La Résistance Is Kaput, and So Are Dems. Long Live the DSA?

Since then, Democrats have remained obsessed with Orange Man Bad as the entire agenda of their party. Its establishment heavily recruited La Résistance candidates in the midterm primary cycle, expecting their voters to rally to the TDS anthem. 

Instead, they have discovered that the "resistance" has curdled on the shelf, and that voters are exhausted with Trump exhaustion:

It's kind of been a rough set of primaries for Heroes of the Resistance 1.0 between Vindman losing tonight, Dan Goldman losing his seat (although there were other issues there) and George Conway getting only 6% of the vote in NY-12. People want to move on.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) August 19, 2026

In retrospect, the strategy here is bizarre to the point of mental illness. One would think that Trump's popular-vote win in 2024 over the relentless Biden-Harris effort to make Trump's disqualification the issue of the election would have pushed party leadership to start developing a new argument for leadership. Instead, Democrats doubled down on TDS, especially figures like Gavin Newsom and Jon Ossoff, who thought TDS was a grand uniting message for the Left. 

Instead, it turned out to be a dead end. Again.

And what happens when a party keeps trying to win elections while offering nothing of substance? They leave themselves open to factions with a real agenda. That's especially true when radical factions promise real action while the establishment keeps offering the same old failed strategies. Axios takes note of the successes of Democratic Socialists in the vacuum left by the Democrat establishment and its failed promises:

Why it matters: In the first Trump administration, involvement in impeachment was a fast-track ticket to Democratic stardom. Now it's seen as little more than set-dressing for an unpopular party establishment.

• "Being aggressive on accountability and corruption (such as with impeachment) is not enough," one House Democrat told Axios in a text message.
• Democratic primary voters, the Democrat said, "are looking for us to be more aggressive and bold on a whole host of issues. ... Standing up to Trump is a must, but it's not enough in 2026."
• Another House Democrat said of impeachment: "Members now realize that it's not that big of a deal. It's old hat ... Especially when you can't deliver."

This has been the risk all along. Democrats insisted they could stop Trump with impeachment, even though they were far short of votes in the Senate. They insisted they could stop Trump with lawfare and failed. They insisted they could stop Trump with a ginned-up and absurd 14th Amendment argument, and that also failed spectacularly. Now, in this midterm cycle, Democrats ran Trump impeachment figures in primaries promising that another impeachment would stop Trump.

Did they really think voters would fall for it again? Promising the moon and delivering a pebble is always a recipe for political failure. When the party offers nothing else but The End Of Trump This Time And We Really Mean It even after Trump won his biggest election result, no one can be surprised that voters don't want impeachment grifters around to remind them of that failure. 

Instead, voters in Democrat primaries chose the only other option available to them. David Frum at The Atlantic points out the same risk that DSA candidates present in this midterm cycle, and why Democrats may go from the Trump skillet into a Marxist flame-out:

The far left of the Democratic Party has never been as energized as the party’s center about Trump and democracy. A 2017 analysis in The Washington Post suggested that between 6 and 12 percent of people who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries voted for Trump in the general election. With many careful caveats, the analysis observed that these voters exceeded Trump’s margin of victory.

In 2024, likewise, some leaders of the activist left noisily defected from the Harris-Walz ticket. For many of them, opposing Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza mattered more than stopping a Trump presidency at home. The effect of this mobilization on the left is hard to measure, but The Nation was quick to insist that the Biden administration’s Gaza policy likely cost the party Michigan, because many Arabs and Muslims swung toward Trump. The article did not seriously consider whether culture politics, such as Kamala Harris’s support for transgender rights, influenced socially conservative Arab and Muslim voters, even though the city of Dearborn has long been a locus of anti-gay grassroots politics in the state. The claim that Harris lost to Trump because of Gaza may well be activist self-medication, but this kind of story about the election is telling.

This year, the dulling of anti-Trump impetus on the left is even more visible and consequential. Again and again, primary voters have made choices that subordinate general-election concerns to factional power-seeking. Democratic leaders—the dreaded “Establishment”—have promoted highly plausible candidates for statewide office in North Carolina, Texas, and other suddenly competitive states. But the insurgent left has again and again upset leadership plans with high-risk choices to serve its own factional agenda, putting at risk once-probable Senate victories in Maine, Michigan, and some House seats too.

And this also has a large contradiction at its core:

Many of the far-left candidates are aggressively obnoxious from a centrist’s point of view. Centrist Democrats are not socialists, not revolutionaries, and not disposed to blame Zionist conspiracies for every trouble in American life, including police brutality and urban gentrification. Why on earth would centrist Democrats in Michigan vote for a radical leftist who calls most Democrats hypocrites when the other choice on the ballot is a Republican campaigning on reducing housing costs by simplifying the government-approval process?

That's the big question in Michigan, but also in Maine, Texas, Florida, and maybe in Georgia too. The DSA's entire agenda consists of promises that cannot possibly be redeemed, platformed on a political/economic system that has only ever delivered shortages, tyranny, and misery. A handful of DSA radicals will enter Congress in January, thanks to early poaching in deep-blue districts, but they may not last long. At some point, the party will finally stop obsessing over Trump and start focusing on its survival.

At the moment, though, the Democrat Party is intellectually kaput. Unless and until they come up with a realistic alternative to the DSA that focuses on real deliverables, they'd better be prepared to lose a lot of elections under the red banners of the Marxists they allowed into their "big tent."