Yet the woman who introduced modern democratic socialism to America, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, may find this outcome more discomfiting than thrilling — at first blush, at least. Though AOC entered Congress as a disruptor railing against the party’s leadership, she has become, quietly, far more accommodating in Washington. Will the incoming socialists follow the same pattern — or adopt a more radical line, forcing her to choose between fidelity to the Left and her mainstream aspirations?

AOC is friendly with top Democrats, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who might well end up the next House speaker. She has climbed the ranks of key committees. She has been, when needed, a good soldier. In 2024, at the Democratic National Convention, she delivered a forceful speech in favor of Kamala Harris, hailing the then-vice president for working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire in Gaza. Meanwhile, members of the so-called Uncommitted National Movement — progressives who refused to commit to the Harris-Walz ticket over Palestine — were all but barred from the convention. This irked Leftists to no end, leading them to question AOC’s progressive credentials and to wonder out loud whether she was a sell-out.

Yet beyond the hard-Left rank-and-file, AOC is unlikely to face an immediate battle with the new socialist electeds. She didn’t endorse all the primary challengers who won — in deference to her House colleagues, she stayed away from those challenging incumbents or the preferred candidates of incumbents. Even so, she has made overtures to the victors, praising Valdez and Avila Chevalier in New York. The winners all express a fondness for her — publicly, at least. In short, comity will likely reign within The Squad.

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There’s a larger question, though, over how these relationships might fare if some of the new Leftists decide to behave in a more confrontational manner. Ocasio-Cortez may run for president and wants to make a bid for a broader national audience. A lawmaker like Avila Chevalier won’t have the same incentives. Within the DSA itself, there are also going to be fresh tensions. It isn’t hard to find online gripes from Leftists wondering if AOC is too soft on Israel, too willing to accept the Democratic status quo.

How things change.

It was in 2018 when AOC won her shock primary over Joe Crowley, the boss of the Queens Democratic Party, seen as a potential successor to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The organization that supported her, the DSA, was mostly a fringe curiosity, a legacy project of the famed political theorist and activist Michael Harrington, who died in 1989. As recently as a decade ago, the DSA boasted only a few thousand members nationally and had little impact on conventional electoral politics. When AOC won, she benefited from the first DSA boom, which followed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s unsuccessful but surprisingly robust battle against Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Fast forward to today, and there are around 120,000 DSA members across the country, per the organization’s own tally. 

At first, it looked like AOC would fulfill the expectations of her greatest fans and detractors alike. Before she was even sworn in, she stormed Pelosi’s office with 200 youth activists to demand Congress do more to combat climate change. Her nascent Squad seemed poised to disrupt the Democratic majority, with AOC leading the way. 

Some of their number, such as Omar and Michigan’s Rep. Rashida Tlaib, would prove to be lightning rods. Yet as the years wore on, Ocasio-Cortez gradually evolved into an institutionalist, a proud progressive who would nevertheless partner with Pelosi and try to climb the ranks of the body. She is one of the top Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and while she still supports policies like the Green New Deal — a massive stimulus program to fight climate change while putting millions to work on the scale of the original New Deal — she rarely talks about it anymore. In light of her rising stature in the Democratic caucus and her alliance with Jeffries, AOC didn’t endorse Avila Chevalier or Valdez in their primaries, though both are fellow Latina DSA members from New York City. 

Among a faction of the left, AOC skepticism persists. Bhaskar Sunkara, the Jacobin founder (and a contributor to these pages), recently declared that Ocasio-Cortez is “more progressive than socialist.” Some in the DSA have grumbled that by upholding corporate-friendly Democrats like Jeffries, AOC has undercut her own seriousness about rebuilding the welfare state and union power. There’s a schism, too, between how New York City socialists view Ocasio-Cortez — they adore her — and a smaller slice of the national leadership that has always seen her as too moderate: AOC never forced a vote on Medicare for All, voted to support Iron Dome funding for the Jewish state, and seemed, at times, more concerned with placating colleagues in seniority than catering to the base. 

How will these factional tensions contour her future and that of the wider DSA-aligned Left in Congress?

Power, generally, tends to change those who obtain it. For the next wave of DSA members entering the House, the question is whether they’ll follow the current AOC example — or venture down a more radical path. The latter, given Ocasio-Cortez’s own entanglements with the Left, may be more likely. Neither Avila Chevalier nor Valdez have said they would support Jeffries for speaker. Kiros and Rabb haven’t committed, either. (Brad Lander, who is not a DSA member but would be one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress next year, has said he will back Jeffries.) 

This doesn’t mean, ultimately, that Jeffries won’t have the votes to win the speaker’s gavel. Nor does it imply that all of these DSAers won’t fall in line with the mainstream of the party. But it does offer a preview of what’s to come. 

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What was true was that Ocasio-Cortez never employed the tactics of hard-Right Republicans in Congress, many of them members of the House Freedom Caucus, who were able to take down one speaker (Kevin McCarthy) and hold another hostage (Mike Johnson). If these conservatives took relatively little interest in governing — the nihilist anti-spending approach dated back to the Tea Party years — it was inarguable this faction could, at times, impose its will on the rest of the Republican Party.

The hard Left has never been able to do the same to the Democrats, whose party leadership disciplined members far more effectively and could, more often than not, tamp down insurgencies. Donald Trump thrice clinched the GOP nomination, while Sanders couldn’t do it even once. In 2026, though, the Democrats are running out of cards to play. A democratic socialist governs New York City, and Leftists are running roughshod over establishment Democrats in congressional primaries. Jeffries, for all his skill, lacks Pelosi’s stature and naked political talent. AOC and her allies couldn’t defenestrate Pelosi because she was, unlike McCarthy, one of the great backroom tacticians of the modern era, a legislative leader with few peers anywhere. And she was a historical figure, too, the first and so far only female speaker of the House. By the time AOC entered Congress, Pelosi had already completed a four-year stretch as speaker and spent many decades in politics; she was the preeminent power in San Francisco and Washington, DC.

What is Jeffries compared to that? Suddenly, the radicalism that the new DSA members might pursue almost reads like realpolitik. Why should Valdez or Avila Chevalier or Rabb fear Jeffries? What can he really do to them? Why not try to replicate the House Freedom Caucus model on the Democratic side? Jeffries’s staunch support for Israel is outmoded, and even ordinary Democratic voters alienated from the DSA don’t have an especially high opinion of him. They’re tired of their leaders and don’t feel they’re fighting Trump hard enough. 

This is where the DSA Leftists can appeal, to some degree, to the “normie” Democratic voter — both despise Trump and want to engage in political combat at his level. AOC, ultimately, will have to shift with them — she’ll need to be more pro-Palestine and anti-Israel, and more willing to spar with Jeffries. For her, this all might be liberating, anyway. The AOC of 2018 would probably be protesting the AOC of 2026. If she really wants to run for president, she’ll need every last activist in her corner. That primary will be a real war.

But the Democratic establishment should only take so much heart in this. A quirk of history has kept the mayor of New York from seeking the presidency. However, the Democratic establishment is every bit as frail as the GOP establishment was a decade ago, and Mamdani-backed candidates won a string of remarkable victories in New York’s congressional and state primaries in late June. 

Today, the Democratic establishment is finding the bottom the Republican old guard reached in the 2010s, just before a fading reality TV star romped through the primaries and proceeded to remake the party in his own image. Chuck Schumer and his ilk are almost as limp as Jeb Bush was in 2016, when he promised a shock-and-awe campaign but was humiliated on debate stage after debate stage. The odds are better, right now, of Schumer becoming the Senate Majority Leader in 2027 than of him surviving a primary in his own state in 2028. 

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Trump and Mamdani are chummy because Trump understands, intuitively, that the Democratic Socialist, immigrant Muslim represents the Left version of himself. The two men may agree on nothing politically, but they know what it is like to confront the full wrath of their respective parties’ establishments. They carry battle scars from slaying scions of political dynasties that were once very popular (Bush, Cuomo), and they know the feeling of winning nominations while party elites withhold endorsements. Trump, of course, is the Republican Party elite now, while Mamdani, only six months in office, is a generational star who still can’t get more than a grudging acknowledgment from Schumer, or Hakeem Jeffries, who is probably going to be the House Speaker next year.

But Jeffries and Schumer, for different reasons, represent a political approach that is fast falling out of vogue. Schumer is 75, and his kitschy, cable TV hucksterism and Israel-cheerleading is alienating to a vast majority of voters under the age of 40. Jeffries is much younger and may well have a future leading the Democrats, yet his own style has failed to resonate with the party’s base. He is not revered like Nancy Pelosi. Very few Democrats beyond the members of his caucus are excited for him to lead the House. His own Israel boosterism has made him the target of young progressives, and rank-and-file voters still feel that he hasn’t aggressively confronted Trump enough. 

It is easy to forget that the base of the Democratic Party was once much more comfortable with its establishment wing. Bernie Sanders could not win the Democratic nomination because, for all the ways party apparatchiks and the DNC might have foiled him, he never won over enough voters to overcome Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. Ten years ago, many Democrats liked the former First Lady and Secretary of State. She was not a great political talent, but enough voters in the primaries didn’t want to take a chance on a socialist senator from Vermont.

That era is gone. No true frontrunner exists for the 2028 Democratic nomination. No Clinton or Obama can tip the scales. If Kamala Harris wants to run, she’ll have to get in the muck with everyone else and hope she can survive a grueling primary season. The establishment was desperate to coronate Clinton in 2016 and Barack Obama helped engineer Biden’s 2020 victory, convincing the center-Left candidates in the field to drop out and consolidate against Sanders. The establishment won’t have that power, in this election cycle. 

Socialist candidates can win today because there are no more effective Red Scares and fewer and fewer voters remember the Soviet Union. Democratic Socialists are economic populists, and there is a growing share of the Democratic electorate that responds to this messaging. Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America undertakes actual political organizing — the sort Obama abandoned once he became president — and its candidates benefit from an establishment that decided it wasn’t worth the effort to knock on doors or pass out leaflets in the streets. DSA is filling a void. The party elites are only now understanding how threatened they are.

This doesn’t mean DSA is taking over the Democratic Party tomorrow. Members of its ranks still espouse fringe views around defunding the police and abolishing prisons. So far, there is little evidence DSA can win in districts with large numbers of independent or Republican voters. That was Trump’s original magic — to cross over, to create a coalition. But maybe, someday, the socialists can. After Mamdani, who can say what’s not possible? 

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At the minimum, the far-Left is going to rack up more victories in Democratic primaries. Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the DNC, proclaimed recently that Leftists and socialists who “hate the Democratic Party” should not “run for our nomination.” “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers,” Harrison posted on X. “Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” It was a laughable statement — not only because Harrison was the DNC chair who hoped to deceive the American people over Biden’s fitness to seek another term, but because it revealed a belief in a politics that effectively no longer exists. There are no Democratic Party “volunteers,” nor truly any “infrastructure.” Candidates are responsible for recruiting their own volunteers and building out their own get-out-the-vote operations. The DNC can, on certain national campaigns and the presidential race, assist, but the Democratic Party in America — like the Republican Party — is effectively a shell organization, a ballot line that anyone, with enough effort, can occupy. 

That’s how Mamdani became the Democratic mayor of New York City and Trump became the Republican president of the United States. This is not a parliamentary democracy. Parties do not select candidates, control lists, or charge membership fees. Party lifers like Harrison sometimes like to pretend they do this, or that they have a right to say what a “Democrat” is. At some point, a Trump-like contender will subvert the Democratic Party at mass scale. There isn’t much to head off this possibility; it isn’t like there’s an all-powerful shadow establishment that can rally behind one candidate and squelch the powerful insurgent. Mamdani proved, at the local level, that overcoming this opposition is possible with enough charisma and organization. And his victory shouldn’t be undersold because it was in one city: if New York City were a standalone state, it would be one of the 15 largest, close in size to Virginia. Sanders, were he running in New York City, might have even won were he ten years younger or a bit more palatable. 

Either way, men like Harrison, Schumer, and Jeffries will have to adjust to the new order. They will not control the destiny of the Democrats much longer. The clock is ticking.