The Socialists Won the Primaries. That Is Not the Same as Winning.
Democrats are fighting over who gets on the ballot. Republicans spent the year redrawing it. Every seat that decides the House is still in play.
By Brian Bullock | Everyone Knows | brianbullockwriter.com
A primary is not an election. It is a party choosing who it wants to send into an election. Those are two different events with two different electorates, and almost every story written about the Democratic Socialists of America this summer has quietly treated them as the same thing.
They are not. A Democratic primary in upper Manhattan is decided by a few tens of thousands of the most committed Democrats in the country. A general election in Michigan or Ohio is decided by everybody, including the people who do not think about politics until October. The candidates who just made headlines have proven they can win the first one. There is very little evidence yet that they can win the second, and one piece of evidence this week that cuts the other way.
What a Primary Actually Decides
The wins were real and they were not close. In the June primaries in New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed three candidates for Congress and all three won. Claire Valdez took an open Brooklyn and Queens seat by more than twenty points. Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32 years old, unseated Adriano Espaillat, a five term incumbent and the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Brad Lander beat Dan Goldman by more than thirty points. A week later in Denver, a 29 year old first time candidate named Melat Kiros knocked out Diana DeGette, who has held that seat since 1997.
A year ago the DSA had two members of Congress. It is now on track for at least five. The organization put fifty thousand volunteers into the field for Mamdani in New York City alone, and its leadership talks openly about running a competitive presidential candidate in 2028.
Now look at where those wins happened. Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. Brooklyn and Queens. Lower Manhattan. Denver. Those are among the safest Democratic districts in the United States. Kamala Harris carried Colorado's first district by 56 points. In seats like that, the primary is the election, because the November race is a formality.
That is not a criticism of the candidates. It is a description of the terrain. Winning a nomination in a district your party wins by fifty points tells you that you are popular with Democrats. It tells you nothing at all about whether you are popular with Americans.
Wisconsin Was the First Real Test
On August 11, the movement stepped outside that terrain for the first time in a race that mattered, and it lost.
Francesca Hong, a state representative and a self described democratic socialist, ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Wisconsin. She had the endorsement network. She had the national attention. Public polling showed her with a substantial lead over her nearest rival, David Crowley. Both parties were watching the race specifically to see which direction Democratic voters were steering.
She lost.
Understand what that result is and is not. It is not a general election loss. Hong did not get beaten by a Republican. She got beaten by Democratic primary voters in a swing state, which is the part that should interest anyone trying to read November. In New York, Democratic voters looked at a socialist and saw the future. In Wisconsin, where the general election is genuinely competitive and a Trump backed Republican might win the governor's office, Democratic voters looked at the same thing and hedged.
Hong had also taken heavy fire over earlier positions, including support for defunding the police and a suggestion about scrapping national holidays. Those are the kinds of positions that never cost a candidate anything in a safe seat and cost a candidate everything in a purple one.
Democratic moderates in Wisconsin spent that night breathing out. NPR's own senior political correspondent framed it as the party running an experiment on whether these candidates can win outside deep blue areas, and summed up the finding in one line: affordability matters a great deal to Democratic voters, but electability may matter more.
The Warnings Are Coming From Inside
The most useful thing about this story is that you do not have to take a Republican's word for any of it. Democrats in competitive seats are saying it themselves, on the record, with their names attached.
The New Democrat coalition put swing district members on a press call about exactly this problem. Representative Emilia Sykes, who holds a purple seat centered on Akron, Ohio, said plainly that in Ohio, in Nebraska and in parts of Arizona, far left candidates are not going to win. Representative Greg Landsman, also of Ohio, put it in terms of arithmetic: if socialists and their message take over the party, Democrats risk losing races they should be winning in November.
In Michigan, establishment Democrats spent the summer openly worried about Abdul El Sayed winning the Senate nomination. He won it. He does not call himself a socialist, but he carries much of the same platform, including taxing billionaires, Medicare for All and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That seat is a genuine tossup, and it is now the movement's first real statewide general election test.
Not every Democrat is alarmed, and the pushback deserves a fair hearing. Senator Dick Durbin points out that he served alongside Bernie Sanders for years without the republic collapsing and that the tent is big enough for disagreement. Representative Ritchie Torres of New York, who sits about as far from the DSA as a New York Democrat can sit, won his own primary comfortably and does not believe any of this costs his party the midterms. Their argument is simple: far left candidates winning in far left districts is not news, and never has been.
Both things can be true. Nobody should be surprised that a socialist won in a district Harris carried by fifty six points. The question is what happens the first time one of them has to win somewhere that Trump might carry.
The Numbers Outside the Primary Electorate
Inside the Democratic Party, this movement is strong and getting stronger. Outside it, the numbers are not close.
A Fox News poll puts socialism at 30 percent favorable with the country at large. Marquette measured the Democratic Socialists of America specifically and found the organization underwater at 25 percent favorable to 43 percent unfavorable. A Washington Post and Ipsos survey found registered voters view democratic socialist leaders unfavorably by 42 to 17. Among independents, the voters who actually decide close races, it runs 30 against 12.
There is one number pointing the other way, and it is worth stating honestly. A CNBC survey found 32 percent of registered voters said they would be more likely to support a candidate who called themselves a democratic socialist. That is not nothing in a country where general elections are decided by a few points. And polling also shows that close to half the country cannot accurately say what the movement stands for, which cuts both ways. It means Republican attacks land in soft ground. It also means the label is not yet fixed in the public mind, and a disciplined candidate can define it before an opponent does.
What the numbers add up to is a split, and the split is the whole story. The word socialist is a liability in a general election and an asset in a Democratic primary. Every candidate carrying it is being rewarded for saying things in June that will be read back to them in October.
The Map Moved While Nobody Was Watching
While the Democratic Party argued about who it wanted on the ballot, Republicans spent a year changing what the ballot looked like.
Ten states have enacted new congressional maps in this cycle. Eight of them redrew in favor of Republicans, two in favor of Democrats. Roughly two out of every five House districts in the country now sit in a state that redrew its lines mid decade, which is an extraordinary number outside of a normal post census year.
It started in Texas at the President's urging, with a map targeting five Democratic held seats. California answered with Proposition 50, which voters approved 65 to 35 in November of last year, clearing the way for a map worth roughly four or five seats to Democrats. By late April the back and forth was close to a wash.
Then the courts moved, and they moved in one direction. The Supreme Court sharply limited the use of race in drawing districts, which opened the door for Republican led states across the South. Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee acted within weeks. A week after that ruling, the Virginia Supreme Court blocked a Democratic drawn map that could have flipped as many as four seats, on the procedural ground that the underlying constitutional amendment had not been passed twice as required. Virginia voters had already approved it in a special election. It did not matter.
Not everything went the President's way. The South Carolina Senate rejected his redistricting push. Missouri's top court let a Republican map stand. New York Democrats wanted to answer California and could not get past their own independent redistricting commission in time.
What the Map Actually Bought
Here the honest reporting diverges, and readers should know that before anyone tells them the House is decided.
NBC's count puts Republicans in position to gain as many as 16 seats under the new lines against six for Democrats. The Associated Press counted 14 seats Republicans believe they could win against six giving Democrats an edge, before pending changes. Those are ceilings, not projections. They describe what is possible if everything breaks one way.
Sabato's Crystal Ball, working from race by race ratings rather than raw seat counts, expects a net Republican gain of about six, with a range of five to nine, and notes that four of the redrawn seats are currently rated tossups. Their finding on the median district is the one worth remembering: the middle seat in the House is now a district Trump carried by 4.9 points. That is redder than it was before this all started.
The Cook Political Report is more conservative still, projecting Republicans net around five seats from redistricting alone. Cook's conclusion is the one that should end any victory lap in either direction. Democrats remain favored to win control of the House, but they are no longer overwhelming favorites.
Read those three together and the picture is clear enough. Republicans won the map fight. They did not win enough to make November safe. They were defending a majority of three or four seats, which means a five or six seat structural improvement moves them from losing narrowly to something close to even.
Anybody's Game
So both of the confident stories being sold right now are wrong.
The first story is that a socialist wave is coming and Republicans are finished. That story is built entirely on primary results in districts where Democrats win by fifty points, and it ran into a wall in Wisconsin on August 11. The party's own members in competitive seats are on the record saying these candidates cannot win where they live.
The second story is that redistricting has locked the House up for Republicans. It has not. The most careful trackers put the structural gain in the range of five to nine seats, some of the redrawn seats are still rated tossups, and the party analyst least likely to be accused of Republican bias still has Democrats favored, if barely.
What is actually true is narrower and more interesting. One party is having a fight about what it believes, in public, in the middle of an election year, and it has not resolved it. The other party spent that same year improving its terrain and still has not built a cushion. The median House district leans Republican by less than five points. A handful of seats decide the majority.
The votes that get talked about all summer are the ones inside one party's family argument. The votes that decide anything come in November, from people who have not been paying attention to any of it.
THE END
By Brian Bullock / Everyone Knows Podcast | Starborne Studios | brianbullockwriter.com | @EveryoneKnws1