Will Socialism Sweep the Midterms?

American Thinker 

In recent years, the Democrat party has steadily shifted left, embracing ideas once considered fringe, including open borders, transgenderism, and the Green New Deal.

In abandoning the political center to Trump and his MAGA base, Democrats effectively cost themselves the House in 2022 — and the presidency and Senate in 2024.

With the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race approaching, analysts expected a centrist correction.  Instead, Democrats have doubled down, integrating a Marxist-oriented doctrine labeled “democratic socialism” into their public identity.

To traditional observers, this defies political logic.  Historically, parties seeking national victory have moderated to appeal to the center, the so-called “broad middle.”

After three straight landslide presidential losses in the 1980s, Democrats did exactly that.  Sensing that voters perceived Democrats as big-government liberals detached from middle America, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), an organization composed of moderates like Al Gore and Al From, pushed the party to reject high spending and divisive culture wars in favor of pragmatic centrism aimed at middle-class and swing voters.

As DLC chairman in 1990, Clinton branded himself a “New Democrat,” advocating welfare reform, free trade, and fiscal responsibility.  His centrist strategy rebuilt the Democrat coalition and returned the party to the White House in 1992.

That Democrat party no longer exists.  Rather than recalibrating in anticipation of the looming 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential race, today’s Democrats have accelerated their embrace of far-left ideology, blending with socialist movements — particularly the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Founded in 1982, the DSA has grown from fringe movement to Democrat party power broker.  Its formula for pushing its socialist agenda deep into the party mainstream is quite simple: Run DSA-supported socialist-leaning candidates in Democrat party primaries and appeal to Democrat primary voters by having those candidates “champion” Democrat pet progressive issues, such as affordability, government-run health care, and climate change.

Once these candidates achieve positions of real power, with the support of the DSA, they then begin to pursue measures to achieve the DSA’s central mission to “dismantle and move beyond capitalism” through a “wholesale socialist transformation of our economy.”  The organization envisions a society where “the people” own the means of production — either through nationalization of key industries or indirect control via regulation, taxation, and boardroom influence.  The result is the same: government dominance over what Americans produce, earn, and keep.

The DSA’s Marxist Caucus calls for the state to take over industries such as finance, energy, and banking.  Its militant wing, Reform and Revolution, seeks to build a “mass socialist party” to “overthrow the capitalist state — democratically.”  It promotes public ownership of the energy, auto, and defense sectors and state control of broadband, utilities, and even technology firms.

A turning point for socialism’s march through the Democrat party came with Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.  Sanders championed DSA-style proposals — “Medicare for All,” tuition-free college, and the Green New Deal.  His campaigns inspired new socialist-leaning politicians such as representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman, all backed by the DSA.

Over the last decade, the DSA has helped elect candidates nationwide.  In Massachusetts, its endorsements flipped city council seats in Somerville, Cambridge, and Medford.  In Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and Los Angeles, DSA-backed officials now hold city and school board positions.  Similar victories have occurred in Milwaukee, Detroit, Colorado Springs, and Jersey City.  DSA legislators serve in New York,  Michigan, and Wisconsin.

This is no longer protest politics — it’s a strategy to transform the Democrat party from within, and eventually control the presidency, House, and Senate.  The shock 2025 elections of Democrats Zohran Mamdani, a DSA member and self-avowed socialist, as mayor of New York City and Katie Wilson as Seattle’s mayor were watershed moments in that transformation.

The DSA’s influence in the party will only grow as it endorses socialist-oriented candidates in the 2026 primaries and midterms to challenge centrist Democrat incumbents.  The DSA is promoting various candidates for the city council in Seattle, Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, the Michigan and Maine senates, and the Georgia and Wisconsin governorships.

Mamdani, a DSA member, will govern America’s largest city and financial capital.  To fund his campaign promises — city-run grocery stores, free public transit, and taxpayer-funded “gender transitions” — Mamdani has already mobilized his allies throughout New York to pressure a reluctant Governor Hochul to support legislation imposing a 2% “surcharge” on “millionaires” in the state.  Such a bill could include provisions to tax Wall Street transactions or impose wealth taxes on hedge funds.  And if millionaires and billionaires flee, expect Mamdani to turn to middle-class earners and small businesses to fund his costly plans.

The DSA also supports expanding sanctuary policies and granting illegal aliens local citizenship — measures critics say are designed to secure Democrats permanent electoral majorities.

The recent vote on a House resolution condemning socialism highlights the growing influence of socialist ideas within the Democrat party.  Whereas all Republicans supported the resolution, only a minority of Democrats joined them.  A majority of House Democrats refused to condemn socialism, suggesting either sympathy toward socialist policies or concern about provoking the party’s rising socialist wing.  Their reluctance to back the resolution underscores the movement’s expanding power.

A Patient and Strategic Movement

One of the DSA’s greatest strengths is patience.  Rather than forming a separate party, it strategically penetrated the Democrat party, letting the party label carry its candidates to victory.  This approach is succeeding because the DSA’s ideology, though Marxist, overlaps with elements of Democrat policy that expands government control over economic life, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Green New Deal, and soon a universal basic income program to address the “affordability crisis.”

The DSA’s long-term strategy is clear.  Make sure that the next time the Democrat party takes over the House, Senate, and White House, it will be a party led by true believers like Representatives Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib, Senators Sanders and Warren, and Mayor Mamdani.  That new Democrat party can then impose from above socialist policies that will radically transform our social and political institutions.

The DSA, of course, must first gain control of the party, and it will seize any opportunity to do so.  Trump’s DOJ is threatening subpoenas for dozens — perhaps hundreds — of establishment Democrats and allies allegedly tied to the “Crossfire Hurricane” and “Arctic Frost” efforts to block Trump’s 2016 victory, undermine his presidency, and later prosecute him after 2020.

Normally, Democrats would rally as one to defend Obama- and Biden-era officials.  But this time, it would not be surprising for the party’s socialist wing — figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib — to offer only lukewarm support for their beleaguered “colleagues.”  They view establishment Democrats as obstacles to a socialist takeover and might secretly welcome their purge.  Many DSA leaders have been captured on video openly stating that they “hate” the Democrat party, which they see as a neoliberal tool of the capitalist class.  Socialists play hardball.

Conservatives Must Respond to the  Socialist Threat

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed warned that although America “needs a sane and centrist Democratic Party” to counter this movement, a Mamdani victory will likely accelerate the leftward shift as more progressives win primaries and pull the party further left.

After the November 2025 election, Senator Bernie Sanders told a national audience that a national movement is being formed and will use primaries and upcoming midterm House and Senate races to further extend the socialists’ power.

If conservatives, centrists, and traditional liberals hope to halt socialism’s advance, they must educate the public on its economic consequences — not merely debate cultural issues like gender-neutral bathrooms or cashless bail.

They must clarify that socialism entails government confiscation of private profits, wages, and property — redistributed according to state priorities.  Such a system, critics argue, erodes personal freedom, private enterprise, and the foundations of a market-based democracy.

The Mamdani victory offers conservatives an opening: to label future Democratic tax and regulatory initiatives not merely liberal, but socialist and Marxist, forcing Democrats on the political defensive.

Socialist office-holders offer Republicans real-time examples of socialism in action to showcase to the American public, such as Mamdani’s plans to seize properties from landlords who neglect repairs and transfer them to government ownership.  Newly elected Seattle mayor Katie Wilson said she would force grocery chains to make food affordable and voiced her support for a government-run grocery store system.  She even stated that she will not permit “giant grocery chains to close stores that will leave behind food deserts.” That’s socialism in action.

The Democrat party’s ideological transition from center-left to socialist demands that major news outlets begin to interview new party leaders like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani, rather than  Chuck Shumer and Hakeem Jeffries, when trying to take the pulse of the Democrat party on issues such as affordability and immigration.

The stakes could not be higher.  If the socialist faction within the Democrat party prevails, the nation’s transformation will be not merely political, but structural, profoundly threatening to the American way of life.