I recently wrote that the wins by more progressive candidates in Democratic primary races that ousted candidates favored by the party establishment would show us whether the party would embrace this new energy and help these candidates win the general election races or whether the establishment would instead seek to hold on to its grip on party power even if it meant losing in the general election. And it appears that at least some are opting for the latter course.

Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic national committee, directed a pointed message at candidates running under the party’s banner while openly criticizing its direction.

“I say this with no ill will or animosity: if you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” Harrison wrote on social media. “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.”

It is curious how Harrison frames the progressives as ‘hating’ the Democratic Party purely because they want to take it in a different direction. He seems to think that the neoliberals who have dominated the leadership for so long are the rightful owners of the party and should not be challenged. He is not alone.

Over the last few days, prominent party figures have moved away from unifying under a “blue no matter who” banner to push for a more formal break with their left flank, and said the moment may have arrived for Democrats to confront their more socialist wing.

“I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the S-word: schism,” James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist and former Bill Clinton adviser, said on his podcast. He added that some DSA-aligned candidates “have no place in the Democratic party” and, of the broader coalition: “I’m not in that fucking political party.”

Norman Solomon has a very good analysis about the current state of the struggles within the Democratic Party and says that the party establishment is panicking and also reveals whom people like Harrison and Carville actually represent.

Between 2008 and 2016, when Harrison worked as a lobbyist for the powerhouse firm the Podesta Group, he represented scores of huge corporations. They included Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Boeing, BP, General Motors, Google, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Oracle, United Technologies, Walmart and Wells Fargo. He also lobbied for trade associations like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and the National Mining Association.

Harrison is an archetype of the political operatives telling democratic socialists to leave the Democratic party. If they followed such advice, the new mayors of New York and Seattle would no longer be Democrats. Nor would the next mayor of Washington DC, or the member of the Los Angeles city council now in a runoff for LA mayor.

Many prominent mainline Democrats are suddenly insisting that their party’s big tent should get smaller. One of them, James Carville, declared last week that the socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district, “is not a Democrat” and House Democrats “should not seat her in the caucus”.
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After gaining fame as the campaign manager for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory, Carville served as a consultant overseas for corporate and conservative candidates from Greece to Latin America. He and Harrison are just two of the eminent Democrats now publicly melting down about the left’s advances in this year’s primaries. The surge of voter support for strong progressives is a shock to seasoned lobbyists and political consultants for corporate America along with Democratic politicians who serve it.

A major factor is the drastic shift away from public support for Israel during the last two years, now showing up on ballots. Mainstream Democrats have been knocked out of their denial comfort zone. Even though it has lately become expedient to distance oneself from Aipac, the main pro-Israel lobby group, most Democrats in Congress (along with Republicans) remain closely aligned with Israel – despite the genocide in Gaza.

The Democratic leaders in Congress, Representative Hakeem Jeffries and Senator Chuck Schumer, have always been stalwart advocates for Israel. Each has received more than $1.7m in campaign contributions from pro-Israel groups. Steadfast allegiance to Israel is one of the key reasons for their mutual antagonism with the left.

People like the odious Carville and Harrison represent neoliberal Democrats, not the party’s base.

The data, however, offers a more complicated picture of where the Democratic base actually stands. A Fox News poll in March showed that 49% of all registered voters, including 72% of Democrats and 60% of independents, described capitalism as working “not very” or “not at all” well.

CNN data analyst Harry Enten pointed to a poll from Marquette Law School that found the DSA now holds higher favorability than sitting congressional Democrats, from Democratic voters and leaners themselves.

In his segment, Enten summarized it by saying: “Simply put, they’re more popular than the Democrats currently in charge.”
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National polling also consistently shows that cost of living and affordability – which often comprise the center of democratic socialists’ platforms – remain the dominant concerns for US voters. And younger and more liberal Democrats are significantly more likely to express support for generational change within the party’s leadership.

It’s an opening that the DSA isn’t shying away from, with its sights set beyond the November midterms. DSA’s national co-chair, Megan Romer, told Politico last week that the group was dispatching surveys to all 250 of its chapters this summer, asking members to weigh in on who should carry the democratic socialist banner into 2028, with responses due back to national leadership by 15 September.

“What DSA represents is a real contrast to Democrats who have run the last couple of elections on fear,” Romer said. “You can’t run on that. You have to offer an alternative.

People like Carville want power so that they and their friends can benefit from it rather than use the power for the general good. He has exploited his talent for using colorful language in the service of power by portraying himself in such a way that the media call on him to give the ‘liberal’ point of view when he is actually serving right wing interests.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries vigorously opposed the progressives in the primaries but after the election, realizing that he needs them to win in order to gain a Democratic majority and the speakership, has at least on the surface, tried to reach out.

The fierce establishment reaction was a notably different posture from that adopted by House minority leader and New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, himself a figure the DSA has openly targeted.

When asked on CNBC about DSA supporters chanting “you’re next” at a screen showing his face, Jeffries pointed to Donald Trump. “Our focus is going to be on ending this national nightmare in this country,” he said.

By Saturday, Jeffries had publicly congratulated the nominees on social media. “From public servants to union organizers to community activists, the path is different but the work is the same,” he wrote. “We must decisively address the affordability crisis and crush far-right extremism.”

Coming up on August 4th is the Michigan primary for the US senate seat where a progressive Abdul El-Sayed, endorsed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, is running strongly against the establishment candidate representative Haley Stevens , after a third candidate who tried to straddle the two wings dropped out.

The Senate primary in Michigan has come under scrutiny nationwide by Democrats, who are vying internally to decide whether the party should hew to the more traditional approach backed by national figures like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer or embrace the leftist wing, helmed by figures like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. While Stevens has seen the support of establishment groups that argue their methods are best equipped to take on former Rep. Mike Rogers, the presumed Republican nominee, El-Sayed and his backers have made the case that the energy lies with their movement.

El-Sayed has adopted a more aggressive posture on the campaign trail, such as in his modification of former first lady Michelle Obama’s famous line: “When they go low, we don’t go high,” El-Sayed has said. “We take them to the mud and choke them out.”

Even right wing political operative Steve Bannon has noticed the surge is support for the democratic socialist position.

To Bannon, it’s proof of something he’s said for months: The U.S. is in a transformational political moment, and leadership in both parties is way behind.

“We are facing a new politics. We’re seeing the dying of the old politics before us,” Bannon said in a Tuesday interview. “You’re seeing it burn to the ground before you.”

Bannon argues that Mamdani and his allies have tapped into a base enthusiasm the Democratic establishment has been sleeping on.
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Here’s the thing I would tell people: We have a capitalist system with no capitalists. We have a very concentrated part of who controls capital in this country, and 80 percent of the people have no participation in, really, the capitalist system. You must be prepared to make radical changes to our system, and you must be prepared to stand in the breach, and to basically beat these people down, not just at the polls, but by government policy.
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We’re in a fourth turning. And Mamdani and his troops, his forces, they understand that they’re playing for keeps. They believe that they are on the rise, and they have within their grasp to take control of the most powerful nation in the history of the Earth in its 250th year.

In the next three to five years, they believe they will get ultimate power, and if you don’t stop it, they just might.

Of course, he also does the usual scaremongering about these people being ‘Marxist jihadists’, the way Trump is now trying to do. We should expect the Republicans to double down on that.