He Didn't Want to Run Without DSA

Larkin, a former Bernie Sanders campaign field director and Democratic operative, joined the DSA in 2020. His platform reads like the organization's wish list: Medicare for All, a $25 federal minimum wage, tuition-free public college and abolishing ICE.

He sells those ideas in the name of the “working class,” but Larkin himself was raised in wealth. He attended Pine Crest, then Phillips Exeter Academy, one of the most exclusive boarding schools in the country, before Sewanee: The University of the South. The candidate promising tuition-free public college is a product of some of the most expensive private education in America.

The clearest window into how Larkin sees his own candidacy came in his interview on the DSA-aligned Cosmopod podcast.

“I would not want to do this as Oliver Larkin, the individual. I really wanted DSA as a partner and an accountability structure for my campaign.”

— Oliver Larkin, Cosmopod interview, March 2026

The DSA delivered. Its National Electoral Commission said four Florida chapters were already “canvassing and carrying petitions” for Larkin when the national organization announced its endorsement, and the Broward County DSA organized recurring campaign calls for the race.

Beyond the DSA, Larkin's campaign has been endorsed by CAIR Action, MPower Action, Emgage Action, Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights Action and activist Linda Sarsour. To raise money in the closing stretch, the campaign staged a virtual rally featuring the far-left streamer Hasan Piker.

Abolish ICE, and Prosecute It

“Abolish ICE” sits near the top of Larkin's campaign website. In the Cosmopod interview, he went further, listing “abolishing and prosecuting ICE” among the positions his campaign takes, meaning not just eliminating the agency but bringing charges against its officers.

In his Ballotpedia candidate survey, Larkin reached for the language of the Holocaust to describe Republican immigration policy, and argued that American policing is an “imperial boomerang” imported from Israel.

A “Hard No” on Israel

Larkin supports the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. In a June 2026 profile, The New Arab reported that he frames BDS as a nonviolent response to what he calls Israel's “genocide” in Gaza and “apartheid expansion” in the West Bank. He says he is a “hard no” on U.S. military aid to Israel, backs a single binational state, and describes Israel as a religious-supremacist, settler-colonial system.

He believes the Israeli government has committed genocide in Gaza, approves of an immediate suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel, and supports H.R. 3565, filed by Illinois Democratic U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez to restrict the sale, transfer, or export of offensive weapons to Israel.

He would also like to see the Israeli prime minister arrested on American soil. During Benjamin Netanyahu's July 2026 visit to the United States, Larkin told Fox News that he supported U.S. law enforcement executing the International Criminal Court warrant against Netanyahu, suggesting the New York City Police Department or another American agency should carry out the arrest.

“Slave State Compromises”: Remaking the Constitution

Larkin's ambitions do not stop at policy. His Ballotpedia responses call for abolishing the Electoral College, expanding the House, and rewriting constitutional structures he dismissed as “slave state compromises.” He has told Fox News he wants to abolish the Senate outright.

“It is time to rectify the slave state compromises in our Constitution.”

— Oliver Larkin, Ballotpedia Candidate Connection, 2025

In an interview with a DSA publication, Larkin explained that the Reconstruction Amendments were “only the start of what we need to continue to do to build a working-class democracy for all of us.” According to the DSA, “finishing Reconstruction would mean overturning the capitalist economy and replacing it with socialism, winning universal rights, and atoning for the sins of slavery and empire.”

He is equally clear that he does not intend to be a team player if he reaches Washington. Larkin has said he would not support House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker, and in the Cosmopod interview, he described the DSA as a way to build a “parallel power structure” against the two-party system. He is not running to strengthen the Democratic Party so much as to build a rival power base within it, and, he explained, the ideal is “breaking out of this two-party duopoly.”

The Company He Keeps: Cliff Connolly

Cliff Connolly sits on the DSA's National Political Committee, the organization's governing body. He was elected on the slate of the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), whose stated goal is “dismantling the US Constitutional Regime.”

Connolly is not a distant fellow traveler of the Larkin campaign. He interviewed Larkin on the Cosmonaut podcast, appeared with him in an April 2026 campaign video and called the race "critical" to win, and publicly celebrated the national party rallying to the cause.

“We all came together on the Oliver Larkin campaign.”

— Cliff Connolly, X, April 16, 2026

This is the man Larkin chose to campaign with, and his public record is extraordinary. On the United States, Connolly wrote in June 2025 that the American government is the most evil force on the planet.

“No entity on this earth is more evil than the United States government. It is the Great Satan.”

— Cliff Connolly, X, June 21, 2025; archived by Canary Mission

In the same post, he called Israel the Great Satan's “rabid dog.”

On October 7, 2023, as Hamas gunmen carried out their massacre in southern Israel, Connolly posted his support.

“Hamas is fighting for the liberation of Palestine.”

— Cliff Connolly, X, October 7, 2023

A year later, in October 2024, he called people fighting alongside Hamas and Hezbollah “the truest Christians on earth” and cast armed resistance as a Christian tradition. He has written that a majority could be built to “dismantle the Israeli apartheid state.” On domestic policy, he has written “F**k the police,” argued that a DSA government could dismantle the police, and reduced his platform to a slogan, “Abolish the Police, Close the Prisons.”

In February 2025, he took a class of elementary school students to an ICE protest. These posts are reproduced in his Canary Mission profile.

Ending the Cuba Embargo

Larkin supports ending the U.S. embargo on Cuba. He is running to represent a district that is home to one of the largest Cuban-American populations in the country, many of whom fled the very regime the embargo targets.

The numbers are not close. Florida International University's 2024 Cuba Poll found that 55% of Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County support continuing the embargo.

Connolly again supplies the subtext. In October 2025, he joined a DSA delegation to Cuba, calling the trip one of the greatest honors of his life and voicing support for ending the embargo. The delegation was hosted through the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP). In July 2026, the U.S. State Department terminated the legal status of an ICAP official, describing ICAP as part of Cuba's foreign-influence apparatus.

The candidate who wants to lift the embargo has been campaigning with a party leader who traveled to Havana as the guest of a group Washington has since labeled a foreign-influence operation.

The Backlash

Larkin's opponent, Jared Moskowitz, is a Jewish, establishment-aligned Democrat, and the reaction to Larkin from South Florida's Jewish community has been sharp.

The Miami Herald editorial board warned that Larkin's brand of anti-Zionism cannot be separated from rising antisemitism:

“Larkin said he does not consider anti-Zionism to be antisemitic. But that's disingenuous. He must know full well that many, or even most, Jews see anti-Zionism as a less-obvious but still potent form of antisemitism. He may try to add his own spin to the term, but it remains offensive and is a dog whistle that, no doubt, appeals to antisemites.”

Rabbi Efrem Goldberg of Boca Raton went further, urging his congregants to register as Democrats specifically to stop Larkin. “This has to do with a primary where one of the candidates is a supporter of Hamas, anti-Israel, antisemitic,” he said, warning that voters who sat it out would “have to look at themselves when they could have done more and didn't.”

Larkin has also shown he will bend the truth to land a hit on Moskowitz. Florida Politics reported that Larkin falsely accused Moskowitz of dropping out of a candidate debate the congressman had never agreed to attend. According to the news outlet WLRN, event organizers acknowledged that Moskowitz had not been formally invited due to a “miscommunication.” Larkin cast the absence as a cowardly withdrawal anyway.

What This Race is Really About

Larkin may lose on August 18. The money, the incumbency, and most of the public polling are with Moskowitz. But the outcome is almost beside the point.

Oliver Larkin is the clearest expression yet of a DSA strategy that no longer bothers to hide: run the organization's own dues-paying members in contested Democratic seats, not safe-blue ones. According to DSA, Larkin is fighting to become a DSA rep in Congress as “part of a ‘nationwide movement to fight for the principles of socialism’ and the demands in our national Workers Deserve More program…”, a true “tribune of the people.”

He asked for the DSA as his “accountability structure.” He took its first federal endorsement of the cycle. He campaigned with a national DSA leader who calls America the Great Satan and cheered Hamas on October 7. And he is asking a South Florida district full of people who fled communism to send a democratic socialist to Congress.

Win or lose, the DSA has made Florida's 25th a statement about where it intends to take the Democratic Party.