The Democrats' Tea Party Moment

Three sitting Democrats gone in eight days, a 35-primary winning streak, and a governor's race in Wisconsin — the DSA is following the same script that remade the GOP after 2010.

Note: as I finish this piece Wednesday night, Graham Platner has just dropped his Maine Senate bid amid a sexual assault allegation. That's a real story, but it's a different one from the story below. Platner was never a DSA candidate, and he isn't leaving the race because Democratic voters rejected him — he's leaving because his endorsers fled overnight, not because of an ideological reckoning. What follows is about something else: a disciplined, organized movement that is winning clean primary votes against sitting incumbents, and doing it again and again.

In the spring of 2010, as Tea Party insurgents began knocking off Republican incumbents in primaries, the party establishment reached for a familiar reassurance. GOP leaders repeated the idea that the Republican party was a big tent, welcoming the movement as an infusion of energy that could be absorbed, and managed. Ohio Congressman John Boehner said “there really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the tea party activists believe in.” The RNC chairman, Michael Steele, embraced the activists as a grassroots gift. The insurgents, the thinking went, would supply votes in November and then take their seats quietly in the back benches.

Six years later, the back benches ran the party. What Boehner and other Republicans failed to appreciate was that widespread agreement on issues was not the same as tolerance for the existing leadership, and grievances that start in safe districts do not necessarily stay there. The Tea Party’s raw anti-establishment energy hardened into a governing bloc that toppled a sitting House majority leader, Eric Cantor, in a 2014 primary no one saw coming; drove Speaker Boehner into retirement in 2015; and finally found its vessel in Donald Trump, who seized the party’s presidential nomination over the objections of virtually its entire leadership. The “big tent” had not absorbed the movement. The movement had absorbed the tent.

Democrats should study that history closely, because they are living its opening chapters now.

Start with what has happened. On June 23, candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept New York City’s House primaries. Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old organizer who helped found Columbia University Apartheid Divest, unseated Adriano Espaillat, the five-term chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who had outspent her significantly. The same night, Claire Valdez, a one-term state assemblywoman and DSA cadre member, routed Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso by 25 points for the open seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez — even though Velázquez herself had endorsed Reynoso.

A week later, on June 30, the pattern repeated 1,700 miles away. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old first-time candidate, unseated Rep. Diana DeGette in Denver, ending a run in Congress that had begun three decades earlier, before Kiros was born. DeGette was no institutional dinosaur — she was a leading member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus who had voted against additional military aid to Israel and served as a House impeachment manager against Trump. It didn’t matter. Kiros ran against incumbency itself, attacking DeGette’s ties to the industries she regulated, and closed to win by six points.

A year ago, the DSA had two members in Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. It is now on track for at least five, with its leaders openly discussing a competitive presidential run in 2028. By the organization’s own count, DSA-endorsed candidates have won 35 primaries this cycle, out of roughly 150 they backed, running the gamut from city councils to Congress. That is a bigger farm system than the number suggests, because DSA’s national count doesn’t capture the down-ballot sweep underneath it: in the same June 23 New York primary night, DSA-aligned candidates also won state Senate and Assembly seats in Brooklyn and Queens by margins as large as 58 points, building the bench that produces the next generation of Congressional candidates. The organization itself has grown to roughly 100,000 dues-paying members and more than 200 elected officials nationally, up from just a few dozen a decade ago.

And how did the Democratic establishment respond to the recent DSA victories? CBS News reported that a handful of liberal leaders themselves called it a “progressive Tea Party” moment, explicitly invoking the 2010 conservative insurgency. But that was not the dominant perspective. House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar shrugged that voters have a right to vote and said he took nothing more from the results. Other party veterans have offered the same soothing vocabulary Republicans used in 2010: the party “is a big tent” said several congressmen; the newcomers bring energy; primaries in deep-blue districts don’t tell us anything about the party’s direction. It was reminiscent of Boehner’s comment that “there really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the tea party activists believe in.”

The parallels between the early tea party and the DSA are not simply rhetorical. Both movements arose from a genuine grievance the establishment was slow to credit—for the Tea Party, bailouts, deficits and a sense that Washington Republicans had gone soft on spending; for the DSA, an affordability crisis that its candidates have ridden with discipline and a radical anti-Israel hardline that is appealing to many young voters steeped in years of schooling that has fed them an oppressor/oppressed narrative. Kiros, Avila Chevalier and Valdez all made a version of the same argument: their opponents had good voting records but were captured by the machine, the donor class, or both. Espaillat had taken $670,000 from AIPAC-linked donors, a fact Avila Chevalier repeated at every debate. DeGette’s own progressive record on choice and impeachment wasn’t enough to inoculate her against the charge that thirty years in Washington had made her part of the furniture.

Both the tea party and the DSA built durable infrastructure rather than chasing a single election: the Tea Party through local chapters and talk radio, the DSA through its dues-paying members, tenant organizing and transit campaigns that double as candidate farm teams. Both learned that a primary electorate is small, ideological and winnable long before the establishment learned to defend it. And both benefited from party leaders who mistook geography for containment—assuming that what happened in a safe district would stay in a safe district.

The Democratic establishment’s belief that democratic socialists can’t win outside deep-blue enclaves like Brooklyn or Manhattan is being tested in real time, and not favorably. Colorado’s 8th District is the definition of a swing seat: Trump carried it by less than two points in 2024, and the sitting Republican, Gabe Evans, won it by less than one point. The Democratic primary there was won by Manny Rutinel, running explicitly as the more progressive candidate against a moderate opponent backed by Emily’s List — not a DSA nominee, but a data point that the leftward pull is not confined to safe seats.

More striking is Wisconsin, a presidential battleground with a Republican-controlled legislature, where state Rep. Francesca Hong — a DSA member since 2020, endorsed by DSA chapters across the state — has led several polls in the crowded August 11 Democratic primary for governor against sitting Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes. If Hong wins that primary, Democrats will be forced to test the “can’t win outside Brooklyn” theory in a state that decides presidential elections.

New York’s Mamdani, the movement’s most prominent figure, is actively remaking his city’s congressional delegation and lending his coalition to insurgents nationally, much as Trump-aligned figures once lent theirs.

The Republicans learned the lesson the hard way. Virginia’s 7^th District was solidly red. Dave Brat, a Tea Party-aligned economics professor, pulled off in June 2014 one of the biggest upsets in modern congressional primary history when he defeated Eric Cantor, then the sitting House Majority Leader and the No. 2 Republican in the chamber. His victory decapitated the Republican House leadership.

There is one more echo worth noting. The Republicans who dismissed the Tea Party did so partly because they found its foot soldiers unserious—amateurs with Gadsden flags who would be tamed by Washington. Democrats now console themselves that democratic socialists cannot win general elections. Perhaps. But the Tea Party’s candidates weren’t supposed to win either, until they did, and the people making that prediction were the same ones who failed to see Cantor’s defeat, Boehner’s fall and Trump’s nomination coming.

None of this makes the DSA’s capture of the Democratic Party inevitable, and it’s worth being precise about why not. The Tea Party’s rise required years of establishment complacency and a Republican leadership that treated every individual loss as an isolated fluke rather than a pattern. Democrats still have an opening the GOP didn’t take in 2010: they can contest the argument on the merits — on affordability, on what “electability” actually means in a district-by-district sense, and on policy differences on ICE, immigration, law and order, and foreign policy — rather than simply wishing the movement away with the same “big tent” bromide Republicans once sang to themselves.

That bromide turned out to be less a strategy than a lullaby, and Republicans sang it right up until the moment they woke up in someone else’s party. Democrats are humming the same tune now. The difference is that this time, they’ll get an answer within months, not years — Wisconsin votes on August 11. I hope they are paying attention.