Heedlessly Elevating Socialist Firebrands Has Downsides

By Judson Berger

Friday, July 10, 2026

 

When they go low, we seize the means of production.

 

This appears to be Democratic primary voters’ attitude this year toward the excesses of the Trump era. But fighting recklessness with recklessness has its own costs, as the party is learning the hard way in Maine.

 

“Today, it’s the Democratic Party’s turn to confront how easily it was manipulated by ideologues,” Noah Rothman writes of that Senate campaign meltdown, after a sexual-assault allegation against Graham Platner at last compelled his most prominent supporters, including Bernie Sanders, to pressure him to exit the race ahead of Monday’s drop-out deadline. In a lengthy and blame-casting video posted late Wednesday, in which he again denied the accusation, Platner suspended his campaign.

 

Other attention-getting and problematic Democratic congressional candidates don’t appear to have nearly the record of normally disqualifying personal sins that Platner has, but the red flags (emphasis on red) are obvious to all but the most ideologically committed. As John Fund writes, Democrats’ “hatred of Donald Trump has driven them to search for and embrace lots of extreme and questionable candidates this year.”

 

Darializa Avila Chevalier, the party’s candidate for New York’s 13th congressional district, can’t articulate a circumstance in which a murderer should go to prison for murdering. Melat Kiros, the Democrats’ pick for Colorado’s first congressional district, struggles to call out deadly antisemitism. AOC-backed Abdul El-Sayed, running for a Senate seat in Michigan, has campaigned with streamer Hasan Piker, who has said America “deserved 9/11,” favors Hamas over Israel, and has expressed comfort with an array of crimes; Mallory McMorrow dropped out of that race last weekend, leaving a binary choice between El-Sayed and the more moderate Haley Stevens. Noah is not hopeful going into Michigan’s August primary: “Democratic primary voters are not casting safe ballots. They are voting with their hearts, and their hearts are with the socialists.”

 

The takeaway from the Platner saga — a truth reinforced in countless elections this century — is that voters and operatives are willing to look past awful flaws for the sake of partisan allegiance. “Now they are paying the price,” NR’s editorial observes.

 

The stakes for other races might not be as high right now as the balance of power in the Senate. But continuing to elevate candidates whose contempt for country and the notion of private enterprise is palpable will lead U.S.  politics down an ever-darker path. As with Mamdani and AOC, each newly minted socialist celebrity can become a kingmaker in his or her own right, committed to expanding the movement’s influence in the Democratic mainstream — a sort of chain migration for socialists into the halls of power. It shouldn’t take sexual-assault allegations for the party to reconsider these choices.