Democratic candidates with deep socialist roots are scrubbing their social media histories ahead of the midterms, but the receipts keep surfacing, and voters in swing states are not buying the makeover.
Abdul el-Sayed, the 41-year-old Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, had his campaign quietly delete past social media statements that included declaring "fireworks suck" and drawing a link between football and slavery. CNN caught the cleanup and reported on it this summer, forcing el-Sayed's team into damage control. The campaign responded with what Republican strategist Colin Reed called a "canned declaration" about el-Sayed's love for "Michigan football on Saturdays."
The problem for el-Sayed is geography. Michigan voted for President Donald Trump twice in the last decade. A candidate who mocked the Fourth of July and tied the country's most popular sport to slavery is not running in a safe Brooklyn district. He is asking for votes in a state where those positions land somewhere between baffling and disqualifying, and deleting the posts only confirms the campaign knows it.
El-Sayed is not the only far-left Democrat who tried to sand down the edges this summer. In Wisconsin, one of America's most purple states, 37-year-old Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong ran for governor and watched her own social media history become a liability before Election Day. Among the positions that surfaced: support for canceling Thanksgiving.
Hong tried to reverse course. She declared Thanksgiving her "favorite" holiday and told voters she does not "want to cancel it." The reversal did not work. Hong lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary by roughly 4,000 votes.
That margin matters. It was not a blowout driven by name recognition or spending. It was a close race in which a candidate's own past statements gave primary voters, Democratic primary voters, enough reason to pick someone else. If your own party's base will not tolerate the record, a general electorate certainly will not.
Even the movement's most prominent figure has started backing away from the brand. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 36-year-old New York Democrat whom Reed describes as "one of the leaders of this movement," offered a blunt assessment of the progressive era she helped launch:
"Woke 1.0 was crazy."
That is not a Republican talking point. That is the congresswoman who popularized the Green New Deal conceding that the first iteration of her own ideological project went too far. Reed frames the admission as a tactical move, an attempt to put distance between the movement's past and its future without actually abandoning the underlying agenda.
And the agenda keeps moving. In New York City, the Mamdani administration is pursuing government-run grocery stores. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been publicly distancing himself from the Democratic Socialists of America. The party is pulling in two directions at once: its leadership wants to appear moderate while its rising candidates keep arriving with hard-left records that require extensive editing before they can be shown to a general-election audience.
Reed, a former campaign manager for Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown and co-founder of South and Hill Strategies, argues that el-Sayed's calculation is straightforward: better to take the hit on the flip-flop than to defend the original position. That logic tells you everything about where these views actually sit with voters. If calling fireworks terrible and comparing football to slavery were popular positions, the campaign would be running ads on them, not erasing them.
The Democratic Party is still reckoning with the fallout of its previous election losses. Reed writes that the party is "in need of new ideas, leaders and voices." But the candidates stepping forward keep arriving from the same ideological corner, carrying the same baggage, and deploying the same strategy: say what you believe until you need votes outside your base, then delete and deny.
Early voting starts in some states in a matter of weeks. El-Sayed's Senate race will test whether a scrubbed social media feed can substitute for a moderate record. Hong's primary loss in Wisconsin suggests the answer is no. Voters can forgive a changed mind. They are less forgiving when the change happens to coincide with a campaign launch and a CNN story.
You can delete the post. You cannot delete the worldview that produced it, and voters have gotten very good at telling the difference.
