Rep. Josh Gottheimer is telling his own party that the Democratic Socialists of America are trying to hijack the Democratic brand, and he wants them shown the door.
The New Jersey Democrat, a leader of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, went on Fox News Sunday to deliver a blunt message: DSA members are not Democrats, their values clash with the party's, and they should start their own organization instead of borrowing the Democratic label to push what he called a communist, anti-American, open-borders agenda.
His remarks landed the same weekend the DSA held its Socialists Summit in Chicago, where convention footage captured members voicing support for the Communist Manifesto, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, and campus organizing aimed at driving Immigration and Customs Enforcement off university grounds. Newsmax reported on Gottheimer's interview and the DSA summit activity that prompted it.
Gottheimer did not hold back about the gap between his party and the DSA faction trying to operate inside it:
"Their values, their ideas are certainly not in line with ours, and they don't support our leadership. They're trying to use the Democratic Party as a vessel for their ideas. And as you heard in some of these conventions, literally, they're supporting 'The Communist Manifesto' and [Russian revolutionary Leon] Trotsky, they're anti-American, they are anti-cop, they don't believe in borders."
That is not a Republican talking. It is a sitting Democratic congressman describing members of an organization that routinely backs Democratic candidates in primaries and general elections, and whose endorsed officeholders caucus with Democrats in Congress.
Gottheimer framed the DSA's influence as outsized relative to its actual size. He put DSA membership at roughly 150,000, against approximately 45 million registered Democrats nationwide. Fox News noted the same numerical disparity in its coverage of the interview.
The congressman argued that the math should make the solution straightforward.
"We have to make clear that's not who we are. The good news is there is only about 150,000 of them registered and there are 45 million Democrats. We should make it very clear that they're not Democrats and they're not welcome in the Democratic Party."
But if the solution is straightforward, the party's leadership has been slow to implement it. The DCCC chair recently declined to repudiate the Democratic Socialists, pivoting instead to affordability talking points when pressed on the question.
Gottheimer addressed that gap directly by invoking House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. He said Jeffries would not allow progressive social media personality Hasan Piker to become a party leader, and he went further in dismissing Piker himself:
"Well, [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries won't, and let me be very clear that Hasan Piker is not a Democrat, the guy is the ultimate grifter, right? He's the guy who said that 9/11 is America's fault. He's just an online personality. We've got to make it clear he's not welcome here in the Democratic Party."
Jeffries has not made an independent public statement on the matter. Gottheimer was speaking for him, or, perhaps, putting words in his mouth to force a response.
Gottheimer's broadside did not arrive in a vacuum. Longtime political strategist James Carville had already said he would disown the Democratic Party if Piker were permitted to become one of its leaders. Carville's comments, reported days earlier, set the stage for Gottheimer to carry the argument from cable-news commentary into elected-official territory.
The pattern is becoming hard to ignore. A Clinton-era official recently warned that Democratic Socialists will "destroy" the party unless its leaders draw a clear ideological line.
And the warnings are not limited to party insiders. Commentator Bill Maher has said Democrats are being "colonized" by socialists, going so far as to declare his own vote up for grabs over the issue.
Each of these voices, Carville, Maher, now Gottheimer, is saying the same thing from a slightly different perch: the Democratic Party has a faction problem it refuses to confront head-on, and the longer leadership waits, the more the socialist brand bleeds into the mainstream Democratic one.
The DSA is not backing down. At the Chicago summit, members of the DSA's National Political Committee responded to critics like Gottheimer by insisting their platform represents authentic American values. One committee member said that people who call them anti-American fail to understand that their agenda is the "most American thing you can do." A second member compared democratic socialism to Christian charity, saying it is the "same kind of stuff that I am used to [in] growing up in the Christian Church. It's a lot of the same sort of helping out your neighbors and that's the ethos of democratic socialism."
Those are warm sentiments. They also sit uneasily alongside the summit footage that the New York Post documented: members endorsing Trotsky, rallying around the Communist Manifesto, and organizing to obstruct federal immigration enforcement on college campuses. Helping your neighbors is one thing. Organizing a front to get ICE "off our campuses" is something else entirely.
That tension, between the DSA's self-image as a neighborly civic movement and its actual platform of communist theory, open borders, and anti-law-enforcement activism, is precisely the contradiction Gottheimer is trying to force into the open.
Gottheimer described himself as "a very proud, common-sense Democrat." He said he was fine with the DSA having its own party. His objection was specific: the DSA is not building its own brand. It is borrowing the Democratic one, running candidates in Democratic primaries, and pulling the party's public image toward positions most voters reject, abolishing immigration enforcement, embracing communist theory, and opposing law enforcement.
The DSA's ambitions extend beyond local races. The organization has rallied behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a potential 2028 presidential bid, a sign that the faction sees itself not as a fringe movement but as the party's future.
For Gottheimer and the Blue Dog wing, that is the core problem. A group of 150,000 members is leveraging the infrastructure of a 45-million-member party to mainstream positions that most of those 45 million never signed up for. And the party's top leaders, Jeffries included, based on what is publicly known, have not drawn the line Gottheimer is demanding.
Gottheimer is not the first moderate Democrat to say this out loud. He may not be the last. But until Jeffries or someone with comparable authority actually enforces the boundary, bars DSA-endorsed candidates from party resources, refuses to seat them in leadership, or simply says in public what Gottheimer said on Fox News, the words remain an alarm that leadership keeps choosing not to answer.
When 150,000 people can steer a party of 45 million, the problem is not the 150,000. It is the leadership that will not say no.
