Alicia Nieves is a columnist for UnHerd, from which this article was adapted.
Here is an uncomfortable truth facing Democrats: A left-wing movement increasingly appears capable of remaking their party in its socialist image. The evidence of the liberal establishment being sidelined around the country is becoming difficult to ignore.
Last week, Graham Platner, who has described himself as a socialist in online forums, won Maine’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate with 72 percent of the vote. So significant was his lead that the party’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, suspended her campaign weeks before the contest. On the other coast, Nithya Raman, the first DSA member elected to the Los Angeles City Council, advanced to a mayoral runoff against the incumbent, Karen Bass.
Meanwhile, in New York, Zohran Mamdani is using his political capital as mayor not to unify the Democratic Party but to build a New York-based socialist faction in Congress. He recently endorsed the DSA-backed firebrand Darializa Avila Chevalier and progressive Brad Lander in their respective bids. Further south, preliminary vote tallies suggest Janeese Lewis George, another democratic socialist, will become the next mayor of D.C.
The Democratic establishment will now be compelled to spend millions to fend off any remaining primary challengers, no small feat for a party that needs significant funding to compete in other battleground races. Aside from such expenditures, however, the national leadership seems unwilling to acknowledge the scale of the socialist threat.
Unlike previous iterations of the American hard left, today’s movement has learned to build a durable political infrastructure capable of producing candidates, mobilizing volunteers and influencing Democratic politics. For more than a decade, this movement has quietly built a political ecosystem that operates independently from the traditional party. Organizations such as the DSA, Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party have spent years recruiting candidates, training activists and building donor networks.
The movement’s success isn’t measured only by the number of candidates it elects. It’s also reflected in a growing capacity to shape Democratic politics. Across the United States, self-described progressives and DSA-endorsed candidates have assembled voting blocs on city councils and successfully pressured moderate Democrats to slash police funding, ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement from city jurisdictions and expand funding for various social welfare programs.
No organization has been more central to this effort than the DSA. With more than 200 chapters, nearly 100,000 members, thousands of motivated volunteers and a growing roster of elected officials, the group has become the backbone of the modern socialist movement. Its greatest strength is its willingness to adapt tactics to local conditions, either touting its presence or deliberately obscuring its involvement when doing so is more electorally advantageous.
Platner’s rise illustrates this well. His candidacy, the public is now learning, was largely manufactured by a handful of DSA members from the same networks that powered Mamdani’s election. Socialist operatives Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan explicitly sought out Platner through a DSA-affiliated local activist group. The duo then crafted a carefully curated image of him as a humble veteran and blue-collar oyster farmer. The operatives managed to keep several major liabilities from coming to light until late in the primary, including his Nazi tattoo, allegations of manhandling an ex-girlfriend and extramarital sexting. With Platner as the nominee, Democrats are now stuck with a socialist with enough baggage to sink the party’s chances in Maine and damage its brand elsewhere in the country.
If that campaign showcased a growing sophistication in defeating the party’s preferred pick, Raman’s challenge to Bass reveals something more fundamental. The socialist movement will turn on Democratic incumbents regardless of how much they’ve already conceded to the radical left.
Bass wasn’t a moderate who resisted progressive demands from city lawmakers or the grassroots. She had worked closely with Raman on their biggest shared priorities, including the city’s homelessness crisis. The mayor also had the support of many of her progressive colleagues on the council. But none of that mattered. Once Raman saw that Bass had become politically vulnerable, as she did after mishandling the Palisades wildfires, the young socialist decided to challenge her. The movement, in other words, isn’t one that can be appeased; it’s an insatiable insurgency that views propagating its own power as equally important, if not more so, than securing policy victories.
The Democratic Party thus faces the seemingly impossible task of forging a united campaign capable of winning enough moderate votes to flip at least one chamber of Congress, while resisting a hostile takeover by a radical movement. The costs of that high-wire act are already in full view.
In Maine, party officials have no choice but to rationalize Platner’s fitness to the middle-of-the-road voters they can’t afford to lose. In L.A., the broader progressive ecosystem’s decision to challenge Bass has helped transform what might otherwise have been a routine municipal election into a national Democratic headache. The presence of television personality Spencer Pratt has further amplified the failures of blue governance in the city. While the DSA has formally withheld its endorsement from Raman — in part over her tepid support for Israel after the Oct. 7 massacre — there’s little doubt she’d push city politics closer to the group’s position.
As usual, Democratic leaders have opted for damage control over direct confrontation in response to each power grab. This posture of strategic ambiguity reflects a naive confidence that maintaining a peaceful coalition will eventually absorb DSA and progressive officials into the party apparatus and keep them under establishment authority. Never mind the strength the movement has built at the local level or its willingness to use local political power to resist submission to national leadership.
The tipping point may have already arrived. If Mamdani succeeds in helping even one DSA challenger unseat a sitting member of Congress, or if the candidate cultivated by DSA operatives captures the Maine Senate seat, it will demonstrate that the party establishment can no longer protect its own incumbents. The result: Every safe Democratic seat will become a potential target.
Members of Congress will live in fear of the DSA or other leftist organizations launching primary challenges against them. The threat itself would become the most powerful leverage the movement has to push the national party to the hard left. The Democrats’ performance in the midterms, as well as their viability in the 2028 presidential election, will depend on whether they can confront this challenge.
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