Florida primary fight marks DSA's last stand

A guy named Oliver Larkin trying to knock off Jared Moskowitz in South Florida is not exactly the kind of thing that usually gets national attention, but here we are, watching it as some kind of referendum on whether the Democratic Socialists of America still have a pulse. After Wisconsin went badly for them last week, Florida is being treated as the last exit ramp before DSA has to admit its 2024-2025 strategy of primarying sitting Democrats has mostly flopped.

There's something almost quaint about it. A few years ago DSA candidates were being talked about like the future of the party, the energy that was going to drag Democrats leftward whether the establishment liked it or not. Now they're reduced to hoping a Miami-area congressional seat saves the whole project from irrelevance. Moskowitz isn't even a moderate boogeyman in the traditional sense; he's just a guy who does retail politics and doesn't run around talking about seizing the means of production, and apparently that's enough to survive.

We'd enjoy this more if it weren't a symptom of something bigger happening across the aisle. Democrats spent years pretending the socialist wing was a fringe curiosity while quietly needing its volunteers and small-dollar donors. Now that the fringe is losing primaries, the party gets to act like it was never that invested in the first place. Convenient.

Still, don't mistake a bad primary season for the movement dying. Ideas like this don't disappear when they lose elections, they just wait for the next recession or the next charismatic candidate. Florida might be DSA's last stand this cycle, but it won't be their last stand period.