You Didn’t Build This, Establishment Democrats

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

 

Mainstream Democrats are patting themselves on the back this morning, a target into which the party’s jilted far-left fringes would love to shove a knife.

 

Each of these warring parties agrees that the clandestine establishmentarian machinations doomed Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong. That’s the narrative they both want. It allows the mainstreamers to revel in their omnipotence, and it reinforces the persecution complex that animates so many of the Democratic Party’s far-left critics. But the plot has some holes in it.

 

Hong’s defeat is certainly more evidence of an often-overlooked truism: Campaigns matter. And the great DSA hope in the race for Badger State governor ran a terrible one. She wedded her sincere but unpleasant personality with a variety of broadly unpopular policy preferences, and she refused to conceal her contempt for those who were repelled by the joyless lifestyle brand that she mistook for a political philosophy.

 

The establishment pulled out all the stops — in a comically manic fashion, at times. But the progressive left didn’t ride to her rescue. Indeed, they maintained a conspicuous distance from Hong. Those two factors contributed to the candidate’s loss, but this was not an admirable exhibition of collective action. Rather, it was an organic display of mutual revulsion.

 

But Hong’s double-digit lead in the polls remained durable for weeks prior to her public struggle session, and her lead might have collapsed as a result of her own actions more than her party’s. And, as Hong’s backers are quick to note, another progressive who stayed in the race — State Senator Kelda Roys — drew over 7 percent of the vote. Even with all these circumstances conspiring against her, Hong fell short of her goal by just about 3,000 votes of the over 780,000 cast.

 

Hardly a resounding rebuke. And if it was a repudiation, it was one that was reserved only for Hong. The national media’s focus on the success of the rearguard action that took her down may obscure the successes the American far left enjoyed in last night’s primaries.

 

In Minnesota, Senator Bernie Sanders’s pick for Senate, Peggy Flanagan, won her race. She’ll run on a platform that endorses nationalizing the health insurance industry, “tearing ICE apart,” and restricting the public’s right to engage in political speech. If he wins his race for Congress in Minnesota’s second district, Matt Little will take many of Flanagan’s views to Washington as well as the fashionable luddism overtaking so-called progressives. Unlike previous cycles, Ilhan Omar didn’t even face a modest challenge from her fellow Democrats. She’ll be back to advocating the wholesale “transformation of our political and economic systems” in no time.

 

Establishmentarian Democrats want — and, to some extent, deserve — credit for pushing back against the rise of far-left progressivism within their ranks. But at the same time, they also want to promote the notion that Democratic primary voters aren’t as radical as some of the candidates they endorse. Rather, they’re just hungry for change.

 

The results in the race for the Democratic nomination in Connecticut’s first district on Tuesday night lend some veracity to that claim. There, Representative John Larson, a forgettable Methuselah whose career in Washington roughly coincided with the theater-wide release of “The Matrix,” was soundly defeated by Hartford’s relatively unobjectionable mayor, Luke Bronin.

 

That’s generational turnover, and a data point in favor of the mainstream left’s face-saving proposition. And to be fair, plenty of far-left candidates have lost their primaries this cycle even with the support of the American socialist diaspora. Cori Bush, Nida Allam, Junaid Ahmed, and Kat Abughazaleh came up short, too. The results in those races contribute to the mountains of evidence that indicate, when it comes to socialism, the Democratic Party is divided along the lines of class and race.

 

But despite Hong’s loss — one she almost seems relieved by — the Democratic Party’s voters have ensured that this will be a far more radical party in 2027.

 

The next Congress is likely to include figures such as New Jersey’s Adam Hamawy, an unrepentant onetime character witness for the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing. He’ll be joined by Melat Kiros, a political neophyte whose boundless compassion allows her to see the 9/11 attacks from the perspective of the attackers, and Chris Rabb — a radical progressive who isn’t sure if the Jews didn’t engineer their own massacre on Bondi Beach last year. These representatives will caucus with the likes of Claire Valdez, whose campaign literature contends that everything positive you’ve ever heard about America is a lie, and Darializa Chevalier — a dogmatic idealist so committed to her dystopian vision that she cannot even bring herself to say that murderers belong in prison. Neither would exist in her ideal world. But neither would America, given Chevalier’s commitment to “undermine and eradicate” it by bringing “unrest and violence” to its streets.

 

These far-left figures will join Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee, Ayanna Pressley, Delia Ramirez, and Greg Casar in the House’s growing “progressive squad.” And their ideology may get a toehold in the Senate if the bad political environment for the GOP papers over Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s many flaws.

 

None of this is to dissuade establishmentarian Democrats from pulling out all the institutional stops to arrest the rise of socialism within its ranks. But they should put the self-congratulations on hold. They’ve lost a lot of ground to their erstwhile complacency, and they’ve only just begun to fight back. There’s a lot of fighting to do yet.