That Socialist Takeover Republicans Keep Warning You About? They’re Bankrolling It.

Republicans are spending millions to boost socialist candidates while warning voters that socialism is taking over.

Over the past three weeks, leading conservative voices in both elected office and the media have been sounding the alarm over a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. And not just a takeover, but a dangerous communist threat to democracy as we know it and the baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie-filled American way of life.

A search of cable news transcripts over the past three weeks turns up nearly 6,500 mentions of the words socialist and socialism on Fox News. CNN voices said the same terms roughly 1,300 times, and MS NOW about 800. Given the rising DSA influence in the Democratic Party, there’s no question it’s a relevant political story, but is it 6,500 mentions in three weeks big? Endangered democracy is in the eye of the beholder.

There’s a problem with the alarm, however: socialism is no longer the third rail it was even a decade ago, when Bernie Sanders’ rise to national prominence brought similar warnings. Recent elections show candidates connected with DSA and promoting an affordability agenda doing surprisingly well, no longer relegated to the single-digit fringes they long occupied, and polling confirms the shift. NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani survived a full communist-apocalypse treatment. Abdul El-Sayed won a Senate primary in Michigan despite intraparty establishment opposition. The scare tactic plainly isn’t ending careers the way it used to.

There’s an even bigger issue with the anti-socialist fearmongering coming from the right. While Republicans warn about socialist candidates taking over and conservative media dusts off the hammer-and-sickle graphics, Republican-connected PACs are spending real money helping left-wing candidates win Democratic primaries.

(Record scratch)

You read that right. In the hyper-twisted and grossly overfunded world of political campaigns, socialist candidates are getting significant campaign dollars from the very people warning that they’re dangerous. I’m not one to speak about evidence of end-stage capitalism, but if I were? It would go here.

Republican PACs funding the campaigns of candidates they gravely warn against is as big a what-the-fuck moment as you can find in American politics. It also serves as a pure expression of too much money in politics, or the tail wagging the dog, or whatever tortured metaphor you want to toss in here. Simply put, it’s nuts.

What might be more nuts? It’s a perfectly rational approach, and not a new one. You want to win a general election, so you help nominate the opponent you think will be easiest to beat. In this case, socialists. Democrats have played the same game, spending millions in past cycles to boost right-wing extremists of the grossest sort in Republican primaries, so no one here is innocent.

This deeply cynical scheme relies on an assumption that once worked. Calling a candidate “socialist!” in a general election might still send swing voters running, and for decades it did. It legitimately hurt George McGovern in 1972 and taught generations of Democrats to avoid the word at all costs. Just ten years ago, Bernie Sanders spent an inordinate amount of time explaining what democratic socialism wasn’t (Cuba!) before he could explain what it was (Denmark!)

Mayor Mamdani was the OG cover story of this narrative, and he bore the brunt of the attacks for more than a year, complete with tabloid covers, Soviet-style graphics, and a president calling him a communist on a daily basis. He won anyway, and despite the hammer-and-sickle front pages that rang in his mayoralty, eight months into his term, the garbage in all five boroughs still gets picked up. Mamdani seemed to embrace the socialist label in the context of affordability, and it turns out not to have hurt him. And that trend seems to be extending beyond New York City.

A recent CBS poll found 58 percent of Democrats view socialism positively while capitalism sits under 50% with the same group. Republicans see those numbers as proof that the Democratic Party has lost its mind, and they and their conservative outlets make that case to their own voters all day (see 6,500 mentions on Fox News over the past three weeks). The challenge of this scare tactic is that it isn’t designed to persuade Democrats; It’s meant to move independents in a general election.

When a network warns of “socialist” or “socialism” on an average of three hundred times a day for three straight weeks, the scare tactics cease to work as an effective stigma campaign and start to look like a marketing campaign. A viewer whose rent or gas bill eats half their paycheck? Fox News warning about which candidates the wealthy and powerful most want to stop only works if the viewer trusts the wealthy and powerful. That used to work, but the polling suggests that’s changed.

The Republican PAC money’s fear-mongering candidate funding also proves a point socialists have been making all along. They’ve long warned that the super rich are spending whatever it takes to decide which candidates voters get to choose from. You can argue with that, but it gets much harder when Republican donors are pumping millions through PACs with names like Progressive Champions to pick the winners of Democratic primaries. It feels like the richest are putting their thumbs on the scales to cheat the system, and yes, Democratic PACs have done the same in helping extremist GOP nominees win their primaries. But in this instance, it supports socialists blasting dirty money for fixing the results of a game before it’s even played.

Here’s the thing: the bet may still very well pay off in November. The country has never elected a socialist president, and that label continues to move plenty of voters over 50 who grew up with a Cold War.

But it's fascinating to see where Republicans have landed on socialism. Their PACs are paying to promote the very movement they claim will destroy the country. Nonstop press coverage has helped make socialist candidates more well-known, and amplifying their affordability agenda might have actually helped them. The massive amount of PAC money proves these candidates’ arguments about who really runs American politics. The entire bet rests on a playbook that last worked when Nixon was president.

Socialist candidates aren’t waiting to find out if it still works; they’re too busy cashing checks from Republican PACS..