New York City's socialist faction just captured three congressional nominations and five state legislature seats in a single primary night, and the people who won them have a paper trail of praising Lenin, Stalin, and the abolition of borders, police, and prisons. That's not a fringe observation — it's what the candidates themselves wrote, before they deleted it.

The stakes are plain: a major American city's Democratic apparatus is now dominated by politicians who talk about affordability but mobilize around anti-Israel sentiment, and who have expressed more sympathy for Soviet revolutionaries than for the country they want to govern. Fifteen House Democrats felt compelled to sign a public letter insisting, "We are capitalist, not socialist" — a sign of how far the party's center has already collapsed.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared Sunday that he and his allies are carrying a "national message" to Americans struggling to make ends meet. "We don't have to nationalize that message," Mamdani said, according to The Guardian. "That is a national message — it's a national crisis." He called it a "New Deal understanding" of Democratic politics.

But the state Democratic Party chairman, Jay Jacobs, told a different story about what actually powered the wins. "Yes. I do think the Israel-Palestinian issue had an impact in the election," Jacobs admitted to the New York Post. "It hurt establishment Democrats." Jacobs said the issue was decisive for the activists who showed up in a primary where only about 17% of citywide Democratic voters participated.

The most revealing case is Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ousted five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the 13th District covering Harlem and Washington Heights. CNN reviewed her archived Twitter account from 2020-2022, which she deleted. The account bio read: "how communist of you." She recommended Marx's Capital as "essential must-read," complained that libraries didn't carry enough Lenin, and retweeted a post lamenting that banned book displays didn't include The Complete Works of J.V. Stalin. She retweeted Assata Shakur — convicted in the murder of a New Jersey state trooper before fleeing to Cuba — quoting her preference for Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro. One retweeted post mocked the idea that communism's lack of soup varieties was a dealbreaker. Another post described wiping her dirty hands on the American flag.

Chevalier also attended an October 8, 2023 pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square — one day after Hamas slaughtered Israelis — where demonstrators torched the Israeli flag and flashed swastikas, the New York Post reported. She organized with Students for Justice in Palestine at Columbia University and centered her congressional platform on halting U.S. military aid to Israel and pushing full divestment from the Jewish state.

When President Trump called her a communist, Chevalier declined to engage, saying on MSNOW: "I won't be reactive." She previously told CNN she had "grown considerably" since the tweets.

The Anti-Defamation League didn't buy it. "On Tuesday night in New York City, a movement built on antisemitic rhetoric won three congressional primaries," the ADL said in a statement, noting that attendees at the DSA victory party chanted "From the river to the sea" — a phrase calling for Israel's elimination. "We're witnessing candidates succeed not in spite of their demonizing rhetoric against the Jewish community and the Jewish state, but because of it."

The Guardian framed the socialist wins as a populist economic message going national. The Post framed them as an anti-Israel insurgency riding low turnout. CNN documented the Marxist paper trail but let Chevalier's "I've grown" statement stand without challenge. What none of them grappled with directly: a faction that celebrates Stalin and wipes its hands on the flag just captured the Democratic ballot line in three congressional districts in America's largest city, and the party's institutional wing could only muster a letter insisting they still like capitalism.

The open question isn't whether the Democratic Party has a socialist problem. It's whether the 15 House Democrats who signed that letter have any plan to do something about it — or whether the letter itself was the whole plan.