Will the GOP have reason to send a thank-you note to New York Mayor Mamdami after he and his consort of young Democratic Socialists frighten the hinterlands enough to forestall the loss of one or both houses of Congress in the upcoming midterms?
Fox News host Larry Kudlow thinks so. “They’re gonna get clocked in the upcoming election,” Kudlow said on a Fox Business Live panel, “[The socialists] are giving the Republican Party a great gift, and they will take advantage of it.”
But over at the Michael Savage podcast, Savage seems resigned to the opposite outcome. “We’re going to lose so bad in the midterms” he grumps, spatula in hand while tossing and turning a fry pan of noodles.
While getting out front with a predictive analysis may be good for clicks and views, the smart if unsatisfying call is to refrain from speculation with the mantra that it’s just too early to tell. Such ostensible restraint is not stopping a deluge of coordinated conservative messaging about how the democratic socialist threat plays in the Midwest. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck—name the host and you’ll find the narrative. Communism is embedded in every report.
Assisting that narrative are some rooftop voices in the Democratic Party who see ruin for their 2026 chances to align with a historical record confirming that the party out of power always gains midterm seats on Capitol Hill. Former Clinton advisor James Carville—usually a reliable pulse-taker for the left—is railing about democratic socialists from Sen. Bernie Sanders to AOC on down, decrying their misguided targeting of establishment Democrats.
“These people are so fucking stupid,” he said in a video for Politicon.
With the outcome of the Iran War hanging fire, and affordability paramount in the minds of the U.S. electorate, why not latch onto traditionalist fear of Democratic Socialism? Despite the relatively small-pond influence of the socialist far left, the policies and prescriptions propounded in these precincts are anti-American and unsustainable.
Kudlow: “They may win a few deep-blue city mayoral races, but that’s about it.”
It’d be disingenuous for influential conservative voices to wax thankfully about the advent of the “Commies.” More effective are dire warnings from high-profile pundits about confiscation of property and means of production, but beneath the alarming allusions to Castro, Stalin and Che Guevarra, is a welcome, plurality-making gift. And a rhetorical countermeasure calculated to help President Trump’s GOP buck the historical midterm trend.