Stephen A. Smith: Democratic Party Needs to Be ‘Purged’

During Sunday’s broadcast of CNN’s “State of the Union,” potential 2028 presidential candidate and ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith said the modern Democratic Party would need to be purged for him to seek that party’s nod.

According to Smith, Democrats had taken their progressive politics too far.

Partial transcript as follows:

TAPPER: If you were to run for president, though, it would be as a Democrat, or no?

SMITH: You know what? I’m an independent. I’m a registered independent. I would lean — who leans left. I’m fiscally conservative when it comes to my money. I’m socially liberal. I’m liberal when it comes to social issues pretty much across the board. I believe in living and let living. So I’m a moderate. And I would say, if I had to run, it would be as a

Democrat, but I’m not happy with the Democratic Party. So the Democratic Party, as presently constructed, it would pretty much need to be purged in order for me to assume that I would want to be associated with them and I would garner their support, because I don’t like the way they have gone about doing a lot of things for a very, very long period of time.

And I think that I don’t view Donald Trump as winning the election. I view the Democrats as losing the election, as absolutely, positively blowing it with some of their actions. And that’s why I think that, again, if somebody was to associate me with that, the party, as presently constructed, where it leans so extremely left, or at least has spent the vast majority of time doing that, oh, that is not something that I would vibe with at all.

I would definitely be looking to be a game changer in that regard.

TAPPER: What are some of the things that Democrats have been doing that have turned you off and that make you say the party needs to be purged? Who needs to be purged from it, first of all? Do you have any names?

SMITH: Well, I’m not going to name names. I’m not going to do that to a lot of people, but we know who the extreme left is. We know how they go about operating. We know what we lean towards when it came to open borders.

We know that the spending was excessive, even though it’s excessive on the Republican side as well. I think a $37 trillion budget, when Republicans try to act like it’s just the Democrats, that’s not true. But the Democrats certainly shouldn’t be absolved from blame in that regard.

Certainly, with identity politics, woke culture, cancer culture, I thought that that was something that ravaged our nation psychologically, because you had people literally scared they were going to lose their jobs if they pronounced the wrong pronoun, for crying out loud. It got that bad.

And I think that that’s one of the reasons that Donald Trump is in office today, because so much stuff, a lot is focused on the individual, as opposed to actual policies itself. I’m talking about what they preached and what they talked to the American people about more so than what they’re doing. The kind of messages that they were disseminating was incredibly uncomfortable to listen to and to hear.

And I thought that it wasn’t emblematic of what most Americans are thinking about. They’re trying to pay their mortgages, rent, buy food and groceries, pay gas and deal with the prices, the cost of living. And they want safety in the streets. That’s primarily what most American citizens are about, trying to live in peace and harmony.

And that’s not something that I think either side has promoted along the way. And that’s why I think the state of the nation is what it is at this particular moment in time.