It’s been said that you should never interfere with your political opponent when he’s committing electoral suicide, so let’s keep this column to ourselves.

There’s an energy, a growth sector, within the Democrat Party, but it isn’t a healthy one — at least not when it comes to winning statewide and national elections. I’m speaking of the Democratic Socialists of America — the radical outfit whose candidates have been knocking off traditional Democrats in primaries all across the fruited plain.

If you think the Democrats haven’t learned the right lessons from their 2024 curb-stomping at the hands of Donald Trump, you might be onto something. What the American people tend to want is normalcy, even if it comes in a loud package. Trump’s brashness might be unsettling to certain mainstream voters, but those same voters have come to realize that there’s nothing radical about his policies. When it comes to lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government, and a muscular global presence, Trump is a doctrinaire Republican, and his prescriptions are largely Reaganesque.

The Democrats, on the other hand? Their policies are becoming less and less normal, more and more radical.

We saw the evidence of this recently, when leading Democrats, from Kamala Harris to Sandy Cortez, began trial-ballooning some really idiotic and unsettling ideas. A few weeks ago, for example, Harris called for a “no-bad-idea brainstorm” for her fellow Democrats. Among the bad ideas she floated were packing the Supreme Court, admitting Puerto Rico and DC as states, and doing away with the Electoral College.

Those aren’t mainstream Democrat ideas. Those are radical socialist ideas. And that’s where the energy is within the Democrat Party. As Stu Smith writes in City Journal:

Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s top leadership met for an in-person meeting of their National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing authority. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

“Workers Deserve More!” they shriek. But everyone knows socialists don’t work. They just live off other people’s money.

Laughable, right? And yet, the DSA is where the energy is on the Left. As Samantha-Jo Roth writes in the Washington Examiner, these folks “have spent years building influence inside the Democratic Party, recruiting candidates, building campaign infrastructure, and embedding operatives inside races stretching far beyond the deep-blue urban enclaves where the movement first gained traction.”

To what effect, you ask? “DSA-backed or DSA-aligned candidates who advanced or claimed victories in state and local races this year,” Roth adds, “included candidates in Georgia, Oregon, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, North Carolina, and Vermont, reflecting the organization’s continued focus on building influence beyond Congress and into municipal, legislative, and education races.”

Ah, yes, those “education” races. We conservatives and Republicans tend to ignore those local contests and focus instead on the state and national levels. That’s understandable, but we do so at our peril. Leftists, on the other hand, know that they can effect real change in communities all across the country without ever being elected to the House or the Senate, either at the state level or nationally. Give us the children, they say.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, socialism still tends to have a low electoral ceiling — at least nationally. Which is why the Democrat Party apparatus and mainstream media fellow travelers shivved Bernie Sanders in 2020 in favor of the, ahem, more electable Joe Biden. Yes, yes, a hard-left city like LA or DC might well want a mayoral choice between hard-left and even-harder left, and a city like New York, with a 9:1 Democrat voting advantage, might well elect a guy like Zohran Mamdani, but those are gated electoral communities. Socialism still doesn’t play in Peoria. Which is why I’d just as soon keep this conversation to ourselves.

Democrat pollster Matt McDermott says that many voters are less motivated by ideology than by frustration with the political establishment and economic anxiety.

Folks, if “economic anxiety” is what’s keeping Democrats up at night, just wait till they get full-blown socialism good and hard, like they’re getting in New York City. As with ObamaCare and other forms of socialism: If you think [insert leftist policy idea here] is expensive now, just wait till it’s free.

“The challenge isn’t just winning primaries,” said Democrat strategist Jon Reinish. “The challenge is building a coalition broad enough to win nationally.”

He’s right, but he’s also wrong. Democrats have already won nationally. Twice. Folks tend to forget that before he threw his hat into the ring for the presidency, Senator Barack Obama had the most liberal voting record in the entire U.S. Senate — to the left, even, of Socialist Bernie Sanders. True, Obama ran in 2008 as a Democrat, not a socialist, but that’s increasingly a distinction without a difference.

In a way, the Democrats’ dalliance with naked socialism is understandable, given how badly their party has fared with working-class Americans of late, and given how brutally they were curb-stomped by Donald Trump in 2024. Democrats are all about power, and they’ll pursue it by any means necessary, even if it means voting for racist, misogynistic, Nazi-loving, sexually depraved, trust-fund commie pigs.

Third Way’s Kate deGruyter says that Democrats “risk serious electoral consequences if the party becomes too closely identified with the DSA.”

She doesn’t say. There’s still a strong stench associated with socialism in this country — at least among adults who remember what the second “S” in “USSR” stood for — but it’s increasingly not true among our children, whose teachers and professors tend to present socialism as a legitimate political philosophy rather than the ruinous ideology that’s failed everywhere it’s been tried and brought misery to untold millions along the way.

Still, I tend to think we’re seeing the results in recent polling. The so-called generic ballot question is asked every two years by pollsters hoping to glean some insight into the mood of the electorate, and the gap between Democrats and Republicans regarding that question has narrowed considerably in recent weeks — to the point where that midterm GOP bloodbath that everyone said was a forgone conclusion is now very much in doubt. Polling by The Economist/YouGov, for example, had Democrats with a 47-40 generic ballot advantage in February, but that gap has since narrowed to 39-36. And we can expect it to stay narrow as we return victorious from Iran and gasoline prices return to normal.

The Democrats’ long-awaited after-action report from the 2024 election says that the party “needs to rebuild support with working-class voters, men, Latinos, rural communities, the South, and Middle America more broadly, while sharpening its message on affordability, public safety, and candidate quality instead of relying solely on opposition to President Donald Trump.”

All that is easier said than done, especially when all the energy within the party belongs to the forces who are fundamentally off-putting to all those constituencies — if not downright repulsive to them. The lone exception among these groups is Latinos, whose ancestral home countries in South and Central America have tended to gravitate toward socialism. No wonder the Democrats are fighting like hell against ICE, fighting like hell to keep these illegals from being deported. Where we see illegal immigrants, Democrats and Democrat Socialists see future generations of voters.

As Europe is now learning, and as Americans have largely failed to learn, you can have a welfare state, and you can have open borders. But you can’t have both.

Will the Democrat Socialists of America win the hearts of everyday Democrats? That’s the battle that will increasingly play out between now and the 2028 presidential election. But the real test will come on November 3. If the Democrats fail to retake the House from the Republicans, they’ll be devastated. And they’ll have to look in the mirror, and they’ll have to acknowledge their own willingness to swap spit with the Democratic Socialists in their midst.