Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.   We’re approaching five months of our on and off war with Iran, but it’s not really quite five months of war. It’s more like forty days of kinetic action, the first forty days, and then the subsequent hundred and ten days are often on negotiations with the Iranian regime, once in a while punctuated with exchanges of missiles and bombs, etc.  So where are we now? What is the strategy of the United States? We’ve been talking about the midterms for seven months, six months, five months, four months, three months, but as we’re looking at August, September, and October, we’re getting down now close to just three months.  So what is the Trump strategy?  What is the Iranian strategy? We know what the Iranian strategy is. The regime cares nothing for its own people, whether that’s the thousand or so collateral deaths through our and our allies’ bombing, and we know that they slaughtered somewhere between 40 and 50,000 of their own, and they don’t care.  As long as they’re corrupt, rich, and in control, that’s all they care about. They have no problem being royals, monarchs, and lording over a nation of rubble.   So what should we do though? They’re trying to wait us out, remember, because they think Trump will—if the price of gas is $4 and the price of oil is $110 and there’s a war going on—the Left will win the midterms.  They’ll take the House, and we’ll have an impeachment circus for the next two years punctuated by lawfare. That’s their strategy. And then you’ll have a Democratic president, they think, soon enough, and it will be Barack Obama, John Kerry, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken all over again. That’s what they hope.  Donald Trump has to have a strategy, so what is it? How’s he going to stop and get out? I think we know he’s now going on a two-week… he just finished two weeks of intensive bombing.   The strategy is to say that I have taken a 50-year investment worth about a half a trillion dollars and essentially destroyed it.  Destroyed it. And I’ve also hit some dual-use targets, and I’m about ready to leave. But I had certain objectives that I want to ensure are met. Number one, they can’t have a nuclear bomb. I can bomb Pickaxe Mountain. I would expect he might do that in the next week and seal it, not necessarily get all the enrichment, but just seal as he did the other nuclear depositories.  He can say I wanted to create turmoil. So when we’re gone and the Iranians start to recoup and they emerge from the rubble, they see what their government’s doing. They see they’re broke, their standard of living is falling, falling, falling, and this theocratic corrupt regime wants to take what little money they have and buy missile launchers and centrifuges and subsidize Arab terrorists, and therefore domestic unrest will continue, if not accelerate.  And that will be a form of containment itself. I also want to ensure if Donald Trump is talking, he would say, I want to ensure that the Strait of Hormuz is open. We have done considerable damage to the coastal offensive capability opposite of the strait of the Iranians, and we have attrited its navy, its drone forces.  So he can probably say, with a skeleton American fleet who is always stationed in or at the Gulf, the strait, I can tell my Gulf allies and the Israelis and my allies in Europe and Asia, you depend on the strait, you can help patrol it, and we will help you too. And it won’t be hard to keep it open.  He can also say, “We are not  lifting the sanctions. No, no, no, no. And we’re not going to stop the bank account freezes. You’re not gonna get any money. We’re not gonna talk to you, is what I’m saying.”  And then he can say as well, “I don’t know what the denominator of missiles is. I know the numerator. We have destroyed thousands. But obviously they had prepared for this and there are launchers here and there.”  But Israel and the Gulf states between them have nine hundred combat aircraft. We probably have five to six hundred in the area. If they begin launching missiles, they can always retaliate, and we can keep the strait open, but we’re not going to be in a war footing and the majority of our forces are going to leave.  And here’s what I think is new. He can declare that there is now a government in exile, an alternate regime. It can be based in the Western countries, or it can have affiliates in places in the Middle East that are sympathetic to it. And we will talk to the government in exile, the alternative government.   Who did this?  Ayatollah Khomeini did. For 13 years, he was in Iraq setting up, with the help of Saddam Hussein, the arch enemy of his own Iran, an alternate theocratic government and inundating Iran with propaganda. And then as it started to work and the revolution started to take off, he went the last four months of the Shah’s regime to France, and he sent thousands of cassettes in, and he was the government in exile.  And people in Europe began talking to him. Michel Foucault and other crazy French intellectuals thought he was wonderful. But the point is, then he flew in and hijacked that revolution and took control.   Why can’t that regime suffer what they created? In other words, take the confiscated money, the hundreds of billions of dollars, and say to the Iranians, “We don’t want to talk to you because you can’t tell the truth.  We don’t recognize you anymore as the official government because you killed forty to fifty thousand of your own people. So whether it’s the Shah or a temporary coalition of dissidents, we’re going to recognize a government in exile, and we’re going to give it sufficient funds so it has media capability.”  It can tour Europe, it can tour Asia, it can seek big power support, and we’re going to probably help arm it and arm the Iranian people. And they will be a government in exile. As far as we’re concerned, there is no government in Iran. We don’t know who’s running it, and we don’t care. We do not want to talk to it.  We are talking to a group of people who represent the people of Iran and who have promised us, as a condition of our support, that they will, if in power, quickly move to a transitional government that ensures elections within a year or two. And it worked for Khomeini, it can work for us. Don’t talk to the Iranians.  Do enough damage so you can go home with the assurance they have not had the ability, they do not have the ability, to create a bomb. And the Strait, with the help of our allies, will remain open, and any tit-for-tat further activity can be managed by the fifteen hundred combat aircraft that is shared by U.S.bases, our Gulf partners, and Israel.   And that should be sufficient force to handle a radically debilitated Iran that has lost a half-century and a half trillion of investment. And the moment it gets one dime, it will not spend it on a restive population. It will spend it on Arab terrorists to arm them and to rebuild, but that will be very difficult, both politically when the people are furious at them and both financially when they have a half a trillion dollars of reconstruction and no income.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

For a while there, Airbnb seemed bent on taking a vacation from its principles. Happily, a federal lawsuit has driven home to the company the importance of honoring its stockholders.The lawsuit has prompted Airbnb to rethink and reverse its actions from a year ago, when the company refused to include two legitimate shareholder resolutions—both filed before the company’s deadline—leaving both off the proxy ballot for Airbnb’s 2025 annual meeting.The two resolutions were each delivered by FedEx and signed for, on separate days, by an Airbnb mailroom employee, six months before the meeting and four months before the ballots were sent out. Company officials, though, shrugged off the omission, suggesting the signatures were forged, presumably by some enterprising delivery person.Curious that the malevolent delivery worker should choose—at random—to compromise only the resolutions filed by The Heritage Foundation (owners of $46,000 worth of Airbnb stock) and the American Conservative Values ETF ($447,000 in Airbnb stock)—especially given that a separate resolution, mailed in by a considerably more left-leaning stockholder, made the proxy ballot without any trouble at all.No one at Airbnb has ever explained this odd double-standard, or why, contacted nearly a month before the shareholder meeting with Heritage and ACVF’s concerns, the company declined to make any effort whatsoever to investigate or address the situation.Nor, until being sued, did anyone at the company show any great concern that improperly excluding shareholder proposals is a violation of both company protocol and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules.Shareholders have a right for compliant proposals to go on the company’s proxy materials—to have their voices heard.The Heritage resolution highlighted Airbnb’s long history of political divestment, calling on the company’s board to issue an annual report to shareholders analyzing the legal and reputational risks of bowing to the “profoundly anti-business activism” represented by the “Boycott, Divestment, & Sanctions” movement.In 2018, for example, under pressure from some of those activists, Airbnb delisted Israeli-owned rental properties in the West Bank. True, the company relisted those properties the following year, but similar pressures continue to be exerted.Meanwhile, ACVF’s resolution called on Airbnb to issue a report on the potential of its terms-of-use policies to undermine fundamental freedoms. Like many digital service providers, Airbnb has embraced a policy of banning people from their services who are “leaders of hate groups” or engage in speech that the company deems “hateful.” Those words paint in broad strokes—and, oddly, it seems only conservatives are suspected of coloring outside the lines.Airbnb drew media attention in recent years for blocking conservative commentators Michelle Malkin and Lauren Southern from reserving properties—and in Southern’s case, extending that ban to include her parents, for no other reason than their relation to their daughter.Airbnb trumpets tolerance and celebrates diversity, but actions speak louder than words. And Airbnb’s actions—blackballing potential customers whose ideas they don’t agree with and excluding shareholder resolutions that could shed light on its politicized business practices—have been deafening.Displaying that kind of contempt for the views of millions of Americans is unjustifiable—and ultimately, bad for business.In response, the firm I work for, Alliance Defending Freedom, joined with attorneys from top legal firm Boyden Gray in filing a federal lawsuit against Airbnb in federal district court. After the court denied in part Airbnb’s motion to dismiss the case—specifically allowing the claim challenging the exclusion of the resolutions to go forward—the company agreed to include the two shareholder proposals from Heritage and ACVF on the agenda for its 2026 annual meeting of stockholders.It shouldn’t take a lawsuit to steer Airbnb’s leadership in this right direction, but both Heritage and ACVF have expressed their hope that this decision brings about lasting and meaningful change for the company, “creating long-term value for investors and focusing on its core business,” in the words of Andy Olivastro, Heritage’s chief advancement officer.In other words, here’s hoping Airbnb will find this new moral high ground a good place to stay. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of Thursday’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Sami Winc: Let’s turn to California, and California seems to be a petri dish of all those ideas that the Democrats have going.  I’ll read a few of the things that are happening this week in California, and you can provide us with commentary.  The first thing that I think is very interesting is that the federal Congress, the House, has passed a bill for the defense budget of $1.15 trillion. In it, Donald Trump has the ability to seize property in California for an oil pipeline. The property they’re looking at is down near Santa Barbara.  Victor Davis Hanson:  I think it’s on federal land.  Sami Winc: Yeah. And if it’s not, they have the right to buy it up, is what the bill says.  Victor Davis Hanson: Well, basically, he’s saying to Californians, and I think I’m correct, that we have the fourth or fifth largest oil and gas reserves of any state: Monterey Shale offshore, the Elk Reserve, Naval Reserve near Bakersfield.  So he said, “You people have the highest gas prices in the nation, and it’s kind of a drag on the rest of the nation because you have the tech sector, and you’re driving everybody out, and you’re losing your competitiveness. Part of the reason is your fuel is so expensive, your gasoline and diesel fuel, and your electricity.  “You’re trying to get rid of nuclear. Your wind and solar don’t work much, and you’re importing a lot of energy from the Middle East that we don’t like. So we would like to go in and take our federal leases and put them up. There’s a lot of oil out there. Get Chevron and Exxon to pump.  “And there are other areas that have rare earth minerals in the desert you’re not fully utilizing.”  That’s what he’s trying to do.  Sami Winc: All right, let’s look at another story.  There’s a homeless group that works at 17 different homeless facilities in San Francisco, and they just recently lost their funding.  They were being funded at about $26,000 per inhabitant they were taking care of, and their facilities were rife with understaffing, sexual abuse, a dead and decaying body in one case, vermin infestation, broken elevators—the perfect example of how the government is not taking good care.  Victor Davis Hanson: So what happens is the government doesn’t want to deal with it, so it just takes these block grants. Then somebody says, “You know what? They’re paying $26,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 per person. So I’ll just create a little nonprofit, and I’ll say that I’m taking care of people on the street. For maybe six weeks I’ll do a good job.  “But then I don’t want to get around those people. They don’t bathe. They defecate on the street. They’re violent. They’re mentally ill. I’m just gonna pay me and my family and my staff a lot of money and rip off the government.”  That’s what they’re doing.  And they’re not…  Gavin said if they gave him $10 billion, I think, he could solve the homeless problem.  And they did, and it’s worse than ever.  Sami Winc: It’s worse than ever.  Victor Davis Hanson: We know what the only answer for it is to do one of two things, or both: Have everybody come in for a diagnostic test and cut off the drugs so they can’t get fentanyl, and then either do one of two things. If they are mentally unsound, open up state hospitals where they can get care.  And if they’re not, have some kind of little village on the outskirts of town where they have, you know, 200- or 300-square-foot little rooms with a bed and a dresser, and then they have a big group facility with showers and toilets, and make it humane.  And they won’t do that.  Mamdani said, “We’re not gonna take people off the street.”  So he’s got a huge homeless problem in New York.  And Los Angeles—I never believed two things about L.A. I grew up in California, and from when I was a little boy, there was no such thing, really, as downtown L.A. It had the police station and a couple of government buildings, but it wasn’t like San Francisco with high-rises.  Then in the ’90s, as we came on the eve of globalization, it was a window onto China and Japan. You wouldn’t believe it. You’d go down to L.A. in ’93, ’95, ’98, 2002, 2003, and there were like 20 cranes in the sky at any one time. The city was really clean, you know what I mean? It was immaculate. And they had a downtown.  So you couldn’t believe that.  And now you can’t believe it.  When you go down there, the cantinas have taken over everything, and the street merchants, and these beautiful buildings that were just built 30 years ago have graffiti on them. There’s plywood on a lot of the windows where nobody wants to go.  You have to step over people, and it’s deserted. It’s kind of like Santa Monica.  Anything that leftism touches has the anti-Midas touch. It destroys.  And it’s costing a fortune to destroy L.A.  Sami Winc: Yeah.  Victor Davis Hanson: I mean, it’s very expensive to pay homeless people to destroy things.  Sami Winc: Yeah, it is.  It took me a second there, Victor. I’m like, “What?”  Victor Davis Hanson: It is. It was very expensive to tell BLM and Antifa, “Do you want to destroy the country for four months? Well, we won’t arrest you, and we’ll give you a grant. Go ahead and do it.”  Sami Winc: All right.  So California voters have put Proposition 39 on the upcoming ballot, and the state is doing everything to subvert that.  There’s a new story on how they’ve written into the voter ballots a negative summary of it, and then the informational part of it is also negative.  Victor Davis Hanson: Which proposition are you talking about?  Sami Winc: It’s called Proposition 39. It’s a voter ID proposition. So the state’s trying to undermine it, in other words, by subtle means.  Victor Davis Hanson: What usually happens in California is, whether it was Three Strikes, ending affirmative action, or gay marriage—even in its demented state now, after we’ve lost 12 million conservatives to out-of-state immigration—the people still poll that they want it.  Overwhelmingly, they want voter ID.  But by the time the SEIU and the California Teachers Association get done funding against it, and then all of these Bay Area and L.A. wealthy donors, they’ll probably defeat it.  And if they don’t defeat it, some Ninth District left-wing judge who hasn’t been in the news for two months and thinks he’s Socrates wants to be considered cutting-edge and controversial, so he’ll probably throw it out if it were to pass, like they did with gay marriage.  We passed a proposition that said marriage was only between a man and a woman, and you could have a legal relationship, but it wouldn’t be called marriage.  And it passed overwhelmingly.  Then they libeled it and said it was because of the Mormons and Christians.  But actually, the post-election data showed it was mostly Black and Hispanic people, and then they shut up.  The moment that passed, they sent it to a U.S. federal judge, and he threw it out.  At the time, he was living with another man, so you’d think he would have…  And when people said he had a conflict of interest, they said, “That is the worst thing you could say. That is so homophobic.”  So he threw it out, and the people’s will went up in smoke.  That’ll happen with the voter ID initiative unless it gets to the Supreme Court, if it should pass.  Sami Winc: Yeah.  Victor Davis Hanson: I don’t like to be cynical about California, but I’m 72, and I’ve lived here, and I’ve watched it deteriorate. You want to cry when you see what’s happened to it.  Sami Winc: Well, I’m not gonna cheer you up anymore with these last two stories.  One is that California Pizza Kitchen—for anybody who does not live in California, it’s pretty much an institution here. There are 185 stores. The owners have left California, and they also said it’s almost an impossible business environment to operate in. That’s a big business.  The second story is that in the small seaside town of Capitola, a deranged man—I don’t know if he was homeless, actually—Tyler Liljedahl…  Victor Davis Hanson: He was up on felony charges. He’d been let out.  Sami Winc: Yes, he had been let out of jail.  The state also knew that he talked about hearing voices and having homicidal fantasies, and he stabbed to death a woman in a small seaside village that has about 1% of the population in it.  Victor Davis Hanson: If you were to describe the case in Californese, their language, it would be something like this:  “Well, a poor African American young man was only 19, and he made a few errors. He had some violent periods in his life, 19, and we decided not to incarcerate him. We convicted him of a felony, and he’s out now, and for all practical purposes he’s making something of himself.”  But, Mr. Parole Officer, he went to the Capitola Mall to kill somebody, and he saw an elderly Asian male, whom he wanted to kill.  I think he was also a racist, by the way. He didn’t go after other Black people.  But he was afraid the elderly Asian man might put up a fight. So then he found a woman crossing the street, and he thought, ‘Ah, she’s looking at cars, and I’ll just follow her.'”  She was 73.  It was just the classic California dichotomy.  Here was a woman living by herself with a cat. Everybody believed she was beloved. She devoted all of her time to the arts, was an artist, just a wonderful person minding her own business.  Before he followed her, he went to a sporting goods store and bought two—not one, two—knives, because he said he liked to stab with both hands at the same time.  Sami Winc: Yeah, so he bought two knives.  Victor Davis Hanson: Two knives. He goes out, and he stabs her 11 times in the back and chest, through the heart, and he kills her.  And then what will happen?  He’ll be out in three or four years.  This is just…  There are so many things about California.  If I can tell you that if he was a young white guy whose parents came out from Oklahoma, and there was a wonderful, beloved Black artist, and he went out there and stabbed him twice, the whole state right now would be in an uproar about its racist policies.  But they don’t really are.  There’s been no big outrage. It’s just collateral damage.  It’s like the Sikh truck drivers who ran over three people—or whatever they did in California. They rear-ended them.  Oh, they paralyzed that one girl, and he only got five years.  California is really, I think people should understand, a very sick society.  It’s the sickest society of all the states that we have.  And Gavin Newsom has been an accelerant of that sickness.  And it’s a racist state. Twenty-seven percent of the population was foreign-born, and it does not want to acculturate, assimilate, or integrate them.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The filibuster is unconstitutional. Our Founding Fathers spoke against requiring a supermajority threshold to pass regular measures in Congress, yet the erroneous practice continues today via the filibuster. Current Senate practice reaches beyond our Founders’ original plan that a supermajority vote was only to be used for the five instances listed in the Constitution and two instances listed within the Amendments, according to CRS. Those who advocate for the filibuster are invoking the symbolism of protecting “history” when all they are actually protecting is an unconstitutional tradition. The Constitution specifies a very limited number of times when a supermajority vote is necessary: amending the Constitution, overriding vetoes, convicting impeached officials, ratifying treaties, and expelling Members of Congress. The 14th and 25th Amendments also allow for a supermajority vote to remove individuals deemed unfit to serve from office. The filibuster is nowhere listed in the Constitution, and the supermajority vote to overcome it was an accidental creation. That’s right, the biggest impediment to delivering on the mandate handed to the House, Senate, and White House by the American people is an accident that we have turned into tradition. In 1805, Vice President Aaron Burr advised the Senate to get rid of the “previous question” motion that allowed a simple majority to end debate. After the Senate followed Burr’s advice, Senators inadvertently left themselves without a means to end debate through only a simple majority vote (half plus one). The groundwork was then laid for the first recognized filibuster to occur in 1837, almost 50 years after our Constitution was originally ratified and a year after the last surviving signer of the Constitution, James Madison, passed away. This accident, the filibuster, is in direct contrast to the wishes of our Founding Fathers. In the Federalist Papers, our Founders were explicit that requiring agreement from a supermajority had been detrimental to our governance under the Articles of Confederation from 1781-1789. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 22, while requiring a supermajority “two-thirds” vote for passing normal measures might, “at first sight … seem a remedy, is, in reality, a poison. To give a minority a negative upon the majority … is … to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser.” Hamilton lists this “poison” as an essential reason for getting rid of the Articles of Confederation. Hamilton notes in particular that a supermajority vote is designed “to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the … decisions of a respectable majority.” Father of the Constitution, James Madison, also warned against a voting threshold of “more than a majority” in Federalist No. 58, writing that if Congress were to consistently enforce such a threshold, “the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.” Thomas Jefferson advocated for certain two-thirds voting among the seven allowances listed in the Constitution, but he wrote to James Madison in 1787 that “it is my principle that the will of the Majority should always prevail.” Yes, our Founders wanted minority rights protected, and they feared the “excess of law-making,” but their remedy was our Constitution’s unique presidential veto authority, as outlined in Federalist No. 73, writing that “The injury which may possibly be done by defeating a few good laws, will be amply compensated by the advantage of preventing a number of bad ones.” The filibuster is an accident turned into tradition resurrected from the ashes of the Articles of Confederation. Our Founders were purposeful in forming the Constitution and intentionally limited the times when they deemed a supermajority necessary to pass legislation. The filibuster is causing gridlock in Congress that’s stopping important legislation from getting passed. The American people are now frustrated that despite handing Republicans a majority in Congress and the White House, we are unable to execute on a mandate. Many cite Article 1, Section 5 of the Constitution, in which the House and the Senate are each granted the authority to “determine the Rules of its Proceedings,” as a defense of the filibuster. Commonsense dictates that this does not mean the Senate can create rules that go against or expand the authorities given to them by the Constitution, but rather that they can create their own rules as they align with our Founders’ intentions. Senate rules on supermajority voting should not supersede the clear intent of the voting threshold established by our Founders. Between 1837 and 1975, the Senate expanded the voting threshold to a two-thirds supermajority vote (today, 67 Senators) to invoke cloture, thereby ending filibuster debate. Since 1975, the filibuster has required a three-fifths supermajority vote (60 Senators) to end debate on most legislation. During this same time frame, the talking filibuster morphed into a silent filibuster where Senators can delay debate by simply signaling their intent to object rather than actively having to stand on the Senate floor and continuously raise points of objection. We must stop allowing the tyranny of the few to overpower the will of the majority. It’s time to call the filibuster what it is: an unconstitutional accident. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

The Democratic Socialists of America are not hiding their plan to reshape America. On Sunday, their co-chair joined Fox News and openly confirmed that their long-term goals ahead of the midterm elections include abolishing parts of the U.S. government. Megan Romer appeared on Shannon Bream’s “Fox News Sunday,” saying the organization’s goals include abolishing the presidency, U.S. Senate, and Supreme Court, as well as prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the nation’s borders. The Democratic Socialists of America also envision defunding the Pentagon and granting amnesty for illegal aliens. Read their platform:Abolish the Senate, the Presidency, the Supreme Court and immigration enforcement. Open the border wide. Grant mass amnesty. Defund the Pentagon. The barbarians are inside the gate—and Democrats are WELCOMING them in!Communism is no longer a far fetched… pic.twitter.com/qu4qVA7YSk— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) July 26, 2026 Romer added that abolishing U.S. borders and defunding the Pentagon are “part of this longer-term plan.” “We’re not saying open the borders tomorrow. We’re saying rebuild and imagine a society that works for everyone, and the open borders is part of a longer-term, international plan that involves us stopping destabilizing countries,” she said. The organization did not respond to the Daily Signal’s request for comment, but the same priorities are listed on the group’s website. According to its Workers Deserve More 2025-2026 Program, the goal is to deliver “full voting rights to all permanent U.S. residents,” including illegal immigrants living in the United States, and to “expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked-choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate.”  Our national program, Workers Deserve More is officially live. visit the link below and see what members of DSA are building.https://t.co/ZasQNJgskw— DSA (@DemSocialists) July 14, 2026 The organization is actively making endorsements in the 2026 midterm elections. Currently, it has endorsed 163 candidates across the country, including 30 for Congress. Five of the federal candidates won their primaries and will be on the November ballot as Democratic Party nominees. Ten lost their primary elections. Most notably, the group has endorsed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. Candidates seeking an endorsement must meet the standards of the party’s National Electoral Commission, which includes committing to “uphold DSA’s national policy platform, Workers Deserve More, and DSA’s national priorities, campaigns and initiatives.” This includes the goals Romer voiced to Bream. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., told Bream that the Democratic Party welcomes these candidates, some of whom support abolishing the very offices they are seeking. “I do think the Democratic Party has always been known … as a big tent,” Kaine said. “[If] somebody says, ‘I’m a DSA candidate,’ I don’t think you should use that to throw them out. … Candidates have to rise and fall on their own merits,” he continued.