Joe Scarborough spent the better part of a decade turning Morning Joe into the unofficial green room for the Democratic establishment. So when the former Republican congressman from Florida goes on air and tells Democrats they're about to blow it again, the diagnosis carries a certain weight.
His warning this weekend was blunt: Democrats, poised to win the majority in Congress, is "fumbling the football on the two-yard line."
What triggered Scarborough was a segment on the Democratic Socialists of America's growing footprint inside the party — specifically candidates like Francesca Hong, the DSA member running to be Wisconsin's next governor, and Abdul El Sayed, the DSA-adjacent candidate who just secured the Democrat nomination to be the next Senator for Michigan. Scarborough pointed out that embracing candidates who've staked out positions on police abolition and anti-Israel rhetoric is exactly the kind of self-inflicted wound that handed Trump a second term.
"It seems an awful lot like what was happening in 2024 when Democrats couldn't get out of their own way," Scarborough said on the show alongside co-host Mika Brzezinski. Which is a polite way of saying: you people learned absolutely nothing.
He's not wrong. In 2024, the Trump campaign spent approximately $30 million on advertisements tying Democrats to their most radical members and policies: defunding police, open borders, taxpayer paid sex change operations for transgender prisoners, and more. It worked because the ads didn't need to exaggerate. The clips were real. The quotes were real. Trump simply played the clip of Kamala Harris saying she'd make taxpayers pay for sex changes for prisoners and let voters decide for themselves who was better suited to represent them.
And here we are in the midterm cycle, watching the same playbook set up for the same result. "The Democratic Party has a choice to make," Scarborough said — a sentence so obvious it shouldn't need to come from a cable news host who left the GOP two decades ago.
The choice, of course, is whether to distance themselves from candidates whose policy positions poll somewhere between "deeply unpopular" and "electoral poison." Abolish the police. Open hostility toward Israel. The kind of platform planks that energize a Brooklyn fundraiser and vaporize swing-district moderates.
Democratic leadership — Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries — hasn't exactly rushed to distance themselves from these radical policies either. The silence is strategic: alienate the DSA wing and you lose the far-left part of your base. Embrace them publicly and you hand the GOP another cycle of thirty-second spots that write themselves.
Some Democrats will argue this is just primary noise — that these candidates won't survive general elections, that the party will consolidate around electable moderates. That argument would carry more weight if it had worked at any point in the last six years. The DSA wing isn't shrinking. It's winning primaries. Francesca Hong isn't running for city council in Madison. She's running for governor of a swing state.
You can watch Scarborough's rant against the far-left member's of the Democrat party here
Scarborough's football metaphor is apt. Democrats have the ball inside the two-yard line — a favorable midterm environment, an opposition party that's given them plenty of material — and they're calling trick plays nobody asked for. Police abolition isn't a Hail Mary. It's a fumble on a quarterback sneak.
We watched this movie in 2024. We know how it ends. Apparently so does Joe Scarborough, which puts him roughly two years ahead of every Democratic strategist currently drawing a paycheck.
When the guy who built his entire second career on being the Republican Democrats could trust tells you the house is on fire, the smart move probably isn't to argue about the color of the curtains.