Do Democrats really have a big tent? Or do they have a gulag with auxiliary pup tents?
Earlier this week, Chuck Schumer tried putting lipstick on a pig when yet another of his preferred Senate candidates went down to defeat. In June, Graham Platner walloped Janet Mills in Maine, only to withdraw when accused of rape while Der Oysterführer’s progressive allies stood by him even after earlier allegations of domestic assault. Maine Democrats then anointed progressive Troy Jackson to replace Platner, only to discover that he’s been cohabiting with his second cousin for decades.
Schumer’s humiliation worsened in Michigan, where he and the party establishment reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars to help Haley Stevens defeat DSA-aligned Abdul El-Sayed. Stevens nearly succeeded, but El-Sayed and his father-in-law’s Muslim Brotherhood money managed to eke out the primary victory. In response, Schumer tried to claim that the loss showed the value of the Democrats’ “big tent”:
Senator Chuck Schumer thinks Democrat Socialists — who want to oust him as Leader — make the Democrat party stronger.
REPORTER: “Is the rise of the DSA good for your party?”
SCHUMER: “Being a big tent party is a strength not a weakness.” pic.twitter.com/17hSbCbtMx
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 4, 2026
A “big tent,” you say? Just how large do progressives and Democratic Socialists intend to allow it to be? Former DNC vice chair David Hogg told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins on Thursday that the tent will get scaled back enough to leave the moderates of the party on the outside looking in:
Former DNC Vice-chair David Hogg thinks that there is no room for moderates in the Democrat party:
CNN: “What would you say to the moderates in your party?”
HOGG: “They don’t have the right values.” pic.twitter.com/JH9INFoALs
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) August 7, 2026
He then offers advice to moderates in the party – get behind the socialists, or suffer the consequences:
And I think if I was a moderate, what I would be thinking about is, Hmm, how can I actually change and offer voters something new, and how can I develop an actual philosophy that is not just a triangulation of the political spectrum? Because I think that’s part of the reason it sounds like these moderates don’t believe at all in what they’re saying because they’re constantly recalculating, Well, what’s the middle of the political spectrum. And that political spectrum is constant (ph). Meanwhile, candidates like Zohran Mamdani and others around the country are delivering for their constituents.
Let’s not forget, the establishment was losing their mind when Leaders We Deserve, for example, came in and spent $300,000, as one of the largest (inaudible) campaign, and everybody was saying that he’s going to be on every piece of Republican mail this November, and it’s going to destroy our chances.
And look at where we are. He is now the most, one of the most popular, if not consistently the most popular elected official, not just in New York but in the United States of America. If that doesn’t tell you everything that you need to know about the credibility of the establishment, that lost twice to Donald Trump, to talk about electability and popularity, I don’t know what will.
First off, it’s unclear what Hogg knows about electability in the first place. Second, it wasn’t the moderates that anointed Kamala Harris after the Joe Biden fraud conspiracy got exposed in the June 2024 presidential debate, and it wasn’t the moderates that cooked the 2024 Democrat primaries to keep it from getting exposed in the first place. Harris got on the 2020 ticket as a concession to progressives and as a passing of the torch to the Left – and the Left bungled the election, not the moderates.
The real lesson from the 2024 election is what happens when radicals overplay their hands once in power. Trump won a second term because of the open-borders policies that Biden created and that leftists have demanded for decades, as well as the secondary and tertiary effects of the massive migration crisis that resulted. Crime went up, housing costs skyrocketed, wages got undercut, and voters made it clear that they rejected those policies. Harris stood by them anyway, and enough moderates fled to Trump to allow him to win the popular vote, the first Republican to do so in twenty years.
Hogg thinks that every electorate is identical to New York City, where Mamdani is already proving less popular than imagined. Going full DSA in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, and especially Texas, with weirdoes like James Talarico, Francesca Hong, and El-Sayed, will accomplish what Hogg demands: forcing moderates out of the party. The likeliest result will be electoral disaster, from which Schumer is desperately deflecting with talk of a “big tent.”
The DSA and the progressives do not want Schumer’s “big tent.” They want a pure, Mamdani-esque party that excludes people like Chuck Schumer, who can only be considered “moderate” in a purely comparative sense. Their idea of a big tent is one where the socialists occupy every square inch, and everyone else gets relegated to lean-tos in the pouring rain.
Editor’s Note: The 2026 Midterms will determine the fate of President Trump’s America First agenda. Republicans must maintain control of both chambers of Congress.
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