The Hostile Takeover of the Democratic Party That Everyone but the Democrats Saw Coming

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

The first time I ever heard of Zohran Mamdani was in early February 2025.

 

Donald Trump had just taken the oath of office for the second time. Democrats were still emerging from the malaise induced by 2024’s myriad debacles for their party. Internally, they fretted over their institutional sclerosis, concluding with some reluctance that their gerontological establishment must be sidelined even as none of its septuagenarian and octogenarian leaders were eager to volunteer for the ice floe.

 

Into this milieu stepped Zohran Kwame Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who openly sought the support of other democratic socialists in what was then a long-shot bid to take New York City. His first ad was revealing.

 

The spot featured a young couple cringing into their phones as they watched Chuck Schumer try and fail to project enthusiasm. “God damn Democrats,” said one of Schumer’s youthful critics. “I’ve never been prouder not to be one.” She did like Zohran, though. “He’s running on freezing the rent, union-built housing, city-run groceries, universal child care, free buses,” our heroine, “Harmonia,” confessed. Her boyfriend was easily persuaded to back Zohran, but she explained the practical step they’d need to take: “This is the Democratic primary, so if we want to vote for Zohran where it really counts, we have to change our party affiliation.”

 

Neither of the ad’s protagonists identified themselves as members of the Democratic Socialists of America, but it was also made clear that they were not “truly independent.” Indeed, they were enlisting themselves in a crusade to capture the party from without, and they made no secret about their intentions. That project is well underway today.

 

The time for former DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison — or any other Democratic institutionalist, for that matter — to defend the party from outside forces that “hate the Democratic Party” was then. And with its successes in this year’s primary elections, the DSA has grown bold enough that its operatives are no longer being coy about their aims:

 

 

The DSA’s elected officials are, according to the NYC-DSA’s co-chair Gustavo Gordillo, Schrödinger’s Democrats. “When they’re in the legislature, they’re part of the Democratic Party caucus,” he said. But outside that setting, Democratic Socialists want little to do with the Democratic Party as it is currently constituted.

 

The DSA doesn’t “agree” with “the way the Democratic Party establishment organizes or runs its party apparatus,” Gordillo added. What’s more, to the extent that the Democratic Party draws its funding from well-heeled donors, it has a conflict of interest that prevents it from advocating socialist policies. Therefore, the DSA’s focus is on moving “independents” into positions of power within Democratic ranks.

 

So the DSA doesn’t like how the Democratic Party is organized or run. DSA leaders don’t like how it raises funds, and they dislike the policies it advocates. They don’t even seem to have much respect for registered Democrats, establishmentarian or otherwise, and are therefore invested in overhauling the party’s demographic makeup — transforming it from what it is today into something entirely different.

 

Certainly, with this usurpatory agenda laid bare, there is now some belated grumbling in Democratic ranks. “Centrist Democrats, normie Democrats, need to realize we’re the insurgents, and they’re the new establishment,” one center-left organizer told Politico.

 

Matt Bennett, “co-founder of the moderate think tank Third Way,” agrees. “It is vital that Democrats do not mistake the radicalism of a very small electorate in very blue places with the desire of the larger Democratic Party to move sharply to the left,” he warned.

 

An intrepid few have gone further than that. “I’m not in that f***ing  political party,” spat the longtime Democratic strategist James Carville. He said accurately of the DSA that “these people are not Democrats,” and “there’s just some s*** I can’t be in the same tent with.”

 

But these are rare expressions of dissent. By contrast, Democrats in elected office are making accommodations with the socialists on the rise within their ranks. Perhaps, after Democrats sacrificed their credibility in the all-out effort to drag Joe Biden into a second term, the party’s leaders were deprived of any argument in their favor. But the time to make that argument was in February 2025. That moment is gone.