The Democratic Socialists of America just unseated establishment Democrats in primary elections in both New York City and Denver. Two major cities. Two incumbent Democrats. Two DSA replacements. And the Democratic National Committee's official response was to distribute messaging guidance telling party leaders to describe the situation as a "big tent party."
California Governor Gavin Newsom got the memo.
Asked directly about the split between establishment Democrats and the DSA insurgency tearing through their primaries, Newsom didn't push back. He didn't distance himself. He didn't even attempt the standard "we're a diverse coalition" non-answer that most party leaders default to. Instead, as Twitchy reported, Newsom floundered through what can only be described as a verbal car accident, eventually landing on the idea that Democrats need to "be in the addition business."
Addition. As in, adding the people who want to abolish capitalism, nationalize industries, and dismantle the economic system that built California's tax base — the same tax base that funds Newsom's hair product budget.
The DNC's coordinated language is the real story here. This wasn't one governor going rogue on a Sunday show. The national party apparatus pre-loaded talking points for exactly this question, which means they knew it was coming. They saw DSA candidates knocking off their own incumbents in NYC and Denver, and instead of drawing a line, they drafted a press strategy to make it sound like a feature rather than a hostile takeover.
That distinction matters. When a party loses primaries to candidates running on democratic socialism and the official response is "welcome to the tent," that's not coalition management. That's capitulation with better branding.
The online reaction told the story Newsom's words couldn't. "WTF did he just say???" one commenter wrote. "Do all politicians from California have such a difficult time stringing a few words together?" asked another. The most cutting observation came from a user who noted simply that "the DSA is eating the DNC alive."
He's not wrong. The DSA isn't asking for a seat at the table. They're replacing the people sitting there. And the party leadership's answer is to act like that was the plan all along.
Now, to be fair, the "big tent" argument has a long history in American politics. Republicans used it for decades to hold together libertarians, social conservatives, and defense hawks. The difference is that none of those factions were running on abolishing the free market. You can stretch a tent pretty wide before it collapses, but there's a structural limit when one group inside it wants to dismantle the poles holding the whole thing up.
One commenter put it cleanly: "It's only a big tent if the people under it aren't trying to kick each other out."
The DNC clearly decided that fighting the DSA in primaries was a losing proposition, so they skipped straight to absorption. Newsom is just the first governor willing to say it on camera — badly, incoherently, but unmistakably.
The party that spent four years calling Republicans "extremists" just welcomed actual socialists and called it addition.
