A recent chair of the Democratic National Committee apparently wants democratic socialists to get out of his party. “If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” Jaime Harrison tweeted on election day last week, shortly before results showed that three of those socialists had won Democratic primaries for Congress in deep-blue New York City. He didn’t identify his targets, but the implication was clear.

Harrison’s call for self-expulsion was the bizarre opposite of a welcome mat: “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Don’t ask Democrats to invest their time, money, and energy in your campaign.” The tweet turned reality on its head. Socialist candidates have been winning because they inspired multitudes of people to volunteer and provide what’s needed to win.

The little tirade from Harrison attracted a lot of attention, with more than 5m views on X. What’s widely known about him is that he served as Joe Biden’s DNC chair for four years after running for the Senate from South Carolina in 2020, when he raised a record $130m and lost to Republican senator Lindsey Graham by 10 points. But little-known information about Harrison puts his evident broadside against socialists in context.

Between 2008 and 2016, when Harrison worked as a lobbyist for the powerhouse firm the Podesta Group, he represented scores of huge corporations. They included Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway, Boeing, BP, General Motors, Google, Lockheed Martin, Merck, Oracle, United Technologies, Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo. He also lobbied for trade associations like the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and the National Mining Association.

Harrison is an archetype of the political operatives telling democratic socialists to leave the Democratic party. If they followed such advice, the new mayors of New York and Seattle would no longer be Democrats. Nor would the next mayor of Washington DC, or the member of the Los Angeles city council now in a runoff for LA mayor.

Many prominent mainline Democrats are suddenly insisting that their party’s big tent should get smaller. One of them, James Carville, declared last week that the socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who won the Democratic primary in New York’s 13th congressional district, “is not a Democrat” and House Democrats “should not seat her in the caucus”.

Carville’s political insights are notable in a pair of essays for the New York Times. One came in October 2024, when he wrote about Kamala Harris’s campaign against Donald Trump:........

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