Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer Built Their Own Headaches, Brick by Leftist Brick

On June 23, 2026, New York City Democratic primaries handed the establishment two humiliating defeats. Candidates backed by democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept three competitive congressional races. Rep. Adriano Espaillat — a five-term incumbent who chaired the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and held the endorsement of Hakeem Jeffries himself — lost to 32-year-old community organizer and DSA member Darializa Avila Chevalier. Rep. Dan Goldman, whom Jeffries also backed, was routed in New York’s 10th District by former City Comptroller Brad Lander. A third Mamdani-backed democratic socialist, state Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, won the open seat in New York’s 7th District. 

Every race Jeffries touched turned to ashes. At the Valdez victory party that night, when Jeffries appeared on the screen, the crowd booed. Then they chanted “You’re next!”

The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is not something that came out of the blue. It’s been compared to the Republican Party’s TEA Party movement during the Obama years. But the difference between then and now is that the Democrats have spent years coddling the socialists and extreme personalities in their party. The Republican Party establishment actively tried to keep theirs down. The Republican establishment, as a result, was able to better manage the rise of the conservative wing of the party and there have been some good things to come out of that managed growth. It’s not perfect, but there have been some major wins. The Democrat establishment, however, has openly embraced and paid lip service to their progressive wing, and when they failed to deliver, that wing got more and more rabid.

The result is a nightmare for leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.

How the Democrats Got Here

To understand the jam Jeffries and Schumer are in, you have to go back to 2016. The conventional explanation for that election was that Donald Trump was some kind of unprecedented political shock. But the working-class defection from the Democratic Party did not happen overnight.

Johns Hopkins sociologist Stephen Morgan documented the shift in a peer-reviewed study. A substantial proportion of eligible working-class voters had already been pulling away from strong Democratic identification throughout the Obama years, long before Trump announced his campaign. The party had been quietly hollowing out its own blue-collar base for over a decade, replacing it with college-educated professionals and ideological activists with fundamentally different priorities.

Democratic leadership saw the data. They kept moving in the same direction anyway.

Then came 2024, and the numbers got impossible to dismiss. According to Pew Research, Trump drew to within three points of Kamala Harris among Hispanic voters, a group that Joe Biden had carried by 25 points just four years earlier. Trump nearly doubled his support among Black voters compared to 2020. Among men under 50, a demographic Biden had won, Trump now won outright. Harris lost the White House by roughly seven million votes compared to Biden’s 2020 total. Not because those voters switched to Trump en masse, but because Democrats who had turned out in 2020 simply stayed home.

Gallup’s tracking data tells more of the story. Democratic Party identification fell to a new low of 27 percent in 2023. The party’s advantage among Hispanic adults hit its lowest point in Pew’s polling going back to 2011. Among Black adults, the advantage shrank to levels not seen in a generation. Coalitions that Democratic operatives had spent decades treating as guaranteed were no longer showing up. And the party’s leadership had no answer for why.

The answer they would not give is the obvious one: they spent those years accommodating a progressive left that was actively alienating the very voters Democrats needed to win.

Ignoring the Threat

Schumer and Jeffries have never had a clean answer to the core question their own left flank poses: when does managing the progressive wing of your party become enabling it?

Schumer spent years threading a needle on the Senate floor, careful never to directly challenge the ideological direction his party was drifting. He watched AOC primary Joe Crowley out of his House seat in 2018 and treated it as an anomaly. He watched Bernie Sanders come within striking distance of the Democratic presidential nomination in both 2016 and 2020, and managed the threat with primary scheduling and endorsements rather than any serious reckoning with what it meant. He let the party’s progressive infrastructure grow, its fundraising muscle strengthen, its grip on urban primary elections tighten, and he offered no real resistance.

Now the same infrastructure is pointed at him. A Data for Progress poll from 2025 showed AOC leading Schumer by 19 points in a hypothetical 2028 Democratic primary, 55 percent to 36 percent. AOC has not ruled out the race. After this week’s primary results, she does not have to. The energy is already there, and Schumer’s own approval numbers in New York have cratered. He declined to endorse in any of the three contested NYC races that just played out, which is a remarkable act of political cowardice from the Senate’s top Democrat.

His response to Tuesday’s results was, somehow, even worse. He told the New York Post it was evidence of “a great united party.” Two of his party’s incumbents just got thrown out by socialists, and Schumer called it unity.

Jeffries is in a nearly identical bind, just with a shorter timeline. He actively campaigned for Espaillat and Goldman. He lost. And when a CNBC anchor asked him point-blank about a candidate, Avila Chevalier, who has called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders, and called the United States a “f—ing disgrace,” Jeffries could not bring himself to say clearly that she should not be a member of the Democratic caucus. He said her views were “clearly not my views,” pivoted to attacking Trump, and got called out by the anchor for dodging the question.

That is the political trap Jeffries built for himself. In support of what he would think was a “big tent,” he spent years trying to hold together a coalition that includes both working-class swing-district Democrats and the hard-left New York City progressive base. Tuesday proved that those two wings cannot occupy the same tent indefinitely. Jeffries kept refusing to define what he actually stood for, so now the socialists are doing it for him.

More Data They Ignored

The polling on this is not ambiguous, and it is not a matter of conservative spin.

The Gallup survey released in August 2025 found that among Democrats, 66 percent now view socialism positively, while only 42 percent view capitalism favorably. A Data for Progress survey from the same period found that Democratic voters preferred politicians aligned with AOC, Sanders, and Mamdani over establishment figures aligned with Schumer, Jeffries, and Pelosi by a 20-point margin. That preference held across party lines among non-college voters and Latinos.

Pull back to the general electorate, though, and the picture changes. Outside the Democratic primary base, socialism remains a significant liability. The Fox News poll from March 2026 found a record 38 percent of voters saying it would be a good thing for America to move toward socialism, which sounds significant until you realize that means 62 percent either oppose it or are uncertain. Among general-election voters, the socialist label still costs votes. Democrats are effectively optimizing for primary victories while handing Republicans a general-election message on a silver platter.

The NRCC released a statement after Tuesday’s results, saying “Every House Democrat, in safe and competitive districts alike, will now answer to the radicals calling the shots.” They are not wrong. A Democrat running in a competitive district this fall will be asked to answer for Avila Chevalier, who has called for abolishing police, prisons, and borders and described the country as a disgrace. Every Senate candidate will be tied to the growing socialist wing Schumer spent years refusing to confront.

Years in the Making

The Democrats’ problem with the hard left is not new. It has been building for years, and there have been unmistakable warning shots along the way.

In 2018, AOC beat Joe Crowley, then the fourth-ranking House Democrat and an heir apparent to the speakership, in a primary that the Democratic establishment dismissed as a fluke. 

It was not a fluke. In hindsight, it looks a lot more like a template.

Bernie Sanders came within striking distance of the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, then came back and nearly did it again in 2020. He built a national fundraising apparatus that outperformed the party’s institutional donors and assembled a loyal bloc of voters whose enthusiasm never transferred to whoever survived the establishment’s consolidation against him.

Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayor’s race in 2025 by routing Andrew Cuomo, the consummate establishment Democrat, by double digits in the primary. Cuomo then ran as an independent in the general and lost again. The lesson was clear: the progressive left had become strong enough to beat the establishment in New York City even when the establishment ran a second time.

Mamdani then turned that energy toward Congress and went three for three this week, taking out two incumbents that Jeffries personally backed.

At some point, a pattern stops being a surprise and starts being a choice. Schumer and Jeffries chose accommodation over confrontation, threading needles when they should have been drawing lines. Now they are standing in the results.

Editor’s Note: New York City is now facing the consequences of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist takeover.

Help us continue to report on his radical policies and expose the Democrats who support him. Join RedState VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.