The socialism smear, not Piker, is the story Marcus wants you to follow. David Marcus, in Why it’s too late for Dems to ditch Piker and his America-hating socialism (Fox News Opinion, August 13, 2026), argues the Democratic Party has been captured by a Twitch streamer named Hasan Piker and a left-wing group called the DSA. He says this capture — not housing, not prices, not the cost of being alive — is the story of the 2026 midterms. His evidence: a Democratic primary candidate named Francesca Hong lost in Wisconsin after polls had her up about fifteen points and prediction markets at 96% the morning of the primary, and another named Abdul El-Sayed barely won in Michigan two weeks earlier, also after polls had him up double digits. The polling misses prove, he says, that voters secretly prefer moderate Democrats but are getting steamrolled by the socialist left. The Republican message is now obvious: tie every Democrat to Piker, and watch the seats fall.
It’s a tidy story. It’s the story Republicans want told, not the one the evidence supports.
Start with the polling. Yes, Hong lost. Yes, El-Sayed squeaked through. Yes, the polls had both up double digits, and they underperformed. That’s a real polling failure. A polling failure is a polling failure. It can mean late-deciding voters, a turnout differential, or a weak ground game — and the most common explanation in low-engagement primaries, well-documented and unglamorous, is that pollsters ask likely voters, and “likely voter” screens in primaries are notoriously bad at predicting who actually shows up. Marcus treats the miss as proof of a hidden conservative majority in the Democratic coalition that just got bypassed. That is one possible reading. It is not the only one, and he offers no evidence for it. He just declares it. The next Democratic primary that overperforms for the moderate, he’ll have the same column ready. Either direction, the column writes itself.
Now the “socialism” word. Hong didn’t run on abolishing ICE. She didn’t run on abolishing the police. Marcus names those as her positions to make her sound like a cartoon. She ran for governor of Wisconsin. The polling miss in Wisconsin doesn’t tell you whether Wisconsinites reject “socialism.” It tells you whether they preferred one Democratic candidate over another in a primary. Those are different questions. A primary that a moderate Democrat wins decisively says: Democratic primary voters preferred the moderate. It does not say: voters prefer Republicans over DSA-aligned candidates. That question doesn’t get asked in a Democratic primary.
And the “communism” thing. Marcus quotes a Mamdani aide as saying the program involves “impoverishing the White middle class,” then treats that as a description of communism. It is a description of one aide’s unfortunate phrasing. It is not the Comintern. Mamdani is a democratic socialist and New York City’s mayor. He is not Stalin. Calling him Stalin isn’t an argument; it’s a refusal to make one.
The column’s list of horrors — abolishing the police, abolishing ICE, abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Supreme Court, “seizing private property” — none of those specific planks were on Hong’s actual platform, on El-Sayed’s actual platform, or on Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral platform. They are scare props the column hangs the word on, the way a Halloween mask hangs on a hook. The actual contested ground in those races was Israel, electric utility reform, and which unions the state party would credential. That isn’t the gulag. That is an intra-Democratic coalition fight wearing a costume.
And Marcus’s piece leans on Piker as the Democratic Party’s policy director. Piker is a Twitch streamer with a large audience and zero elected position. He raised money and stumped for El-Sayed. The party apparatus decided what to put in its platform. Piker is a streamer, not a Democratic committee chair. Treating his audience as the party’s governing coalition is treating the stadium as the legislature.
The word “socialism” is doing almost all the work here, and almost none of it honestly. Strip the word off and look at the specific policies the voters Marcus is talking to actually like. Universal childcare subsidy: polls show broad bipartisan support, including majorities of self-identified Republicans across multiple survey designs. The expanded Child Tax Credit of 2021, the centerpiece of the American Rescue Plan, polled broadly across party lines while it existed. A public option on health insurance: around half of Americans support it when you stop leading with the word “socialism.” Sectoral bargaining rights: popular in surveys that don’t attach the offending word, because people who have ever tried to negotiate alone with a major employer understand the asymmetry. None of those numbers describe a fringe. They describe the actual working lives of ordinary Americans, including the working-class voters the column claims to be defending from the socialist menace.
Concede this much: Piker says things that are genuinely indefensible. Some of his rhetoric is real gift-wrapped footage for the opposition. On that point, Marcus is right. He is wrong about it being the story.
The whole thesis is that Democrats should stop talking about Piker. He quotes Piker, references Piker’s Rolling Stone shoot, references Piker’s Twitch, references Piker’s feud with Senate Democrats. By the time you finish the column, Piker is the entire Democratic Party. That’s not an accident. The Piker frame is doing work that the policy frame cannot do, because the policy frame would require him to defend something.
Here’s the part Marcus doesn’t mention. Every other rich country runs a version of what the same column would call “socialism” if proposed here. Universal healthcare and paid parental leave — that’s Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland. They are capitalist democracies with stronger floors under the market. They are not communist. They are not socialist in the way Marcus means the word. They are simply places that decided, on purpose, to build things we have decided not to. The scam is in the not-building. Calling the alternative “socialism” is what lets us not build it.
Here’s the actual Democratic problem, the one the column won’t name: the cost of being alive in America right now. Childcare runs a family around eighteen thousand dollars a year. Medical bills still bankrupt people. A house that used to be a home is now an asset class traded by people who will never sleep in it. These are not “socialist” problems. They are problems every other rich country has solved with public provision. A child allowance, expanded like the 2021 Child Tax Credit, cut child poverty by 46 percent in a single year, by the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure — the largest one-year reduction in the recorded era. We know this. We did it. We turned the policy on, poverty fell by nearly half; we turned it off, poverty came back. That is a controlled experiment the American government ran on American children. The result was published. If that is the “socialism” Marcus is warning Democrats will lose elections over, he is fighting a war against a piece of paper that polled bipartisan while it existed.
You already live inside the alternative. The credit union in your wallet is a cooperative. The public library is universal provision. Social Security and Medicare are among the most popular programs in the country, and nobody calls them socialist because we built them sixty years ago and we got used to them. Rural electric co-ops serve 42 million Americans. Credit unions have more than 145 million members. The Bank of North Dakota has been state-owned since 1919 and consistently profitable. Alaska’s Permanent Fund just mailed another check, and has for forty years. None of this is theoretical. None of it is socialism. None of it is communism. It is the boring American social-democratic infrastructure that nobody calls by its name because calling it by its name would help the other side win an argument.
The Marcus column isn’t going to convince anyone who wasn’t already convinced. It will convince people who already want to vote Republican to feel better about it, and people who already vote Democratic to feel anxious. Both reactions are the point. The Piker story is a permission structure: it lets Republican-aligned voters skip past the actual question, which is what we owe each other when a child gets sick or a parent gets old or a job disappears. It lets Democratic-aligned voters chase their own tail. Both outcomes serve Marcus’s coalition.
And yes — the GOP will run Piker footage in every battleground ad through November. The party cannot unring that bell by Election Day. The rest is just Marcus’s cowbell. The only durable counter to a piece of attack footage is a working alternative voters can see and use. Social Security and Medicare and the child allowance and the public bank and the rural electric co-op serving forty-two million Americans. Build a thing. A working thing. A thing people can point to. That’s the only move that has ever worked, in every country that has ever won it. The plumbing works. Pick a better word.