Speaker Mike Johnson used a Virginia campaign stop to cast House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries as powerless to stop a socialist insurgency inside his own party, a line of attack Republicans plan to carry into November.
Johnson, campaigning Monday in Virginia Beach for Rep. Jen Kiggans, zeroed in on a string of recent New York primary results that saw DSA-endorsed challengers defeat Jeffries-backed incumbents. The Speaker called the Democratic Party a "rudderless ship" and said its internal fractures amount to "an open civil war" that Jeffries cannot control, Fox News Digital reported.
The results Johnson pointed to are real, and they carry weight. Several weeks ago, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a self-described socialist running with DSA backing and an endorsement from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in the 13th Congressional District primary covering parts of the Bronx and Upper Manhattan. Jeffries had endorsed Espaillat.
In the 10th Congressional District, which spans western Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, Brad Lander, a former DSA member also backed by Mamdani, ousted Rep. Dan Goldman. Jeffries endorsed Goldman, too.
And in a Brooklyn- and Queens-area seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velázquez, Claire Valdez, another Mamdani-backed socialist, beat Velázquez's chosen successor. Jeffries did not endorse in that race at all. Three contests. Three losses for the Democratic establishment. Two of them direct repudiations of Jeffries' own endorsements.
Johnson did not treat the results as a local New York story. He framed them as a national liability for every Democrat on the ballot in 2026, and he did so from the district of a Republican incumbent whom Democrats need to flip if they hope to retake the House.
Johnson told the Virginia Beach crowd that Jeffries "lost his slate of candidates in his own backyard," then laid out what he described as the DSA's long-term strategy:
"The challenge is coming from people who, you know, they put their platform out, they published it. They want to abolish the border. They want to abolish all prisons in America. They want to abolish the U.S. Senate. They want to remove the president. They want to expand the House and make it a unicameral governing body over the country. Why? Because they believe that over two or three cycles, they'll be able to bring a wave of Marxists, communists into the Congress and take it over."
Johnson's characterization of the DSA platform is his own; Fox News Digital did not independently verify whether the organization's published platform contains each of those specific planks. But the Speaker's broader point, that the Democratic Party's left flank is growing bolder, and that its establishment leadership failed to stop it, rests on the primary results themselves.
That argument is one Jeffries has faced from inside his own caucus as well, not just from Republicans looking for a campaign talking point.
When Fox News Digital reached out to Jeffries' office for comment on Johnson's remarks, a spokesperson did not provide a direct statement. Instead, the spokesperson referred the outlet to an interview Jeffries gave Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" with host Kristin Welker.
In that interview, Welker pressed Jeffries on the left-wing challengers who had toppled his endorsed incumbents. Jeffries responded by pivoting to the broader midterm picture:
"I expect that there will be at least 220 members of the House Democratic Caucus when we take back the majority, if not a number much greater than that. We as House Democrats are committed to fighting for an affordable America every day, every week, every month until we solve this crisis."
The answer avoided the substance of the question. Jeffries did not address why his endorsed candidates lost, did not comment on the DSA-backed winners by name, and did not say whether he views the primary outcomes as a threat to his leadership. Neither Chevalier nor Valdez has publicly backed Jeffries to remain the House Democrats' leader.
That silence is notable. Senior Democrats like Sen. Chuck Schumer and Jeffries himself have brushed off the socialist primary results even as moderate Democrats have raised alarms about what the trend means for the party's general-election viability.
Johnson's decision to make the case from Virginia Beach was deliberate. Kiggans holds a competitive seat, and Democrats have targeted her district as part of their path back to the majority. By tying every Democratic candidate to the DSA's primary winners, Johnson is betting that suburban and swing-district voters will recoil from the party's leftward shift, even in races far from New York City.
Republicans currently hold 219 House seats, a margin so thin that just two defections on any party-line vote can sink legislation. Johnson has navigated that math under pressure before. During the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, he summoned the House back into session on just 36 hours' notice to pass a stopgap funding bill, moving forward even after Jeffries declared "strong" Democratic opposition, as the New York Post reported.
That episode underscored both the fragility of the Republican majority and the limits of Jeffries' ability to leverage Democratic unity against it. Johnson's Virginia Beach remarks suggest he sees the New York primaries as an opportunity to make those limits a permanent feature of the midterm debate.
Johnson has been barnstorming Virginia with a message that Republicans will expand their majority in November, and the Democratic primary results hand him a concrete exhibit to wave at voters who might otherwise be tempted to give Democrats another look.
Johnson was blunt about what he thinks the primary results say about Jeffries' standing. "They don't have a leader," the Speaker told the crowd, before adding that Jeffries' endorsed candidates lost "in his own backyard."
Johnson referred to the Bronx as Jeffries' backyard. Jeffries' own congressional district sits entirely in Brooklyn, a geographic distinction that matters on a map but underscores the political point rather than undermining it. The losses happened in New York City, in districts adjacent to Jeffries' home turf, in races where his endorsement was supposed to carry weight. It did not.
Whether Jeffries faces a formal leadership challenge remains an open question. No such challenge has been reported. But the dynamic around who leads the House Democratic caucus is shifting, and the incoming class of DSA-aligned members has given no indication it intends to fall in line behind him.
Johnson summed up his read of the situation in plain terms:
"It's a fascinating thing to see the Democrat Party, they're in the midst of, now, an open civil war. Truly, they don't know who they stand, what they stand for, or who stands with them. They don't have a leader."
Jeffries' response, routed through a spokesperson and delivered via a pre-recorded television clip, did not rebut that characterization. It changed the subject.
When a party leader's own endorsed candidates lose in his own city, and his answer is to talk about how many seats he expects to win nationally, the gap between the talking point and the scoreboard speaks for itself.