In 1981, following the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan's life, one of the first people who visited the president in his hospital room was Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill.
According to several sources, including O'Neil's then-chief of staff, future MSNBC host Chris Matthews, in his book Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked, O'Neill entered Reagan's hospital room and walked over to his bed. Reagan was still groggy, but O'Neill reached out and held both of Reagan's hands in his and said, God bless you, Mr. President." O'Neill then leaned down and kissed the president on the forehead.
The gesture is significant because three months later, Reagan was skewering O'Neill for his obstructionism in blocking his tax and spending plans. Reagan once famously compared O'Neill to the video game character Pac-Man, describing him as "a round thing that gobbles up money." O'Neill would retaliate by calling Reagan "a tool of the wealthy" and the "most ignorant man" to ever occupy the White House.
Reagan got almost everything he wanted in his tax and spending bills despite the Democrats' 51-seat majority in the House. In 1982, Republicans, with Reagan's blessing, made Tip O'Neill the face of the opposition — the poster child of Democratic Party excess. A national ad campaign in key congressional districts, painting O'Neill as the slightly comical, rotund caricature of a liberal Boston Irish politician, was undertaken.
It didn't work. Democrats won 26 seats in 1982, expanding their majority and forcing Reagan to compromise on his spending bill. But the concept of nationalizing the mid-term elections was set, and is how both parties now see it as a way to gain seats in an age when gerrymandering has made picking up more than a handful of seats a struggle.
Zohran Mamdani, the avowed socialist leading the race for New York mayor, may give Republicans the perfect foil to run against in 2026. He's so outrageously extreme that the GOP won't even have to exaggerate that much to portray him as dangerous and antithetical to American values and norms.
Naturally, Democrats are sweating bullets and looking for a way to hide Mamdani before the midterms somehow. Their problem is that a large plurality of their base enthusiastically supports Mamdani, as do a good number of Democratic officeholders.
Democratic Party moderates are losing their minds.
They worry a Mamdani mayoralty will deepen an existential crisis for a party desperate to win back power in Congress — simultaneously handing Republicans a cudgel to paint their moderate opponents as socialists and encouraging hard-left copy cat candidates to primary Democratic incumbents, potentially pushing the party further to the left.
Republicans are giving the 33-year-old democratic socialist a starring role in digital ads and fundraising appeals — affixing him to moderate Democrats who represent swing seats in the New York City suburbs and nationwide.
A video this month by the House GOP’s campaign arm warned that Democrats “want to turn America into a socialist, crime-filled dystopia” and features a clip of Mamdani discussing the “abolition of private property.”
“I’ve never seen Republicans more giddy about the idea of a socialist mayor of New York City,” said Democratic former Nassau County executive Laura Curran. “They’re more excited about this than Mamdani’s followers or supporters.”
“Mamdani is the greatest threat to Democrats probably since Ronald Reagan because he’s everything Democrats have been accused of being and in fact is — to the extreme,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime New York Democratic operative. “Republican ad makers will know what to do with this.”
Indeed, the GOP sees Mamdani as an early Christmas present. The Democrats? Not so much. In fact, it gets worse for the Dems.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have become delusional, thinking that Mamdani's primary victory signals a moment like Lenin's bloodless coup in Petrograd in April 1917. It's the start of the revolution, and there's no stopping the socialists now!
The upshot is that DSA is preparing to primary Democrats across the board in New York, including Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries.
The Democrats have no answer to this. It's worse than being a deer in the headlights because the party is running down the road, full speed ahead, trying for a monumental collision with a semi.
If I were you, I'd make sure your pantry was fully stocked with enough popcorn to last through November.
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