The Press Looks Beyond the Midterms to the Democratic Civil War of 2027b

The Press Looks Beyond the Midterms to the Democratic Civil War of 2027

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

There’s plenty of campaigning left to do before voters head to the polls in November. There will be plenty of surprises in store for us in the weeks ahead, some of which could make or break the candidates on whom Democrats are depending in their quest to retake one or both chambers of Congress.

 

Some media outlets are not, however, particularly interested in this dynamic. They’re already looking ahead — beyond the midterm election cycle and into next year, when Democrats will presumably be the majority party once again. Once the GOP’s legislators have been swept aside, that’s when the Democratic Party’s real challenges will begin.

 

In a report that seems informed to a conspicuous degree by progressive critics of establishment Democratic politics, Axios warned that the party’s leader in the House, Hakeem Jeffries, is facing “mounting behind-the-scenes frustration” from left-wingers who bristle at the minority leader’s refusal to flatter their pretensions. After all, the democratic socialists are coming. And when they join forces with House progressives, they will form a bloc that can derail the majority’s agenda.

 

If Jeffries wants to avoid humiliation, he’ll either kowtow to the far-left today or he’ll be forced out of leadership tomorrow. “Constituents have shared with me that House Democrats need to replace Jeffries,” said one California-based progressive candidate.

 

Almost simultaneously (imagine that!), CNN published a similar analysis of the conditions that render a clash between Democratic leadership and its progressive upstarts inevitable. “Most Democrats, I think, agree that the current leadership is failing to face the moment,” said New Jersey congressional candidate Adam Hamawy, a progressive who worked for an al-Qaeda-linked “charity” and served as a character witness on behalf of the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

 

Privately, CNN revealed, almost “all progressives who spoke to CNN” believe that Jeffries will be returned to leadership by his caucus. But applying a little pressure to Jeffries now might shake loose a few desirable concessions from him. And to judge from these two reports, which repeatedly cite progressives’ frustration over Jeffries’s recent skepticism of “Medicare for all,” it’s not hard to guess what exactly it is that progressives are demanding.

 

“Republicans, as much as I disagree with them, they’re smart,” the Maoist influencer Hasan Piker recently mourned. “They want to win. Democrats operate like they want to lose all the time.” It’s too bad that so many of the youngish progressives lending their weight to the socialist uprising seem to have no adult memory of the Tea Party. If they had, they might recognize aspects of that populist rebellion in their own movement.