The Democrat-Republican two party system has let us down for decades & it has never been more evident than the last two years. In 2025 we had avowed socialists elected mayors in NYC & Seattle & in 2026 more avowed socialists have won Democrat primaries in congressional districts in NY, Colorado, & Pennsylvania. All of them are expected to win in November - Raab in Philadelphia is even running unopposed. Most of these winners are members of or associated with the Democrat Socialists of America (DSA) which is not a political party but an activist organization with over 120,000 members & chapters in all 50 states, making it the largest socialist organization in U.S. history. Even @ that the DSA only has a 21% favorable rating among registered voters (Marquette poll) so their candidates are punching way above their weight.
In addition, far left Democrat candidates, whether they self-identify as progressives or DSA members but definitely not centrist candidates, have won statewide primary elections - something many strategists thought they couldn't do. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan's Democrat Senate primary by 1% espousing all the DSA views, but says he is a capitalist so Michiganders have to be careful not to fall for double talk. Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan won the Minnesota Democrat Senate primary handily by 19.6% after espousing progressive & DSA views although she never identified as a Democrat Socialist - what's worse is that Flanagan is Tim Walz's lieutenant, which is not an honor with all the meal, housing, & Medicaid fraud that took place right under their noses this past year in Minnesota, & yet she won. And although she didn't win the Wisconsin Democrat Gubernatorial primary DSA member Francesca Hong certainly made her presence felt losing by only 3,796 votes out of 792,009 ballots cast - Hong a Wisconsin state representative & part time bartender who earlier had called for defunding & abolishing the police & canceling Thanksgiving came within 0.5% of winning the nomination.
Centrist Democrat political pundits are minimizing the DSA results by just considering El-Sayed's narrow victory & Hong's narrow loss as a wash proving that centrist Democrats still hold sway in the party. But if you combine the more extreme Flanigan blow out victory in Minnesota & count the three states as a region, which they pretty much actually are, the DSA espousing candidates won 52.7% of the head to head vote over the centrist Democrat's 47.3% thereby showing that DSA candidates can hold their own in a region not just a particular state. And both the losing candidates in Michigan (Stevens) & Wisconsin (Hong) joined the victorious candidates in their states for a unity breakfast just hours after the elections were called showing the Democrats are focused on winning & that there's not a dime's worth of difference between a DSA candidate supported by Gen Zers & a centrist Democrat supported by older life-long Democrats when you get down to it. Meanwhile Republicans are focused on asking who won the 2020 Presidential election. See table below for Democrat primary election results.
I used to long for a hypothetical choice - something like Ronald Reagan versus Steve Lonegan where the citizenry couldn't lose. Instead we had the nightmare reality of Trump versus Kamala Harris where we could not win. And the voters in Texas will have a similar no-win Senate election in November between James Talarico & Ken Paxton.
Now there is real discontent in the country & primary results show no incumbent is safe - 15 term incumbent Colorado Congresswoman Diana Degette was first elected to the seat in 1996 - four months before the victorious DSA candidate Melat Kiros was born.
It is not hard to see why the electorate has awakened. Crossing the red line of affordability provided a sudden awareness that it was a loser to have paid tens of thousands of dollars per year for a college education that is now valueless to an employer who prefers robots. The problem compounds in that grade inflation masks whether or not the student is prepared to go into the world @ all or if he can think. This leads to the attraction of young people to socialism especially if they were never taught the dangers of socialism, or even what it is, & that freedom & capitalism are the basis of prosperity.
The problem begins in K-12 where Neal Boortz told us over twenty years ago that the teachers unions & government schools are more dangerous to America's future than al Qaeda. We may be just beginning to fully understand Neal's point.
Professor Friedman put it this way, writing in the Cato Policy Report, March/April, 1999 - "Any institution will tend to express its own values & its own ideas. Our public education system is a socialist institution. A socialist institution will teach socialist values, not principles of private enterprise."
What should we expect from adults when over 50% of them read @ an elementary school level. These adults are the people who 35 years ago were eighth graders reading @ a fourth grade level & now they are the parents of the young socialists. This degradation of parenting has gone on for decades & the power of the teachers unions throughout the country is the result to our detriment. When their children also learned @ an unsatisfactory level the poorly educated parents blamed the teachers who defended themselves through their unions.
That voters don't like the deal they are getting from the two party system is confirmed by Gallup's finding that 27% of voters self-identify as Republicans, 27% as Democrats, but 45% as Independents. In breaking away from the two major parties these voters are looking for a certain degree of normalcy, but would still like to see something positive get done. This is true because many primaries produce extreme candidates from both parties in very low turnout elections, partly the result of Independents being precluded from voting in closed primaries. (As of February 2026 Independents are afforded some primary participation in 10 states, where state law requires semi-closed primaries for congressional or state-level offices & in 12 states, at least one major political party conducts semi-closed primaries for congressional or state-level offices.)
And voters aren't finding that normalcy in older progressive candidates or younger DSA candidates both of whom campaign for universal single payer healthcare, free child care, free buses, state owned grocery stores, abolishing ICE & the Border Patrol, a four day work week, rent control, wealth confiscation of the rich & corporations, ending U.S. aid to Israel, solidarity with Palestinians, & any other purpose that does not create things of value. This list makes it easy to see why "socialists eventually run out of other people's money."
And they're also not finding that normalcy in the chaos that Nikki Haley warned us follows Trump & the MAGA movement - such as 1) the bad feelings of allies over tariffs arbitrarily imposed plus the added cost Americans are paying for the imported goods & services subject to the tariffs, 2) the loss of stature & cost of the war with Iran that Trump unilaterally started or the humiliation that the theocratic terrorist regime not only withstood the American military might but has actually increased its influence in the Middle East as a result of the war that has now produced sailor exhaustion & declining morale including reports of suicidal thoughts on the USS Abraham Lincoln (& probably other ships as well) - deteriorating living conditions (food rationing & lack of personal supplies like toothpaste & soap, & water contamination) & a worsening mental health environment during the ship’s 200+ record-breaking consecutive days @ sea without making a port call that has experienced @ least one man trying, but prevented, from jumping overboard with one man succeeding & being rescued, 3) the $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund Trump plans to use to compensate people who assaulted police officers & marched to the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to harm Mike Pence & many of the Members of Congress who are still in office but are also still too spineless to vote to stop this self-dealing outrage of Trump suing the government that he runs & then dropping the case when his DOJ agreed to the creation of the fund & providing Trump et al. income tax audit immunity for past tax returns, or 4) Trump's preoccupation with the construction of a ballroom, a 250 feet tall "triumphal arch" located between the Lincoln Memorial & Arlington National Cemetery, & algae growing in a reflecting pool on the mall all demonstrate how tone-deaf Trump is to Americans' troubles. Note - with regard to point 3: Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, in order to secure the votes of Senators Tillis & Cornyn to move his nomination for Attorney General forward, signed a piece of paper supposedly providing assurances regarding concerns of Trump's self-dealing income tax audit immunity & the anti-weaponization fund being dead is not worth the paper it is written on since Trump has never agreed to any such arrangement.
Recognizing how lousy the 156 million Americans who are entirely out of the stock market feel about their paychecks not stretching to always cover the essentials of life, several groups have been formed to try to meet both this economic need to get something positive done & the need for normalcy, summarized as follows:
ORL was founded in 2024 by former Republican senators Danforth (MO), Cohen (ME), & the late Simpson (WY) to function as a "shadow RNC" focusing on unity, fiscal responsibility & discipline, the free market, constitutional due process, & strong foreign alliances (such as NATO). This active national organization is dedicated to restoring traditional conservative values & challenging & providing an alternative to the current GOP's populist & MAGA aligned direction.
Forward recognizes that almost half the voters are not affiliated with either major party & in the spirit of getting things done says "It's time to move Not Left, Not Right, but Forward." The Party points out there are 520,000+ elected positions in the U.S., but under the current system, 70+% are uncontested. They ask "How’s that working out for us?" One of Forward's main points is that the two party system excludes more than thirty million Independent voters from the primary process across the country – this in & of itself has given rise to the success of candidates representing the DSA, most famously AOC in 2018, who won her primary by 1.9% after receiving 7.4% of the total registered vote in an election with 12.9% turnout.
Forward's website includes a list of candidates for some of the 520,000+ positions mentioned above - Independents, Forward Party, & unaffiliated. I was interested to see that Ken Block was listed as an unaffiliated candidate for Governor of Rhode Island. Readers of RTE may remember that Ken was the data professional hired by Trump's lawyers to provide technical evidence that Trump won the 2020 election, which of course he didn't because he couldn't. Click on A Data Professional's Analysis Of The 2020 Presidential Election to refresh your memory. The title of Ken's book on the subject, which I read before making the post, tells the story:
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Ken seems like a square shooter & the voters in RI should give him a good look before casting their ballots for Governor.
Not meaning it to be a left handed compliment, this is the best presentation I have seen Democrats make in decades. Led by Representatives Tom Suozzi (NY) & Adam Gray (CA), "A Promise to America" refers to a centrist political pledge signed by 13 House Democrats & candidates. It is an obvious challenge to progressive DSA candidates, so good for them for fighting back. The pledge explicitly rejects socialism, endorses secure borders, champions capitalism, promotes confident patriotism as an alternative to extreme partisan divides, & honors America's exceptional character & extraordinary achievement.
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All three of the above groups seem sincere & I hope people will check out candidates aligned with them in both the 2026 midterms & the 2028 presidential election. I have posted for years that we really have one big government party with two wings who take turns in power with a constant incremental movement to the left - a slow burn losing proposition. In a narrow majority Congress (i.e., nearly evenly divided), a small handful of people can control a lot of what happens or equally as important a lot of what doesn't happen if neither of the two major parties can muster enough votes to move their agenda forward. The Freedom Caucus recently protected us from bad legislation by holding significant influence while numbering just two & a half dozen members. As I researched the above three groups I thought of a similar arrangement if they live up to their mission statements - but they give us a chance to look @ something other than candidates from the Democrat & Republican parties where we waste our votes choosing somebody we don't believe in.
Over the years I have supported, worked for, &/or voted for people I thought would make a difference such as Dave Corsi, Stan Serafin, Steve Lonegan, Mike Agosta, Anna Little, Jim Gawron, Jim Poesl, Murray Sabrin, Tod Theise, Alan Keyes, Ben Carson, Richard Luzzi, Steve King, Ron Paul, Gary Johnson, Chase Oliver, Mike Huckabee, & Steve Forbes.
Some of these people are still friends. But all of them are people I believed in so I never cast a wasted vote.
