The Bow-and-Scrape Primary

Are Democratic presidential hopefuls beginning a political pilgrimage to Mamdani, El-Sayed and Hasan Piker’s socialist left?

It may be one of the strangest sights in modern Democratic politics.

Politicians who may soon ask Americans to make them President of the United States are crisscrossing the country, cultivating activists, making telephone calls, seeking interviews, issuing endorsements and carefully navigating a political movement that only a few years ago Democratic leaders often treated as a noisy faction on their left flank.

Now the faction has votes.

It has organizers.

It has money.

It has an enormous online audience.

And, perhaps most importantly, it has demonstrated that it can defeat establishment Democrats in Democratic primaries.

So begins what might fairly be called The Bow-and-Scrape Primary.

That phrase is intentionally provocative. Nobody is literally kneeling before New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed or political streamer Hasan Piker and asking permission to run for president.

But something politically significant is happening.

Prospective Democratic presidential candidates increasingly have reason to seek the attention, voters, activists and ideological goodwill represented by those three men and the broader democratic-socialist ecosystem surrounding them.

Kamala Harris privately reached out to Mamdani in 2026 while also meeting with progressive and pro-Palestinian activists. Gavin Newsom has positioned himself as willing to appear with Piker and endorsed El-Sayed before his Michigan Senate primary victory. Pete Buttigieg’s representatives previously sought an appearance on Piker’s stream, only for Piker to regard Buttigieg as too centrist. ([Axios](https://www.axios.com/2026/07/01/harris-mamdani-progressives-2028?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

Those are not imaginary connections.

They are evidence of a changing marketplace of influence inside the Democratic Party.

Three Men, Three Different Kinds of Power

It is important to get the facts right because the argument becomes considerably stronger when exaggeration is removed.

Mamdani, El-Sayed and Piker are not three officials sitting around a table deciding who receives the Democratic Socialists of America’s presidential endorsement.

They represent three different forms of political influence.

Zohran Mamdani: Electoral Power

Mamdani is the clearest institutional connection to democratic socialism.

He is a longtime DSA member whose rise has become a model for activists hoping to translate socialist organizing into electoral victories. DSA publications themselves have celebrated the political significance of Mamdani’s success, while the organization’s 2026 electoral operation expanded to scores of endorsed candidates around the country. ([Democratic Left](https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2025/11/12/making-mamdani-a-model/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

Mamdani’s importance therefore extends well beyond New York City.

His political value is that he demonstrated a formula.

Build volunteers.

Organize relentlessly.

Talk about affordability.

Make complicated ideological ideas sound like answers to groceries, rent, transportation and healthcare.

Turn activists into campaign infrastructure.

Then defeat candidates backed by the traditional Democratic establishment.

That gets the attention of anyone considering a presidential primary.

Abdul El-Sayed: Progressive Electoral Expansion

El-Sayed requires a particularly important correction.

He is not a DSA member and describes himself as a capitalist, not a socialist.

In a 2026 New Yorker interview, when directly asked why he had not joined the Democratic Socialists of America, El-Sayed explicitly said, “I’m just not a socialist.” ([The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/abdul-el-sayeds-argument-for-america-and-against-his-own-party?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

That distinction matters.

But politically, it may make his success even more interesting.

El-Sayed represents the possibility that candidates do not necessarily have to adopt the socialist label to tap into many of the issues, organizers and constituencies energized by the socialist left.

His 2026 Michigan Senate primary victory over establishment-backed opposition showed that progressive economic politics could compete in a major industrial swing state rather than merely in deeply blue urban districts. Afterward, leading Democrats quickly moved toward party unity around his candidacy. ([AP News](https://apnews.com/article/0244cbcafd39288608d2ea73636a59cd?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

Newsom had endorsed him before that victory and subsequently headed to Michigan as part of his broader Democratic campaigning effort. ([San Francisco Chronicle](https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/gavin-newsom-michigan-democrats-22376220.php?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

That is how political gravitational fields develop.

Win, and politicians who previously considered you too far outside the establishment suddenly discover the importance of party unity.

Hasan Piker: The New Media Gatekeeper

Then there is Hasan Piker.

Piker holds no elected office.

He does not command a state party.

He does not control the DSA’s endorsement process.

Yet his influence demonstrates something traditional political strategists are only beginning to understand: political power no longer requires an office.

It requires an audience.

Piker has become one of the country’s most visible left-wing political streamers, providing access to a large, disproportionately younger audience that Democratic politicians desperately want to reach.

The evidence of that value is remarkably simple.

Politicians seek his platform.

The New Yorker reported in 2025 that Buttigieg’s team had asked whether Piker would interview him. Piker was reluctant because he considered Buttigieg too centrist. ([The New Yorker](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/24/the-battle-for-the-bros?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

Newsom later publicly indicated that he would be willing to appear on Piker’s show. ([YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD8ulj1n8JM&utm_source=chatgpt.com))

Think about that relationship for a moment.

A possible future presidential candidate possesses the elected office, the national fundraising network and the traditional political résumé.

The streamer possesses something the politician needs:

access.

That is a remarkable reversal of traditional political hierarchy.

This Is Bigger Than Three Personalities

The central mistake would be to interpret this as a story about three men.

It isn’t.

The real story is the development of an alternative political infrastructure inside and alongside the Democratic Party.

DSA openly describes electoral campaigning as a mechanism for building independent political power and holding elected officials accountable. Its national endorsement process is tied not simply to agreement on policy but to an organization’s ability to mount serious field operations. ([Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)](https://www.dsausa.org/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

That is important.

This isn’t merely an ideological book club.

It is political machinery.

By early 2026, DSA-linked reporting counted almost 90 endorsed candidates, including more than a dozen congressional candidates. Later that year, the organization highlighted additional wins in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New York. ([Democratic Left](https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2026/03/02/chapters-prepare-for-a-busy-electoral-season-in-2026/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

Whether one admires or fears the movement, dismissing that organizational growth would be foolish.

Why Would Presidential Candidates Court Them?

Because presidential primaries are not general elections.

A candidate does not initially have to convince every voter in America.

He or she must first assemble enough factions of one political party to survive a nomination contest.

Every presidential candidate therefore looks for constituencies capable of providing several things at once:

votes, volunteers, money, enthusiasm, media exposure and organizational muscle.

The socialist and progressive left can potentially provide all six.

That makes it valuable even to Democratic politicians who don’t personally embrace socialism.

And that is where the potential danger for Democrats begins.

The Primary Election Trap

What helps a politician win a Democratic primary may hurt that politician in November.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey released August 7, 2026 illustrates the contradiction beautifully.

Several individual progressive policies performed well among independents. Sixty-four percent of independents surveyed supported raising taxes on wealthy people and corporations, while 60 percent supported government-provided healthcare.

But when the same electorate encountered the political label “democratic socialist,” 43 percent of independents said that label made them less likely to support a candidate. ([Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/world/some-us-progressive-goals-win-support-independent-voters-reutersipsos-poll-finds-2026-08-07/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

There is the Democrats’ dilemma in a nutshell.

Some socialist-associated policies can be popular.

The socialist brand can be significantly less popular.

A Democratic presidential candidate may therefore spend the primary attempting to secure socialist activists while planning to spend the general election explaining that he or she isn’t actually a socialist.

That is an uncomfortable political straddle.

The Question Isn’t Whether Candidates Talk to Them

Politicians should talk to people with whom they disagree.

Appearing on hostile or ideologically different media is not automatically capitulation.

Newsom, for example, has deliberately pursued a broad media strategy that has included voices on both the political left and right.

Likewise, contacting Mamdani does not prove that Harris has adopted Mamdani’s complete political program.

Endorsing El-Sayed does not transform Newsom into a socialist.

Trying to arrange a Piker interview does not turn Buttigieg into one either.

The intellectually serious question is different:

That is where ordinary political outreach becomes political deference.

Watch not merely whom candidates meet.

Watch what happens afterward.

Which policies suddenly become untouchable?

Which activists are no longer criticized?

Which ideological tests emerge?

Which positions that once would have been considered outside the Democratic mainstream become prerequisites for surviving a presidential primary?

2028 May Settle the Argument

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville is already framing the coming presidential primary as a test of the socialist wing’s actual strength inside his party.

On August 8, 2026, reporting on Carville’s comments described his expectation that a broad Democratic field could ultimately force primary voters to decide how far left the party intends to travel. ([New York Post](https://nypost.com/2026/08/08/media/james-carville-predicts-2028-democratic-primary-will-test-true-strength-of-partys-socialist-wing/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

That may be exactly right.

For years, Americans have debated whether democratic socialism represents the future of the Democratic Party, merely one faction of it, or an ideology whose influence is exaggerated by social media and heavily Democratic cities.

Presidential elections have a useful way of ending theoretical arguments.

They count votes.

DSA itself describes national endorsements as serious organizational commitments rather than symbolic gestures, and socialist activists have already been debating how presidential politics should fit into their broader strategy. ([DSA Electoral Commission](https://electoral.dsausa.org/our-campaigns/?utm_source=chatgpt.com))

The 2028 Democratic primary could therefore become something larger than a contest between Newsom, Buttigieg, Ocasio-Cortez, Harris or whoever ultimately decides to run.

It could become a referendum on what kind of party Democrats intend to be.

Capitalism or Democratic Socialism?

Eventually the semantic games will have to end.

America deserves a clear debate.

Should prosperity primarily be created through private ownership, entrepreneurship, investment, competition and voluntary exchange?

Or should increasingly large parts of economic life be administered, subsidized, regulated or owned through government institutions?

Those are legitimate political questions.

They deserve something better than slogans from either side.

But presidential candidates should be required to answer them.

Not merely when speaking to Wall Street donors.

Not merely when speaking to union halls.

Not merely while appearing on cable television.

Ask them while standing beside Mamdani.

Ask them after seeking Piker’s audience.

Ask them while campaigning for El-Sayed.

Ask whether the candidate believes capitalism requires reform—or replacement.

There is an enormous difference.

The Bow-and-Scrape Test

So perhaps Americans should watch the developing 2028 campaign through a simple lens.

Don’t merely ask which Democrats visit Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada or Michigan.

Ask which ideological constituencies they visit before they get there.

Watch the phone calls.

Watch the endorsements.

Watch the podcasts.

Watch the Twitch streams.

Watch which activists suddenly become indispensable.

And most importantly, watch whether the politicians challenge those activists when they disagree.

Because meeting with someone is democracy.

Debating someone is democracy.

Seeking votes is democracy.

But refusing to speak honestly because a political faction controls something you need is something else entirely.

That is when courting becomes deference.

That is when influence becomes a veto.

And that is when a presidential primary begins to resemble bowing and scraping.

The Bottom Line

The Democratic Socialists of America do not control the Democratic Party.

Mamdani does not personally control the DSA.

El-Sayed is not a DSA member and explicitly says he is not a socialist.

Piker is a media personality rather than an elected official or DSA officer.

Those distinctions should not be blurred.

But neither should the larger political development be ignored.

A growing socialist and socialist-adjacent political ecosystem has accumulated activists, candidates, media influence and electoral victories significant enough that ambitious national Democrats are paying attention.

That attention will only increase if the movement keeps winning.

The real test comes next.

Will Democratic presidential hopefuls merely listen to this faction?

Or will they begin competing to prove their ideological obedience to it?

If it is the former, that’s ordinary democratic politics.

If it becomes the latter, then the Bow-and-Scrape Primary will have truly begun.

Sources & Further Reading

Opinion  /  Political Economy

Redistribution Divides the Harvest. Investment Plants the Next Field.

Before we argue about who receives the grain, someone had to decide, on bare ground, that planting it was worth the risk.

What happens when government establishes a price substantially below the price at which people are otherwise willing to exchange the same product?

Human beings start looking for ways to obtain the underpriced resource. That isn’t necessarily greed. It’s the same incentive mechanism that operates throughout the entire economy, in both directions — toward shortage when a price is capped, and toward production when a price is left free to rise.

A farmer sees corn selling for more than it costs him to grow it, so he plants corn. A builder sees houses selling for more than construction costs, so he builds houses. A trucking company sees manufacturers willing to pay more for transportation than it costs to provide it, so trucks start moving. An entrepreneur discovers that consumers will pay $100 for something he can produce for $70, and suddenly there is a reason to invest money, hire workers, and produce more of it.

Profit is the signal telling capital where people want more production. Suppress the price, and you don’t eliminate the wanting — you eliminate the signal telling anyone to go make more of the thing that’s wanted.

Two Different Points in Time

Redistribution begins after production. The wheat has been grown. The crop has been harvested. The grain is sitting in the barn. The political question becomes: who should receive it?

Investment begins earlier. Before there’s a harvest to argue over, someone has to look at bare ground, weigh the cost of seed and labor against the price the crop might fetch, and decide the risk is worth taking. Nothing in the barn exists yet. The only thing that exists is a signal — a price someone believes will be there when the work is done — and a person willing to act on it.

This is the piece redistribution debates tend to skip past. By the time the political question gets asked, the harder economic question has already been answered by someone else, earlier, for free, and usually without credit: why did this exist at all?

The Same Signal, Working in Reverse

Set a price ceiling below what growers, builders, or haulers would otherwise accept, and the same incentive that filled the barn starts working against you. The farmer who’d plant corn at a profitable price plants something else, or plants less. The builder stops building. The trucking company parks trucks. Not from spite — from the same rational calculation that filled the barn in the first place, now pointed away from the underpriced good.

Shortage isn’t a separate phenomenon from abundance. It’s the identical mechanism, reading a different signal.

Why This Matters More Than It Sounds

None of this settles who should receive the grain once it exists — that’s a real question, and reasonable people disagree about it. But it’s a downstream question. It presupposes a barn that’s already full.

The prior question — will anyone plant the field at all, and will enough people be free to plant beside them — is the one that determines whether there’s anything to argue about later. An economy that spends its energy perfecting the division of an existing harvest, while dulling the signal that gets fields planted, eventually finds itself with a fairer method for dividing less and less.

Opinion  /  Political Economy

The Question That Comes First

Before we argue about how to divide the harvest, we should ask who planted it — and who gets invited to plant the next one.

The immediate political question becomes: “How should we redistribute what already exists?”

Capitalism asks another question that must come first: “How was the wealth created, and how can more people participate in creating and owning it?”

That difference matters more than it first appears. It is not merely a policy disagreement. It is a disagreement about where the story of prosperity actually begins.

Two Different Starting Points

Redistribution divides yesterday’s harvest. It treats the pie as fixed, the work as finished, and the only remaining task as slicing it more fairly. It is fundamentally an accounting exercise — a ledger to be rebalanced.

Investment attempts to create tomorrow’s harvest. It assumes the pie is not fixed at all — that ownership, access, and participation can expand, and that the deeper inequality worth solving is not the size of someone’s slice, but whether they were ever handed a seat at the table to grow their own.

Why the Two Sides Talk Past Each Other

This is why the debate so rarely lands. One side hears “ownership and participation” and assumes it is a dodge — a way of deferring fairness to some indefinite future while today’s gaps go unaddressed. The other hears “redistribute what exists” and assumes it is a ceiling — a way of making today’s inequality permanent by treating the pie as finished business.

Neither critique is entirely wrong. Redistribution without growth stagnates; it can only cut a shrinking harvest into smaller and smaller pieces. Growth without participation concentrates; it can produce a bigger harvest that only a few hands ever touch. Both failure modes are real, and both show up in the historical record.

Only One Question Is Generative

But only one of the two questions actually builds something. You can redistribute a shrinking harvest forever and never grow anyone’s future. You cannot invest in a harvest that was never planted.

The harder, and ultimately more consequential, question is not which slice you receive this year. It is whether the system is building a bigger table for next season — and whether more people are being handed a seat, a stake, and the tools to plant it themselves.

CashLeaks · Commentary · Second Opinion

Ruhlman Is Right About the Asterisk. The Enforcement Side Is Worse.

An independent financial investigator’s response to “No Tax on Tips Has a 15.3% Asterisk” — and a warning about what happens when the seminar crowd’s zero-tax returns start hitting IRS matching systems.

~ Marc Wellington

Michael Ruhlman’s investigation into the “no tax on tips” marketing lands on the right number — 15.3% — and the right villain, the seminar circuit selling seniors a zero-tax dream that Schedule SE was always going to interrupt. I want to add what the piece could only gesture at: the enforcement mechanics waiting on the other side of that bad advice. I have spent years reconstructing financial records after promises like these fall apart, and the pattern is depressingly consistent. The pitch is aggressive. The paperwork is not.

The Paper Trail Already Exists

Start with what the promoters never mention: the reporting infrastructure built into the same law they are selling. Employers and payors must now file information returns showing qualified tips and qualified overtime — occupation codes included. Payment processors issue 1099-Ks. Platforms issue 1099-NECs. Every one of those documents lands in an IRS matching system before the taxpayer’s return does. A senior who reports $25,000 in “qualified tips” from an occupation that is not on Treasury’s approved list, or from a trade with no corresponding net income, is not exploiting a loophole. He is filing a return that contradicts the government’s own records — the single most reliable audit trigger in the modern tax system.

The Quarterly Trap

Ruhlman’s worked example — roughly $7,500 in self-employment tax on a zero-income-tax return — deserves a second look, because that liability does not arrive as one bill in April. It is owed in quarterly estimates, with underpayment penalties compounding for every quarter missed. The retiree who spent the year believing the “no tax” pitch made no estimates at all. By the time the return is prepared, she owes the tax, the penalty, and interest — on a fixed income, with the seminar promoter long gone. In my files, that sequence has a name: manufactured insolvency. Nobody stole anything. The victim simply planned around a number that was never real.

Where I Push Back — Slightly

One friendly amendment to the original piece. Ruhlman writes that the zero-tax senior is a W-2 employee in a listed occupation, and he is correct — but the investigator in me adds a caution flag even there. The new deductions have already spawned a cottage industry of reclassification schemes: employers converting tipped W-2 staff to 1099 status, or relabeling base wages as “tips,” to ride the deduction. Both moves shift the full 15.3% onto the worker while exposing everyone involved to misclassification liability. If an employer proposes changing how you are paid because of this law, that is not tax planning. That is a document I will eventually be hired to read.

The Investigator’s Checklist

For the senior on a 1099 who wants the real benefit without the wreckage, the discipline is unglamorous. Confirm the occupation is on Treasury’s qualified-tips list before claiming a dollar. Keep the tip log contemporaneous — reconstructed records are the first thing an examiner discounts. Pay the quarterly estimates on the self-employment tax, because that liability survives every deduction in the bill. And treat any adviser who says the word “zero” the way you would treat any other stranger promising free money: ask for it in writing, with their signature, and watch how fast the meeting ends.

Ruhlman closed his piece by telling readers to ask the seminar presenter about Schedule SE and time the pause. Fair enough. My version is shorter. Ask who pays the penalty when the pitch is wrong. In every file on my desk, the answer has been the same person — and it was never the man at the podium.

CashLeaks · Tax Investigation

“No Tax on Tips” Has a 15.3% Asterisk — and Seniors on 1099s Are About to Find It

Washington sold retirees a zero-tax dream: stack the new senior bonus deduction with tax-free tips and overtime, and the IRS goes away. The fine print tells a different story — one written in self-employment tax, FLSA rules, and a Social Security formula that quietly claws back the benefit.

The pitch practically writes itself. A retiree drawing Social Security picks up part-time work — driving, bartending, consulting — paid on a 1099. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act hands that worker a stack of new deductions: up to $25,000 in tax-free tips, up to $12,500 in tax-free overtime, a fresh $6,000 senior bonus deduction, all layered on top of a 2026 standard deduction of $16,100 plus the $2,050 age-65 add-on. Run the arithmetic and a single senior can, on paper, shelter more than $60,000 of income from federal income tax. Zero owed. That is the version making the rounds in Facebook retirement groups, tip-jar TikToks, and more than a few paid seminars charging seniors for the privilege of hearing it.

The version the IRS will enforce is considerably less generous. Three structural traps sit inside the marketing, and each one lands hardest on precisely the worker being sold the dream: the senior earning independent-contractor income.

Trap One: The Tax That Never Left

The tips and overtime deductions erase income tax. They do not touch self-employment tax — the 15.3% levy that funds Social Security and Medicare and that attaches to every dollar of net 1099 earnings once a worker clears a mere $400 for the year. A W-2 bartender splits that payroll burden with an employer and never sees half of it. A 1099 senior pays the whole freight, tips included, no matter how many shiny new deductions zero out the income-tax line.

Run the numbers on a realistic case: a single 67-year-old collecting $24,000 in Social Security who earns roughly $28,000 in base contractor pay plus $25,000 in qualified tips. The new deduction stack can drive her federal income tax to approximately nothing. Her self-employment tax bill still arrives at roughly $7,500 — due quarterly, with penalties for underpayment. “No tax on tips” turns out to mean “no tax on tips, except the largest tax most modest earners actually pay.”

Trap Two: Overtime Does Not Exist on a 1099

The overtime deduction is narrower still. It covers only the premium portion of overtime that the Fair Labor Standards Act requires — the “half” in time-and-a-half. Independent contractors are not covered by the FLSA at all. There is no such thing as legally mandated overtime on a 1099, which means there is no such thing as a qualified overtime deduction for the gig worker being told to chase one. The tips deduction, to its credit, does extend to the self-employed — but capped at the net income of the trade that produced the tips, off-limits to specified service businesses, and available only in occupations on the Treasury’s approved list of jobs that customarily received tips.

Trap Three: The Social Security Clawback

The quietest trap is the oldest one. Every dollar of 1099 earnings flows into the “provisional income” formula that determines how much of a retiree’s Social Security benefit becomes taxable. Cross $25,000 of combined income as a single filer and up to half the benefit enters the tax base; cross $34,000 and up to 85% does. The part-time income that was supposed to ride tax-free drags previously untaxed benefit dollars onto the return, consuming the very deduction room the new law created. And the $6,000 senior bonus itself begins phasing out at $75,000 of modified adjusted gross income — a threshold that tips, base pay, and newly taxable benefits all push toward together. Seniors under full retirement age face still another layer: the SSA earnings test, which withholds benefit checks outright above its limits, entirely apart from the tax code.

The Honest Arithmetic

None of this makes the new deductions worthless. For a senior with genuinely qualified tip income, the stack is real money: the standard deduction, age add-on, and senior bonus alone shield $24,150 for a single filer in 2026, and the tips deduction can shield $25,000 more against income tax. What the marketing omits is the sequencing. The self-employment tax is owed first, always, on everything above $400. The Social Security taxability formula runs next, converting “tax-free” earnings into taxable benefits. Only then do the celebrated deductions do their work — against whatever income tax remains, which for many modest earners was already small.

The zero-tax senior exists. He is a W-2 employee, at full retirement age, in a listed tipped occupation, with an employer paying half his payroll tax and withholding the rest. The 1099 senior being sold the identical dream is buying a different product: a real but partial income-tax break wrapped around an untouched 15.3% liability and a benefits formula engineered in 1983 to claw back the gain. Before signing up for the seminar, ask the presenter one question — what happens to Schedule SE? The length of the pause will tell you what the slide deck won’t.