Kamala Harris wants Democrats to see her as the steady hand who can calm a party in chaos.
The socialist wing keeps winning primaries, and nervous Democrats want somebody to draw a line.
And Harris finally gave her answer, one that should worry anybody fond of the Constitution.
Harris Rolled Out the Welcome Mat for the Socialists
Former Vice President Kamala Harris has spent the closing stretch of the midterms hopscotching from one Democrat rally to the next, auditioning for a 2028 comeback she still won’t admit she wants. CNN tagged along as she worked a packed high school gym in the Mississippi Delta for Scott Colom, the Democrat challenging Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS).
Somewhere between the photo lines and the bleachers, CNN asked her the question every Democrat with national ambitions will have to answer sooner or later. How big a role should the Democratic Socialists of America play in the party’s future?
Harris didn’t even pretend to wrestle with it.
“We are, as we say, a big tent, and I don’t think anybody should be kicked out,” she said.
The question didn’t come out of nowhere. Harris put Angie Nixon on the lineup for one of her virtual campaign events. Nixon, a Florida state Representative, knocked off Alex Vindman for the Democrat Senate nomination in August after joining the DSA in June. According to CNN, Nixon signed up with the socialists specifically as part of launching her Senate bid.
So a candidate who joined a Marxist outfit as a campaign strategy gets a warm embrace from the woman who led the Democrat ticket in 2024. Birds of a feather.
The Fine Print Inside That Big Tent
Harris knows exactly who she just welcomed in. The DSA hasn’t kept its goals a secret.
In July, the group rolled out a national platform called “Workers Deserve More.” The document calls for abolishing the Senate outright. It also pledges to “replace the president and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
And that only covers the org chart. The platform demands “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries,” marks police and prisons for eventual elimination, and talks dreamily about a “classless society.” Karl Marx would recognize the blueprint in about five seconds.
DSA co-chair Megan Romer didn’t run from any of it when Fox News’ Shannon Bream read the list back to her on air. Bream asked whether the group really wants to abolish the Senate.
“True,” Romer answered.
Then she gave her reasoning. “The Senate was part of the system that was made to make sure that the people didn’t have too much of a say. So we want to expand Congress significantly, but make it a unicameral legislature.”
A month later, the DSA marked what would have been Fidel Castro’s 100th birthday with a tribute calling the dead dictator “an organizer, a fighter.” Castro filled his prisons with dissidents, seized private businesses across the island, and sent wave after wave of Cuban families fleeing across the Florida Straits with little more than the clothes on their backs.
That’s the crowd Harris refuses to show the door.
The Golden Gavel Gathers Dust
Here’s the part that ought to sting.
Harris holds the all-time record for tie-breaking votes in the United States Senate. She cast 33 of them as Vice President, topping a mark John C Calhoun set nearly two centuries earlier. Chuck Schumer celebrated the milestone in December 2023 by handing her a golden gavel.
“I am honored, I am truly honored,” Harris told reporters at the time.
Those tie-breakers rammed through the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, and working families are still paying off that spending binge at the grocery checkout. But set the policy aside for a moment. Harris built her biggest Washington accomplishments inside the very chamber the DSA wants to bulldoze.
And she won’t even tell those folks to take a hike.
Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the closest thing American socialism has to a patron saint, told reporters he doesn’t want the Senate abolished either. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate, brushed the idea aside too. “I know people in Richmond who align with DSA who don’t want to abolish the Senate,” Kaine said.
Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a DSA member herself, said she doesn’t support scrapping the upper chamber. “It is what it is,” she said of the Senate, hardly a love letter, but at least she picked a side.
Down in Florida, the Democrat nominee for Governor, former Republican Congressman David Jolly, went on cable television and declared, “I reject socialism.” Axios reported that Florida Democrat chair Nikki Fried got into a heated phone call with Nixon over the DSA label and what it would cost the party with voters.
Bernie can draw a line. AOC can draw a line. A Florida Democrat running statewide can draw a line.
The woman with the golden gavel can’t.
Harris Was Running This Play Long Before the Socialists Showed Up
None of this should surprise anybody. Harris has run as a radical, woke leftist for years, and her own record spells it out in black and white.
GovTrack rated her the most liberal member of the entire Senate in 2019. She co-sponsored Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All bill in 2017 and signed onto the Green New Deal resolution two years later. During her first presidential run, she told a CNN climate town hall she’d scrap the filibuster to pass climate legislation.
Her 2019 American Civil Liberties Union questionnaire went even further. Harris pledged to slash funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, backed decriminalizing drug possession for personal use, and made amnesty for some 11 million illegal aliens a top priority.
Then came the answer that should have buried any talk of Harris as a moderate. “I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained,” she wrote.
Taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal aliens in federal custody. CNN’s own KFile team dug that answer up in 2024. Her spokesman brushed it off as “not what she’s running on.” But Harris herself never walked back a word of it.
Socialized medicine, a federal takeover of the energy economy, amnesty, and transgender surgeries on the taxpayer’s dime. The DSA platform reads like her old campaign homework with a few extra chapters stapled on.
Her circle tells the same story. CNN reported that Patrick Gaspard, Barack Obama’s first White House political director, pushed the Colom campaign to bring Harris to Mississippi. Gaspard has also been informally advising rising stars on the left, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the DSA’s crown jewel.
Gaspard compared Harris to Muhammad Ali fighting to win back the heavyweight crown. The people telling her to sit this one out, he insisted, “were worried he would win.”
But a boxer at least knows which corner he fights out of.
Florida’s Cuban exiles have heard the “I’m not really a socialist” routine before. When Castro toured Washington, DC, in April 1959, he spent the trip insisting his revolution wasn’t red at all, just green like the palm trees back home. He sat down with Vice President Richard Nixon, and Nixon walked out convinced he had just met a communist. History settled that argument fast.
Angie Nixon now tells interviewers she isn’t a socialist either, despite carrying a membership card in an organization that just threw Castro a birthday tribute. A different Nixon would have known exactly what to make of that.
2028 Starts at the Tent Flap
The DSA no longer lives on the fringe of the Democrat Party. Its members keep winning primaries from Florida to New York, and a CNN poll found roughly a third of Democrats now call themselves democratic socialists.
Any Democrat chasing the 2028 nomination needs those primary voters. Andy Beshear, Wes Moore, Pete Buttigieg, and Cory Booker are all circling the race, and one of them may yet try running as the adult who tells the socialists no.
Harris just took herself out of that lane.
And she knew exactly what she was saying. Harris has spent two years telling everybody how carefully she weighs every move, and she picked these words with a national reporter standing right in front of her. A politician who spent 2019 racing Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren to the left didn’t need a focus group to find this answer.
Today the line is “nobody should be kicked out.” Tomorrow the platform planks show up as primary litmus tests: abolish ICE, put the biggest companies under government ownership, and get rid of the Senate that stands in the way of all of it. A candidate who won’t say no to the group now won’t find it any easier once she needs its volunteers knocking doors in South Carolina.
So which one does Kamala Harris value more these days, the golden gavel Chuck Schumer handed her or the votes of the people who want to melt it down?
Sources: CNN, “Kamala Harris responds to her critics and Democrats who don’t want her to run again”; CNN, “KFile: Harris pledged support in 2019 to cut ICE funding and provide transgender surgery for detained migrants”; Democracy Now, “Unbought & Unbossed: Angie Nixon on Winning Democratic Senate Race in Florida”; Axios, “Stop gaslighting me!: Florida Democrats’ Senate nominee and party chair have heated call over socialism”; Axios, “Angie Nixon scores socialist breakthrough in Trump’s Florida”; Fox News, “DSA co-chair embraces abolishing Senate, ICE, borders as Democratic infighting escalates”; Fox News, “Harris ACLU questionnaire shows she supported gender transition surgeries for detained migrants, defunding ICE”; Legal Insurrection, “DSA Co-Chair Goes All In on Abolishing ICE, Senate”; Washington Examiner, “What DSA wants”; NOTUS, “DSA Wants to Abolish the Senate. Bernie Sanders Says ‘No.’”; Persuasion, “Socialism vs the Constitution”; Hot Air, “DSA Praises Fidel Castro in 100th Birthday Tribute”; Washington Free Beacon, “As 2020 Presidential Candidate, Harris Backed Taxpayer-Funded Sex-Change Surgeries for Illegal Immigrants”; The Post Millennial, “Even CNN shocked by Kamala’s 2019 support of taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants”; PBS NewsHour, “Harris makes history with record-setting tiebreaker vote in Senate”; Black Enterprise, “VP Kamala Harris Makes History With 33 Tiebreaker Votes, Receives Golden Gavel”; Cubanet, “Fidel Castro, Nixon y la esvástica”
