Vice President JD Vance said the Democratic Party is giving ground to its “most-radical fringes” after a string of local wins by candidates who identify as progressive or socialist.
During an appearance on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Vance said he believes Democrats took the wrong message from their defeat in the 2024 election.
“My genuine hope was that the lesson the Democrats learned from the 2024 election is maybe we should stop being so crazy,” Vance said Saturday.
“And unfortunately, the lesson that Democrats seem to have learned from the 2024 election is to lean into the most radical fringes of their party.”
Vance’s remarks followed several notable victories by socialist candidates in races across the country.
Janeese Lewis George, a socialist serving on the Washington, D.C., City Council, won Thursday’s Democratic mayoral primary in the nation’s capital.
In Maine, progressive Graham Platner appeared last month with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., at a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally.
Platner has since secured the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate and is set to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.
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New York City’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, also teamed up with Sanders for a get-out-the-vote event in Brooklyn this week.
The two supported several socialist and progressive candidates ahead of Tuesday’s New York primaries.
But Vance said the latest party shift has left many moderate Democrats in the dust.
“I was raised by patriotic Christian blue-collar Democrats who loved this country, but they weren’t Republicans,” Vance said.
“But I feel, unfortunately, that those patriotic blue-collar Democrats, they increasingly don’t have a place in that party anymore, at least among the elected senior leadership ranks.”
He pushed back on the idea that socialists are advocating for the working class, arguing that efforts to abolish ICE would hurt prospects for American workers.
“I always find it interesting when socialists tell me that they really stand up for working people, and they want to protect working people, but they want to abolish ICE,” Vance said.
“That means a flood of low-wage immigrants coming into this country, competing for wages against the working people, Black, White and Brown of the United States of America,” he said, adding, “You do not care about working people if you refuse to enforce the border. Stop pretending that you do.”
