Maxine Waters spent Trump's first term urging Americans to harass his cabinet members in public and calling on BLM to "get more confrontational" with police.
Now Democrats are done with her.
What her own party just did to her should terrify every Democrat over 70 in Washington.
Democrat Primary 2026 Is Costing Hakeem Jeffries Millions He Cannot Afford
Thirty House Democrats are facing primary challengers who have raised $100,000 or more.
The party establishment is facing a full scale revolt.
The money tells the story. These insurgent primaries have already consumed more than $64 million – out of roughly $500 million raised by all Democratic House campaigns this cycle.
Every dollar spent fighting each other is a dollar not spent fighting Republicans.
Rep. John Larson of Connecticut put a number on it. He expects to spend $5 million defending himself in his own primary – compared to $400,000 last year just doing his job.
Democrats inside leadership are furious.
One House Democrat close to Hakeem Jeffries – speaking anonymously because he apparently still wants a career – called it "bulls***."
"This is the new reality we live in," he told Axios, "where people do not care about the party and trying to win."
Another senior Democrat, watching the money drain, said it plain: "It's like, 'I've been giving you money to support frontliners.'"
But the insurgents don't care.
Many of these primary insurgents – along with a wave of outsiders and Socialist Democrats running in open primaries – have refused to commit to supporting Jeffries' leadership.
They don't answer to Hakeem Jeffries.
They answer to AOC.
Maxine Waters Primary Challenge Is the Canary in the Coal Mine for House Democrats
Nobody captures this Democrat crack-up quite like Maxine Waters.
Waters, 87, has held her South Los Angeles congressional seat since 1991.
Her district's average resident is 36 years old and rents their home.
Now nonprofit executive Myla Rahman – 34 years younger and a cancer survivor who actually lives in the district – is making the case that Waters has lost touch with the people she claims to represent.
"The community has said that they'd like new energy, a new perspective," Rahman told Politico.
Waters raised a meager $430,000 in all of 2025 and started this year with just $150,000 on hand.
Thirty-five years of winning 70 to 80 percent of the vote will do that to a campaign.
The National Republican Congressional Committee had the line of the week: "Democrats built a party run by career politicians like Maxine Waters, who has been cashing taxpayer-funded paychecks since the Cold War."
They're not wrong.
Jeffries Is Walking Into the Same Trap That Destroyed McCarthy
Hakeem Jeffries could become Speaker of a caucus that answers to Zohran Mamdani, Ilhan Omar, and AOC.
If Democrats ride anti-Trump anger to a House majority in November – and the polling says they might – Jeffries becomes Speaker with a caucus he cannot control.
Democrats did this to Republicans in 2022.
Kevin McCarthy spent 15 ballots trying to become Speaker because a small group of conservatives refused to fall in line.
He finally got the gavel after making concessions that got him fired by his own members nine months later.
Jeffries mocked McCarthy through all of it.
He's about to find out what that chaos actually feels like from the Speaker's chair.
The new Democrat freshmen already aren't committing to support his leadership.
Socialist Democrats backed by AOC aren't running in Republican districts.
They're primarying sitting Democrats who already vote with the left 93% of the time, calling them corporate sellouts for accepting a check from anyone who wasn't Bernie Sanders.
Hakeem Jeffries is looking at dozens of members who won't fall in line.
Kevin McCarthy only had eight.
Good luck with that.
Sources:
- Andrew Solender, "Inside the $64 million midterm civil war infuriating Democratic Party leadership," Axios, March 3, 2026.
- Brady Knox, "Maxine Waters becomes latest Democrat to face generations-younger primary challenger," Washington Examiner, February 10, 2026.
- "Did Maxine Waters Finally Meet Her Match?" Daily Caller, February 10, 2026.
- "New York Democratic primaries 2026: Socialist challengers target progressive House members," Washington Times, January 28, 2026.
- "Democrats No Longer In Lockstep Before Midterms, Spelling Potential Disaster For Party," Daily Caller, February 27, 2026.