A former Democratic Socialists of America organizer who quit over the group’s anti-NATO line now warns radical primary voters could empower dangerous extremists ahead of the midterms.
Jake Altman spent nearly a decade inside the Democratic Socialists of America before walking away in 2022. The Michigan resident and Iowa native is now warning that the same forces that seized his old group are reshaping Democratic primaries just as voters head toward November.
The New York Post reported that Altman, a former union organizer, described the organization’s turn in blunt terms after speaking with the Times of London. He said the group he joined in 2013 no longer resembled the one he left.
“I felt anger and confirmation that the organization had gone completely off the deep end and there’s nothing to be salvaged,” Altman said.
“There’s no point in remaining in an organization that’s been taken over by people like this.”
Altman said he quit after Russia invaded Ukraine and the DSA called for the United States to withdraw from NATO. The group blasted the Atlantic alliance as “imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” That stance, he said, confirmed the takeover he had watched for years.
“There were people who knew better on the inside, and they just did nothing. It’s very similar to what’s happening to the Democratic Party now,” he said.
He first joined in 2013 after watching economic decay hit the Rust Belt during his childhood. At the time, the median DSA member was about 68 years old. Five years later, that median age had been cut in half as younger activists poured in.
Altman traced the surge to the Bernie Sanders movement in 2016 and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 win. Those moments, he said, proved the project could work.
“The Bernie Sanders movement [in 2016] and then AOC’s victory [in 2018] brought a lot of fuel and energy. It was showing we can actually do this. It was proof of concept that they could achieve their goal, which was to change the Democratic Party.”
The DSA platform, as described in the reporting, calls for abolishing the Senate, making the president and Supreme Court subservient to Congress, and defunding the Pentagon. High-ranking members have also pushed to defund the police, abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and sanction Israel over its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Those positions have not stayed on paper. DSA members won Democratic primaries in at least half a dozen House races, and more candidates aligned with the group’s values notched victories across the country. The organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Similar alarms have come from other Democrats who refuse to pretend the socialist wing is a harmless faction, including cases where Fetterman labeled the DSA deeply anti-American over its middle-class record.
Altman’s warning centers on who actually shows up in primaries. He said high-propensity Democratic primary voters, especially affluent ones, have grown more ideological and more radical.
“My concern is that high-propensity Democratic Party primary voters, who tend to be the most engaged and the most ideological, have become radicalized, particularly the affluent ones. I’m troubled because there’s an underbelly to this movement.”
“My view is we cannot let these extremists get power because they really are dangerous,” Altman said. “Even the ones who have good intentions will do things that will have profound consequences for ordinary Americans.”
He also said that among some hardcore activists, “there is a thrill to violence.” That claim sits with his broader charge that the movement’s incentives reward extremes over governing for working people.
Altman now lives in Michigan and says he is backing Republican Mike Rogers in the state’s Senate contest over Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. The choice marks a full break from the party lane the DSA set out to capture.
Party veterans have spent years drawing the same line Altman is now drawing from the outside. One recent flashpoint came when Gottheimer said Democratic Socialists are not Democrats and should not be treated as welcome partners.
Altman wants power pushed back down. “We need a renaissance of democracy where locals begin to take control back from national organizations that have become very extreme,” he said. “We all have a responsibility to try to stop this but I don’t think there are enough people resisting.”
That resistance gap is the core of his midterms warning. Engaged primary electorates can elevate candidates who run on abolishing core institutions and gutting enforcement long before general-election voters get a say.
Other Democrats have urged a cleaner separation rather than another cycle of denial, including moments when James Carville told Democratic Socialists to drop the party’s name and build under their own banner.
Leadership signals inside the DSA have reinforced why defectors talk this way. Public controversy has followed when a DSA co-chair called the Oct. 7 Hamas attack inevitable and blamed Israeli policies, the kind of framing that lands far from mainstream voters.
Establishment voices have framed the stakes in survival terms, not branding terms. A Clinton-era official warned Democratic Socialists will destroy the party unless leaders finally draw a hard boundary.
Altman’s account is simpler. He watched the median member get younger, watched foreign-policy maximalism take hold, watched platform planks aim at the Senate, the courts, the Pentagon, police budgets, and ICE, and watched primary machinery reward the shift. He left. He is telling anyone still inside the big tent that the same pattern is moving through their primaries next.
Primary voters who reward the loudest radicals still stick taxpayers and lawful communities with the wreckage.
