The Democrats' November Problem

Judging by the liberal media news reports, the GOP is in for a shellacking (to borrow President Obama's term) this midterm cycle.

But look at who the Democrats are putting on the ballot. In the safe seats, it costs them nothing. In the states that decide control of Congress, it may cost them everything.

In the New York congressional primaries in June, democratic socialists Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier both won. Chevalier unseated five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the 13th District. Valdez took the open Brooklyn-Queens seat that Nydia Velázquez is vacating, beating Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. A third Mamdani ally, former Comptroller Brad Lander, knocked off incumbent Dan Goldman. In Colorado, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, defeated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette. All of them sit in safe Democratic seats, and all of them will likely move to the House. None of these seats was ever going to be lost to a Republican. What changes is the face of the party in the states where seats are genuinely in play.

Recently, NYC mayor Mamdani said he wanted the Israeli leader arrested on the International Criminal Court's war crimes warrant, comments that he later dialed back a bit. He still insisted that while the city has no independent authority to arrest Netanyahu, he would urge the Trump administration to do so. On a friendly podcast with liberal commentator Jon Stewart, it was Stewart who supplied the label: a Muslim democratic socialist who would like to run your public transportation system. Mamdani welcomed it, saying he was happy to drain the fear out of the words. Mamdani's rhetoric got him elected in New York, but he can't replicate this success elsewhere.

The best chance of that would have been in the Maine Senate race, but as we pointed out in a recent editorial, the man Maine Democrats actually chose, Graham Platner, quit on July 10 amid allegations of sexual assault and misconduct, which he denies. He had won the primary with more than 70 percent of the vote just seven weeks earlier, his past explained away at every turn until it blew up for the world to see.

Now the Democrats have Troy Jackson, a former Maine Senate president who finished third in June's gubernatorial primary and has never won a statewide race, installed by more than 600 party delegates at a hastily convened convention in Bangor. Collins's campaign called it a handpicking by insiders. It looks a great deal like the bait-and-switch that produced Kamala Harris's presidential campaign two years ago. And unlike Harris, who inherited former President Joe Biden's campaign operation and war chest, Jackson has to raise cash from scratch. Susan Collins, a formidable GOP senator, has banked more than $16 million. Jackson's campaign reported about $1 million since he entered the race.

Michigan votes on Tuesday, and it will test whether the Mamdani message travels. In one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, the Democratic establishment is backing Haley Stevens, who has represented Michigan's 11th congressional district since January 2019. She is running against Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who admires the Palestinian cause and is intensely critical of Israel. After state Sen. Mallory McMorrow suspended her campaign in July, the contest narrowed to the two of them, and recent RCP polling average shows El-Sayed with a comfortable 10-point lead.

Like Mamdani's friends and their Guru, Bernie Sanders, El-Sayed supports Medicare for All and calls for the abolition of ICE. He has never convincingly answered which federal department would enforce the country's immigration laws. El-Sayed has also supported defunding the police, but now, after deleting multiple posts, he claims he never held that view. A CNN fact-check proved him wrong, surfacing a 2020 radio interview in which he said plainly that the police did need to be defunded.

Defunding the police is also an issue in nearby Wisconsin. In the governor's race there, Mandela Barnes, the former Lt. Governor, dropped his candidacy on July 30 amid reporting that the state Democratic Party had reviewed allegations he used his position in the party to seek sexual encounters with young adult women. Barnes denies any misconduct, and the party's outside counsel could not verify the anonymous claims. He is the third Democrat to abandon the field. Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez went two weeks earlier over a campaign finance mess. That leaves Francesca Hong, who has represented Wisconsin's 76th Assembly district since 2021 and is a dues-paying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, leading the polls ahead of the August 11 primary, with Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, endorsed by outgoing Gov. Tony Evers, as her main obstacle. Hong did not merely call for defunding the police. In 2020 and 2021, she called for abolishing them, and unlike El-Sayed, she never deleted the posts. She now says a governor cannot defund the police and that she would not do it anyway. The record she has never disowned says otherwise.

In Texas, James Talarico is running for John Cornyn's Senate seat, but his liberal positions are too extreme for Texans. He supports abortion rights in a state that has banned the procedure. He is for a more humane immigration approach, describing the southern border as our "front porch" with a welcome mat out front and a lock on the door, a formulation that lets him sound firm while glossing over the scale of what happened under the Biden administration, when the government logged more than 10 million border encounters. Border Patrol counted an estimated 1.7 million "gotaways" besides. He also likes Medicare for All.

In the seats that are actually contested, a fundamental rule applies that is being ignored: "You can't beat somebody with nobody." What happens at the ballot box is structural and practical because elections are comparative. Voters need a choice. If one side fails to recruit, nominate, or adequately support a real candidate, the other side wins by default, regardless of how flawed that remaining candidate may be.

The Democratic Socialists understand this better than the party that hosts them. They run where the primary decides the seat, in Brooklyn, Harlem, Denver, so the nomination is the whole contest and November is a formality. In purple states like Wisconsin and Michigan, both of which Trump carried in 2024, the broader electorate is unlikely to go for someone as radical as Francesca Hong or El-Sayed.

The absence of a viable challenger is the most reliable predictor of victory for the candidate who is actually running. It is a political lesson that has repeatedly played out over the last 50 years. Yet, the liberal media continues to ignore it.

The socialist movement threatens the Democratic Party's national electability, and the warning is coming from inside the house. Jim Kessler of Third Way believes that the socialist bloc remains a small share of the party, then adds the part Democrats would rather not hear: let it keep growing, and the party becomes unelectable nationally. A republic in good health needs two parties strong enough to keep each other disciplined. One of them is now being remade from within by a movement that rejects the country's founding premises, while the leaders who might have said no have stepped aside instead. In November, voters will not be choosing between two governing parties. They will be choosing between a party and a movement, and the Democrats have not yet decided which of the two they intend to be.