Thomas Suozzi

With less than 90 days to go until the midterm elections, prominent Democrats are warning that socialists running under the party’s banner will make it significantly more difficult to lure centrist voters away from Republicans in November.

“In order for Democrats to go from the minority into the majority so we can end this national nightmare, we do have to own the center and win over centrist voters, independent voters, and swing voters,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, told me. “At the end of the day, that is the only way for us to be in a position to govern and to get big things done.”

Jeffries is relying on the conventional wisdom of American politics — capture the center — to win a majority in Congress and become Speaker of the House. But that task is being complicated by the Democratic Socialists of America, whose New York chapter has succeeded by organizing grassroots campaigns with a focus on bread-and-butter local issues. On the campaign trail last year, Mayor Mamdani stayed firmly on message, reciting promises to freeze rents, expand child care, create fast and free bus service, and open government-owned grocery stores.

But the DSA’s official national platform goes far beyond Mamdani-style promises, including some startling, system-changing proposals DSA candidates studiously avoid discussing in public.

“Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate,” reads one plank. “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” The DSA is calling for the closure of all overseas military bases; amnesty for all immigrants, regardless of current status; and voting rights for permanent U.S. residents and prison inmates. Local police are to be defunded on a path to “fully abolishing the police and prison system.”

Until now, mainstream Democrats have tended to ignore the DSA platform and the group’s vow to “draft a new constitution and create a democratic socialist republic.” One longtime local Democratic leader, Representative Tom Suozzi, says that’s a mistake.

The Long Island congressman and 14 other Democrats have signed a six-point “Promise to America” explicitly calling out the DSA. “We’re capitalists, not socialists. We are for safety, not lawlessness. We’re proud, not ashamed of America,” he told me. “It’s not a matter of the DSA saying, ‘Hey, we wanna be like Norway — just like we are now but better health care.’ That’s not what they’re saying. They want to abolish the United States Senate; they want the president picked by a one-house Congress. They want to defund the police, defund the Department of Defense. They want to have major corporations owned by the government. These are just poor policies. And we need to keep it at that level to talk about the policy.”

Suozzi, who says the inevitable clash between Democrats and the DSA needs to happen before Election Day, is one of only two Democratic congressmen (along with Adam Gray of California) to flip their seats from Republican control in swing districts President Donald Trump won.

“People have to remember that Donald Trump won my seat by 19,000 votes. For me to win, 20,000 people who voted for Donald Trump also voted for Tom Suozzi,” he told me. “So the Republicans are saying, ‘Boy if we had spent more money, we could have gotten that guy.’ So they’ve reserved $4 million in ad time for October.”

And those ads, he is convinced, will try to scare voters with the specter of socialists quietly working to undermine or abolish foundational American institutions, including the Senate and the Supreme Court.

Multiple indicators point to a possible Democratic rout in November. As of late July, according to a Pew Research poll, about 43 percent of registered voters would choose a Democrat for Congress if the vote were held now, compared with 37 percent for Republicans. President Trump’s disastrously low 35 percent approval rating signals a possible catastrophe for Republicans: Over the last 80 years, presidents who fell below 35 percent for any significant period of time ended up seeing their party lose the next midterm and presidential contest.

Jeffries has targeted 45 Republican districts seats, hoping for a replay of the 2018 midterms, when Democrats flipped 41 seats to take control of Congress during Trump’s first term. But beyond Election Day wins, Democratic successes on major, transformational policy — President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, President Johnson’s Great Society in the 1970s, President Obama’s Affordable Care Act — have always been pushed and powered by social movements that were, at times, harshly critical of Establishment Dems.

Organized labor, the civil-rights movement, modern feminism, environmentalism, and antiwar and gender-equality movements have all led the way in pushing for change, frequently tussling with Democratic Party leaders over how and when to advance movement demands. Wise political leaders — many of whom started out on picket lines themselves — understand electoral success depends on establishing a working arrangement with the social movements.

The question for 2026 and the upcoming 2028 presidential campaign is whether the DSA will take its place alongside other movements under the Democratic big tent, or remain confined to a handful of ultraprogressive districts.

Suozzi says his swing district is a good place for euphoric progressive Democrats to get a reality check.

“The Democrats won all over America back in November of 2025. Everybody’s like, ‘This is great; this is wonderful,’” he told me. “But in my district, we lost the Queens portion to a very right-wing Republican city councilwoman. We lost the town of North Hempstead; the city of Glen Cove, my hometown; the town of Oyster Bay; the town of Huntington; the county of Nassau. So the Republicans think they’ve got a shot to get me.”

As for recent wins by DSA-backed congressional candidates Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, Suozzi said those races were for “deep, deep blue seats in primaries, and those candidates don’t have to worry about the general.”

Jeffries certainly has to, and he has urged DSA members — who are already talking about challenging Democratic incumbents, including Jeffries himself — to proceed with caution.

“It’s ironic to me that you’ve got some folks who are focused on 2028 primaries when we have an existential crisis in the United States of America right now and we gotta go actually defeat Republicans who have jammed extremism down the throats of the American people, ripped up the Voting Rights Act, made life more expensive, gone to war over in Iran,” he said. “It’s just been one disaster after another. And so at this moment in time, I think those of us in the congressional delegation are gonna focus on actually doing what’s necessary to take back control of the House of Representatives.”