Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Megan Romer handed Republicans a ready-made campaign ad when she cheerfully confirmed her party's most radical positions on Fox News, and moderate Democrats say the damage may last through the midterms.
Shannon Bream ran through a lightning round of true-or-false questions during a Sunday interview on Fox News, and Romer did not flinch. Abolish the Senate? "True." Replace the presidency and Supreme Court? "Yep." Abolish ICE? "Absolutely." Abolish borders and grant amnesty to every illegal immigrant in the country? "As a long-term plan, yep." Defund the Pentagon? "Absolutely." Abolish prisons? Yes, "as part of a long-term program." The clip circulated widely online and replayed across cable news within hours.
By Tuesday, moderate Democrats were not debating whether the interview would hurt them. They were debating how much. One Democratic strategist put it bluntly: "It's a nightmare. This is a gift to Republicans."
The positions Romer confirmed were not off-the-cuff opinions. They track the DSA's formal "Workers Deserve More" platform, which proposes drafting a new constitution, abolishing the Senate, and replacing the president and Supreme Court with leaders picked by Congress. The manifesto also calls for abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a European-style parliamentary system and shifting large corporations into public ownership.
Romer expanded on the Senate question in the interview, calling it "an anachronistic institution" designed to limit popular power. She said the DSA wants to "expand Congress significantly but make it a unicameral legislature," according to the Washington Examiner.
None of this was a secret. But hearing a national party leader say "true" and "yep" and "absolutely" on camera, one answer after another, compressed the entire platform into a sixty-second clip that needed no editing to make the point.
Speaker Mike Johnson posted on social media Tuesday:
"The barbarians are inside the gate, and Democrats are WELCOMING them in. Communism is no longer a far fetched threat. It is here on our SHORES."
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise went further, warning that DSA-backed candidates are winning races beyond their traditional strongholds. "DSA isn't just gaining influence in New York or California," Scalise wrote. "Bernie Sanders- and Mamdani-backed candidates are winning races across the country. Watch this clip closely. These ideas could be coming to your community sooner than you think."
That is exactly the kind of ad copy moderate Democrats dread. DSA-aligned candidates have already won a string of primary victories in New York and Colorado, capitalizing on voter frustration with the party establishment and skepticism of U.S. support for Israel's actions in Gaza. A DSA candidate is competitive in the Democratic primary for a Senate nomination in Michigan, a state no party can afford to treat as safely blue.
Democratic strategist Steve Schale described the bind those primary wins create for candidates in competitive general-election races:
"You now have to argue to voters that you aren't insane when you want to talk about making groceries cheaper."
Schale added that Democrats in swing districts now "have to spend time and research dollars learning how it impacts the race, then you may have to spend limited campaign resources pushing back on the idea that you want to eliminate the presidency or close prisons when you need to be talking about how to make life more affordable."
John Morgan, a prominent lawyer and longtime Democratic fundraiser, spoke to The Hill on Tuesday:
"It's Cuba. It's Venezuela. They believe that there's this utopian state out there that can survive."
Morgan went on at length, drawing a contrast between the constitutional system the country built and the DSA's vision of tearing it apart:
"The crazy thing is, we built this democracy based on capitalism and all the freedoms. We built the most impressive government in the country in the history of the world, until this point. And now we're talking about dismantling it all. And listen, if there's no police, I'm out. I mean I'm a scaredy cat. I hear noises and I'm ready to call 911 myself. I cannot imagine lying in bed without a 911 next to me."
Morgan predicted Republicans will use the interview against Democrats in the midterms. Given that the clip is already playing on loop across conservative media, that prediction is less analysis than observation.
The alarm was not confined to centrist Democrats. An unnamed DSA member acknowledged that Romer's performance undermined the organization's own outreach goals:
"The first rule of organizing is to meet people where they are. The second is to not give away your strategy. I think it serves the DSA to be more thoughtful about their messaging in spaces like Fox News, where there are millions of working people watching who align with the economic message of DSA."
The member added: "We should be trying to bring them in, not scare them with absolutism. I hope leadership can go back to the key principles."
That assessment captures the strategic failure precisely. DSA politicians who won primaries in New York and Colorado argued that their victories reflected grassroots anger over corporate money in the Democratic Party and insufficient opposition to Israeli government actions in Gaza, bread-and-butter progressive grievances that poll well in certain districts. Romer's interview bypassed all of that and went straight to the positions that poll worst: no borders, no prisons, no Senate, no presidency as Americans know it.
Democratic strategist Hyma Moore warned that the fallout will not stay contained to DSA candidates. "They're talking about burning the whole thing down and that's not where people are," Moore said. "They don't want to burn the whole thing down."
Moore called the interview "an albatross Dems have got to watch out for" and predicted it is "going to hurt DSA candidates first, but it will weigh down on Democrats writ large."
The comparison to 2024 is hard to avoid. During that campaign, President Trump's team repeatedly ran ads highlighting then-Vice President Kamala Harris's past support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for prisoners. One ad concluded: "Kamala Harris is for they/them, President Trump is for you." That single issue did not decide the election, but it stuck because it was real, Harris had stated the position on the record, and no amount of pivoting could erase it.
Romer's interview works the same way. She was not misquoted. She was not taken out of context. She was asked direct questions and gave direct answers. That is what makes the clip so difficult for Democrats to neutralize.
The tension between the DSA's national platform and the candidates who run under its banner was already visible before the Fox News interview. Zohran Mamdani, the DSA's most high-profile member, has tried to separate his own campaign from the organization's stated goals. "My platform is not the same as national DSA," Mamdani told the New York Post, while also insisting: "It continues to be my political home; I continue to be a proud member."
That is a difficult needle to thread. Mamdani wants the organizational muscle and grassroots energy of the DSA without owning the platform its co-chair just confirmed on national television. Republicans are unlikely to let him, or any other Democrat with DSA ties, maintain that distinction through November.
Former DNC chair Jaime Harrison has pushed back against DSA candidates running in Democratic primaries at all. "If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don't run for our nomination," Harrison said, reflecting establishment frustration with an organization that openly seeks to remake the constitutional order while borrowing the Democratic ballot line.
Sen. John Fetterman, who has broken with his party on several issues, was more direct: "This isn't a big tent, it's anarchy. Why can't Dems call out the DSA?"
Steve Schale's frustration pointed to the practical cost. Democrats in competitive races entered the cycle hoping to run on kitchen-table issues, inflation, grocery prices, housing. Every minute a candidate spends explaining that she does not, in fact, want to abolish the Senate or empty the prisons is a minute she is not talking about the cost of eggs.
"It's all just off message," Schale said.
That understates the problem. It is not merely off message. It is the opposite message. Voters in swing districts are not looking for candidates who want to dismantle the government. They are looking for candidates who can make the government work. Romer's interview told those voters, in her own words, on camera, with no ambiguity, that the DSA wants to do the former.
Republicans did not have to distort a single word. They just had to press play.
