Rep. Nicole Malliotakis is sounding the alarm that Democratic Socialists of America-aligned candidates are poised to flood Congress if Democrats flip the House in November, and she says Republicans are the only firewall standing in their way.
The New York Republican went on Fox News Sunday and laid out a blunt case: a wave of DSA-backed candidates is heading toward Washington, and a Democratic majority would hand them real power. She pointed to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who has imposed a new tax on second homes valued above $5 million, as a preview of what voters can expect if the left takes control of the legislative agenda.
Malliotakis did not hold back about the candidates she sees lining up for November. As she told Fox News:
"These are the candidates that will be coming to Congress as part of the commie caucus next year, and that is why we must have our Republican majority. Because if we don't keep this Republican majority, they will be running the show."
That phrase, "running the show", captures the stakes as Malliotakis sees them. Not a handful of backbench socialists making noise on social media, but a bloc large enough to steer committee assignments, floor votes, and spending priorities.
Mamdani, who won City Hall as a DSA-aligned candidate, has become a frequent target for Republicans trying to illustrate what socialist governance looks like in practice. Malliotakis cited his second-home tax and his past positions on policing as evidence that the ideology produces real policy consequences, not just slogans.
She also took aim at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who last week defended democratic socialist candidate Francesca Hong during an ABC News interview. Ocasio-Cortez reportedly referred to Hong as "Woke 1", a label Malliotakis seized on. Hong has drawn scrutiny over controversial past positions, including comments about celebrating Thanksgiving.
Malliotakis's response was direct: "She's trying to laugh off 'Woke 1.'"
The broader argument is that Democratic leadership has stopped treating DSA-aligned members as fringe figures and started treating them as the party's future. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has sidestepped questions about whether democratic socialists belong in his party at all, a dodge that Republicans like Malliotakis read as tacit acceptance.
Beyond Mamdani and Hong, Malliotakis painted DSA-aligned candidates with a broad brush, characterizing their policy ambitions as hostile to core American institutions.
"They want to defund our military, they wipe their hands on the American flag. I mean, give me a break."
She framed the November midterms not as a standard partisan contest but as a referendum on whether socialist ideology gets a permanent foothold in Congress. "There's only so much Americans can take," she said.
That framing has company. Malliotakis and Rep. Claudia Tenney recently warned that socialist and communist ideas are gaining dangerous traction among young Americans. Both lawmakers bring personal weight to the argument: Malliotakis's mother fled Communist Cuba in 1959, and Tenney lived and studied in Communist Yugoslavia, where she witnessed bread lines and empty shelves firsthand. Malliotakis put it plainly: "Socialism is Communism-Lite and we will fight and defeat it."
Tenney and Malliotakis have described their caucus as "a thin red line standing between this radical group of people and being the ones who are the lawmakers." They blame the education system for normalizing collectivist ideology and warn that the appeal of "free stuff" is pulling younger voters toward candidates who would have been unelectable a generation ago.
Republicans are not the only ones raising concerns about the DSA's direction. Just The News reported that a coordinated GOP campaign, led by President Trump, House Speaker Johnson, and other allies, has targeted what they describe as communist infiltration of the Democratic Party. But some of the most damaging testimony comes from inside the DSA itself.
Former DSA member Jake Altman told Just The News that the organization has been "captured" by communists pushing the Democratic Party further left. "One of my real concerns is that we see a lot of resistance to anti-communism within the DSA, even from the moderate wing of the DSA, and I think this is very, very dangerous," Altman said.
City Journal has reported that a coalition of communist caucuses took control of the DSA's governing body, the National Political Committee, by 2023. The DSA has since secured electoral wins across Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Los Angeles, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., a geographic spread that undercuts any argument that the movement is confined to deep-blue coastal enclaves.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has been equally direct, saying: "These are communists. The president is trying to call them that. They want to abolish private prisons, they want to abolish the police, they want to abolish private property."
That language goes further than Malliotakis's "commie caucus" shorthand, but the underlying argument is the same: the candidates running under the DSA banner are not New Deal liberals or even conventional progressives. They represent an ideological tradition that has failed everywhere it has been tried.
The practical question is whether DSA-aligned candidates can win enough seats to form a real power bloc, or whether they remain a vocal but marginal faction. Analysts have projected that the far-left "Squad" could double to as many as fourteen members after November's midterms, a number large enough to extract concessions from Democratic leadership on committee seats, floor amendments, and spending bills.
Malliotakis and her allies are betting that voters, especially older and working-class Americans who remember the Cold War or who have watched socialist experiments collapse abroad, will reject that trajectory if Republicans make the case clearly enough.
The DSA's own track record gives them material to work with. Mamdani's New York City offers a live case study: a mayor who ran on democratic socialist principles and has already moved to impose new taxes and revisit policing policy. Democratic Socialists have rallied behind Ocasio-Cortez for a potential 2028 presidential bid in the wake of Mamdani's victory, a sign that the movement sees City Hall not as the ceiling but as the launchpad.
For Republicans, the midterm pitch writes itself: every DSA-aligned candidate who wins a House seat moves the Democratic caucus further from the center and closer to an ideology that Americans have spent decades rejecting. Malliotakis is making that case now, months before voters head to the polls, because she believes the window to define these candidates is narrow.
Even some Democrats have warned that the socialist wing will destroy their party unless leaders act. So far, those leaders have not acted. Republicans like Malliotakis are counting on voters to do it for them.
When the other side's own members say the organization has been "captured" by communists, you do not need a history book to know where this leads. You need a ballot.