Politics

Democratic socialists just dominated New York — and are coming for 2028

Published

3 months ago

June 24, 2026

Democratic socialists just caused a political earthquake. Now they’re coming for 2028.

Fresh off sweeping victories across New York City that showcased the growing power of the anti-establishment progressive left inside the Democratic Party, Democratic Socialists of America leaders, eager to capitalize on their momentum, are already plotting their next act: making sure one of their own is on the presidential primary debate stage, whether the party wants them or not.

“What DSA represents is a real contrast to Democrats who have run the last couple of elections on fear,” DSA national co-chair Megan Romer said. “You can’t run on that. You have to offer an alternative. And it’s really important that we be involved in that conversation in 2028. It’s important that we have somebody saying sensible things.”

Their search process is already underway. This summer, DSA is dispatching surveys to all 250 of its chapters, asking members to weigh who they want to back and why, and return their findings to national leadership by Sept. 15, details the group first shared with Blue Light News. DSA expects to receive a stack of 20-page to 40-page dossiers from chapters coast to coast weighing in on who should carry the democratic socialist banner into 2028.

The organization plans to hold national discussions, including with leaders like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is 84 and not expected to run in 2028, with a formal vote expected at the group’s 2027 convention next year — though leaders say they could move faster if the primary timeline demands it.

“We’re going to be talking about millions of hours knocking doors for 2028 — so when we decide to really run somebody, people have to feel like they had a say,” Romer said.

Mamdani-backed candidates swept three closely watched New York congressional primaries Tuesday, with Claire Valdez, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier all defeating more establishment-aligned rivals — including two incumbents. It was a major show of force for Mamdani’s political operation, and fresh evidence of the left’s growing muscle heading into 2028. “They ask, ‘Who do you want to run in 2028?’ Then they ask, ‘When does the race for 2028 begin?’ It starts now. It starts on Tuesday,” Mamdani said at a Brooklyn rally last week.

The elephant in the room for the group, of course, is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The New York representative has yet to say whether she will run for president in 2028 — and has been rumored to be interested in running for the seat currently held by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Her name hangs over any serious conversations DSA leaders have about the race. But Romer made clear that one of the country’s best-known democratic socialists would need to go through the same process as any other candidates, and would not automatically be handed a rose.

“She will have to sell her campaign and why DSA should throw down behind it,” she said, noting that means going to the group’s roughly 110,000 members in 250 chapters. “We don’t do kingmakers.”

The relationship between DSA and Ocasio-Cortez has at times been complicated. After backing her insurgent 2018 bid, DSA national in 2024 briefly conditioned its reelection endorsement on several demands around her positions on Israel. That exposed a rift with NYC-DSA, which had already endorsed her and asked national leaders to withdraw their conditional backing.

When asked directly whether DSA wants Ocasio-Cortez to run, Romer was careful not to get ahead of rank-and-file members for or against.

“If it reveals that every chapter is like, ‘We want AOC, we want AOC’ — that’s something that could come out of this process,” she said. “And if that seems to be the overwhelming case, then that may be what we decide to do. We want to get in on the ground floor. It would be really great to be a day-one part of a campaign.”

And then there is Mamdani.

The New York City mayor went from a complete unknown to one of the most popular and influential progressives in the country, boosting democratic socialism’s political profile in a way not seen since Ocasio-Cortez’s rise and perhaps since Sanders’ first presidential run. But Mamdani wasn’t born in the United States, making him constitutionally ineligible for the presidency.

“Some people are like, let’s just run him — let’s just cause a constitutional crisis,” Romer said, describing it as a running joke, though she was “not sure everybody’s fully joking.”

Tuesday’s wins in New York were the latest in a string of DSA victories accumulating across the country, including Chris Rabb’s primary win in Pennsylvania’s 3rd District in Philadelphia, and mayoral races in Washington, D.C., last week and Seattle last fall.

The group is backing Melat Kiros — a first-time candidate taking on a 30-year incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado next week — as well as Oliver Larkin in Florida and former Rep. Cori Bush in her bid to reclaim the Missouri congressional seat she lost last cycle. It’s a packed primary calendar that reflects just how aggressively DSA is looking to expand its footprint heading into 2028.

“The sheer scale of what just happened in New York is historic,” said Bhaskar Sunkara, former DSA vice-chair and president of The Nation. “Nationally, this is a massive boon for the democratic socialist movement. The old institutional left is hollowed out — DSA has proven to be the only real mobilizational force left on the ground. “

But Sunkara noted the movement still had a lot to figure out ahead of 2028, especially if it is to translate its momentum beyond DSA’s urban, heavily lefty strongholds. Moderate Democrats have long argued that democratic socialist candidates are a liability in competitive battleground seats, too far left to win over the voters the party needs in purple districts and red-leaning states.

“A national map includes deep-red and rural districts where the left still has to figure out how to speak to working-class voters and compete,” Sunkara said. “Having national platforms through multiple members of Congress is a start there too.”

DSA’s leaders say the moment the group is having has been years in the making — and comes after some recent turbulent times that followed 2018’s emergence of the Squad as a high-water mark and then saw years of grinding setbacks: a pandemic that gutted in-person organizing, a Biden era that Romer described as a “wet blanket,” and a 2024 Kamala Harris campaign that didn’t listen when DSA tried to push the candidate left.

“The squad dropped off a bit,” Romer said. “2022 was a really, really tough year for left politics.”

The 2024 cycle also brought losses for both Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who was ousted in what was at the time the most expensive House primary in history, powered largely by AIPAC spending.

Now the tide appears to be turning again.

Looking ahead to 2028, the socialist wing of the Democratic Party wants to force a reckoning within the party it believes has spent years running from its own base while asking voters to settle for less.

“The best possible thing that could happen is having a string of victories in the midterms and forcibly reshaping the way the national Democratic Party approaches some of these issues, and having a much larger presence in the Democratic primary, and hopefully the presidential candidacy,” said Hasan Piker, a prominent progressive Twitch streamer and one of the most influential voices in the democratic socialist movement, who campaigned heavily in New York for the full DSA slate.

Tuesday’s wins, he said, are a way to bring the party further to their side, turning far-left politics more mainstream.

As for who he wants to see carry the socialist banner in 2028, Piker is still hoping for Ocasio-Cortez. “That could change, 2028 is far out,” he said. “But that’s what I got so far.”

Politics

Poll: A crack is emerging in Trump’s coalition over deportations

Published

2 hours ago

September 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign is running into resistance within his own voter coalition, as more and more Republican candidates publicly break with him ahead of the November election.

New results from The POLITICO Poll help explain why: Non-MAGA Trump voters are more than twice as likely as self-identified MAGA Trump voters to say his mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, 31% to 14%. While roughly similar shares of both groups believe Trump’s campaign is about right, the MAGA base wants him to go even further: 36% of MAGA Trump voters say his campaign is not aggressive enough, compared with 23% of non-MAGA Trump voters.

Meanwhile, support across Trump’s entire voter coalition falls when it comes to deporting people beyond the most violent offenders, such as those with minor criminal offenses or who have been living in the U.S. for years without legal status.

The new survey, conducted by London-based Public First, reveals how Trump’s immigration agenda — which has long been one of his signature political issues and a reliable GOP rallying point — has divided the very coalition that helped power his two presidential wins. The president’s MAGA loyalists are still more inclined than other Trump voters to support a tougher immigration posture, but there are clear limits to how far voters want the administration to go.

Those intraparty tensions burst into public view this month, when Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.) released a campaign ad pushing back against Trump’s deportation agenda, saying some of his efforts “have gone too far” and that Hispanic voters who supported him in 2024 “feel betrayed.” It was a remarkable break from a sitting GOP lawmaker over one of the president’s defining policies, as Democrats have locked in on Florida’s 27th District as a prime target in their bid to flip the House.

Salazar’s public rift with Trump exemplifies the fears Republicans had been privately warning about for months: that the president’s immigration enforcement — marked last year by high-profile, flashy raids that rippled through communities — was alienating moderate Republicans, independents, young voters and Latinos who support border security and immigration enforcement in theory but dislike how it is being carried out.

And as the party stares down a difficult midterm landscape, including in districts and states Trump won in 2024, other GOP candidates followed Salazar’s lead, increasingly putting distance between themselves and the administration on key issues like immigration — despite having voted last year to approve billions of dollars for border security and immigration enforcement. On Wednesday, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), whose race has tightened against Democrat Adam Hamilton, also softened his stance on Immigration and Customs Enforcement as raids in southwest Kansas prompt temporary business closures and schools.

“When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement. Our sheriffs and police know these communities better than anyone, and working together keeps officers and residents safe,” he wrote on social media, adding that he’s been in direct contact with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

The Blue Light News Poll finds most Americans — including majorities of both MAGA and non-MAGA Trump voters — believe people convicted of serious violent or sexual offenses should be prioritized for deportation, underscoring broad agreement on a more targeted approach to enforcement.

The survey also finds that few people — including among both MAGA and non-MAGA Trump voters — prioritized targeting other groups for deportations. Less than a quarter of each group say people convicted of minor criminal offenses should be prioritized. Support falls further when voters are asked about prioritizing people who have lived in the U.S. for several years without legal status or people with dependent children in the U.S.

“A lot of it has to do with how you talk about it. They don’t want amnesty for people who have broken the law. They want everybody to do it the right way,” said a person close to the White House granted anonymity to discuss how Republicans are viewing the issue. “They understand that some people might be law-abiding, hard working.”

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said Blue Light News is “skewing data to paint a false narrative.”

“The American people sent President Trump back to the White House to stop the invasion of our country and deport the millions of illegal aliens Biden and Democrats allowed into the country. The president is delivering on his promises,” she said.

Days after releasing the ad, Salazar said she had a “fantastic conversation” with Trump and urged him to protect the political “fortune” he had brought to the Republican Party on immigration. She also told CBS last weekend that Trump and the average American understand “the between the narco and the nanny and the gangster and the gardener.”

She said the administration should distinguish between criminals and unauthorized immigrants working in crucial industries such as agriculture, construction, hospitality and health care.

That distinction is also reflected in The Blue Light News Poll. Both MAGA and non-MAGA Trump voters are open to maintaining or increasing the number of people coming into the U.S. to work in sectors facing labor shortages, such as health care or agriculture. Sixty-five percent of MAGA Trump voters and 69% non-MAGA Trump voters say they want to see about the same number — or more — people coming to the U.S. to work in those sectors facing labor shortages.

“Trump 2.0 that took over in January 2025 completely misread what voters were telling him and Joe Biden during 2024, which was that they wanted to see more order and security over the U.S.-Mexico border,” said Matt Barreto, who conducted polling for former Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign. “Instead, what Trump told Americans was, ‘Now I’m going to go hunt down immigrants who are just working and contributing to America.’ And there was extremely limited support for that.”

Past POLITICO polling on immigration has shown that the Trump administration has been unable to reverse the damage with voters on the issue. Last fall, battleground Republicans were already expressing concern about the administration’s immigration tactics. Those concerns intensified in the months that followed, while negative voter sentiment hardened by April after federal agents killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

The Trump administration, in the wake of bipartisan outrage, softened its rhetoric and abandoned flashy raids that often devolved into clashes with protesters. The president also installed Mullin, who moved quickly to repair relationships on Capitol Hill and keep the Department of Homeland Security out of the headlines.

But Mullin is also facing pressure from MAGA critics and immigration hardliners who think he’s not committed to the president’s vow to deport millions of unauthorized immigrants. In an effort to shore up his support with that contingent, top administration accounts, including Mullin’s, have ramped up posts about ICE, arrests statistics and tough talk about the administration’s immigration enforcement agenda.

Politics

Gina Hinojosa wants to make Texas a test case for Democrats’ future

Published

12 hours ago

September 25, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Gina Hinojosa wants to make Texas a test case for Democrats’ future

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Politics

Trump eyes an October campaign rally — in Alabama

Published

18 hours ago

September 24, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump is tentatively set to visit Alabama for a political rally next week, a curious move in a deep-red state as his party fights for control of Congress in several battlegrounds.

The event is penciled in for Oct. 2 in Mobile, but the plans have not yet been finalized and are subject to change, according to two people with direct knowledge of the preparations who were granted anonymity to disclose private planning.

An October rally in Alabama would be a somewhat confounding decision for the president. The GOP has found itself having to play defense in their own territory recently, with Democratic candidates are seriously competing for Senate seats in normally red states like Alaska and Texas. But Alabama has not been considered a state where Democrats have any real shot at winning any statewide office.

Spokespeople for the White House and Republican National Committee did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The rally could help shore up support for state Rep. Rhett Marques, who is locked in a somewhat competitive race with Democratic Rep. Shomari Figures. Marques is still seen to have the advantage after the Supreme Court allowed the state to use a House map that reconfigured Figures’ majority-Black district earlier this year. Mobile, though, is outside of that district.

Marques’ campaign and Figures’ campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

A foray into Alabama would not be the first time that the president has tried to shore up support in a solidly Republican state this cycle — he rallied last month in South Carolina for Sen. Darline Graham during her primary runoff — but as the general election season has begun he has also started to visit battleground states. Last week, he rallied alongside GOP Senate nominee Michael Whatley in North Carolina.

Trump’s potential campaign visit would follow Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy’s announcement last week that the Trump administration has granted a $2.5 billion loan to the Alabama Toll Road, Bridge, and Tunnel Authority. That money will fund the construction of the Mobile River Bridge — the largest infrastructure project in the state’s history. The president is also fond of GOP Rep. Barry Moore, who is running for Senate in the state. Another close ally, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, is the Republican nominee for governor. He’s running against Democratic former Sen. Doug Jones, who he unseated in 2020.