Abdul El-Sayed insists he isn’t a socialist. ‘Socialist’ may be too weak for a man who seems more enamored of an Islamist Caliphate. From Michigan to New York to Florida, candidates once relegated to the ideological fringe are defeating establishment Democrats—and beginning to look less like a faction than a possible future of the party. Totalitarian candidates are on the rise in the Democrat Party.
For years, conservatives warning that America’s progressive movement was marching steadily leftward were routinely accused of exaggeration. Democrats were not becoming socialists, Americans were told. Bernie Sanders was an eccentric outlier. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represented an unusually liberal congressional district. The Democratic Socialists of America were activists operating at the edges of a much larger and fundamentally conventional political party.
That explanation has become increasingly difficult to sustain.
The story unfolding in 2026 is not that every Democrat has suddenly become a socialist. Not completely–not yet. Is democratic socialism synonymous with Soviet-style communism? Again, not yet. The more consequential development is that candidates openly identifying as democratic socialists, and candidates closely allied with that movement, are demonstrating that they can defeat traditional Democrats, capture Democratic nominations and build a political infrastructure capable of reproducing those victories.
And Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed may be the most revealing example precisely because he publicly rejects the socialist label.
The Candidate Who Says He Isn’t a Socialist
El-Sayed is now the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate in one of America’s most important battleground states. He defeated the more centrist Rep. Haley Stevens in Michigan’s Democratic primary and will face Republican Mike Rogers in November. His victory followed endorsements from Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and every current member of the congressional “Squad.”
El-Sayed nevertheless insists that descriptions of him as a socialist are wrong. “I’m not somebody who is a socialist,” he told CNN during the campaign, adding that he believes in capitalism but believes it must be regulated. In another interview he described himself as “a capitalist who’s actually read about capitalism.” A wholistic survey of his totalitarian-leaning statements provide a textbook definition of Mussolini-styled fascism.
Fox News reported that El-Sayed appeared at six DSA events between 2017 and 2020. He headlined a 2019 fundraiser that raised approximately $10,000 for Detroit DSA, whose organizers reportedly described him as a “longtime friend.” At one event, El-Sayed and Rep. Rashida Tlaib were photographed behind imagery depicting a hand labeled “DSA” choking a snake labeled “capitalism.”
Then there is the coalition behind him. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez campaigned with El-Sayed. The entire Squad endorsed him. DSA members have gravitated toward his campaign even without a formal organizational endorsement. His agenda includes Medicare for All and an aggressive attack on corporate concentration and money in politics.
Whether El-Sayed personally checks the “socialist” box is therefore almost beside the point. He has become a vehicle through which America’s socialist left can exercise power in a state that Donald Trump carried twice. That is much more significant than a label.
The Deleted Posts
El-Sayed’s past rhetoric has received renewed attention as he attempts to broaden his appeal for the general election.
CBS News reported this week that it verified two deleted El-Sayed posts comparing America’s COVID death toll with the nearly 3,000 people murdered on September 11. He is for it. Another deleted post from the 20th anniversary of 9/11 compared the victims with deaths resulting from subsequent American military interventions.
Then there is is close relationship with Hasan Piker. Piker, the enormously popular left-wing streamer who infamously said that “America deserved 9/11” appeared at El-Sayed campaign events. Their association has become sufficiently controversial that fellow Democrats have demanded a repudiation.
This is no longer simply Republican opposition research. It has become an argument inside the Democratic Party about how far its insurgent wing has traveled and which associations should remain beyond the pale.
The same problem surfaced after an attack on a Michigan synagogue. El-Sayed initially discussed the attack partly through the assailant’s personal loss in the Middle East and said that “hurt people hurt people.” He subsequently apologized to Michigan’s Jewish Democratic Caucus, saying he had not intended to excuse violence and regretted the pain his words caused.
Taken together, the statements illustrate that a candidate who developed his political identity within America’s activist left is now attempting to translate that identity into statewide political power. And he is hardly alone.
Zohran Mamdani Proved the Model Could Work
The political earthquake really began with Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani doesn’t run away from the terminology. He is a democratic socialist and was sworn in as mayor of America’s largest city in January after campaigning on universal childcare, free bus service, rent freezes and higher taxes on wealthy New Yorkers.
More importantly, Mamdani isn’t treating his victory as a one-off New York phenomenon. He told CBS that democratic socialism “can flourish anywhere.” The movement is now testing that proposition.
In June, all three congressional candidates endorsed by Mamdani won their New York Democratic primaries. Brad Lander defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman. Darializa Avila Chevalier defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat. Claire Valdez captured the nomination for an open congressional seat. At least a dozen NYC-DSA-backed candidates won races that night.
That is not an activist club issuing manifestos. That is an electoral machine. And because these are overwhelmingly Democratic districts, primary victories can be tantamount to election.
The Insurgency Spreads to Michigan
Then came Michigan. State Rep. Donavan McKinney, a DSA member, defeated incumbent Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar for the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s 13th Congressional District. McKinney ran on Medicare for All, ending military aid to Israel and rejecting corporate PAC money. He was backed by DSA and other progressive organizations and is heavily favored in his Democratic district.
On the same primary night, El-Sayed defeated the more establishment-oriented Stevens for the Senate nomination. Consider what that means.
A democratic socialist knocked a sitting Democratic congressman out of office. A Sanders- and AOC-backed progressive with longstanding DSA relationships captured the party’s Senate nomination. And the results occurred not in Brooklyn or San Francisco, but in Michigan, one of the states that determines who governs America.
Reuters now describes El-Sayed and McKinney as part of a broader test for the democratic socialist movement as it attempts to expand its coalition beyond younger progressives and into constituencies, including older Black Democrats, that have traditionally been more skeptical of the socialist left.
Florida Just Delivered Another Warning
Florida provided yet another data point. State Rep. Angie Nixon stunned the Democratic establishment by defeating Alex Vindman for the party’s U.S. Senate nomination. Nixon joined the Democratic Socialists of America in June, although she has emphasized that she doesn’t endorse every position taken by the organization.
After winning, Nixon told CBS that voters weren’t interested in ideological terminology. “It’s not about labels,” she argued.
That phrase is becoming remarkably common. El-Sayed says he isn’t a socialist. Nixon says labels aren’t important. Mamdani says democratic socialism can flourish everywhere.
Conservatives would be foolish to become obsessed with terminology while ignoring the underlying transformation. Look at the policies. Look at the alliances. Look at who is winning.
A Democratic Leadership Vacuum
Former Democratic fundraiser Lindy Li offers one explanation for why this is happening.
Li, who raised money for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris before breaking with the party and now identifies as conservative, told Fox News that the Democratic Party’s post-Biden leadership vacuum has created an opening for DSA.
“Power abhors a vacuum,” she said. “They’re simply filling a vacuum. There’s no one there.” Li’s political conversion obviously gives her a point of view, and her characterization of DSA should be understood in that context. But the underlying observation is difficult to dismiss.
Who currently defines the Democratic Party? The Biden generation is gone. The old Clinton-era centrism has little emotional hold on younger Democratic voters. The party establishment remains institutionally powerful, but establishment-backed incumbents have repeatedly discovered that institutional power doesn’t guarantee victory in a Democratic primary.
The socialist left, meanwhile, has something establishment Democrats increasingly lack: an ideology, an activist base, recognizable national personalities, an economic narrative and an organized mechanism for identifying and electing candidates. It knows what it wants.
Socialism With Better Marketing
There is also a reason the movement is succeeding that conservatives should understand rather than caricature. Its candidates rarely campaign by giving voters lectures on Marx.
They campaign on rent. Groceries. Health insurance. Childcare. Corporate power. Housing.
Young Americans facing enormous housing costs, student debt and health-care expenses (all created by Democratic policies) are told that their economic insecurity is not primarily the result of scarcity, regulation, monetary policy, taxation or failed government programs. They are told instead that the system has been captured by billionaires and corporations, and that government can make life affordable by transferring more economic power to the public sector.
That message has political potency.
Mamdani’s campaign was built around affordability. Nixon stresses everyday costs. El-Sayed continually redirects interviews toward housing, health care and the price of living. Even Reuters’ examination of the socialist movement today notes that its candidates are concentrating on affordability as they try to broaden their electoral appeal.
Supporters see these policies as democratic government correcting market failures, restraining monopolies and providing necessities that private markets have failed to make affordable. They reject comparisons with authoritarian communism and point to social-democratic programs throughout Europe and elsewhere. That is the strongest argument for their side.
But conservatives should recognize what is occurring beneath the friendlier vocabulary: the acceptable boundary of government intervention in American economic life is moving dramatically.
Policies that would have been considered outside mainstream Democratic politics a generation ago are increasingly presented not as radical experiments but as obvious moral necessities.
Yesterday’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Establishment
That is the real lesson of Abdul El-Sayed. It isn’t necessary to prove that he secretly keeps a copy of The Communist Manifesto under his pillow. It isn’t even necessary to win an argument over whether “socialist” “communist” or even “caliphate” is the technically correct description of his political philosophy.
Watch the movement instead. Bernie Sanders spent decades as an eccentric independent socialist from Vermont. Then came AOC and the Squad. Then came Mamdani.
Now Mamdani has become mayor of New York City and helped knock incumbent Democrats out of Congress. DSA-backed candidates are winning nominations in Michigan. A DSA member has captured Florida’s Democratic Senate nomination. And a politician who spent years appearing at DSA events, enjoys the backing of virtually every major figure in the congressional socialist left and advocates some of its signature economic policies is now the Democratic nominee for the United States Senate in Michigan.
The socialist movement has not quite captured the entire Democratic Party. A few moderate Democrats may still exist, often resist it somewhat, and in many parts of the country remain more electorally successful. But that is no longer the relevant threshold.
The question is whether socialism has moved from the Democratic Party’s fringe into a position from which it can plausibly compete for the party’s future.
The 2026 election cycle is supplying an increasingly uncomfortable answer: It has.
And Americans who were once told that warnings about the Democratic Party’s leftward march were merely conservative hysteria no longer have to speculate about where the movement wants to go.
Its candidates are telling us. Its organizations are mobilizing. And increasingly, Democratic primary voters are putting them in office.
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