The sweeping victories by socialist candidates in last week’s Democrat Party primary elections in New York City have intensified a growing internal debate over the leftward shift of the national Democrat Party, and whether more mainstream Democrat candidates and elected officials across the country will be replaced by candidates whose first allegiance is to a Marxist organization that calls itself Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

In a political analysis by Allysia Finley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, she wrote, of a similar purge of traditional Democrat from the ranks of elected officials across the country in the November midterm elections, “Who knows how the civil war [in the Democrat Party] ends, but many Democrats are likely to lose their heads if the socialist purge in New Yorks Democratic primaries last week is a portent.”

“Nine of 10 candidates endorsed by the DSA won primaries for the state Legislature and Congress,” Finley reminds us. “All three insurgent socialist candidates for Congress who were endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won, and two of them defeated left-wing incumbent congressmen whose re-election bids were backed by the local and state Democrat Party establishment.”

The New York primary results have prompted opposite reactions from the leaders of the mainstream and progressive wings of the Democrat party. The party’s progressive activists argue that last week’s New York victories demonstrate growing voter support for radical socialist-inspired initiatives addressing the issues of housing affordability, economic inequality, labor rights, and expanded government social and welfare programs. This was the DSA-inspired platform upon which the formerly unknown Mamdani won the election for mayor last year, shocking the political world.

Last week’s primary victories also enhanced the prestige and influence of the leaders of the progressive movement, including its inspirational elder statesman, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders; Squad leader Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and Mayor Mamdani, whose successful endorsements have turned him overnight into the national Democrat Party’s newest political kingmaker, and a “poster child” against which GOP candidates will run in the campaign leading up to the November election.

Endangering the Democrats’ Golden Opportunity in November

But conventional liberal Democrats worry that their Republican opponents will seize upon these progressive victories as evidence that the national Democrat Party as a whole is moving too far to the left, and is too obsessed with elitist issues to win the support of enough independent and working-class voters to win the November midterm general election. The liberal shift could endanger a golden opportunity for the Democrats to pick enough seats to take over both the House and Senate for the last two years of President Trump’s second and last term in the White House, totally stifling his legislative agenda and turning him into a true lame-duck president.

The concerns about the political liability created by too many socialist Democrat candidates running for office in November have already led several moderate Democratic elected officials, led by Long Island Congressman Tom Suozzi, to publicly separate their much more conventional policy positions from those associated with the party’s socialist wing led by Sanders, AOC and Mamdani.

A Moderate Democrat Declaration of Political Independence

In a public letter titled “The Promise to America,” signed by Suozzi and 14 other prominent moderate Democrats, they emphasized their support for free market capitalism under suitable government controls, the institutions of public safety including local police forces and the criminal justice system, and mainstream principles of Democrat governance, while rejecting what they characterized as the ideological extremes and impractical utopian policies promoted by the DSA and the leadership of the party’s progressive wing.

The moderate Democrat signatories declared in the letter that “politics forces false choices between extremes on right and left. We reject them.

“We are capitalist, not socialist,” the letter continues. “We want safety, not lawlessness [and] we are proud, not ashamed of America. These basic concepts of American democracy and political governance had long been supported universally by members of both major national political parties. But the fact that a small group of Democrat moderates now feel their position to be so endangered by Democrat socialists who reject these principles that they need to recommit themselves publicly to them is convincing evidence of how far the progressive wing of their party has strayed from this country’s mainstream political norms and assumptions.”

The initial signers of “The Promise to America” said that their immediate goal is to recruit 20 Democrat candidates, 200 state and local Democrat elected officials, and 2,000 moderate Democrat activists as a foundation upon which to build a movement to take back control of their party.

Moderate Democrats Fighting for Political Survival

For the sake of their own political survival, these more moderate Democrats felt the need to challenge the growing influence of the DSA and progressive activists over the policies of the Democrat party as a whole. They fear that the extremely liberal candidates that the progressives choose will not be able to compete effectively against their Republican opponents at the ballot box in the cities, states, and congressional districts that are different from the deep blue New York City, California, and Washington, D.C., where the Democrats hold an overwhelming numerical advantage in voter registration. Their goal in publishing their policy statement endorsing a more traditional liberal approach to national issues is to help similarly minded moderate Democrat candidates, running in competitive districts across the country, avoid being linked to the much more extreme positions taken by progressive candidates running in urban districts and big cities where liberal Democrats make up the vast majority of registered voters.

Speaking personally, Congressman Suozzi said, “that [the progressive] message from [the New York primary last week] is not the message that I embrace.” He argued that the more traditional wing of the Democrat party needs to do a better job of making it clear to the voters “what we do believe in.”

However, Suozzi also conceded that, “you have to give the DSA and you have to give MAGA credit, because they’re organized. The people [in their political parties] that don’t agree with their philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we [moderate Democrats do] have to get organized.”

Tapping Into Voter Frustration With Economic Conditions

Suozzi also acknowledged that the progressive candidates have successfully tapped into widespread voter frustration over economic conditions and the affordability crisis.

He argues that while progressive candidates have correctly recognized growing voter frustrations over their current economic challenges, Democrats should pursue solutions through intelligent government regulation of free market capitalism rather than the inefficiencies and waste inherent in top-down government-controlled socialist economic approaches.

The moderate Democrat alternative approach to dealing with these economic challenges is outlined in the “Promise to America” initiative, which emphasizes: support for capitalism rather than socialism; public safety and law enforcement; patriotism and support for classic American institutions; and a pragmatic approach to governance rather than strict adherence to ideologically driven policies which don’t always work as intended or expected.

On the need for new national economic policies, Suozzi is in agreement with former New York Democrat Congressman Steve Israel, who represented competitive congressional districts on Long Island from 2001 to 2017. In an interview with the Washington Post, Israel said that Democrats “need to develop economic policies that resonate with a younger generation that believes the American Dream has been stolen away from them.” Israel believes that these young voters are looking for a chance to become homeowners, for less expensive child care and health care, and for more economic security. But they are frustrated because, Israel said, “they believe that the system is rigged [against them], and it is.”

New York Democrat Preferences May Not Reflect the National Party

Israel also said that, “Democratic primaries in a handful of the most progressive districts in the country do not define Democrats in Congress, or Democrats across the country. I’m more interested in what’s going on in Brooklyn, Iowa, [which is in] a state that is going to be competitive, and is much more representative than Brooklyn, New York, of the political mood in the rest of the country.”

Matt Bennett is the leader of the centrist political organization called the Third Way, which seeks to find ways to bridge the wide political gap between the left-wing and right-wing of American politics. He also said that the outcomes of the primary election in New York last week were “dangerous for Democrat candidates nationwide.”

“What we’ve seen Republicans do very successfully before is weaponize the craziest ideas of the activist left,” Bennett said. “And now the ammunition they’ve got [from the New York Democrat primary outcomes] is much, much more powerful.”

He predicted that Republican candidates will remind independent and swing voters of the most unpopular socialist policies and slogans associated with the DSA candidates, such as “defund the police” and “abolish ICE.” The slogans might convince the crucial swing voters that even mainstream Democrat candidates will wind up forced to support the extreme agenda that the progressive activists have been able to impose on the Democrat Party as a whole. “This is like [a] super-crazy [political] land we are in now,” Bennett said to the Washington Post, referring to the current state of the party.

Democrats Can’t Win Nationally on Promises They Can’t Deliver

Other prominent Democrat voices have also made it clear they are concerned that the party’s candidates in the midterm elections running in more competitive districts and states around the country will be negatively stereotyped by the more extreme ultra-liberal candidates who won their primaries in New York by making attractive but ultimately impossible to fulfill promises of benefits to the voters.

Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who is widely considered to be a potential 2028 Democrat presidential candidate, told CNN that “We as a party need to find our way toward candidates who actually can deliver for people.”

According to an analysis of the deepening split within the Democrat party by Jeet Heer, writing for The Nation, the moderates are “freaking out, sometimes even openly threatening to tear the party apart rather than work within a party dominated [by] a robust wing of democratic socialists. Some of the moderates have said, “If the left isn’t stopped, they [would] prefer to sit out the [November midterm] election or expel the left” entirely from the party.

The analysis suggests “that if enough centrist Democrats [decide to] split the party [rather than cede the party’s leadership to the progressives], the GOP might still win the midterms and elect a MAGA successor in 2028 despite President Trump’s historically low current job approval ratings.”

A CNN report quoted “one Democratic lawmaker sitting in a battleground district [said] that [he and his moderate colleagues] are so concerned about the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America that they have recently begun having serious conversations with donors about leaving the party altogether.”

Is There a Role Waiting for Moderate Democrats in the House?

That seems unlikely. Even if the Democrats do win back majority control of the House in the November midterm election, the size of that majority will be crucial to its legislative effectiveness. If that majority is no more than 10 or 15 seats, the remaining Democrat moderates in the House could band together to block some of the most extreme progressive legislative agenda items. They could then force the progressives to drop their most extreme demands to secure the number of moderate Democrat votes they need to pass any legislation that the House Republicans are united in opposing.

There is already a small group of pragmatic, fiscally conservative, and centrist Democrats in the House, generally representing moderate to conservative congressional districts, who proudly call themselves members of the Blue Dog Coalition. The group was founded in 1995 and has traditionally supported fiscal constraint by the federal government and a strong national defense. They have also been dedicated to reducing the national debt, championing pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) budget rules, and working across the aisle to find bipartisan compromises with like-minded, relatively moderate Republican House members.

Democrat Leaders in the House and Senate Running Scared

Another reason for concern that moderate Democrats like Suozzi and Shapiro have expressed is the behavior of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. They have both fallen into line with the socialist wing of the Democrat party, in an apparent effort to maintain their leadership positions in the face of growing criticism of their tactics from outspoken critics who have openly called for their replacement by more progressive House Democrat leaders.

Over the weekend, Jeffries, who hopes to become the next Speaker of the House, celebrated the victories of the four Democrat congressional primary winners in New York City, including the three DSA insurgents.

“Congratulations to our newest members of the NYC congressional delegation. From public servants to union organizers to community activists, the path is different, but the work is the same,” Jeffries wrote, assuming that their victory in the November general election over their Republican opponents is an inevitable fait accompli.

Jeffries is painfully aware that if the Democrats are successful in capturing majority control of the House in November, thanks to the victories of progressive candidates, their future support for him in his current positions, both as the leader of House Democrats and as the Democrat congressman from his Brooklyn district, cannot be taken for granted.

Jeffries Is Warned by Progressives That He Could Be “Next”

There was a reminder of Jeffries’ political vulnerability during one of the DSA post-primary victory parties last week. When a picture of Jeffries appeared on a giant cable-TV screen, the crowd of DSA supporters in the room began to chant “you’re next.”

The phrase was interpreted as a political threat to Jeffries on two different levels. On one level, it could be understood as an effort by the increasingly powerful progressive caucus in the House to seize formal control of the chamber by replacing Jeffries with a progressive House Speaker who would be even less cooperative with House Republicans than Jeffries would be.

On the other hand, the progressive crowd at that victory rally may have been warning Jeffries that he may also be subjected to a primary challenge from the left by a DSA-affiliated socialist candidate in 2022 when he must stand again for re-election to his seat in the House by the liberal voters in his “deep blue” Brooklyn congressional district.

Pelosi Was Able to Leave the Speakership With Her Reputation Intact

In recent years, Jeffries’ predecessor as the leader of House Democrats, Nancy Pelosi, had more than her share of run-ins with progressive activists who harshly criticized her for making bipartisan deals with House Republicans to achieve bipartisan goals. But somehow, Pelosi always managed to find a way to keep the revolting progressives in line when the time came for them to cast their votes. As a result, Pelosi was able to step down voluntarily with her dignity and her reputation as one of the most effective and successful House Democrat leaders in history still intact. But Jeffries may not be so fortunate.

Writing an opinion piece for The Hill, conservative constitutional and legal expert Jonathan Turley noted that, “For years, Jeffries has joined other Democrats in fueling the rage on the left in the hopes of becoming the next House Speaker. Whether calling for supporters to ‘fight in the streets’, denouncing the Supreme Court as ‘illegitimate’ or posting an image of himself brandishing a baseball bat, Jeffries sought to portray himself as a class warrior worthy of the mob’s support.”

Turley then compares Jeffries to establishment figures during the French Revolution in the 18th century, who followed the same “self-destructive pattern. . . [thinking] that they could use mobs against their opponents while hoping that they would be overlooked.”

Turley notes that “the French Revolution was not some spontaneous uprising of the proletariat or underclass. It was led by relatively affluent figures on the [French political] left, from aristocrats to journalists to lawyers [such as] Maximilien Robespierre. . . who helped organize the revolutionary Jacobins. . .”

A French Revolution Lesson About the Dangers of Leading a Mob

“These educated and affluent figures turned to working-class [French] radicals as their muscle to terrorize their opponents. And not long after executing [all of the French] aristocrats and clergy [they could find], the radicals turned on the Jacobins themselves. [Their fellow French] moderates were sent to the guillotine by Robespierre and his henchmen as they clung to power. But eventually, the mob came for them, too,” Turley observed.

The same historical analogy applies to Senator Schumer, who has also tried to downplay the dangers implicit in the growing split between the moderates and the socialist progressives in his party by praising the diversity within Democrat ranks as an end in itself.

“Were seeing tremendous energy from all different areas of our party,” Schumer told reporters the day after the New York primary last week, ignoring the predictions that the success of the socialists in defeating the Democrat congressional incumbents in New York City will only further encourage progressives to put up AOC as their preferred replacement for Schumer two years from now, both as a Senator from New York and the leader of other Democrats in the Senate.

Schumer’s Shameful Threat Against Supreme Court Justices

Schumer was also guilty of trying to organize and lead the liberal mob a few years ago in its attempts to intimidate and threaten the members of the majority block of six Supreme Court conservative justices that was put in place at the end of Trump’s first term as president. Those justices then began issuing landmark legal rulings that eventually overturned many previous liberal court rulings, including the controversial Roe v. Wade decision. In March, 2020, Schumer personally went to a pro-Roe v. Wade rally on the steps of the Supreme Court building where he warned those conservative justices, “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful [conservative] decisions.”

The uproar generated by Schumer’s clearly implied threat to the physical safety of the justices earned him a rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts. He condemned Schumer’s threatening statements as “not only inappropriate, they are [also] dangerous.”

Schumer later apologized for his statements on the Senate floor, lamely claiming that “the words I used. . . didn’t come out the way I intended.” But they still served Schumer’s larger purpose, establishing him, at least for that moment, as the leader of the liberal Democrat mob, which is still intent on undermining the legal authority of the Supreme Court by packing its bench with new liberal justices to overrule the court’s current conservative majority.

Progressive Democrats Want to Repeat FDR’s Big Mistake

It is the same tactic that Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to use in 1937, after the Supreme Court of that era had struck down some of his liberal New Deal economic programs. But Roosevelt’s effort was foiled by a bipartisan nationwide outcry against his proposal, because it would have disturbed the delicate balance of powers in the U.S. Constitution, which requires the political independence of the Supreme Court as a check on the power of the executive and legislative branches of government. The same objections are still relevant today in response to current progressive Democrat proposals that would turn the Supreme Court and its control over this country’s legal system into their partisan political tools.

But Schumer’s popularity with the radical left wing of the Democrat Party was short-lived. He came under bitter criticism from progressive Democrats for enabling the passage of a continuing resolution crafted by Trump and the Republicans to fund the federal government through the end of fiscal year 2025 and avert a government shutdown in March of that year.

Schumer’s Struggles to Retain His Leadership Role

Many political observers believe that in order to restore his leadership credibility with the progressives, Schumer deliberately instigated the longest federal government shutdown in history. It lasted for 43 days in October and November of 2025, followed by an extended shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from February through April of this year in reaction to Trump’s crackdown on criminal illegal aliens in this country through raids conducted by DHS agencies including the Border Patrol and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Nevertheless, one of the standard talking points of progressive Democrat senatorial candidates in this election cycle is a call for Schumer’s replacement as the leader of Senate Democrats.

Legal commentator Turley notes the irony in the fact that, much like the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution who were eventually consumed by the fire of revolution that they started, including Robespierre and his right hand man, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, and Georges Danton, Democrat leaders Jeffries and Schumer are likely to suffer political execution by the progressive mob in their party that they have been trying so hard to appease.

Turley writes that, with Democratic voters now expressing support for socialism in record numbers and politicians pledging radical changes to our political system, they have proven again to be what Soviet communists called [during the 1930s and 1940s] the “useful idiots” of the American left.

More opportunities for DSA-endorsed candidates and other socialist-leaning “fellow travelers” to demonstrate their growing political strength in Democrat primaries are coming soon. They are running in a Senate race in Michigan, a House and gubernatorial race in Colorado, and a mayoral race in Los Angeles.

In addition to the progressive socialist sweep in last week’s New York primary, Janeese Lewis George, a Democrat socialist, won the nomination to become the mayor of Washington, D.C., defeating a centrist candidate in a primary held on June 16.

The Victory of the Columbia Campus Activist Who Hates Israel

Of the three winning socialist congressional candidates backed by Mamdani in the New York primary last week, perhaps the most disturbing for Jewish New Yorkers was Darializa Avila Chevalier, whose only prior political experience was as a protest organizer on the Columbia University campus for Students for Justice in Palestine and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. She helped to stage a 13-day sit-in demonstration against Israel and the organized harassment of Jewish students on the Columbia University campus in April, 2024. She has also boasted about her participation in a rally held in Times Square that had been organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation on October 8, 2023, to celebrate the heinous attack Hamas launched from Gaza into southern Israel the previous day. Chevalier joined the DSA in 2025, and said that her political views were “informed by the writings of Angela Davis,” the notoriously violent Black activist. She also cited as a source for her hatred of Israel her experiences as a student intern teaching English to Palestinian children living in the West Bank town of Nablus (Shechem) in 2014. During her primary campaign, Chevalier repeatedly questioned Israel’s legitimacy while describing it as an apartheid state.

In the primary, Chevalier defeated incumbent Democrat Congressman Adriano Espaillat, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who represents a district covering the large Hispanic voter communities in Upper Manhattan and western portions of the Bronx, in one of the most significant defeats for a senior House Democrat during this election cycle.

James Carville Calls Chevalier Unacceptable as a Fellow Democrat

In a podcast, James Carville, the famously outspoken former campaign advisor to Bill Clinton, ranted about the radical leftist and intolerant policy positions that Chevalier had taken previously that were so extreme that she had to disavow them when she decided to run in the Democrat primary. Carville gave her no credit for announcing that she had changed her position on these issues in the hope that Democrat primary voters would forget or ignore them.

Instead, Carville said of Chevalier, “Lady, I ain’t [sic] in the same party as you. I’m sorry. I’m just not.”

Carville also said that it was time for more moderate Democrats to “talk the ‘s’ word: schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. Were a big tent.’ But Carville then declared that when considering whether someone like Chevalier could be an acceptable Democrat candidate for a seat in Congress, “There’s just some [people] I can’t be in the same tent with.”

He was, no doubt, concerned that, among other things, Chevalier’s incendiary posts on social media, calling President Joe Biden a “war criminal” and the U.S. a “disgrace” for supporting Israel in its war against Hamas in Gaza could hurt other Democrat candidates running in swing districts across the country in November’s midterm election where hatred of Israel is not yet the accepted Democrat norm.

Carville went so far as to suggest that if Avila Chevalier does win the House seat for New York’s 13th Congressional District in the November general election, other Democrat members of the House “should not seat her in the caucus [because] her views are totally against the Democrat Party’s traditional platforms and the basic principles of American democracy that Democrats” have always believed in.

Liberal Candidates Competing Over Who Is Furthest Left

In the race to fill the vacant seat left by retiring Democrat Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez, who represented New York’s 7th Congressional District, covering neighborhoods in northern Brooklyn and western Queens, State Assemblywoman Claire Valdez defeated Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso despite his support from several prominent Democratic establishment figures, including New York State Attorney General Letitia James and his own progressive policy platform.

The main difference between Reynoso and Valdez was the greater degree of her leftist militancy. DSA member Valdez campaigned on the organization’s socialist policy agenda, including the expansion of social programs and labor union organizing. She was also known for her outspoken criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza against Hamas.

Reynoso also sought to win the support of progressive Palestinian supporters in the primary by accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza while at the same time trying to moderate his image by stressing the need to “tone down this antisemitism that we’re seeing in our city.” But Reynoso’s DSA opponent, Claire Valdez, saw no need to protect the one million members of New York City’s Jewish community from the sharp spike in antisemitic attacks which they have suffered since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Valdez Criticizes NYPD Cops for Protecting Endangered Jews

Instead, Valdez criticized NYPD cops for restraining the organized progressive mob chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside of the Young Israel of Midwood on May 11, in one of Brooklyn’s most concentrated Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. The demonstrators were protesting against a program called “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event” going on inside the shul, which was sponsored by several Israel-based real estate firms as well as the Israeli-American Council and the Brooklyn-based Jewish Press newspaper. Valdez praised the participants in the antisemitic protest by saying that, “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land. They have a responsibility to [do so].”

Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander defeated incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman, who represents New York’s 10th Congressional District encompassing most of Lower Manhattan and western Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Although Lander is not a member of the DSA, he identifies himself as a democratic socialist, emulating Bernie Sanders. During the primary campaign, he received significant support from the same loose coalition of leftist activist groups that helped Mamdani to win the mayoralty election last year.

Two Jewish Candidates Compete Over Criticism of Israel

The was a bitter irony in the contest between two liberal Jewish candidates running to represent a district which includes the Jewish communities on the Lower East Side and the western half of Boro Park, and who were competing with one another over which of them could be more critical of U.S. support for Israel and its prime minister as the country fought for its survival in its simultaneous post-October 7, 2023, wars against Hamas, Iran, and Hezbollah.

As a congressman, Dan Goldman’s record in support of Israel’s security was mixed. He cast votes in the House to fund Israel’s defense and consistently supported the U.S.-Israel alliance against Iran-backed proxies. He was an advocate for securing the return of 251 hostages that Hamas had kidnapped from Israel on October 7 and held in Gaza, and he also supported fighting global terrorism.

Like most liberal Democrats, Goldman was a supporter of the now obsolete and thoroughly impractical two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He strongly opposed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government and condemned its pro-settlement West Bank policy. He also frequently pushed the U.S. government to insist on an Israeli government crackdown based upon liberal media accusations of incidents of unprovoked settler violence against Palestinians.

Goldman avoided inflammatory terms like “genocide” or “apartheid” that other progressives used routinely to condemn Israel for the IDF’s conduct of the military campaign against Hamas in Gaza. Goldman’s complex record on Israel was a highly debated issue during the primary campaign, drawing support from moderate Democrats and pushback from pro-Palestinian progressive activists.

Following his victory in the primary, Lander called for Democrats to “spend more time building a unified Democratic message” than on “factional infighting” between progressives and moderates. He also said that New York’s Democrat primary voters had made it clear that they want to see people who fight harder for working families.

Meanwhile, political observers note that last week’s outcomes in New York’s primaries are part of a broader national pattern in Democratic primaries. Progressive candidates have performed well during recent months, particularly in heavily Democrat districts where the party primary almost always determines the eventual winner of the general election in November.

Perhaps the time has come for more people to show up and vote in primaries. Doing so would prevent Socialists from continuing to win low turnout primaries and subsequently the elections in November.

Progressive Candidates Now Running Across the Country

Several upcoming primary races feature progressive or democratic socialist candidates challenging more established Democrats, and incumbents including: Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, where Abdul El-Sayed is seeking the nomination; Colorado’s First Congressional District, where Melat Kiros is running; Los Angeles’ mayoral election, where City Councilmember Nithya Raman has emerged as the progressive alternative to the notoriously incompetent but equally liberal incumbent mayor, Karen Bass; as well as several additional House races in several safely Democrat districts where progressive challengers are attempting to unseat traditional Democrat incumbents.

The growing prominence of democratic socialist candidates presents both opportunities and risks for Democrats heading into the November midterms.

Progressive activists argue that their candidates and leaders, including Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and AOC, have energized younger voters and successfully addressed concerns over housing costs, health care, wages, and economic inequality. Their primary victories may also increase voter turnout in progressive Democratic strongholds in November, enabling progressive leaders to drive the party’s policy agenda even further left.

Moderate Democrats Highlighting Their Policy Differences

On the other hand, the moderate Democrats who signed “The Promise to America” letter have begun a political publicity campaign emphasizing their policy differences with the party’s left wing while reaffirming support for free market economics, promoting public safety, and supporting more center-left governing and economic policies and goals. Their objective is to preserve the electoral competitiveness of more moderate and traditional Democrat candidates running for election in suburban and swing districts where the values and concerns of most general-election voters are far more conventional and mainstream than the ideologically more motivated electorate in Democrat Party primaries.

The same moderate Democrats who are critical of the party’s progressive wing contend that Republicans will use the primary victories of avowedly socialist candidates to portray the Democrat party as a whole as increasingly aligned with extreme liberal and elitist positions that most independent and swing voters view as too far outside the political mainstream to consider supporting.

Republicans Will Remind Voters About Extreme Progressive Issues

Republican candidates are expected to highlight these issues during their midterm election campaigns against both progressive and more moderate Democrat candidates. The issues include Democrat progressive support for socialism and opposition to free market capitalism; systematically reducing the level of law enforcement through policing, and avoiding the arrest and imprisonment of convicted criminals; opposition to any form of immigration law enforcement, including the deportation of convicted immigrant criminals; and progressive support for rabid antisemitism thinly disguised as anti-Zionism or support for the so-called Palestinian national cause.

President Trump explained the Democrat socialist strategy in a speech last week to his supporters in which he said, “They want to completely destroy the traditional American way of life.”

When a reporter asked Trump about Mamdani’s recent statement that he has no objection to being used as “the poster child” for Democrats, and then asked the president if he was worried about more Democratic Socialist candidates running for office across the nation, the president agreed that it is a serious problem.

Trump Explains the Difference Between Socialism and Communism

“I think it’s a big threat to our nation, actually, because it’s not socialism, it’s really communism. They use the [phrase] Social Democrat because it sounds so nice, but it’s really [Soviet-style] communism you’re talking about.

“I think it’s the biggest threat to our nation. . . maybe since our founding. That includes World War I, World War II, September 11, and the Pearl Harbor attack.”

Trump continued, “People will smile when I say that, but the smart people are going to say, ‘You know, it’s probably right.” It’s basically introducing communism into the United States of America. There’s never been anything so dangerous,” Trump warned.

In an earlier comment on the same issue, Trump noted that communism has failed everywhere that it has been tried. “Communism is very easy to sell,” Trump observed because of the promises that its supporters make, but historically, wherever communism has been applied to govern a country, “It destroys everything.”

Steve Scalise, the Republican House Majority Leader from Louisiana, similarly explained the seismic shift to the left revealed by the results of last week’s Democrat primary in New York by saying, “You could call it the Bolshevik Revolution of 2026, but the Mamdani takeover of the Democrat Party is official now.”

Whether those efforts successfully insulate moderate Democrats or whether the New York primary results become a defining national narrative may become one of the central political questions that will be resolved by the outcome of the 2026 midterm election.