Something is happening inside the Democrat Party that most of its leaders either refuse to see or are too stubborn to realize. A veteran operative who spent decades raising money and votes for the party is walking away, and he is not going quietly. He is naming names, citing chapter and verse on what he sees coming, and warning that a reckoning is already underway. So why does nobody in Democrat leadership seem to notice?
Julian Epstein spent decades as a Democrat operative backing his party's candidates for the House and Senate. That ends this fall. Epstein says he will personally support and donate to Republican Mike Rogers over Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, and he is urging other Democrats to do the same.
Michigan Democrats made El-Sayed their U.S. Senate nominee last week. Epstein reached for President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address to explain why that nomination alarms him. "In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside," Kennedy said in 1961, and Epstein is using the line as a warning about a party that keeps feeding an extremist faction instead of confronting it.
ICYMI: She Called Fauci a Sociopath on CNN, and the Panel Went Nuts
Epstein reserves most of his criticism for national Democrat leaders who keep appeasing the radicals rather than standing up to them. He credits Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) as one of the few exceptions willing to push back. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), however, does not get the same treatment. His go-to line, "We are a big-tent party," strikes Epstein as an empty cliché, one that lets Schumer dodge any real responsibility for what his party has become.
Epstein calls the movement gaining ground in the party a "nihilistic, deconstructionist" third-worldist ideology, far more radical than ordinary Scandinavian-style socialism. We know what the DSA wants and what its candidates are pushing for: eliminating prisons, policing, borders, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, and free markets, and sharing a worldview with groups like Hamas. Epstein predicts Rogers will spend the campaign highlighting El-Sayed's own positions, which could do plenty of damage by themselves.
Epstein traces the party's problem back to 2024, when Democrats positioned themselves too far left of the median voter and lost. I would argue the problem began under Obama, but that’s another topic for another article.
Epstein wants Democrat leaders to admit that post-modern liberalism is failing. He points to New York City, which spends more than $40,000 per student in public schools while few students can read or do math at grade level, as proof that pouring money into the welfare state has not delivered results. Identity-grievance politics, he argues, breeds a victim mindset, and Democrats will keep bleeding members until the party starts emphasizing building and self-reliance over redistribution.
Like that will ever happen.
This is not an isolated problem for the left. In fact, former Clinton pollster Mark Penn says that many Democrat voters will ultimately vote Republican instead of supporting El-Sayed. Even Jill Biden's former press secretary, Michael LaRosa, is endorsing Rogers over El-Sayed.
As the party keeps nominating candidates like El-Sayed, more Democrats who see socialism for what it is will decide they would rather vote Republican than go along with it. Michigan may just be where that math starts to show up on a ballot.
