Campaigns have a habit of fighting last year’s war.

Candidates often spend months refining policy proposals and message lines that worked in the previous cycle, only to discover the political landscape has shifted beneath them. Every so often, a moment comes along that demands a new strategy. Last week’s CNN poll may prove to be one of those moments.

According to CNN, roughly one-third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents now identify as democratic socialists, marking a striking shift in the ideological makeup of one of America’s two major political parties. That number alone should command the attention of every Republican candidate and strategist preparing for the 2026 midterm elections. It is evidence that the Democratic coalition continues moving in a direction that would have been politically unthinkable just a decade ago.

This year, Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York further demonstrated that candidates running on openly democratic socialist platforms are no longer relegated to the political fringe. Now, Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary shows the same movement can succeed in one of the........

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