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This was my first live with Charles Douglas since my son was born last month, and if my voice was a little quieter than usual, that is why. The baby was asleep in the next room.
We came back to an important discussion. While I was taking a break from most of my Substack Lives and a hiatus from cable news appearances, the Democratic Party primaries produced a wave of results that sent people into a spiral.
Zohran Mamdani’s political operation delivered primary wins for Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York’s 13th, Claire Valdez in New York’s 7th, and Brad Lander in New York’s 10th. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, beat a 29-term incumbent in Denver. Phil Weiser beat Michael Bennet in Colorado’s gubernatorial primary. And the panels on cable news reacted as if the Democratic Party had gone full revolutionary, even though the DSA wins were only a small part of the broader story here.
Charles Douglas runs Common Power, an organization that has been doing real electoral groundwork across the country, from Tennessee to Michigan to Alaska. His read on all of this is grounded in something the cable news panels mostly missed: what these candidates actually have in common is not a label. It is a prioritization of the working class that voters appear to believe the Democratic establishment has failed to deliver.
My own view going into this conversation, and coming out of it, is that this is being framed wrong. Calling this a democratic socialist takeover and generalizing the entire party based on a few candidates is doing the Republicans’ work for them. Brad Lander left the DSA. James Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian quoting Scripture in Texas. Phil Weiser is not a democratic socialist. What they all share is a posture, a willingness to say that working people have been deprioritized and that is going to change. That is the story.
We also talked honestly about the candidates who make that argument harder to make. And we talked about what comes next, including Charles’s prediction about a potential political realignment and what the 2028 platform needs to look like.
I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
You can watch our full conversation above and read key takeaways below. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.
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The “Socialist Takeover” Narrative Is Overblown
My belief is that the coverage is not accurately describing the full scope of the recent primary results. Watching pundits respond to a handful of primary wins in deeply blue districts as evidence that the entire Democratic Party holds every single view of one or two candidates is both false and politically useful for exactly the wrong people.
We are talking about three House primaries in districts Kamala Harris won by massive margins. I made this point directly: these are deeply blue districts, the hub of DSA organizing, and it should not surprise anyone that democratic socialist candidates won there. Extrapolating that onto the entire Democratic Party and calling it a socialist takeover is the same anecdote-extrapolation tactic the Republican Party uses constantly. When we are handed three primary wins and respond by debating whether the whole party has lost its mind, we are doing their work for them.
The double standard here is glaring. When Trump wins on white nationalist rhetoric, every pundit rushes to understand the economic anxiety beneath the surface. When a handful of democratic socialists win primaries in Brooklyn and Denver, running on healthcare and economic populism, suddenly we need to excommunicate them? Charles put this plainly: the reason the far left gets villainized immediately is not because of their policy record. It is because what they are saying is that rich people should not have as much money as they have, and that is enough to get the most powerful people in the country to turn on them.
There are real critiques to make, and making them is healthy. I said on the live that I have genuine concerns about how some of these candidates communicate, particularly on issues where imprecise language gives opponents easy ammunition. That is a legitimate internal conversation. But legitimate critique is not the same as generalization, and right now, the generalization is winning the airtime.
The Socialist Branding Problem And the Mamdani Standard
The DSA label creates barriers to entry that the underlying ideas do not require. Zohran Mamdani proved that you can overcome those barriers. He is a unique case and political talent, though, and it is worth being honest about why not every candidate running under a similar banner has managed to clear the same bar.
Mamdani is the Michael Jordan of this political moment. Charles said it directly, and I agree. What Mamdani demonstrated is that you can hold democratic socialist policy commitments while being so disciplined on messaging, so relentlessly focused on affordability and working people, that the label never becomes the story. You throw something at him, and he comes back with rent freeze, grocery stores, fare-free buses. The policy is the answer. Charles noted that Mamdani did not run with DSA flags behind him. I noted that Mamdani also strategically declined to back a challenger to Hakeem Jeffries, understanding the limits of what the moment required.
Not every candidate in this wave has that discipline, and it shows in the margins. I was honest about Darializa Avila Chevalier: I have real questions about some of her past statements and some of her current policy positions. Charles made the counterargument that in the age of the internet, any candidate who was a regular person online before running for office will have something in their history that looks bad in a screenshot. But my point was not about the past posts. It was about current communications discipline and whether it makes life harder for Democrats in swing districts who now have to answer for it.
The DSA label, specifically, regardless of the underlying policy, gives Republicans a free layup. I am not arguing these candidates should hide what they believe. I am arguing that “democratic socialism” as a brand carries decades of fear-mongering baggage that the actual ideas do not need. James Talarico does not call himself a democratic socialist and is running competitively for a Senate seat in Texas. Abdul El-Sayed is a progressive running for Michigan Senate and does not identify as a democratic socialist. There is a lesson in that.
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The DSA As Left Flank, Not The Whole Tent
Charles made the argument that I found pretty compelling, and it helped reframe how I think about this wave. The DSA’s value to the broader coalition is not that every district should elect a democratic socialist. It is that having a real, organized left flank changes where the center of the conversation sits.
When you negotiate from the middle, the middle keeps moving toward whoever is starting further right. Charles laid this out precisely: for years, Democratic deals were made by splitting the difference with a Republican Party that was starting way out on the right. The result is that compromise often landed in center-right territory and was called progress. Now that there is a credible left flank with wins, the negotiating floor moves. Candidates like Roy Cooper or James Talarico or Abdul El-Sayed get to be the “moderate” option in a conversation that has shifted.
Bernie Sanders spent decades saying things that seemed impossible, and that is exactly why they are now possible. Charles made this comparison to Avila Chevalier’s further-left policy positions. The role of the left flank is not just to win elections. It is to expand the range of what the political conversation treats as legitimate. Someone has to hold the far end of the continuum so the middle can move, Charles argued.
A coalition is not a coalition if everyone agrees. Charles closed the section with this, and I thought it was the right note. The instinct to excommunicate candidates whose views make us uncomfortable is the same instinct that kept the Democratic Party in a shrinking tent. Welcome people in. Disagree where you disagree. Then point the collective energy at the actual opponents, who are the Republicans running the country right now.
Why The Establishment Lost Many Of Its Own Voters
The opening that allowed this wave to happen was not created by the DSA. It was left open by an establishment that voters believe stopped fighting and stopped prioritizing the people it claimed to represent.
Chuck Schumer’s sternly worded letters and 12th press conferences are not a governing vision. Charles put it bluntly: the establishment spent the years since 2020 waiting for a vision to emerge, and it never came. Regular people across the country looked at that vacuum and decided to fill it themselves. The candidates winning these primaries are not part of a hostile takeover. They are what happens when the people who were supposed to fight for you didn’t show up as forcefully as voters wanted.
The Tea Party comparison does not hold. I made this point, and I want to put it in the write-up because it keeps coming up. The Tea Party was manufactured. It was funded by the Koch brothers. It was an engineered capture of the Republican Party by wealthy interests, and it culminated in Trump. What is happening on the Democratic left right now is grassroots. The money is running against these candidates, not behind them. That is a fundamental difference, and the comparison should stop.
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What Comes Next: The Party Realignment Prediction
Charles closed with an interesting forecast.
Wealthy Democrats will eventually leave the party if the working class takes it over, Charles said. Charles predicted that as working-class priorities come to dominate the Democratic platform, we will see an exodus of wealthy Democratic donors and voters who will eventually migrate back to a post-MAGA Republican Party. He pointed to Third Way, fully funded by ultra-millionaires, as the first signal of that toe out of the water.
The 2028 platform needs to look like FDR. My read is that the end state of all this is a Democratic Party that runs on New Deal-scale economic ambition: rebuild the federal agencies hollowed out by this administration, roll back the Big Beautiful Bill, build out housing, and invest in the working class at a scale people can feel. That is not radical. FDR did it without calling himself a socialist. The ideas travel. The label does not have to.
The races to watch: Michigan, Wisconsin, Seattle. Charles flagged Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, currently leading in the primary polls, as the next big test. Francesca Hong is polling in second in the Wisconsin governor’s race, which would be significant precisely because Wisconsin is not a deep-blue state. And Charles will be on the ground in Tennessee with Justin Pearson and in Michigan with the El-Sayed campaign in the coming weeks. Keep watching those races. They will tell us a lot about where this goes.
The Bottom Line
The debate consuming Democratic politics right now is real, but it is being badly framed. The candidates winning these primaries are not evidence of a socialist takeover. They are evidence that working people want someone who will actually fight for them. The label matters less than the posture. The posture that is winning is: I am on your side, the powerful are not, and I will not back down.
Charles’s point about the left flank widening the Overton window is an important structural argument to understand here. A Democratic Party with a real left flank negotiates differently. It governs differently. And eventually, the candidates who find the Mamdani-level discipline to hold those commitments while keeping their coalition broad are going to be the ones who define what the party becomes.
If this conversation mattered to you, I hope you consider becoming a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! Independent pro-democracy journalism only works if people back it. And if you’d like to get involved and knock doors this election year, I also highly recommend checking out Common Power.
