The Democratic Party’s Insurgency Has Arrived

Last night was an “earthquake” and a “huge defeat” for Democratic leadership, according to the famed anonymous centrist House Democrat in Axios. New York was ground zero for a battle between the establishment and the new socialist left, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued a series of savvy endorsements designed to not piss their colleagues off while covering every lefty base in New York and D.C., and it worked.

Former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, the ubermensch who was a critical part of Mamdani’s victory, trounced Rep. Dan Goldman by over 30 points in the NY-10 Democratic primary. Another Mamdani-backed candidate, Darializa Avila Chevalier, won the biggest shock victory of the night, ousting Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Mamdani went 3-for-3, as he also endorsed another winner in Claire Valdez. House Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries endorsed the two big New York losers on the night, and he also signaled he supported Valdez’s opponent. Welcome to the Democratic Party insurgency. 

But last night’s big anti-establishment results were not all part of Mamdanimentum, and this is a terrific thread from the always great Daniel Nichanian, Editor in Chief of Bolts, covering the litany of incumbent Democrats who lost to insurgent challengers from their left last night.

Across NY & MD, I’m counting 12 Democratic incumbents who lost (or, in one case, are trailing) to a challenger to their left.

—2 congressmembers (both NY)

—4 state senators (2 in NY, 2 in MD)

—6 state house members (5 in NY, 1 in MD)

A thread to break this down.

— Taniel (@taniel.bsky.social) June 23, 2026 at 9:57 PM

Now, those with terminal and incurable 2016 primary brain will try to package these results into a Hillary versus Bernie never-ending paradigm, and while it was a big night for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), these results do not all map cleanly on to outdated ideological markers. Future Rep. Brad Lander said it best during the Mamdani campaign: “The line in the Democratic Party right now is not between progressives and moderates—it’s between fighters and folders.”

Establishment Democrats and those in power who still to this day vote for Trump’s nominees have proven themselves to be folders, and any kind of ideology can portray itself as a fighter, as former CIA Agent and current centrist Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger proved in her campaign last year. Socialists just have the added benefit of fighting the establishment very publicly for the last decade, so there’s a little more legitimacy to our anti-establishment case than some of the johnny-come-latelies, which probably accounts for some of DSA’s big advancements into New York electoral politics.

But it’s okay to be a johnny-come-lately to the fighter versus folder paradigm. It is far better to be late than never to this party, because all it takes is the conviction to do big things to try to push America off this path of terminal decline. For practically my entire nearly 40-year-old lifetime, this generation of Democrats have run on the default assumption that they are the adults in the room and therefore you must vote for them, and primarying them is akin to opposing the Democratic platform itself. This was a neat trick that was aided by their cronies in establishment media asking everyone to the left of George W. Bush ‘hOw WiLl yOu PaY fOr It’ every time they wanted to help new mothers get baby formula, but the 2024 election brought that facade crumbling down for a lot of people.

It’s very hard to argue that you are the sober and serious people in the room when you lose an election to Joe Rogan, Theo Von and a literal insurrectionist. 2024 exposed the Democratic Party establishment as unserious shlubs best known for losing and then sending you e-mails with subject lines like “URGENT! GIVE US $2.57 OR DONALD TRUMP WILL SHOOT NANCY PELOSI IN THE HEAD!!!”

Democratic voters are pissed off, and it extends well beyond the online Bernie Bros like me that the establishment so desperately wants you to believe constitutes everyone who opposes them. Axios asked a senior House Democrat if their colleagues were worried about last night’s election results, and they responded “yes they are.” Jaime Harrison, the former DNC Chair who set $132 million on fire to lose to Lindsey Graham by double digits, is out here doing the classic Democratic Party leadership smol bean scolding routine. You can just feel the fear radiating off this passive aggressive post he made after the results began to roll in and it became clear that his friends and benefactors were not going to have a good night. 

I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination.

Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.

— Jaime Harrison (@jaimeharrison.bsky.social) June 23, 2026 at 5:58 PM

In a Quinnipiac poll last month, just 41% of Democrats said they approve of the way that Democrats in Congress are handling their job, versus 50% who disapprove. A truly stunning 93% of Democrats think that Congressional Democrats should be doing more to stand up to Trump. The Gallup poll below demonstrates how the party brand was falling even before it crashed through the floor with their own voters under Trump 2. As anyone even tangentially connected to on-the-ground politics right now knows, a lot of Democratic volunteers are righteously pissed off at the party and feel like their efforts are not being supported by those in power. Jamie Harrison and other establishment dimwits like him apparently believe that most Democrats aren’t Democrats, which actually is a pretty terrific explanation for how we got here.  

“Appeasement doesn’t work. You have to be tough,” said the very brave and tough anonymous centrist House Democrat to Axios last night. “Nancy Pelosi brought a machine gun to a knife fight. You can’t win with these guys by playing patty cake.” This is such a perfect distillation of what frauds these people are. There are plenty of folks in this Axios report who go on the record, while this centrist tough guy or gal is talking about taking the gloves off against the left as they try to find common cause with the right, yet they won’t even put their own name behind their own words. These people are a fucking joke and their voters are waking up to this fact, which is why they are texting Axios reporters like they are their therapist and demanding anonymity. 

To his credit, co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, Rep. Tom Suozzi, went on the record to Axios and identified the problem he and his fellow Very Serious billionaire bootlickers have right now: “People who do not support the DSA wring their hands at cocktail parties, while the DSA is organizing.”

If election loser extraordinaire Jamie Harrison had his wishes answered, there would be no Democratic Party outside the fancy cocktail parties he and his friends attend with AIPAC lobbyists while they all lament that they don’t understand this country anymore. The reason why they don’t understand it is because they are the isolated and braindead protectors of a state of affairs that benefits them and the donor class while alienating the rest of America. It’s very hard to run as the Very Serious Defenders of the Status Quo when people don’t like the status quo and have been telling you this for 20-plus years. 

The Democratic establishment is woefully out of touch with its base, and that’s why the majority of its base doesn’t like it. The vast gulf between Democratic leadership and their voters on Israel is a perfect example of this, and last night we saw how it plays out in the real world. NY-10 is the most Jewish congressional district in the country, and they tossed out AIPAC toady Dan Goldman and replaced him with another Jewish Representative in Brad Lander who is willing to call Israel’s genocide a genocide. Know-nothing centrists like national security lawyer Mark Zaid are screeching about how victories like Lander’s are the “MAGA equivalent of destruction” of the Democratic Party, effectively doing the “am I so out of touch? No, it is the children who are wrong” Principal Skinner bit out in public. It’s a new day in the Democratic Party. The establishment actually has to consider the opinions of all those young people under the age of 50 now.

Many are calling this the Democratic Tea Party from a favorable perspective too, and while that is a useful shorthand to describe this anti-incumbent wave en route to a party ruled by a dead-eyed gerontocracy whose brains never left 1996, this is not that. The Tea Party’s starting gun was fired by a former hedge fund guy turned CNBC editor who ranted against President Obama’s Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan, calling homeowners facing foreclosure “losers” from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in February of 2009. Before the sun rose the following morning, websites and organizations with Tea Party branding were established. The Tea Party was not organic, it was an astroturf campaign designed by America’s deranged billionaire class right after they nuked the global economy with an avalanche of fraud. As ThinkProgress’s Lee Fang noted at the time, the principal organizers of Tea Party events were “lobbyist-run think tanks,” Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works.

This is largely the opposite. DSA is not backed by any billionaire, because DSA wants to eradicate the very concept of billionaires. This fight on the left is very simple: it is the capitalist class and their cronies in politics versus the vast majority of the Democratic Party base. The lapdogs of the Democratic elite are reportedly scared, and they should be, because their House leader’s endorsement has proven to be worth nothing as most Democrats have woken up to the con that the party has perpetrated on them for decades. This is not a political party designed for its voters, it’s a party for its donor class that tells its voters the best they’re ever going to get is “not a Republican,” and the fighters in the party are finally aiming to take it back from these grifters and folders.