By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Chris Van Hollen has no primary to survive and no general election to win in 2026. He didn’t need to lift a finger for the far left this year. He did it anyway — twice, in two states where he has no constituents and no accountability — while running interference for his own party’s leadership on behalf of a movement that is, by its own members’ admission, working toward “a fully liberated classless society.” In a word, communism.
That’s not a smear. That’s the Marxist Unity Group’s own language, and it’s the coalition Van Hollen has chosen to carry water for.
Chris Van Hollen has no primary to survive and no general election to win in 2026. He didn’t need to lift a finger for the far left this year. He did it anyway.
The “Fight Club” Is a Pressure Campaign, Not a Debate
Van Hollen belongs to a bloc of senators who’ve nicknamed themselves the “Fight Club” — himself, Tina Smith, Chris Murphy, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren — organized around one goal: strong-arming Chuck Schumer and DSCC Chair Kirsten Gillibrand into standing down while the party’s socialist wing takes over winnable Senate primaries in Maine, Michigan, and Minnesota. A source close to the group’s own organizing effort admitted to the New York Post it had devolved into “one big, giant mess” of senators jockeying for left-wing credibility. That’s the tell. This isn’t a principled ideological debate playing out in public. It’s a coordinated effort by sitting Democratic senators to disarm their own party’s guardrails against the socialist takeover Bill Maher’s audience audibly gasped at.
This isn’t a principled ideological debate playing out in public. It’s a coordinated effort by sitting Democratic senators to disarm their own party’s guardrails.
Maine and Michigan are exactly the two races where Van Hollen went further than pressure — he put his name on the ballot line himself.
Platner: Van Hollen Defended Him Through the Nazi Tattoo. It Took a Rape Allegation to Move Him.
Van Hollen endorsed Graham Platner for Maine’s Senate seat alongside Sanders, Warren, and Ruben Gallego. When it surfaced that Platner had a tattoo resembling a Nazi SS insignia and a trail of inflammatory posts, Van Hollen didn’t distance himself — he ran cover, telling Punchbowl News the candidate deserved a “second chance” and praising his appeal to “blue-collar, labor voters.” Read that again: a Maryland senator publicly defending a Nazi-tattooed Senate candidate as a matter of electoral strategy.
It wasn’t the tattoo, the online history, or the ideology that finally moved Van Hollen. It took a sexual assault allegation.
It wasn’t the tattoo, the online history, or the ideology that finally moved Van Hollen. It took a sexual assault allegation. Only then did he, Warren, and Gallego pull their endorsements — after Bernie Sanders, of all people, had already called for Platner to step aside. Baltimore Sun columnist and former state senator Bobby Zirkin said plainly that Van Hollen owed Marylanders an apology for how long he stood by Platner. He was right, and Van Hollen has never actually delivered one.
El-Sayed: A Decade in DSA’s Orbit, and a Straight Face Denying It
Van Hollen’s second move was worse, because it was calculated rather than reactive: endorsing Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, breaking openly with Schumer and Gretchen Whitmer to do it.
El-Sayed wants voters to believe he’s a garden-variety progressive. His record says otherwise. He headlined a 2019 Detroit DSA fundraiser that pulled in $10,000 for the chapter, posing for photos with Rep. Rashida Tlaib in front of a poster of a DSA fist strangling a snake labeled “capitalism.” He spoke at five more Detroit DSA events between 2017 and 2020. This cycle, DSA moved organizers and money into Michigan specifically to elect him, and every member of the House “Squad” — a caucus stacked with current and former DSA members — has endorsed him. Then, asked directly whether he’s a socialist, El-Sayed tells CNN, “I am not somebody who is a socialist.” That is not a candidate correcting a mischaracterization. That’s a movement operative doing what movement operatives do before a general election: shedding the label without shedding the network, the money, or the politics.
That’s not a candidate correcting a mischaracterization. That’s a movement operative doing what movement operatives do before a general election.
Van Hollen didn’t just endorse this man. The day the endorsement broke, El-Sayed told CNN, “You know who I’d really like to see as Democratic leader? Chris Van Hollen.” A month later, Van Hollen showed up in person to headline a Ferndale, Michigan rally for him alongside Elizabeth Warren. This is a mutual alliance between a sitting senator and a candidate who spent a decade building relationships with an organization that wants to abolish the Senate itself — and Van Hollen isn’t shy about being talked up as the reward.
No Race, No Excuse — Just Ambition
Van Hollen isn’t hiding what this is about. He’s confirmed he’s “kicking the tires” on a 2028 presidential run, after courting early-primary-state Democrats in New Hampshire and Iowa, and he’s already declared that any credible 2028 Democrat needs to break with AIPAC and treat criticism of Israel as a litmus test. Asked point-blank on CNN last week whether Schumer should keep leading Senate Democrats — the leader Van Hollen served under, the leader whose machinery he’s now working to hobble — he wouldn’t answer. “Let’s get through the 2026 election, see what voters say.” To be precise: Van Hollen has not explicitly called on Schumer to step down, and told the AP he hasn’t “thought about” seeking the leader’s job himself. But refusing to defend the man he served under, while actively working to override his leadership’s primary picks, is its own kind of answer. That’s not caution — that’s a man positioning himself at the front of a leftward lurch he thinks he can ride into 2028, without spending any political capital defending the party structure he spent a career building.
Refusing to defend the man he served under, while actively working to override his leadership’s primary picks, is its own kind of answer.
His tax bill with Booker, Kelly, Gillibrand, and Kim this spring — eliminating income tax under $46,000, funded by a millionaire surtax — is the one data point that doesn’t fit the pattern, and even that got flagged by the Tax Foundation as revenue-negative once dynamic effects are counted. Even his “moderate” move costs the country money it doesn’t have.
Maryland Is Already Feeling This
None of this is theoretical for Maryland voters. Metro DC DSA — covering D.C., Montgomery, and Prince George’s counties — has been running the identical playbook here, and it’s working often enough to matter. In 2025 the chapter unseated a 34-year council incumbent in Greenbelt and won a Prince George’s County Council special election. In this June’s primary, its six-candidate slate went 2-for-4 with two races still too close to call — Gabriel Acevero and Shayla Adams-Stafford won reelection; Raaheela Ahmed and Imara Crooms lost. The chapter — which claims nearly 3,400 dues-paying members and knocked more than 150,000 doors this cycle across its D.C. and Maryland races combined — is a well-funded, well-organized machine building a bench in Maryland’s own backyard, one low-turnout primary at a time. It’s the same machine D.C.’s Democratic Party just handed 36 of 48 State Committee seats to outright, certified July 17.
The final Maryland tally is a useful check on the ‘unstoppable’ framing: the chapter can win low-turnout special elections and defend seats it already holds, but it went 0-for-4 this cycle against candidates with real institutional footing.
But the final Maryland tally is a useful check on the “unstoppable” framing: the chapter can win low-turnout special elections and defend seats it already holds, but it went 0-for-4 this cycle against candidates with real institutional footing.
Maryland’s county Democratic Central Committees haven’t been captured the way D.C.’s just was. Not yet. Given the trajectory — and given that Maryland’s own senior senator is out endorsing this movement’s candidates in other states while it builds strength at home — there’s no reason to assume that holds.
Bottom Line
Van Hollen isn’t standing in the way. He’s clearing the path.
Van Hollen isn’t a card-carrying DSA member, and he doesn’t need to be. What he’s done is lend his name, his standing, and his former DSCC and DCCC machinery to a movement whose own internal factions describe their goal, in writing, as communism — in states where no Maryland voter can hold him accountable for it — while positioning himself to ride the same wave into a 2028 presidential run. Maryland voters who think this doesn’t touch them should look at Greenbelt, look at Prince George’s County, and look at what just happened in D.C. It’s coming here. Van Hollen isn’t standing in the way. He’s clearing the path.
Sources: The Hill; Fox News; The National Desk (TNND); Baltimore Sun; The Washington Post (AP); Punchbowl News; Washington Examiner; Times of Israel; NOTUS; Jewish Insider; Maryland Matters; New York Post; Mediaite; CBS News; CNN; Michigan Advance; Newsweek; The American Prospect; Tax Foundation; National Taxpayers Union; Washington Free Beacon; Politico; Metro DC DSA (mdcdsa.org) chapter statements, endorsement archives, and post-primary updates, Dec. 2025–June 2026; Ballotpedia; Wikipedia (2026 D.C. Democratic State Committee election); Maryland State Archives (Maryland Manual, Local Central Committees).
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