It was the Democratic Party’s “Summer of Socialism,” as an email from the Republican National Committee cheerfully called it that morning, and Ashik Siddique, a co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, was standing on a chair outside a bar, rallying the comrades.
“Zohran’s race is a big proof of concept,” Siddique told the crowd, which had gathered in Chicago on the last day of July for a D.S.A. organizing summit. Many of the hundred or so members assembled around him had volunteered for the campaign of Zohran Mamdani, the recently elected New York City mayor and D.S.A. stalwart. “We can scale that up all over the country over the next year and a half,” Siddique said.
The D.S.A. is not generally an organization of outsize personalities; its leaders tend to exude a self-effacing, slightly dorky enthusiasm. As Siddique, a 38-year-old former environmental organizer from New York, mustered the troops on the bar patio, he resembled the lead volunteer at a particularly enthusiastic Sunday-afternoon park cleanup event, pointing people to the spare rakes and garbage bags, and not the leader of an organization that was presiding over what has been arguably the most remarkable season in the history of American socialism.
As recently as 2011, socialism was so taboo in the United States that PolitiFact could observe, uncontroversially, that “the S-word is overwhelmingly considered a toxic label in American politics.” But since Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential run, and even more so since Mamdani’s mayoral win last year, this has changed significantly.
This July, a CNN poll found that a full third of Democratic and Democratic-leaning adults identify themselves as democratic socialists. And they are voting like it.
D.S.A.-backed candidates have won five congressional primaries since June for solidly Democratic seats in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver — two of them upsets of long-serving incumbents. A D.S.A.er is poised to be the next mayor of Washington. Another is in a runoff for mayor of Los Angeles.
The narrow loss this month of Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist candidate for governor running in Wisconsin’s Democratic primary with local D.S.A. chapters’ endorsements, disappointed many on the left. But it was also a signal about the potency of new socialist politics: Even without the backing of national D.S.A. leaders and politicians, her campaign came within a few thousand votes of beating a rival enthusiastically supported by the state’s Democratic governor.
In 2015, the D.S.A., the largest socialist organization in the country (though not a political party), could claim fewer than 7,000 members, most of them inactive. In early July, Siddique announced, the group had reached 120,000 members, making it larger than any organized socialist movement in American history — even in the early-20th-century heyday of the Socialist Party of America.
“I try not to be a superstitious person, looking for omens or signals,” Siddique went on, “but the day we hit 120,000 members, surpassing the historic Socialist Party, was the Fourth of July.”
“U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” someone shouted. The comrades chanted along for a few beats, then trailed off into slightly uncomfortable laughter.
It has been a little less than a decade since supporters of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign dusted off the D.S.A., a minor heirloom from a long-gone era of the American left, and refashioned it as a vehicle for taking on what they viewed as a complacent and compromised Democratic establishment. Since then, that establishment has observed the D.S.A. with wary curiosity, like an oil tanker captain squinting through binoculars at a band of pirates approaching from a great distance on a slow and iffy-looking fishing pontoon.
“Yes, you had the A.O.C. victory” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 upset in a New York congressional race — “and some other Squad stuff, but the D.S.A. really wasn’t, you know, a major player,” Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, told me. But the organization’s winning streak, starting with Mamdani, has snapped the Democratic Party to attention. Those who oppose the D.S.A., Representative Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Long Island, told me, “have been wringing our hands at cocktail parties. Nobody’s been getting organized. And we have to get organized.”
Some prominent liberal Democrats have argued for welcoming democratic socialists and pursuing “addition, not subtraction,” as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California told a podcaster in July. But moderates maintain that there can be no compromise with a movement whose national platform calls for abolishing prisons and the United States Senate, and which frankly views the Democratic Party not as a coalitional partner but as a means to an end.
Cowan likens the D.S.A. to Trump’s MAGA movement: an insurrection that Republicans first dismissed, then accommodated and finally were devoured by. “They pose, in my view, a mortal threat to the Democratic Party,” he told me.
Third Way, which spent heavily against Sanders’s campaigns in 2016 and 2020, announced in August that it would invest $15 million in a project to counter the D.S.A.’s rise. Otherwise, Cowan fears, a D.S.A.-aligned candidate like Ocasio-Cortez could mount a credible challenge for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028: “a reprise of Bernie 2016, 2020, but successfully this time.”
On this, many socialists agree. “Zohran’s campaign showed us the power that we have — and the power people have come here to take,” Diana Moreno, a D.S.A. assemblywoman from Queens, told me at the bar in Chicago, where a contingent of D.S.A.ers had gathered to discuss how to organize for an Ocasio-Cortez presidential run. “Now, it’s like, we’re heading for the moon, baby!”
On one level, the D.S.A.’s appeal in a guillotine-curious moment in American politics is obvious enough. “People really don’t like Donald Trump, according to the polls, and they really don’t like the Democratic Party,” John Nichols, executive editor of The Nation and co-author of a book with Sanders, told me. “D.S.A. comes along and says: ‘We’re different. We don’t like Trump, and we’re not particularly satisfied with the Democratic Party.’”
The D.S.A.’s membership amounts to less than 0.3 percent of registered Democrats, and its wins, even this year, fall far short of recent right-wing upheavals like MAGA and the Tea Party. But like those movements, the D.S.A. is a sort of black light illuminating the failures of the party it has taken as a host.
It has produced talents like Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani at a time when Democratic leaders’ approval ratings, and the party’s, are dismally underwater. Its politicians have won voters on issues like data-center construction and the war in Gaza, where more mainstream Democrats have been slow to grasp major shifts in the electorate or are paralyzed by the commitments of the party’s donor class and interest groups. Its grass-roots volunteers have helped the organization’s candidates beat much better-funded rivals and at times promoted simpatico (if not socialist) progressives like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race.
But the D.S.A. is also a movement with no demonstrated ability to expand the Democratic majorities it would need to implement even the most modest elements of its platform in a country where 57 percent of people, according to a Gallup Poll last August, still view socialism negatively. The internal factions that have gathered under its capacious definition of democratic socialism — “a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods and society” — range from slightly left of progressive to outright communist, and they are deeply divided on whether working within Democratic politics is even a desirable strategy, or rather a betrayal of the full revolutionary promise of their movement.
Its leaders view a presidential run by a popular D.S.A. politician with excitement but also trepidation. “There are people who feel like it would force a crisis and potentially help destroy our organization,” Siddique told me, “because we couldn’t deal with the contradictions.”
On an evening in early July, a couple of hundred New York socialists descended on a bar in Crown Heights, a Brooklyn neighborhood on the frontier of the Brooklyn and Queens districts known as the Commie Corridor, where the D.S.A. gained one of its first significant beachheads in Democratic politics in the late 2010s. At the bar, the wine was orange, the beer was Narragansett and the arak was Palestinian.
“Chelsea!” someone called out. I turned to see a newly arrived Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who served seven years in prison for leaking classified military and diplomatic files to Julian Assange, exchanging hugs with other guests. Manning has lately become a fixture of the New York D.S.A. chapter’s parties, where she occasionally plays D.J.
The party that night was a fund-raiser hosted by the influential socialist podcaster Daniel Denvir, along with a number of prominent New York D.S.A. activists and politicians, for David Morales, a socialist candidate for mayor in Providence, R.I.
The terroir of the D.S.A. varies from city to city. Events hosted by N.Y.C.-D.S.A., by far the organization’s largest chapter, feel like parties for a fashionable new literary journal, heavy on writer types with stick-and-poke tattoos and Ivy League diplomas stashed in Bushwick closets. Some of the bigger Midwestern chapters are more of a bartenders-and-bike-mechanics scene, while elsewhere there are strong notes of the intense left-liberal online fervor of 2020 — a boom year in D.S.A. recruitment — embodied by the social workers and librarians who are still on Bluesky yelling at people to wear masks. (In order to attend the Chicago summit, I was asked, for the first time in years, to submit proof of a negative Covid test.)
All of these subcultures are consistent with the findings of the D.S.A.’s last member survey, in 2021, whose respondents were by their own account overwhelmingly white, college-educated and urban. This is not a portrait of the working class the D.S.A. professes to champion — though the many critics who have noted this tend to misunderstand the D.S.A.’s project. The group seeks less to capture the working class, as it is usually understood in American politics, than to redefine it.
Its dream is a country where enviably paid union autoworkers, marginally employed immigrant Uber drivers, downwardly mobile graduate students and even comfortably middle-class professionals whose fortunes are more precarious than their parents’ are united by shared aspirations (health care, affordable housing), a shared view of who is standing in the way of them (billionaires, landlords, imperialists) and at least a bumper-sticker-level agreement about what is to be done. (Tax the rich. Abolish ICE. Free Palestine.)
Observed at close range, however, the D.S.A. feels less like a class expression than a cultural one. Offline communities built around shared interests — the sort once found in bowling alleys, all-ages punk-rock venues, church basements or radical bookstores — are rare now, and D.S.A. chapters fill this role. They offer not just a different politics but a different model for what participating in politics means. Chapter operations are heavily D.I.Y. affairs, which adds a giddy unreality to their victories, as if a group of college friends started a record label in their dorm room and somehow ended up using it to unseat an eight-term congressman. “It becomes a thing that you do to meet your friends — and to make friends,” Shua Sanchez, a 36-year-old organizer with the Milwaukee chapter, told me.
Even Democratic strategists who are wary of the group’s growing influence in the party grant that they have figured out something that the mainstream of the party now struggles to organically produce. “They’re real civic engagement,” said Adam Jentleson, a former staff member of Harry Reid’s and John Fetterman’s and president of the Searchlight Institute, a new Democratic think tank that is trying to drag the party away from the cultural politics of the 2020 era. “We don’t have Elks Clubs anymore. We don’t have union halls anymore, really. But we have these 50 people in a room discussing Robert’s Rules of Order. We shouldn’t let them determine the direction of the party, but we shouldn’t chase them out of the tent.”
There are recent antecedents to this in left-liberal politics — and not just the 2016 Sanders campaign. More than one D.S.A.er confided to me that their formative experience with grass-roots politics was the conventionally liberal 2008 candidacy of Barack Obama, whose two million volunteers, organized through Obama for America, propelled his campaign from long shot to the White House. Many Obama volunteers felt they were building a progressive force bigger than his presidency and were disappointed when Obama’s advisers shunted the volunteers off into the Democratic National Committee as a highly managed cheerleading operation for his administration.
“I knocked doors for Obama!” Sanchez, the Milwaukee D.S.A. organizer, told me. “And they never asked me to do anything again after that.” Megan Romer, the D.S.A.’s other national co-chair, who phone-banked for Obama in 2008, said that for the D.S.A., the experience had been “instructive”: “Like, how did that get dissolved? How did that get co-opted? Because there was organic energy.”
Renée Paradis, an election lawyer and a onetime progressive Democrat, also worked for Obama’s campaign, in 2008, and joined the D.S.A. immediately after Trump’s inauguration in 2017. “I was like, This elite theory of change is just absolutely inadequate to this problem,” she told me at the Brooklyn party.
Paradis worked on Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign, which more than any other introduced the political and media class to the D.S.A. The group’s organizers, however, generally regard Mamdani’s election last fall as more significant. “What’s different about Zohran,” Denvir, the podcast host, told me, “is that Zohran is a cadre member of N.Y.C.-D.S.A.” Unlike Ocasio-Cortez, who joined the organization around the time she started running for Congress, Mamdani spent years volunteering for and managing campaigns for other D.S. A. candidates before he ran himself.
Mamdani demonstrated his commitment after arriving in Gracie Mansion with his endorsements in New York’s congressional races, backing two D.S.A.-endorsed candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez, who won their primaries and will almost certainly win seats in November. This was a vision of an organization that didn’t just endorse politicians but produced them organically from its own rank and file, turning out candidates who saw themselves as part of its ongoing project.
“This would be really a foolish, silly, vain project if we just elected socialists for the sake of it,” Julia Salazar, a D.S.A. state senator, told the crowd in Brooklyn. “We elect socialists to build this movement, to build power together.”
“It feels like a moment of immense possibility,” Paradis, the election lawyer, told me. On this point, though, the D.S.A. was not entirely unified. As we talked, she was checking her phone. On social media, Rhode Island D.S.A.ers were fuming at the New Yorkers for participating in a fund-raiser for Morales, whom the state chapter refused to endorse. Although Morales was a socialist, the chapter was led by hard-liners who unendorsed him three years earlier for voting to re-elect the Democratic state house speaker.
These conflicts are not uncommon in the D.S.A. Decision making in the organization resides mostly at the level of its often fractious local chapters. The more moderate of those chapters, like New York, in turn sometimes find themselves at odds with the national organization, where more radical elements often have a loud voice.
For instance, although Ocasio-Cortez is endorsed by the New York chapter, the national D.S.A. has recently withheld its endorsement over what it views as insufficient commitment to several aspects of the D.S.A.’s program. The two national co-chairs are actively divided over her future. Siddique is involved in efforts to draft her for the 2028 presidential race, but Romer told me she is “a little bit skeptical of how committed A.O.C. is to D.S.A.”
These disagreements are partly structural and partly historical. The D.S.A. is an organization whose membership has mostly arrived in the heat of political crises and then has had to figure out what, exactly, they are doing together.
The D.S.A. was founded in 1982 by Michael Harrington, an influential midcentury public intellectual and activist who organized alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and wrote a book, “The Other America,” that inspired the Johnson administration’s “war on poverty.” Harrington, who died in 1989, was also the heir to the legacy of organized socialism in the United States — although at the time of his inheritance, there was not much left of it.
The Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901, was a prominent force in the early 20th century, fusing the agrarian populism that rose up in opposition to the inequality and corruption of the Gilded Age with radical elements of the labor movement and new Marxist thinking from Europe. Its membership included figures like Jack London, Helen Keller and W.E.B. Du Bois. At various points in the 1900s and 1910s, Socialists held seats in state legislatures, as well as the administrations of more than 30 towns and cities from New York to North Dakota to California.
When Eugene V. Debs ran as the Socialist candidate for president in 1912, he won 6 percent of the vote. Socialists saw his campaign as the beginning of an ascent. In fact, it was the peak. The party’s opposition to American involvement in World War I led to some of its leaders’ being prosecuted under the Sedition Act by Woodrow Wilson’s administration. When Debs ran for president again in 1920, it was from prison.
But the Socialist Party also fell victim to more prosaic, and often self-inflicted, misfortunes. Few of its politicians elected during the boom years managed to stay in office for more than one term. The party fell into an acrimonious factional struggle — then as now, a chronic left-wing habit — and in the 1920s, it lost much of its membership to the new American Communist Party, which was both more radical and better organized.
The socialists’ most popular ideas, meanwhile, were co-opted by progressive politicians, most fatefully Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal took an economic agenda that democratic socialists advanced in other countries and packaged it as Democratic policy. After the New Deal, the Democratic Party became the hegemonic power in American politics. The Socialist Party became a footnote.
By the time Harrington became chairman in 1968, the Socialists were a party in name only, whose political commitments would, to a 21st-century socialist, appear incongruous. They supported civil rights and labor but having split bitterly with their erstwhile comrades over the authoritarian direction taken by the Soviet Union, they were also fiercely anti-Communist and often hawkish in Cold War foreign policy. (Some would soon break from the left entirely, becoming the first generation of neoconservatives.) Unable to win electorally, the party had shifted toward cultivating influence within the Democratic Party through union leaders and sympathetic politicos.
But when the Democratic coalition cracked up in the late 1960s and ’70s, Harrington somehow managed to step on every resulting shard. He fell out almost immediately with the New Left. “We thought he was far too right-wing,” recalls the political historian Michael Kazin, at the time a member of Students for a Democratic Society. “He didn’t like revolution.” He also didn’t like Jimmy Carter, whom he viewed as unacceptably conservative, and backed Senator Ted Kennedy’s failed challenge in the 1980 primary. Two years later, locked out of the Democratic establishment and shocked by the Reagan Revolution, Harrington assembled the remnants of two earlier left-wing organizations into a new group, the Democratic Socialists of America.
“In the early ’80s, D.S.A. was basically meaningless,” said Kazin, who joined around that time. The group drew a modest membership of older Harringtonites and refugees from the New Left, like Kazin, who had been chastened by the movement’s post-1968 collapse amid political violence and ideological esotericism and were now willing to consider what Harrington called “the left wing of the possible.” But what was possible, in the ’80s, was not much.
The first inklings of the D.S.A.’s more promising second act came during Obama’s presidency. Though not a leftist, Obama drew an energy that in another time would very likely have found its way to more left-wing causes, attracting volunteers who saw him as an antiwar protest candidate or were simply captivated by the prospect of electing America’s first Black president. Taking office with a governing trifecta amid a crippling financial crisis, he also seemed to represent the first opportunity in decades to enact an ambitious progressive policy agenda.
But as hopes of a new New Deal receded in 2009 and 2010, the left soured on Obama. The first major expression of discontent, in late 2011, was Occupy Wall Street. The protest movement’s encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park happened to be a few blocks from D.S.A. headquarters, and a handful of members made a pilgrimage to the occupation, marching behind a red banner. But the protest’s most profound impact on the D.S.A. was an indirect one. “Without Occupy,” David Duhalde, later the D.S.A.’s deputy director, told me, “there’s no Bernie Sanders.”
The entrance of Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist (though not a D.S.A. member), into Democratic presidential politics was a historical pivot point in the American left. His gambit was as audacious as it was obvious: What if, instead of just railing against the two-party system, as left-wing activists had for decades, you actually tried to win by its own rules? Although he lost, his unexpectedly strong performance opened up a universe of possibilities.
These were most clearly articulated days after Trump’s election in an article in Jacobin, a buzzy newish socialist magazine aligned with the D.S.A., titled “A Blueprint for a New Party.” One of the magazine’s editors, Seth Ackerman, called for “a national political organization that would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a leadership accountable to its members and electoral candidates nominated at all levels throughout the country.”
This organization would, in effect, be a political party — but unlike the Green Party, with its dogmatic insistence on running on its own ballot line, it would be pragmatic about the two-party system. Its candidates would operate on the Sanders model, running independently when it made sense and in Democratic primaries when it did not. They would be within the Democratic Party but not of it; their real allegiance would be to a “truly democratic party” outside the system.
As it happened, a vehicle for this vision already existed, and the supporters of Sanders’s campaign, gathering offline and on social media, soon found it. On the eve of the 2016 election, the D.S.A. had 6,400 members. By the end of 2017, it had nearly 30,000.
“In 2017, there was a lot of trial and error,” Siddique, a Sanders-campaign volunteer who joined the D.S.A.’s Washington chapter that year, told me. “We were all just figuring out, What is socialism?” Siddique went on. “What is organizing? What are we doing here?”
Siddique and Romer, the organization’s national co-chairs, are now often summoned onto cable news shows to affirm the D.S.A.’s most radical positions, but they are not really movement leaders in a conventional sense. The national organization works to extract some semblance of consensus from its disparate chapters and caucuses — which, over the past decade, have sometimes heatedly debated the answers to those initial questions. Sanders’s campaign, out of which most of the new arrivals came, offered some points of policy agreement (Medicare for all) and some broad inclinations (fighting oligarchy) but plenty of blank spots, and fissures opened up quickly enough.
The splits were often generational in an organization whose median member age, after 2016, dropped suddenly to 33 from 68, according to its surveys. The new arrivals were mostly too young to remember the Soviet Union, and some — including Romer — proudly announced themselves to be Marxist-Leninists, which appalled the anti-Communist oldheads. The organization’s fast-proliferating new internal coalitions included a Communist Caucus.
On foreign policy, the new D.S.A.’s members mostly settled for a sort of all-purpose opposition to American imperialism and militarism — including U.S. membership in NATO, which the organization sees as “primarily an aggressive force,” Romer said. It continues to oppose arming Ukraine. “Do we want to go to war with Russia?” Romer asked. “Does that feel like a good idea to anybody?”
But one foreign-policy issue above all preoccupied the new members: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of them was Olivia Katbi, who joined the D.S.A. the day after the 2016 election in Portland, Ore., where she soon became co-chair of a new D.S.A. chapter.
“A lot of us who joined, myself included, were kind of new to politics,” Katbi, a 34-year-old high school track coach in Portland, told me. But Katbi, who is Syrian American and has Palestinian family members, had taken an interest in the Palestinian liberation movement several years earlier after attending a rally for the cause in Chicago. “That really opened my eyes about Palestine — and B.D.S.”
The then-decade-old Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement calls on governments and institutions to pressure Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories, expand the rights of Palestinian citizens and give Palestinian refugees the right to return. It had become a tenet of the broader left-wing activist milieu that gathered itself within the D.S.A. in 2017. At the organization’s convention that year, Katbi and several other members put forward a resolution for the D.S.A. to endorse B.D.S. When it passed, supporters erupted into cheers, waved a Palestinian flag and began chanting, “From the river to the sea/Palestine will be free.”
The D.S.A.’s founding cohort included many friends of the Israeli left, like Harrington, who considered himself a Zionist. This gave the B.D.S. resolution, like much of Israeli-Palestinian politics in America, a sort of Oedipal resonance: It was an act of breaking from the organization’s Harringtonite past and pointing it toward a more radical future.
But the issue opened up subtler divisions within the organization’s younger majority, which became visible in 2021, when Jamaal Bowman, a D.S.A.-endorsed New York freshman congressman and member of the organization, voted for additional funding for Israel’s missile-defense system and visited the country with a liberal Zionist organization. A D.S.A. working group dedicated to the B.D.S. issue, which had drawn the organization’s dedicated pro-Palestinian activists, reacted furiously, leading more than 50 local chapters in calling for Bowman’s expulsion.
The D.S.A.’s main governing entity, the national political committee, condemned Bowman but refused to expel him. The spat continued until the D.S.A.’s next biennial convention, in August 2023, when the committee succeeded in passing a resolution dissolving the B.D.S. working group.
These tensions exploded after Hamas fighters mounted an attack on Israeli military installations and civilians on Oct. 7. The statement the national D.S.A. issued that day allowed that “we unequivocally condemn the killing of all civilians” but argued that “today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime”; it also called on members to “take to the streets to join a protest for peace and against funding the Israeli state.” That day, N.Y.C.-D.S.A. promoted on its official X account a rally hosted by a coalition of other organizations (though not the D.S.A. itself), proclaiming the group “in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of occupation and apartheid.”
In the ensuing blowback, even some politicians allied with the group distanced themselves, and 24 prominent old-guard members announced their resignations. But in the coming weeks, as Israel launched its counterattack in Gaza, the D.S.A. faced an uprising on its other flank, too. Members of the organization’s disbanded B.D.S. working group staged a sit-in at the Washington office of Sanders, who had denounced both the Hamas attack and Israel’s reprisal, and shortly after announced that the group was leaving the D.S.A. entirely, reconstituting itself as an independent organization. The D.S.A., they claimed, was no longer “a safe space for our members to organize.”
The moment, Siddique told me, “felt like a massive crisis for the organization.” When I asked him whether there was consensus within the D.S.A. about the Oct. 7 attacks, he replied carefully: “I think we’re a big-tent organization. There’s always a very wide array of perspectives.”
But the duration and brutality of Israel’s invasion of Gaza has largely resolved the dispute in the pro-Palestinian vanguard’s favor. When the working group’s leaders reformed themselves within the D.S.A. last year, as a new coalition with the stated aim of building the organization “into a mass revolutionary force” that “advances anti-imperialist politics with Palestine as our compass,” they met with little opposition.
Still, the more pragmatic D.S.A.ers I met spoke of the hard-line activists with exasperation. Part of this was genuine disagreement — the view that, as one of them put it to me eye-rollingly, “you don’t actually have to ‘hand it to Hamas.’” But even some of the most pro-Palestinian voices in the D.S.A. considered the working group’s posturing unhelpful to the cause, if not openly nihilistic. “It’s really hard to organize with people who seem to hate the organization we’re organizing in,” Olivia Katbi wrote on X.
The conflict maps loosely onto a new kind of generational division in the D.S.A. Nearly a decade into the organization’s rebirth, the members who joined immediately out of the Sanders 2016 moment, organized around the project of winning electoral power, have mostly replaced the Harringtonites as the organization’s graying old guard. And they have increasingly found themselves defending that project against more recently arrived activists — the pro-Palestinian vanguard and various far-left factions — who see electoral politics as a cop-out, a delusional diversion from the true business of revolution.
More than once, I heard these activists described by other D.S.A.ers as “ultras” — an old Marxist pejorative for the far fringe of the left, the radicals who threatened to devour or derail movements. Ultras blew apart the New Left of the 1960s, and witnessing the explosion at close range had led many early D.S.A.ers to join the organization, with its sober-minded vision of change. Now their successors were learning the same lesson.
D.S.A. pragmatists believe that the organization’s electoral successes have helped settle some of these internal arguments in their favor. Its string of recent wins, from Mamdani to its congressional upsets this summer, have brought it attention that labor organizing and demonstrating have not, forcing the political mainstream to take the group seriously. But the D.S.A. itself has, in truth, not always been the principal driver of these wins. Its bottom-up structure — the national organization can back only candidates already endorsed by local chapters — and internal disagreements have made it slow to capitalize on the same shifts in politics that it has anticipated.
This is particularly true when it comes to Israel, on which Democratic voters, and especially young voters, have shifted sharply pro-Palestinian since the Israeli invasion of Gaza. This shift has led the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-Israel lobbying group better known as AIPAC, to wade aggressively into Democratic primaries. Its efforts have drawn a furious counterattack from Justice Democrats: a political action committee that, like the reinvigorated D.S.A., emerged from the 2016 Sanders campaign and works on behalf of left-wing congressional candidates.
Three of the D.S.A.’s five 2026 primary victories in national races were candidates endorsed and in some cases recruited by Justice Democrats to punch back at AIPAC-backed incumbents, who were only later endorsed by the D.S.A. Two of the three candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York and Melat Kiros in Colorado, are pro-Palestinian activists who just recently joined the socialist organization.
What the D.S.A. has been able to give these candidates is a grass-roots army: canvassers and phone bankers who can provide a valuable edge. On a hot and humid Sunday afternoon in July, Cara Tobe, an organizer with the D.S.A.’s Detroit chapter, was knocking on doors across several neighborhoods on behalf of a congressional candidate named Donavan McKinney, a Justice Democrats recruit challenging an AIPAC-backed Democratic incumbent, Representative Shri Thanedar, whom he would defeat two weeks later.
McKinney, a Black union organizer and state representative with family roots in the auto industry, had been a D.S.A. member since 2019 and was practiced in pitching its merits to prospective constituents in a plurality-Black, lower-income district. “A livable wage, to be able to work one job, to not only make ends meet but have some disposable income, benefits to take care of your family and a retirement to look forward to: That. Is. Socialism,” he told me. But the D.S.A.’s Detroit chapter decided to back him only many months into the race, to the frustration of supporters like Tobe.
Tobe, a 37-year-old Wisconsin native, wore a D.S.A. T-shirt and a “TEAM ZOHRAN” hat; like many D.S.A.ers, she had volunteered with Mamdani’s campaign in New York. In her doorstep conversations, she would talk up McKinney and mention the D.S.A. as a sort of if-you’re-curious aside.
The voters, all registered Democrats, sometimes took note and sometimes did not. The ones who recognized the D.S.A.’s name seemed to regard it positively. “D.S.A. is going to save this country,” a bookish-looking man in his 50s told her.
“Next year’s definitely going to be interesting,” Tobe told me as she made her way between houses. “We’ve never really had this many people going into Congress.” A member of the D.S.A.’s pragmatic camp, she believes these victories have pushed the organization in that camp’s direction. “It’s like, OK, we’re building a party,” she said.
The D.S.A.’s primary wins are likely to bring the group’s congressional contingent to seven members. That is far fewer than the several dozen that the Tea Party captured in its breakout year of 2010, but it is enough to upgrade its caucus from what is currently a duo — Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib, who was also elected in 2018 — to a bloc.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn-born, dispassionately tactical Democratic leader in the House, has a mutually antagonistic relationship with the D.S.A., which one of his advisers called “Team Gentrification” in last year’s mayoral race. But if Democrats return to the House next year with a narrow majority, “he needs all of our votes to be speaker,” said Chris Rabb, the D.S.A.-backed Democratic nominee in Pennsylvania’s third congressional district.
But transforming the government requires controlling not just a party but a majority. The compromise stimulus packages and health care legislation that Democrats passed under Obama, which D.S.A.ers now consider insufficient half-measures, required decisive numerical advantages in both chambers that neither party has seen since. “A political party exists for the purpose of gaining power, and then using that power to do good things in governing,” Cowan, the Third Way president, told me. Neither the D.S.A. nor Justice Democrats, Cowan points out, have flipped a single congressional seat from red to blue; their wins have simply pushed already-Democratic districts further left. If they couldn’t win the majorities they needed to enact their vision for the country, Cowan asked, “what the hell is the D.S.A. good for, then?”
This is one reason the next presidential election looms so large for both the D.S.A. and its intraparty enemies. Both anticipate that the Democratic presidential primary will feature a D.S.A.-aligned candidate like Ocasio-Cortez, whose presidential ambitions are a matter of intense speculation. (Through her staff, she declined to comment for this article.)
To the D.S.A., contesting the presidency at the nadir of the Democratic Party’s popularity, and at the height of the organization’s own, is an opportunity — and also, in all likelihood, a necessity. The most radical paradigm shifts in American governance, from F.D.R. to Reagan to Trump, have required a head of state’s unique power to make once-marginal political ideas — from the progressive welfare state to free-market conservatism to right-wing authoritarianism — mainstream, to acclimatize even disengaged citizens to the previously unthinkable.
The Democratic Party’s moderates and many of its reformers fear that a D.S.A. candidacy would extend Republican control of the country at a genuinely existential moment, dividing the party and, if it succeeded, sending the Democrats into a general election with the S-word hanging around their neck: a label that remains anathema to a majority of American voters.
Socialists counter that as a general election matter, socialism’s popularity is unproven, because it is untested. Few people would have imagined that a socialist could win 43 percent of the Democratic primary vote in a presidential election, after all, before Sanders. And a socialist Democratic candidate running in a competitive general election remains a theoretical proposition — which was why, for several weeks in July and August, Francesca Hong suddenly became a figure of great significance in American politics.
Hong, a state assemblywoman and chef from Madison, was a relatively recent convert to the D.S.A.; she told me that she didn’t know much about the organization until 2020, when the group’s small Madison chapter endorsed a friend with whom she was campaigning during her first race. Running for governor this year, she became an early progressive favorite but was not a dominant presence in the race until mid-July, when her closest rival dropped out over campaign-finance irregularities — making Hong, overnight, the top Democratic contender.
If a democratic socialist could win a Democratic governor’s race anywhere, it might have been Wisconsin, a state with a deep progressive political culture and one of the last redoubts of the old Socialist Party; its largest city, Milwaukee, had Socialist mayors throughout the first half of the 20th century. Wisconsin is also a stubbornly purple state, and a Hong victory would have set up a clarifying test of socialism’s potential, and limits, in American politics.
Shua Sanchez, the Milwaukee D.S.A. organizer, likened the possibility of her winning to Obama’s upset in the Iowa caucuses in 2008. If Hong could “show that a socialist woman of color can win in a state like Wisconsin,” he said, “that opens the door to someone like A.O.C. winning a presidential race.”
When I caught up with Hong in late July, the state’s mainstream Democrats were in the midst of a panic. David Crowley, the county executive of Milwaukee, who had dropped out of the race days earlier, had hastily re-entered it, with the immediate endorsement of Gov. Tony Evers. “I think when you fight power, power fights you back,” Hong told me as we rode back to Madison from a campaign stop in Baraboo. “People are inherently afraid of change, sometimes, when it means a change to your influence, right?”
Some powers, however, seemed happy enough to have Hong in the race. Republican groups were in the midst of spending around $4 million on TV ads spotlighting Hong’s progressive agenda. This reflected a bipartisan conventional wisdom that Hong — a dogged campaigner but an unpracticed retail politician with a lot of unexploded ordnance in her social media posts from the fever season of 2020 and 2021 — would be an enviable opponent for Republicans.
Hong had initially broken out from the Democratic field with her sharply defined positions on new issues like data center construction. But as she went from outsider curiosity to heavily scrutinized front-runner, she struggled to defend herself instead on old positions: past exhortations to abolish the police, a tweet calling to “cancel Thanksgiving.” Evers, asked whether Hong could beat the Republican candidate, Tom Tiffany, said, “Probably not.”
The drama had strangely little to do with Hong’s socialism per se. Her old statements weren’t all that particular to the D.S.A.; they were part of the broader progressive sprint to the far edge of social-justice politics in the first Trump term, in which many mainstream Democrats, too, had participated. Asked about Hong’s statements on ABC’s “This Week,” Ocasio-Cortez responded, “Woke 1 was crazy” — a popular shrug of a self-absolving catchphrase among Democrats that, as it happens, originated with a D.S.A. City Council member in New York. Still, Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse Hong, nor did Sanders — and nor did the national D.S.A.
On the Wisconsin primary election night of Aug. 11, Hong’s supporters packed into a music venue in Madison. On the edge of the mostly millennial and Gen Z crowd, Barbara Clark and Patty Elson were taking in the scene. Clark, a 72-year-old retired public-school teacher, and Elson, an 80-year-old retired real estate agent, were, as they were quick to point out, well outside of the crowd’s demographic; they were the kind of well-dressed, genial baby boomers I encountered more frequently in liberal Resistance contexts, at post-Women’s March kaffeeklatsches and No Kings rallies.
“I think a lot of older people are afraid,” Clark told me. She had worked for years on Democratic campaigns, including managing a local office for the Obama campaign in 2008 and volunteering for his re-election in 2012. “Now, I can’t do that anymore,” she said.
I asked Clark whether she now considered herself a Democrat, a democratic socialist or both. “I don’t know what I think of myself as anymore,” she said. “I mean, I was a Democrat. I really was. A straight Democrat.”
“The party has shriveled up,” Elson said. “They haven’t done a thing because of that corporate money. It’s keeping them in line.”
The early returns were starting to come in, and they were much closer than the last polls, which had Hong up by double digits. The supporters’ ebullience acquired an anxious edge. When Hong appeared late in the night, she spoke elegiacally about “how we’re going to win together in November — and for Novembers to come.” When the final ballots were counted, she had lost to Crowley by several thousand votes.
Just before midnight, I ran into Clark and Elson again on their way out. I asked them what they thought had happened. “He got a lot of the Democratic money people,” Clark said of Crowley.
“I think she would’ve won,” Elson said, her voice quavering. The future was so close. But now, once again, they would have to wait.
But from another angle, Hong’s loss was a kind of victory for the D.S.A: A socialist candidate whom even the socialists had been hesitant about had come remarkably close to winning a major statewide election and would be spared the blame for a loss, if it occurred, in November.
When I suggested this reading to Siddique, the national co-chair, he demurred, allowing only that Hong’s run “had really raised everyone’s expectations.” The margin had been small, he emphasized, “and now we have way more data now about how far we can get with our existing strength — and what more can happen going forward.” The movement had fallen short of proving what it claimed was possible. But that only meant it still was.
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