Rep. Josh Gottheimer, one of the Democratic Party's most prominent moderates, went on Fox News and declared that Democratic Socialists of America members "are not Democrats", and told them to get out.
The New Jersey congressman and House Intelligence Committee member used his Sunday appearance on "The Big Weekend Show" to draw a line that few in his party have been willing to draw publicly. Gottheimer, who leads the centrist Blue Dog Coalition, accused the DSA of trying to commandeer the Democratic Party "as a vessel" for ideas he called anti-American, anti-police, and hostile to border security. He said the group's roughly 150,000 members have no business claiming a home inside a party of 45 million registered voters.
The broadside landed at a moment when the Democratic Party's internal fault lines are widening. Gottheimer is not the first Democrat to publicly clash with the socialist wing, Sen. John Fetterman has openly mocked DSA members on more than one occasion, but few sitting House members have gone this far, this bluntly, on national television.
Gottheimer did not settle for vague complaints about the party's left flank. He pointed to footage from a DSA convention in Chicago, where members were recorded on camera making statements about organizing to remove ICE from college campuses. One unidentified socialist at the convention said the group was building a front to get "ICE off our campuses." Gottheimer folded those clips into a broader indictment.
Fox News Digital reported Gottheimer's full remarks on the program:
"Their values, their ideas are certainly not in line with ours, and they don't support our leadership. They're trying to use the Democratic Party as a vessel for their ideas. And as you heard in some of these conventions, literally, they're supporting the Communist Manifesto and [Leon] Trotsky, they're anti-American, they are anti-cop, they don't believe in borders."
He followed that with a flat declaration: "They're not welcome in the Democratic Party."
The congressman also singled out left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, calling him "the ultimate grifter" and claiming Piker once said "9/11 is America's fault." Gottheimer insisted Piker is not a Democrat and said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries would not embrace him. Fox News Digital reached out to both Piker and the DSA for comment; neither response was reported.
Longtime Clinton confidant James Carville has struck a similar note. Fox News reported that Carville told the network he would disown the Democratic Party altogether if Piker were permitted to become one of its leaders.
Not everyone at the Chicago convention accepted Gottheimer's framing. A member of the DSA's National Political Committee, unnamed in the Fox News report, said people who call the organization anti-American "do not understand that their platform is the most American thing you can do." A second NPC member compared socialism to values from the Christian church, saying it was the "same kind of stuff that I am used to growing up in the Christian Church."
Those responses did not address Gottheimer's specific charges about the Communist Manifesto, Trotsky, or open borders. They offered a general defense of the DSA's identity without engaging the congressman's claim that the group's goals are incompatible with the party's mainstream platform.
The broader internal struggle is not limited to rhetoric. Socialist-aligned challengers have already unseated longtime Democratic incumbents in primaries, and some party members have signaled openness to DSA-backed candidates like Maine oysterman Graham Platner and Harlem-based socialist Darializa Chevalier. Gottheimer's appearance was, in part, a direct response to that trend.
Former Marine bomb technician Johnny Joey Jones, who was hosting the segment, saw an opening. He reminded Gottheimer that another New Jersey Democrat, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, had already walked away from the party during President Donald Trump's first term.
Jones told Gottheimer:
"You wouldn't be the first New Jersey congressman to find a better party. I'm just saying leave the door open if you want to."
Van Drew, a longtime lawmaker whose district includes Cape May, had angered South Jersey Democratic committees when he switched to the Republican Party and embraced Trump's platform. The precedent was obvious, and Jones was not subtle about dangling it.
Gottheimer did not take the bait. He made clear he intends to stay and fight for his version of the party, the version he says represents common-sense, mainstream Democratic voters, not the 150,000 DSA members he wants shown the door.
That position puts him in an increasingly visible minority. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has dodged direct questions about whether Democratic Socialists belong in the party, and leadership broadly has avoided the kind of confrontation Gottheimer chose on Sunday.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who represents Silicon Valley, offered a different diagnosis of the party's troubles. Khanna said Democrats should not have "watched wealth pile up on Wall Street and Silicon Valley" at the expense of working-class Americans. He added that "the Democratic Party needs reform."
Khanna's critique did not directly echo Gottheimer's, he focused on economic populism rather than the socialist label, but both men acknowledged that the party's direction is a live and unresolved question. The difference is that Gottheimer named specific enemies within the coalition. Khanna pointed to systemic failures without drawing the same bright line.
The split is not academic. Senior Democratic strategists have warned that the socialist surge inside the party could hand Republicans easy wins in competitive districts. Gottheimer's own seat spans liberal New York City suburbs west of the George Washington Bridge and deep-red, Trump-friendly communities near the Delaware Water Gap, exactly the kind of district where a DSA endorsement could be a liability, not an asset.
And the fractures extend beyond ideology into identity. A Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice recently quit the Democratic Party over what he described as rising antisemitism, a departure that underscored how many different fault lines are running through the coalition at once.
Just the News noted that Gottheimer's status as Blue Dog Coalition leader gives his remarks added weight, he is not a backbencher freelancing on cable news but a figure who speaks for the party's centrist infrastructure.
Gottheimer framed the choice starkly. Socialists can "scream and yell and try to hijack" the party, he said, but "we have to make clear that's not who we are." He drew a numerical contrast: 45 million registered Democrats against 150,000 DSA members. The math, in his telling, should settle the argument.
But math does not settle arguments inside political parties. Organized minorities with energy, volunteers, and primary voters routinely punch above their registration numbers. Gottheimer knows this, his district's geography forces him to balance two electorates that want different things. His willingness to go on Fox News and call DSA members anti-American, anti-cop socialists who admire Trotsky suggests he has calculated that the bigger risk is silence, not confrontation.
Whether Democratic leadership agrees remains an open question. Jeffries has not publicly echoed Gottheimer's language. Schumer has sidestepped it. And the DSA keeps organizing, keeps running candidates, and keeps treating the Democratic Party as exactly the vessel Gottheimer says it should never become.
When a party cannot say plainly who belongs to it and who does not, the people willing to answer that question loudest tend to win it, and right now, the socialists are louder than the moderates.