Abdul El-Sayed, Zoran Mamdani, Francesca Hong, Graham Plattner. All people that you may not agree with. And you might not even believe that they have any real solutions, like at all, but that’s exactly why they’re interesting. Because whether you think their ideas are good or terrible, this is a common thread running through some of the best known DSA and DSA aligned candidates.
They identify a problem voters care about and they offer a policy. El-Sayed and Plattner are talking about healthcare, affordability, and corporate power. Mamdani has focused on rent, childcare, and the cost of living. Hong has affordability and opposition to data centers central to her campaign.
All four are making the same broader argument, ordinary Americans are getting squeezed while wealthy interest groups gain more power. And again, you can think their solutions are terrible. You can think Medicare for all would make healthcare worse. You can think rent control creates more problems than it solves, and you can think blocking data centers is just bad economic policy.
But that’s not really the point, guys.
They’re just giving voters something substantive to argue about and hitting on issues regular Americans would like to see discussed and that are impacting their everyday lives.
And this is where establishment Democrats and Republicans, what some would consider the uniparty types, can find themselves in a very sticky political situation.
And instead of directly confronting the underlying issue, Republicans tend to fall into this trap of attacking the cultural baggage surrounding these candidates.
They’re socialists. They’re radicals. Look at what they said. Look at who they associate with. Look how far left they are.
And sure, those attacks worked in 2024, but let’s be honest though. For most Americans, the public school civics classes, if you’ve ever even take one, did such a terrible job teaching people what those things are. Most people couldn’t identify those political policies if it hit them in the face.
So if someone is worried about housing, healthcare, childcare, wages, energy costs, or the impact of AI and data centers on their community, telling them that the Democrat proposing an answer is a socialist doesn’t tell them what you’re going to do about the problem. And that frustration doesn’t necessarily just stop at domestic policy.
You can make the same argument when voters look at Washington spending money overseas or sending billions of dollars to foreign countries while Americans are just dealing with things in their communities. Like that buzzword? Affordability.
The United States is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. So when people see enormous amounts of money going toward foreign governments or overseas conflicts when things aren’t the best at home, they can reasonably ask, what about the problems here at home?
And you don’t have to agree with the premise that foreign aid or military spending is inherently bad. But again, you have to answer the question. Because if the political response is simply you’re not allowed to question that, you’re just obviously leaving an opening for someone else to come along and say, actually, I have a plan.
And that’s even bigger problem for Republicans right now. They’re the ones in power.
It’s easier to campaign against a problem when you’re the opposition. It’s harder when voters can look at you and say, okay, you’ve had the power. What are you doing about it? And lucky for them, Republicans don’t have to accept the premise of these candidates’ solutions.
They can say the solution is wrong, explain why it’s wrong, and then offer something better. In fact, that’s probably the stronger political argument because there’s a massive difference between saying their solution won’t work and saying we don’t have a solution. And that’s the opening candidates like El Sayed, Mamdani, Hong, Plattner are exploiting. Sometimes even against their own Democrats.
Their biggest strength may not be that voters agree with their policies. It may be that they’re talking about problems people actually believe are real, and they’re willing to put an actual proposal on the table.
So if the GOP wants to stop the style of the candidate from gaining traction, the answer probably isn’t just to call them a socialist. It’s to beat their solution with a better one, because eventually voters are gonna ask the same question. If their answer is wrong, What’s yours?
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