This past week a political earthquake hit the Democratic Party so strongly that Republicans felt it.
Tremors, perceived and unperceived, prefaced this moment. But Darializa Avila Chevalier’s defeat of incumbent Representative Adriano Espaillat in NY-13’s Democratic primary came as the first time in a long time that all Democrats felt the earth shift beneath their feet.
The Democratic Party is a different party now.
Chevalier posted “Israel doesn’t exist!” back in 2020, attended an anti-Israel demonstration on October 8, 2023, and helped organize the Pro-Hamas occupation of Columbia University in 2024 that included a takeover of Hamilton Hall and tents strewn across the campus’s South Lawn. That a seventh-year Columbia University doctoral student boasted all that on her CV but not her sociology PhD. does not surprise. That she effectively won a seat in Congress representing parts of the city containing more Jews in it than any other does not surprise, either. It shocks.
By taking off their mask prior to the midterm elections, Democrats undoubtedly suppress their gains.
The Democratic Party, reflexively pro-Israel almost from that nation’s origins because of the party’s reliance on an urban, ethnic coalition, now appears on the whole hostile to Israel. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), once a force to elect liberal Democrats, now acts as an albatross around the neck of any candidate associated with it who runs in a deep-blue district. DAC’s win, and Brad Lander’s defeat of Rep. Dan Goldman after a New York coffeehouse shamefully refused him service saying his money comes “probably from AIPAC,” signal more than just a shift on Israel.
Last Tuesday shows the transformation of party animals into party cannibals. Established and entrenched once meant perpetual reelection. Now it means vulnerable and targeted. Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 72, could tell you that after a 32-year-old grad student defeated him. Democrats are in a nasty and foul mood. With no Trump on the ballot in their primaries, they take out their displaced anger on their own. DAC won as part of a great purge.
Tuesday also shows an unmistakable ideological metamorphosis. Just as Barack Obama’s Democratic Party was not Walter Mondale’s Democratic Party, Chevalier’s Democratic Party is not Obama’s Democratic Party. The energy within the party belongs to Marxists, economic and cultural. DAC won a Democratic primary after advocating the abolition of prisons (Would she like the state to house Rex Heuermann in her guest bedroom?) and once tweeting, “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me” (happy Fourth!).
“Lady, I ain’t in the same party as you,” octogenarian James Carville reflected. “I’m sorry. I’m just not, and I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk ‘the S-word’ — ‘schism.’ I really do.”
Carville, a wise political strategist, grasps that coloring blue districts a deeper shade of blue likely handicaps Democrats who run in purple and red districts. If you live in Des Moines or Virginia Beach or Omaha and you do not know DAC, then get ready. She comes to the commercial breaks of your local six o’clock news this fall. Some Democrats who would have won instead lose because of the party’s extreme left turn.
Even a psycho such as Norman Bates knew enough not to wear his murder outfit upon meeting Marion Crane and Milton Arbogast. By taking off their mask prior to the midterm elections, Democrats undoubtedly suppress their gains. Darializa Avila Chevalier, the woman with four names but zero brain cells, exhibits this lack of sense mainly in terms of the broader political strategy for her entire party. The Democratic rule-or-ruin caucus, safely enveloped by 80-20 districts, shows not a care for their fellow party members duking it out against Republicans in competitive races.
Not just DAC in NY-13, but in NJ-12 Adam Hamawy — a former friend of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman who testified for the defense during his trial for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center — represents a party that knows no leftward boundary. Its propensity for the application of hyperbolic rhetoric to Donald Trump and just about any issue, from the minimum wage to immigration, necessarily means a Manichean interpretation on events in the Middle East. Criticizing some of Benjamin Netanyahu’s military actions as, say, disproportionate and unwise, will not do. They must compare Israel to Nazi Germany and call its military actions “genocide.” They always go for Bacardi 151 or Everclear grain alcohol when the situation calls for a glass of wine or even some near beer.
Surely cloaking Jews in the garb of their monstrous exterminators lays bare their anti-Semitism. It also reveals the users of such language as extremists who always reach for the harshest label to describe the people with whom they disagree.
In the 2026 Democratic Party, it is always Year Zero and never Thermidor.
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