Ro Khanna Refuses to Address the Democrats' Antisemitism Problem

Ro Khanna had a chance on that panel to just say the obvious thing. Instead he did the dance. You know the one: change the subject, talk about "nuance," accuse the questioner of bad faith, anything but answer the actual question in front of him. That's not a gotcha. That's a party spokesman who can count votes and knows exactly where his primary electorate has drifted.

Because the poll numbers aren't subtle. A meaningful chunk of Democratic voters are now telling pollsters they want candidates who'd cut off Israel and who describe themselves as socialists, sometimes literally communists. That's not a fringe curiosity anymore, it's a plurality in some of these surveys. Scott Jennings put it bluntly and got mocked for it, but nobody has actually shown his read was wrong. When your base is cheering for the people making common cause with the loudest anti-Israel voices in American politics, "it's complicated" isn't an answer, it's a dodge.

What's telling is who gets asked to answer for this and who doesn't. Khanna is smart, well-spoken, and perfectly capable of saying "no, we shouldn't be flirting with people who traffic in that stuff." He chose not to. That tells you something about where the incentives point inside his own coalition right now.

Democrats used to be the party that would at least perform discomfort with this. Now the discomfort itself seems to be disappearing, replaced by deflection and a shrug. If the leadership won't name the problem when it's put right in front of them on camera, don't expect the base to police itself either.