The blue wave that crashed through American politics last week carried some socialist sea foam.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a growing force in progressive politics that has also emerged as a political lightning rod, secured eight seats in the House.
Democratic socialists will serve as mayor of the country’s capital and its two largest cities.
And come January, the movement’s explosive growth will also stretch much further: At least 54 DSA-endorsed state lawmakers will serve across 19 states.
The DSA is dwarfed in size by most other political organizations — it has about 130,000 members, on par with Illinois’ largest teachers union. But its rapid rise since the election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) last year has reshaped the American political left.
Katie Sims, the national DSA’s electoral chair, said the influx of new elected leaders shows the group’s growing power and grassroots approach to winning elections, particularly in cities like New York, Los Angeles, D.C., and Detroit, where its chapters have powered disciplined door-knocking operations.
“In a country that has had such a hollowed-out political life, where elections are won or lost by a really small number of donor-class people, it’s pretty novel and pretty powerful to have tens of thousands of people go outside and talk to their neighbors to win an election,” Sims said.
Republicans have relentlessly attacked democratic socialism in ads and campaign speeches, sometimes conflating it with communism.
More mainstream figures within the Democratic Party have warned that many of the ideas in the DSA’s intentionally radical platform, such as abolishing prisons and the Senate, threaten the party’s broad appeal outside liberal metro areas.
These center-left voices argue that midterm election results show voters prefer moderates, pointing to candidates in that mold who won a greater number of seats by larger margins and pulled off upsets in GOP-friendly districts. Democrats who flipped Senate seats in red states such as Kansas and South Carolina explicitly criticized democratic socialism.
“Democratic socialists get the attention, but moderates made this week’s Democratic majorities,” Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal, wrote on X.
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), both DSA members who won reelection, will be joined by another six DSA-endorsed candidates won seats in Congress, including four who ousted longtime incumbents.
The list includes Melat Kiros (Colorado), a barista who says she was fired from her lawyer job for speaking out on the war on Gaza; Darializa Avila Chevalier (New York), who participated in pro-Palestine encampments at her alma mater, Columbia University; progressive state lawmaker Donavan McKinney (Michigan); and Angela Gonzales-Torres, a community organizer whose father was deported to Mexico when she was a teenager.
Mai Vang, who was endorsed by the Sacramento DSA, lost her general election challenge to Rep. Doris Matsui (D-California), the Associated Press said Tuesday.
The DSA’s emphasis on “co-governance” with its endorsed elected officials has also led to some conflicts spilling into public view, particularly on foreign policy and criminal justice issues where elected officials have strayed from the group’s platform.
DSA’s national organization withdrew its endorsement of Ocasio-Cortez after she expressed support for funding Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. (She later said she would oppose all military aid to Israel.)
Likewise, Los Angeles Mayor-elect Nithya Raman (D) lost her support from national DSA — and nearly from the group’s Los Angeles chapter — because she never fully endorsed targeting Israel with boycotts, divestment and sanctions.
Of 165 DSA-endorsed candidates who ran last Tuesday, 107 won their races and another two are headed to runoffs, according to the DSA’s electoral tracker. Their victories include races for mayor of Ann Arbor, Michigan, a majority of the Burbank, California, city council, and a conservative-leaning statehouse seat in the Tampa Bay area.
Ashik Siddique, the DSA’s national co-chair, said those wins are a reflection of a focus on organizing at the local and state level, particularly after Bernie Sanders — one of the country’s most prominent democratic socialists — came up short in his 2016 run for the White House.
Yet this year’s election also showed limited success in purple and battleground districts. Some of the most-hyped candidates in those areas for statehouses in Kansas, New Mexico and Vermont lost.
DSA does not track all members who run for elected office, only those who are endorsed by a local chapter or later by the national organization, so its tally is an incomplete figure.
Its totals do not, for example, include David Morales, who won the mayor’s race in Providence, Rhode Island, but was not endorsed by his DSA chapter, which is so far-left that it does not support candidates running in Democratic primaries, or Angie Nixon, who narrowly lost the race for U.S. Senate in Florida and was backed by only some of its smallest chapters in that state.
Nixon, who was among the most high-profile candidates for federal office, only joined DSA over the summer but later distanced herself from the group.
She posted a strong showing in parts of South Florida full of Cuban and Venezuelan immigrants who had fled socialist regimes and whom some had warned might be impossible to win over under the DSA label.
DSA leaders say they have momentum nationally, including a soon-to-be 16-member caucus in New York’s 213-person legislature.
“Those are gains that can foreshadow more to come,” Siddique said.
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