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Former White House adviser Steve Bannon said the insurgent left candidates in the Democratic party are “very smart” not to campaign on bucking President Trump.
“They campaign as anti-establishment. Very smartly, if you look at their campaigning, they’re not really even campaigning on Trump,” Bannon said in an interview with Politico published Thursday about the rise in democratic socialist candidates across the nation.
“He gets a mention. But they’re very much like the Tea Party, like old Breitbart. They’re going against the Democratic establishment,” he added.
Bannon complimented their messaging, referring to it as “sophisticated” but noted that it “clearly resonates” with people across the country, and not just in New York.
Some Democratic leaders have asserted that the growing crowd of democratic socialists within the party is limited to the Empire State, where three congressional candidates with ties to democratic socialism won in campaigns last week.
Melat Kiros, another democratic socialist, unseated 15-term incumbent Rep. Dina Degette (D-Colo.) in a Democratic primary on Tuesday.
Bannon said trends are showing the movement is not a fluke and accused Democrats of being “asleep” while Republicans are taking it “extremely seriously.”
“They’re a national power,” Bannon said of democratic socialists.
“They have worked below the surface to perfect a ground game and a canvassing operation. It’s too late for the Democrats to recreate that. I told people in the Republican Party and it was dismissed [as] a flash in the pan, it’s clearly just a New York City thing,” he added.
The former Trump adviser said old politics are out and “radical change” is in.
“You have to be absolutely relentless. People, it’s not about talk anymore, it’s about action. You have to show people very specifically what you’re prepared to do to both stem this threat and to break the oligarchs and the big tech guys and to provide true opportunities…” Bannon said.
“We have a very concentrated part of who controls capital in this country, and 80 percent of the people have no participation in, really, the capitalist system. You must be prepared to make radical changes to our system, and you must be prepared to stand in the breach, and to basically beat these people down, not just at the polls, but by government policy,” he added.
Earlier this month, Bannon warned that Republicans would lose the Senate majority in November and told Politico that democratic socialists could be in “ultimate power” in the next three to five years if nothing stops their advancement.
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