Vice President JD Vance warned that the Democratic Party is surrendering to its “most-radical fringes” following a wave of local victories by self-described progressive and socialist candidates.
Speaking on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Vance argued that Democrats learned the wrong lesson following their 2024 election loss.
“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.”
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His comments come after a wave of socialist candidates won high-profile races nationwide. Janeese Lewis George, a socialist member of the Washington, D.C., City Council, won Thursday’s Democratic mayoral primary in the nation’s capital.
Last month, Maine progressive Graham Platner appeared alongside Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during a “Fighting Oligarchy” rally. Platner has since won the Democratic Senate nomination and will face Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.
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.
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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.”
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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.”
