Max Boot: “As I’ve traveled around, speaking about my book on how extremists hijacked the Republican Party, I have been hearing from Democrats who are worried that the same thing is happening to their party. They have good cause for concern. The Democrats, to be sure, are not nearly as far-left as Republicans are far-right. But they are moving to the left, with the number of Democrats who describe themselves as liberal having doubled from 25 percent in 1994 to 51 percent in 2018.”

“There is nothing wrong with being liberal — I’m a classical liberal myself — but there is an uber-progressive wing in the Democratic Party that is becoming more vocal and influential. It is, in many ways, the mirror image of the far-right populists who have taken over the GOP.”

“I think he’s clinging to a rhetorical strategy that was very powerful when he was coming of age 50 years ago, but it’s just a little bit different right now,”

— South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on CNN, dismissing President Trump’s efforts to portray Democratic policies as “socialist.”

“Democrats are flirting with socialism in ways they carefully and clearly ran away from in the past, handing President Trump a new way to unify Republicans — and to club his opponents,” Axios reports.

“It started with Democrats sitting silently as he railed against socialism in his State of the Union speech. It intensified with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s release of a Green New Deal, a vague policy manifesto loaded with big-government policies.”

“The surge is unlikely to abate: Young, Twitter- and social-savvy Democrats favor socialism over capitalism. And no Democrat in politics today plays the social media game with more savvy than AOC.”

Washington Post: “Sen. Kamala Harris is raising the possibility of eliminating private health insurance. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other prominent Democrats are floating new and far-reaching plans to tax the wealthy. In Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam voiced support for state legislation that would reduce restrictions on late-term abortions… Casting Democrats as a scary and radical force is giving a fractured Republican Party a common thrust at a time when Trump’s standing even within his own party has started to dip. And it is giving Democrats a bit of the heartburn that Republicans have been grappling with for more than two years.”

“Abortion, taxes and health care have long been among the most combustible political topics. But in the context of the energetic field of 2020 candidates and amid coarsening political rhetoric, they have taken on new gravity. The past few days offer a preview of the next two years, as Democrats argue that the country is yearning for policies previously believed to be too far left, and Republicans cast them as ‘radical zealots’ (Fox News host Laura Ingraham), ‘so radicalized’ (presidential son Eric Trump) and ‘the party of death’ (former House speaker Newt Gingrich).”

A new Gallup poll finds that for the first time since 1994, more than half of Democrats, 51%, identified their political views as “liberal.”