The Democratic Party Will Be a Radical Party

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

 

Somehow, Texas Democrats seem to have missed the much-chronicled “vibe shift” that corrected for the excesses associated with left-wing social politics. Lone Star State Democrats have spent the last week competing with one another to out-“woke” the other — not in service to some grand political project but only to silence their critics.

 

“I think there needs to be an apology,” said onetime Texas Senate candidate Colin Allred, who dropped out of the race in December, of his onetime challenger for the Texas seat, James Talarico. Whether Talarico knows it or not, his remarks “came across in a way that was offensive to that young woman and to many others,” Allred continued.

 

Talarico’s offense was to reportedly tell a woman “identified as Morgan” that he said, candidly and in private, that he had “signed up to run against a mediocre Black man, not a formidable and intelligent black woman” (Talarico says this was a “mischaracterization” of his remarks). Allred insists that Talarico’s comments were an insult to all women and minorities, not just him.

 

For her part, that “intelligent black woman,” Representative Jasmine Crockett, is taking the scandal in stride. Crockett, who is also running for Senate and is now in the pole position to take the nomination, is captaining a ghost ship. “Crockett’s fundraising surge never came,” NOTUS journalist Alex Roarty reported. She’s being “outspent roughly 19-to-1 on ads,” he continued, and Democrats “aren’t sure who exactly is running” her campaign. To even make note of Crockett’s half-hearted efforts is to invite accusations of racism. As one Texas activist told NOTUS, “Candidates of color cannot use these traditional methods because these traditional methods were not designed for them.”

 

These nostalgic appeals to the nostrums that once silenced so many skeptical mouths in and around 2020 are amusing. But Crockett is still the likeliest nominee. And while a Texas Senate seat is a reach in any cycle, a bad one for Republicans in which they, too, nominate a bad candidate could produce unanticipated outcomes. Even if Crockett loses in November, the Democratic primary voters who give her the nomination are responding to the same political incentives that prevail everywhere else.

 

We got a glimpse of the forces at work radicalizing the Democratic Party this week in New Jersey. There, the moderate Democrat and former Representative Tom Malinowski lost his bid to return to the chamber in another, slightly bluer Garden State house district. His opponent, left-wing organizer Analilia Mejia, ran a platform that included abolishing ICE, impeaching conservative Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, zeroing out “all student loan debt,” boosting the minimum wage to $25/hour, and, of course, cutting off Israel.

 

Mejia’s radical politics may not be a perfect fit in New Jersey’s eleventh congressional district, a well-heeled New York City suburb with a modest partisan lean toward Democrats. But that may not matter much if Democrats are the beneficiaries of a wave election in which voters care more about sending a message to Washington than who it is who delivers that message.

 

Indeed, progressives have been winning more intra-Democratic fights than they’ve lost of late. The far-left “smells blood in the water,” and they anticipate many more Democratic establishmentarians will be victims of their primary voters’ anxiety before the year is out. For now, however, the politics of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani are ascendant on the left.

 

When I first encountered Mamdani’s name, almost exactly one year ago, it was amid the then-unknown candidate’s effort to convince the city’s socialists to register as Democrats for his benefit. The advertisement was a love story — a twisted melodrama in which socialist politics nourished the soul as much as or more than human affection. That struck me as a potent message with which more grounded and responsible politicians could not compete. Only the reckless or naïve would promise their voters that the pursuit of incremental political reforms could suffice for meaning, belonging, and a sense of purpose in life. “If Democrats demand an emotive expurgation from their politicians, even at strategy’s expense,” I wrote at the time, “they’ll get it.”

 

By the end of this year, the Democratic Party will be a measurably more radical party than it was in January. The only outstanding question is whether the general electorate will look beyond the progressive movement’s compulsive messianism and ratify the wisdom of their preferences.