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Well, when you have even Engels in The Principles Of Communism foreshadowing how the left would do things in the USA, one can only shake one’s head at the whole thing:

It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces. […]

In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat — that is, with the agrarian National Reformers. …

Once they found that the Democratic Party was sympathetic to their ideology, they rapidly focused their efforts there, of course; but they didn’t forget about the GOP, with the poison being fed into them way back in the “progressive” era.