstream Democrats and the democratic socialists is disappearing.
Consider: The DSA wants to eliminate border enforcement. Well, for four years, Biden effectively opened the southern border, allowing millions of illegal migrants to swarm into the country. Democratic socialists want to get rid of the Senate. Many mainstream Democrats want to get rid of the filibuster, which would effectively end the Senate as a check on their radical agenda. Democratic socialists want to get rid of the Supreme Court, too. Many mainstream Democrats want to pack the Supreme Court, and install a leftist majority to rubber-stamp their power grabs.
Democrats and democratic socialists have the same goals, in other words. The DSA is just more honest about it.
Perhaps some of this will fly in a midterm election, when the out-of-power party usually gains ground. But Trump won the presidency in 2024 with a swing-state sweep because Democrats failed to deliver on Biden’s promise to govern from the center. If they want to win those states and take back the White House, they’ll need less socialism and more triangulation.
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