The Democrat Party’s socialist wing just pulled off a string of primary upsets that even the party establishment can’t explain away.
Pete Buttigieg went on Fox News and had every opportunity to say something about it.
He didn’t — and what he said instead left a former RNC chairman shaking his head.
Buttigieg Invents a New Label Rather Than Answer the Question
Former Transportation Secretary and potential 2028 candidate Pete Buttigieg drew criticism from a former RNC chairman when he appeared to sidestep opportunities to disavow the rise of socialism in the Democrat Party and instead called himself a “Buttigieg Democrat.”
Speaking on *America Reports*, Buttigieg declined to directly address questions about Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) policies, such as abolishing the Senate and ending deportations, instead criticizing President Donald Trump’s foreign policy and economic record.
Asked directly where he stands, Buttigieg reached for something that sounded moderate without committing to anything. “I’m a Pete Buttigieg Democrat. I think I’m a common-sense Democrat, but of course everybody thinks that their ideas are common sense to them,” he said.
And then, rather than draw any line between himself and the DSA, he offered this: “Look, there’s always going to be some people in my party who go too far for me, people I disagree with. If you pick the five or 10 or 15 furthest-left people in our party, they’re going to, by definition, disagree with a lot of others. But there’s so much that we do, in fact, agree on,” Buttigieg said.
That’s not a repudiation. That’s a shrug dressed up as nuance.
Buttigieg also tried to thread an odd needle by placing the DSA and Donald Trump in the same category. “I think one of the reasons why you see people who run on a promise of shaking it up, whether it’s a DSA candidate on the left or whether it’s someone like Donald Trump, is because people can tell that the system we have is not just showing its age — it’s letting us down,” he added.
So in Buttigieg’s telling, the people pushing to abolish the US Senate and the man who won a landslide election to defend it are essentially the same phenomenon. That’s a remarkable thing to say out loud.
Reince Priebus Wasn’t Buying It
Fox News political analyst Reince Priebus, who served as RNC chairman and Trump White House chief of staff, argued on *America Reports* that Buttigieg was refusing to confront the socialist wing of his party, calling the interview an example of mainstream Democrats aligning with “people that are far outside the mainstream.” “The opponent, the Democrats from where Pete Buttigieg is at, is aligning itself with people that are far outside the mainstream. They’re on the wrong side of normal, and he didn’t really address that when he was pressed,” Priebus said. “And that’s the big question for him.”
Priebus put his finger on something real. Buttigieg is running a 2028 presidential campaign in slow motion, and part of that calculation involves not alienating the DSA voters he’ll need in a primary while also not scaring off the moderates he’ll need in a general. The result is a lot of careful language that doesn’t actually say anything.
But the socialist wins keep piling up, and at some point the careful language stops being a strategy and starts being a tell.
What the DSA Actually Wants — and What It’s Winning
Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., a 30-year incumbent, lost to a DSA-backed challenger in a high-profile primary. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old socialist, defeated DeGette in a Democrat primary for a deep-blue House seat anchored in Denver, according to The Associated Press, scoring a major victory for the socialist left.
The DSA had been aiming to cast DeGette’s loss as evidence of its growing momentum after a slate of socialist candidates won Democrat primaries in New York City the week prior.
And the DSA’s ambitions go well beyond winning a few House seats. The DSA’s new platform calls for ownership of private corporations, free public college, rent control, state-run health care, reparations for slavery and amnesty for people in the US illegally. Additionally, it looks to abolish ICE, prisons, the Supreme Court and the Senate.
Read that again. Abolish the Supreme Court. Abolish the Senate. Grant amnesty to every illegal alien in the country. This isn’t a fringe pamphlet — it’s the governing document of a movement that just knocked off a 30-year incumbent in Denver and ran the table in New York.
The DSA’s new platform calls for ownership of private corporations, free public college, rent control, state-run health care, reparations for slavery and amnesty for people in the US illegally. Additionally, it looks to abolish ICE, prisons, the Supreme Court and the Senate.
Every one of those proposals represents a direct attack on the constitutional order that has made American prosperity possible. Government-run healthcare has produced rationing and wait lists everywhere it’s been tried. Amnesty for illegal aliens isn’t a humanitarian gesture — it’s a strategy to import a new voter base and permanently tilt the electoral map away from the American working class. Abolishing the Senate doesn’t democratize anything; it eliminates the one institution designed to keep heavily populated urban centers from steamrolling the rest of the country.
But Buttigieg doesn’t want to say any of that. He wants to be the reasonable face of a party that is rapidly becoming something most Americans wouldn’t recognize.
Earlier in July, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to concerns about DSA proposals, including abolishing the Senate, calling it a “constitutional question” and noting, “we’ve all got our complaints.”
So the two leading contenders for the 2028 Democrat presidential nomination are, respectively, a woman who treats dismantling the US Senate as an interesting constitutional debate, and a man who compares DSA socialists to Donald Trump and then calls himself a common-sense Democrat. That’s the field. That’s what the party has produced.
A University of New Hampshire Granite State Poll places Buttigieg neck-and-neck with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a potential 2028 match-up.
And that poll tells you something important. The Democrat primary electorate is genuinely divided between a candidate who will at least be honest about wanting to tear things down and a candidate who wants to accomplish the same thing while sounding like a reasonable adult. Neither of them is willing to look at what the DSA is doing to their party and say it plainly: this is socialism, it has failed everywhere it’s been tried, and it has no business anywhere near the levers of the American government.
The historical record on socialist governance isn’t ambiguous. Economic decline. Shrinking middle classes. Governments that expand until there’s nothing left of private life that hasn’t been regulated, taxed, or seized. The DSA isn’t proposing something new — it’s proposing something that has been tried and rejected by every serious nation that’s lived through it.
Pete Buttigieg knows all of this. He’s a Harvard man and a Rhodes Scholar. He’s read the books. But he also knows that saying it out loud would cost him votes in a primary where the DSA is now a kingmaker. So he invents a new label for himself, says something vague about common sense, and hopes nobody notices that he never actually answered the question.
Priebus noticed. And so did a lot of voters who are watching a party sprint toward positions that would have been unthinkable in any previous generation of American political life.
Sources: Fox News, NewsNation, The Washington Times, NPR, Time