Democrats generally fold faster and easier than a wet paper towel. When your belief system is more or less fully transactional, you don’t become known for the strength of your convictions. So pardon me if I’m more than skeptical about a defeated primary candidate, or even the House minority leader himself, suddenly trying to talk tough about the DSA takeover happening inside their own party.
Let’s start with Rep. Haley Stevens.
She lost Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, and this week, on Fox News’ “The Sunday Briefing,” she said what a lot of nervous Democrats are apparently thinking out loud now that a new poll shows El-Sayed trailing Republican Mike Rogers by four points and underperforming with Black voters, women, and suburban voters compared to Kamala Harris’s 2024 numbers.
“It certainly makes sense to get rid of this Hasan Piker affiliation,” Stevens said, before pivoting back to insisting the party’s platform still beats the Republicans’.
“It certainly makes sense.”
Really?
Hasan Piker is the streamer who has said he wants to “wipe his a– with the Constitution” and that “the United States should go f— itself.” El-Sayed campaigned poolside with him at a Detroit party for content creators just weeks ago.
And now it makes sense to get rid of the affiliation?
That’s not exactly moral outrage. That’s somebody looking at ugly polling and suddenly discovering a problem everybody else could already see.
Which is why I don’t really believe her.
Then there’s Hakeem Jeffries.
He told “Meet the Press” he doesn’t support Medicare for All and doesn’t support “the DSA agenda as has been articulated by the DSA itself.”
Fine.
Except Jeffries co-sponsored the Medicare for All Act in 2019. Then he did it again in 2021.
So what changed?
Seven incumbent House Democrats have already lost primaries this cycle to DSA-backed challengers, including two Jeffries allies in New York. That’s enough to get anybody’s attention.
Even Rep. Ro Khanna broke with him on the same show, on the same day, calling Medicare for All “arguably the most important priority” and demanding a floor vote if Democrats retake the House.
At least Khanna is telling us what he thinks.
Jeffries wants us to believe he has suddenly discovered restraint at precisely the moment his own caucus is getting eaten alive in Democratic primaries.
Maybe he has.
I don’t really believe him either.
And that’s the problem.
This isn’t about one position on one Sunday show. Democratic leaders spent years supporting legislation and courting political allies they’re suddenly anxious to put some distance between themselves and now that those ideas are costing incumbents elections.
You don’t get points for discovering the fire after the curtains are already burning.
Look at what they’re running from.
The DSA’s new platform calls for abolishing ICE, abolishing the Senate, subordinating the presidency and Supreme Court to Congress, and defunding police toward eventual abolition.
Those aren’t Republican characterizations of the platform.
Those are the ideas.
And Democratic Socialists aren’t merely holding meetings in somebody’s basement and printing pamphlets nobody reads. They’re winning Democratic primaries. Seven incumbents are already gone.
So when Jeffries suddenly wants America to know that he doesn’t support the “DSA agenda,” I’m left with the obvious question:
Where was this urgency before they started beating your people?
Medicare for All is a bad idea. I’ve believed that for years. It’s enormously expensive, hands even more control of health care to Washington and somehow always gets sold as “free” right up until somebody asks who pays for it.
But that’s almost beside the point here.
The people pushing these ideas aren’t hiding what they believe.
Piker certainly isn’t.
The DSA isn’t.
Khanna isn’t.
In a strange way, I respect the honesty more than the sudden repositioning from Democratic leaders who’ve discovered that perhaps their voters aren’t as excited about all of this as the activists are.
Say what you believe.
That’s really not too much to ask.
If Jeffries has genuinely changed his mind about Medicare for All, say why. If Stevens believes campaigning with Piker was wrong, say it was wrong. Don’t tell me it “certainly makes sense” to ditch him after the pollster walks into the room carrying bad news.
And don’t expect voters to forget how recently you were somewhere else.
So sorry, Hakeem Jeffries. Sorry, Haley Stevens.
Maybe this really is conviction. Maybe two Democrats looked at what’s happening inside their party and independently decided enough is enough.
I’d actually welcome that.
But conviction usually shows up before the poll.
Until I see that, I can’t really believe them.