The Democrat Party just got a wake-up call it has been ignoring for years.
Socialists keep winning, and the party’s own establishment can’t figure out how to fight back without surrendering.
And now a new poll and a shocking Michigan primary result say where the left is actually headed.
A Swing State Goes Left of Left
Wild election results in Michigan have many Democrat Party establishment figures worrying about insurgent socialists taking over their party, with uber progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed being the latest to score a win over an established Democratic candidate.
El-Sayed overcame a nearly $65 million onslaught of outside money and an establishment that had rallied around Stevens. Governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed his opponent. AIPAC poured in tens of millions on attack ads. None of it worked.
El-Sayed campaigned with movement favorites US Senator Bernie Sanders and US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, along with Hasan Piker, a controversial left-wing Twitch streamer.
Piker is not a fringe figure in this crowd. Piker tries to argue that the DSA’s socialism comes not from Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders but from the “liberation movements” of Dr Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. That rebranding effort is deliberate, and it has been working inside Democrat primaries.
Schweizer noted on the latest episode of *The Drill Down* that “We’ve seen socialists win this year in places like California and New York, but this is the first DSA victory in the Midwest.” Coming in a swing state in America’s heartland, “This is a massive sea change in where American politics is heading.”
Michigan is not just any state. Michigan has been a very important swing state in recent national elections, supporting President Trump in 2016 and 2024 and President Joe Biden in 2020. Winning it in November is a different challenge entirely. Polling in the state shows El-Sayed trails Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost a Senate race in 2024.
But the primary result itself tells a story that goes beyond one race.
One Third and Climbing
About a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults identify as democratic socialists, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS. That number did not appear from nowhere.
In 2010, a Gallup poll showed 50 percent of Democrats had a favorable view of socialism. As of last year, before the victories of now-New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and now-Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, that number had risen to 66 percent.
And as Gallup noted, “Democrats are the only partisan group of the three that views socialism more positively than capitalism — 66% to 42%, respectively.” That is not a rounding error. That is a party that has moved.
Building on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory over Andrew Cuomo last year, candidates describing themselves as democratic socialists have secured the Democratic nomination in several US House races around the country, including defeats of incumbent Representatives Adriano Espaillat in New York and Diana DeGette in Colorado.
The DSA’s own platform openly calls for government seizure of major corporations, the abolition of the Senate, replacement of the Presidency and Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to Congress, and the creation of a classless society — textbook Marxist objectives that would dismantle the constitutional republic and private property rights. These are not fringe demands being whispered in back rooms. They are the stated agenda of an openly Marxist organization that is now winning Democrat primaries across the country.
For Schweizer, the real question is not whether the Democratic Socialists of America are “making inroads” in the party or not. It is whether establishment Democrats can stop the socialists without joining them.
That is the trap. And right now, there is no sign the establishment knows how to escape it.
Where Rights Come From
Schweizer reached back to a speech that cuts straight to the core of what this fight is actually about.
Schweizer pointed to a speech that Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas gave earlier this year talking about progressivism in America and where rights come from. “He said that the problem with progressives and with the left, including the Democratic Socialists of America, is that they don’t believe our rights come from God.”
Thomas issued a blistering critique of modern-day progressivism in a rare public speech, describing the modern political philosophy as a threat to America’s founding principles. Speaking to a packed auditorium at the University of Texas at Austin to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas drew a direct line between contemporary political movements and what he described as a departure from the Constitution’s original meaning.
Thomas put it plainly. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government,” Thomas said.
That distinction matters enormously. A government that grants rights can revoke them. A government that merely secures rights given by God has no such power. The entire constitutional order rests on that difference. And the DSA, with its calls for central planning, government seizure of corporations, and the abolition of the Senate, operates from the opposite premise entirely.
Socialism has never produced broad prosperity. Every serious experiment with it — from the Soviet Union to Venezuela to Cuba — ended in economic collapse, authoritarian drift, and the destruction of the middle class. The people who suffer most are always working Americans, not the political class that imposed the system on them.
But the DSA is not trying to relitigate the Soviet Union. It is trying to rebrand Marxist goals in language that sounds reasonable to a generation that was never taught what those goals actually cost. Calling it “democratic socialism” does not change what government seizure of the means of production has always produced. It just makes it easier to sell in a primary.
The establishment Democrats who are now wringing their hands over El-Sayed’s win spent years accommodating the DSA’s rise, staying silent while socialist candidates won in New York and California, and treating the movement as a useful energizing force rather than a genuine threat to the party’s electability. Their alarm now is real, but it is also late, and it is self-inflicted.
And the numbers keep moving in one direction. Democratic socialists reported higher levels of enthusiasm ahead of this year’s midterm elections. Among respondents who are registered voters, 66 percent of democratic socialists said they are extremely motivated to vote, compared with 57 percent of other Democrats.
Motivated voters show up. And in low-turnout primaries, they tend to win.
The question Schweizer is raising is not whether the DSA can win primaries. It already answered that. The question is whether a party that cannot distinguish itself from an openly Marxist organization can win general elections in states like Michigan — states President Trump carried in 2016 and again in 2024, states where working-class voters know exactly what happens when government decides it knows better than the free market.
The answer to that question will arrive in November. But the drift inside the Democrat Party is not waiting for November to announce itself. It is already here, in the polling, in the primaries, and in the platform of every candidate willing to wear the socialist label and dare the establishment to stop them.
Sources: Breitbart News, The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer, CNN/SSRS Poll, Gallup, Bridge Michigan, CBS News, NBC News, Fox News, Heritage Foundation, University of Texas at Austin (Justice Clarence Thomas address, April 15, 2026)