Tom Suozzi, the Democratic congressman, likes to talk about his maternal grandfather, an Irish electrician who helped install the lights on top of the Empire State Building. And his father, who came to this country from Italy and was a navigator on a B-24 bomber during World War II, got himself into Harvard Law and then, after graduating, couldn’t get a job because no one would hire Italians. These two stories were history, but really, it was the Democratic Party’s story—that of melting pots and labor unions and upward mobility and optimism leavened with grit, loss, sacrifice, and a belief in the promise of America.

It is also the subtext of Suozzi’s Promise to America, a pledge to push back against the leftist tsunami engulfing his party. Suozzi formally unveiled it last Thursday, two days after a slate of candidates backed by New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic House primaries in New York City. The pledge includes support for capitalism, free speech, and America—and, just as importantly, opposition to socialism, purity tests, and a belief that the country is the root of all evil everywhere. He was launching it, he told me, because he thought his fellow moderates had been “asleep at the switch” in the face of the ascendant far left.

“I believe that I can disagree with people, but I don’t have to hold them in contempt,” Suozzi said. There are, he added, an array of “bad actors”—social media influencers, the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Russians—looking to exploit our differences.“There are dark forces that are influencing this effort on the left and the right.”

As of now, 10 House Democrats have signed on—starting with Suozzi, whose congressional district stretches from Queens to Levittown, and Rep. Adam Gray, who represents a mostly agricultural district in California’s Central Valley. Suozzi’s immediate goal is 200 state and local officials, and another 2,000 activists, influencers, and donors.

The 63-year-old congressman told me that he had been thinking about the promise for months and talking about it—publicly, at least—since early June, at Welcome Fest, a gathering of centrist Democrats, in Las Vegas. That was when Suozzi and Gray—the only House Democrats who, in 2024, flipped congressional districts that Donald Trump won—took to the stage to discuss their big new idea for reclaiming their party.

“We have to get back to the basic principles of the Democratic Party has historically been,” Suozzi said at the time.

Suozzi said his party has lost sight not only of America but also its base. The Democrats weren’t paying attention to the new radicals and the forces propelling them into office: the underlying anger, the unaffordability, the squeezing out of the middle class, the withering away of the working class.

After last week’s socialist sweep, Suozzi became the face of the old Democratic Party fighting back against the radicals banging down the front door.

“It was like, this is really serendipitous,” Suozzi said. After asking me where Savodnik comes from—the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were forced to live under the Russian Empire—he said, “I should say, it was beshert”—Yiddish for “meant to be.” Exactly the kind of small talk—or, Ishould say, kibbitzing—one expects from a seasoned Democratic pol from New York City.

Anyway, his party. It was coming apart at the seams, and the congressman wanted to do something about that.

“If you look at the far left and far right, they are ecosystems,” he said.“ It’s not just one organization. It’s not just DSA”—the Democratic Socialists of America—“and it’s not just MAGA. There are dozens of organizations that feed off each other on both sides. We’ve got to create an ecosystem for the left-of-center folks where we’re promoting each other.”

Suozzi said it was a mistake to dismiss out of hand the likes of President Trump and Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who endorsed the three victorious House candidates—sociology student Darializa Avila Chevalier, state assembly member Claire Valdez, and former New York City comptroller Brad Lander—and has become the national poster boy for the new socialism.

“I’m giving them credit,” Suozzi said, because they’re organized, and they’re succeeding. I think that the democratic socialists, like MAGA, have correctly diagnosed the problem, which is that people are very unhappy because of their economic insecurity. My objective is not to challenge the diagnosis. It’s that I don’t like their solutions.”

He added: “Do I think there’s economic inequality? Yes. Do I think climate change is real? Yes. Do I think that immigrant injustice is off the rails in our country? I absolutely do.”

Suozzi said the left and right’s remedy for all this is to “tear it all down.”

“I don’t think that’s the answer. That answer has a lot of appeal in the current click environment, but it’s much too simplistic. I am a proud Democrat. I’m more inclined to look at some of the traditional Democratic ideas, like unions and increasing the minimum wage.”

He wanted to focus on concrete things, solutions, and policies. “What are we doing to protect the middle class?” he said. “What are we doing to protect people’s basic rights? Affordability, immigration, taxes, crime, healthcare”—that was the stuff that, to his mind, voters wanted to talk about.

Suozzi sounded like a much more robust, much more lucid Joe Biden during the 2019–2020 Democratic presidential primary going tête-à-tête with the wokists: Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, and so on—none of whom spent much, if any, time on the campaign trail talking about why Donald Trump had been elected in the first place. They preferred to perform, to don their pronouns and apologize for their privilege and all that.

Now it’s 2026, and there are people winning Democratic primaries whose idea of America is not Tom Suozzi’s. Radicals like Avila Chevalier and Valdez who think America’s history is one of oppression and hate, full stop, who have catapulted Israel and the fight against white supremacy and settler-colonialism and the “genocide” in Gaza into their organizing principle, their litmus test. Those whose so-called progressivism has bled into a bleating war against billionaires and borders and prisons.

Suozzi’s promise states that “We believe America’s story is one of extraordinary achievement and unfinished work,” which would have struck Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson as kind of obvious but, in today’s climate, feels weirdly radical. Or anti-radical. It is, perhaps, not entirely coincidental that Suozzi grew up in Glen Cove, on the north shore of Long Island, just a half hour via the Grand Central Parkway from Jamaica Estates, where Trump, now 80, spent his childhood.

Yes, there were the obvious differences having to do with wealth and age and party label. But both men grew up in the shadow of the city, the great metropolis, and they had a shared patois, if not worldview. They had a native understanding of the mixing and mashing together of peoples and backgrounds.“I couldn’t be more different than Donald Trump,” Suozzi said when I asked him about this.“I think I was always a few economic groups away from him.” But then, he added: “I’m a new kind of old-fashioned Democrat”—which is not all that dissimilar to Trump’s description of himself. “I’m recognizing that the world has changed pretty dramatically but lookingback at the traditional ways of doing things.”