If Establishment Democrats Will Not Fight Back, Democrats Will Vote Them Out for Socialists

Fresh off a wave of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Mayor Zohran Mamdani-backed candidates defeating congresspeople supported by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in New York City, another establishment “earthquake” rocked the city of Denver this week, 1,800 miles away. Melat Kiros, a 29 year-old first-time candidate backed by DSA, took down a 30-year incumbent who has been in office since I was a child. I have very few memories of my hometown without Rep. Diana DeGette, most of which come before I could form fully coherent sentences, and for the first time in my life next year, I will file her away in my memory as Denver’s former Representative.

Kiros clobbered DeGette, winning 53% of the vote in the CO-1 Democratic primary, versus just 39.8% for DeGette, while another 7.02% went to Wanda James. It’s a deep-blue district so the coming months are the last time we will be able to refer to Melat Kiros without Rep. in front of her name. This is a stunning result, and it proves that the Democrats have a very serious problem that extends well beyond the siloed Beltway political dynamics that dominate so much of our national attention.

Other establishment candidates went down beyond Denver too, like in one of the few nationwide bellwether districts in CO-8 where aspiring Blue Dog Dem Shannon Bird was annihilated by 30 points by socialist Manny Rutinel who spent the final month of the campaign disavowing most of everything he ever said he believed in. Senator Michael Bennet, who self-described former Democrat James Carville and abundance bro Matt Yglesias believed was the party’s 2020 savior for fucking president (Bennet bowed out after coming in 11th in New Hampshire), lost his bid to succeed America’s worst elected Democrat as Colorado governor, losing handily to Attorney General Phil Weiser. The best results for establishment Democrats in Colorado came in winning the four-way Attorney General race and with John Hickenlooper defeating Julie Gonzalez to retain his Senate seat, but she joined the campaign late, did not do much campaigning and only lost by 5.8% of the vote. The race to replace Gonzalez in the highest profile primary for Colorado State Senate was also another blow to the establishment, as progressive Chela Garcia Irlando beat Andrés Carrera, a former staffer for Governor Jared Polis.

Denver and New York City share a commonality the same way they share a commonality with Raleigh, Boston, Chicago or Los Angeles: lots of people under the age of 40 live in American cities, but it largely ends there as all politics truly is local, especially local politics. Establishment Democrats dream of a congressional majority fueled by the comfortable suburban enclaves mooching off America’s cultural and economic centers, but they now face a revolt led by new blood in major cities flexing their political muscle against broken down machines. 

DeGette was…fine. She is solidly on the left flank of the Democratic Party, one of the world’s more conservative liberal parties, but she spent nearly three decades as a largely non-descript legislator and a staunch ally of the Democratic establishment. When the time came to act like there is an emergency and buck the establishment who led us here, she continued her passion of being a largely non-descript legislator and reliable establishment vote. When Trump won a second time and shocked the Democratic base’s sense of the Democratic establishment’s competency, this entire political party misread their own voters by unanimously reelecting Democratic leadership across both chambers of Congress. 

Now some of them are losing by double-digits in primaries and whining in concession letters about how “this was not the way I would have wanted to end my career in politics” after three fucking decades in a job this coalition very clearly feels they are entitled to. Sorry establishment Democrats, but if you wanted your base to think you were doing something to address the problems that lead to two presidential election losses to a racist game show host, maybe you should have at least floated the idea of doing what sports teams do in these situations and fire the head coach to make it at least look like you have some new ideas. If you don’t do it, your voters will.

Why would anyone think that people like Diana DeGette are taking this grave moment in American history seriously when their reaction to a historic humiliation was to stay the course that got them here? What exactly do Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries and Dick Durbin bring to the table in Trump’s America? Bipartisan comity? Not one Democrat in either chamber decided to speak up and offer an alternative to so-called leadership after 2024? 

Fuck that. This is war being waged on America and the constitution itself. Article I doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense anymore. Every Democrat owns this, from DeGette to Jared Golden to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Cory Booker, because they all reacted to the greatest fuck-up in modern Democratic Party history by shrugging their shoulders and voting the same shlubs into leadership who then were strong-armed into the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. 

So why would they be surprised now that their voters are voting some of these shlubs out? I feel like I quote him in every other blog these days, but incoming Rep. Brad Lander’s fighters versus folders characterization of the Democratic Party is what is happening here. Socialism has not won, not yet. Us loudmouths on the left also get too much airtime in America’s discourse relative to our power in it (largely due to the fact that many driving this discourse also live in the Beltway), and we are not the Democrats’ main concern here. The historic breakdown in Democratic support is rooted in normie liberal Dems giving into the great defining political motivator of our time: negative polarization, pointing it at the people in power to blame.

I’ll just add that between handwringing Dem centrists and young Dem-adjacent socialists is a large group I would label “self-described liberals who are enraged/sick of this crap” and are ready to vote left/progressive. Don’t underestimate them. And FFS don’t scold them; they’re also sick of that.

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— Mark Harris (@markharris.bsky.social) July 1, 2026 at 3:25 PM

The “leadership” of Schumer and Jeffries and Durbin and every other decrepit Democrat dedicated to turning back the clock to 1996 has become stale. For far too long, these center and right-wing Democrats could furrow their brows, claim to be Very Serious as they echo right-wing talking points on NPR or in the New York Times and bring the Laken Riley Act to the floor of Congress, then convince enough liberal voters that they had the Very Serious candidates who could win general elections. It’s a fundamentally McCarthyite logic that America will reject anything that can be characterized as socialism, but this is where us lefties have to thank the Republicans for their assist in our battle against the Democratic establishment, as calling everything government does “socialism” for three-quarters of a century has smoothed the edges around the 20th century’s chief boogeyman and made a lot more people think socialism isn’t so bad after all. 

I would extend Lander’s fighters versus folders case to assert that this central tension flows between two different groups looking at the world through two different frameworks. There are those still stuck in the Cold War compromise paradigm celebrated by the “era of big government is over” Clinton years, and those who see the internet age for what it hath wrought in an increasingly polarized America with an utterly unhinged Republican Party loudly declaring a dedication to ethnic cleansing while economic inequality rises to its worst levels in a century. Reps like DeGette were raised under a political establishment that viewed bipartisan legislation as the lifeblood of their coalition, and now that is being upended by a Democratic base tired of losing to a bunch of racist maniacs while Democratic politicians like Phil Weiser continue to say nonsense like “competition is healthy” when asked whether we need a strong Republican Party.

No we don’t. We have a strong Republican Party at the national level, and it is giving everyone who says this a swirly as they thank them for the honor of putting this bipartisan activity on their resume that they can show to voters as they reek of urine and failure. Every establishment Democrat fancies themselves as the exact middle of a 50-50 district, but gerrymandering has killed most of those districts. We have to put up with Marie Glusenkamp Perez’s kooky bullshit because she found a way to win a Trump +3 district, but there’s no reason for those representing our major cities filled with young people sympathetic to socialism and Palestine to be represented by compromise-brained AIPAC-backed candidates like DeGette. The times they are a changin’.

So Democrats must change with them, or perish. This freakout over democratic processes is just exposing what us lefties have long known since the very ugly 2008 Democratic presidential primary that every Hillary-backing establishment figure has memory-holed (fun fact: the racist birther shit with Obama initially sprung from the mind of longtime Clinton adviser Mark Penn). The Democratic establishment is hostile to any non-sanctioned democratic activity within the Democratic Party. Melat Kiros and Darializa Avila Chevalier participated in democracy and ran a primary campaign and won and now a bunch of well-paid establishment figures are portraying this as some kind of great crime committed against the party, while alleging that everyone who voted for campaigns that ran on justice for Palestine is an antisemite.

Per a recent NBC poll, just 17% of Democrats sympathize with the Israelis versus 67% who sympathize with the Palestinians trapped under apartheid and genocide. More Independents (37%), sympathize with Palestinians than Israelis (27%). Why is the story among so many establishment Democrats and their toadies and consultants in media that the majority of us horrified by a genocide are out of touch? The polls are crystal fucking clear. Democrats who run as pro-Israel candidates are very obviously only trying to appeal to one kind of voter: Republicans.

Yet in the wake of NYC’s elections, Jake Tapper is interviewing losers like Dan Goldman who lost in a landslide to a Jew and is insinuating that Jews like Lander and I are part of an antisemitic movement led by that guy with the scary sounding name, Zohran Mamdani. Unfortunately, this is nothing new to us Jews on the left, and the gentile world now is seeing how powerful American Jewish institutions are largely all more conservative and generally do view a lot of us liberal and Israel-skeptical Jews as insufficiently Jewish. Many 20th century assumptions are dying a very public death, as Jews like Brad Lander are tapping into a much more ancient view of our people than the institutions rooted in the colonialism of past hundred years, and their spirit is meeting this moment for a lot of regular Democratic voters looking for someone who isn’t a losing loser who loses then brags about how they did it bipartisanly.

The Democratic establishment is freaking out because they are operating off of a playbook that simply cannot beat the electorate’s defense in present day America. They have long leaned on the fact that there are more self-described moderates and conservative Democrats than self-described left and liberals in the party, knowing that all they had to do was split the left and they could elect as many people who vote with Republicans and get money from their donors as they want. Even in the supposed end days of big government under a generation of Democrats traumatized by a Reagan revolution, those Democratic congressional majorities that Clintonites hailed as bipartisan models were won in the Great Society and New Deal eras. This past generation of Democrats have only known political ball for eight years of their lives at the tail end of the 20th century when the bounty from the digital revolution put politics on easy mode. 

The moment the social contract fractured in 2008, and the best the powers that be in the party could do was overrule the agenda of the most popular politician of their lifetimes and pass a national healthcare law written by insurance lobbyists and first enacted by a Republican governor, the ground began to shift under the party’s feet. It cracked again in 2016 and finally broke in 2024. Now we are seeing how far this “earthquake” reverberates, and we can confirm it spreads from coast to coast.

No longer are Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and everyone who has stewarded the party through this generational breakdown viewed as the adults in the room by the median Democratic voter. It’s not necessarily that the Democratic base has turned into a bunch of rabid socialists, although young people certainly are more sympathetic to it than those who grew up under the peak of McCarthyism, it’s that the left flank is the only one consistently dedicated to the fight against the fascists in a very public manner, and most Democrats are proving in the age of Trump 2 that they will pull the lever for the fighter over the folder, irrespective of ideology. That’s how a squishy left-of-center moderate like Phil Weiser and a DSA-backed candidate in Melat Kiros found themselves on the same side of the anti-establishment wave crashing into the Colorado establishment on Tuesday night, and it’s why this wave is likely headed your local Democratic primary’s way too.