The winner of my House district’s primary, Cait Conley, is the candidate the Democratic establishment wanted. And I think she can beat Mike Lawler in the general, although of course a lot can happen between now and November.  But I’ve bumped into some younger progressives in the district who swear they will not vote for her, because she’s not pure enough on one issue or another. And I don’t disagree with them as far as the issues are concerned, but House Democratic majority, folks. The bigger, the better. Vote Blue No Matter Who.

Now I think some other people need to hear that same message. See, for example, After wins by democratic socialists, centrist Democrats unite to push back by Matthew Choi in WaPo. (I appear to be out of gift links, but maybe you can read some of it.)

Thirteen Democratic House members and candidates announced their support Thursday for a centrist initiative aimed at pushing back against the party’s tilt toward democratic socialism. …

… “They should not be the face of our party,” said Jessica Killin, a Democratic candidate running in a competitive Colorado district. “We need to be organized and clear in our vision.”

Killin is one of the 13 who signed on to the “Promise to America” initiative that commits candidates to a set of centrist principles, including capitalism, fiscal discipline, strong borders and pride in the United States.

Yeah, that sets up such a strong contrast to Republicans, right?

Part of me does appreciate that Republicans are absolutely going to seize on the flakier DSA candidates and hang them about the necks of every Democrat running everywhere. Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the Mamdani-endorsed candidates who won on Tuesday, is a bit much even for me and will probably serve nicely as this year’s “defund the police.” But it appears I’m not the only Democratic voter who has had it with the centrists. Michelle Goldberg writes in the New York Times,

Many Democratic primary voters, however, are in no mood for defensiveness. As they see it, they’ve been failed by a cautious, compromising establishment, and they’re going to overthrow it. The Democratic version of the Tea Party is here, with dramatic implications for the midterms and possibly the next presidential election. As Mamdani said at a rally at Brooklyn’s Kings Theater last week, people are asking when the race for 2028 begins. “It starts now,” he said.

then later, Goldberg writes,

That means the 2026 midterms could end up being a giant national experiment that tests the populist left’s theory of victory. For years, it has argued that Democrats have failed because, in thrall to corporate interests, they let themselves become the party of the status quo. Unable or unwilling to galvanize voters with an economically progressive alternative to the right, they’ve offered only timid, business-friendly incrementalism. Usamah Andrabi, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, the organization that recruited Avila Chevalier to run for Congress, told me that too often, the Democratic Party “tries to stymie big and bold ideas” in favor of technocratic pragmatism. “I think what voters have really made clear, particularly this past year, is that they are desperate for bold, visionary leadership,” he said.

What I’ve been saying for at least a couple of decades.

See also A Far-Left Freedom Caucus Would Be a Nightmare for Jeffries by Paul Kane at NOTUS. It begins:

Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-New York) has a message for the far-left Democrats who won in Tuesday’s primaries and are all but guaranteed to join Congress in January: tone it down.

But Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), the liberal icon whose 2018 upset win inspired this movement, had a very different message directed at the old-line Democrats: welcome these incoming progressives with open arms, or else they’ll spark ideological clashes.

This is worth reading. It quotes AOC,

“My hope is that they are not met with the hostility and the cruelty, frankly, that I experienced, and I think that a lot of that can inform what happens afterwards,” she added, noting that they should be respected for having won their districts just like everyone else.

I hadn’t realized she’d been dissed so badly when she first came to the House in 2019. But, yes, the DSAers were elected like everyone else, and should they win in November their constituents expect them to deliver what they ran on, or at least be seen trying real hard. Once again, it looks like the centrists are the real clogs in the machine who insist their timid, incremental approach is the only legitimate one and everybody had better get with their program. And the centrists will still be the whopping majority in the House, so it’s not like they’re going to lose control in the near future.