Socialists Are Tearing Through the Democratic Party Establishment

At that victory party in Brooklyn, I watched as hundreds of canvassers, organizers and DSA members burst out in rhapsody as the candidates they spent months knocking doors and making calls for were officially called as the party’s nominees. Following thunderous chants of ​“DSA, DSA” from the crowd, Valdez declared ​“We haven’t just won an election, we’ve declared that this movement is durable, that it is growing, and that it will not stop until working people are no longer asked to just build the table, no longer just offered a seat at the table, but run the table.” 

A week before the primary, Mamdani held a rally at the Kings Theater in Brooklyn to hype his endorsed candidates along with Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose presidential runs helped seed this blossoming movement. 

Sanders asked the packed room: ​“Why are progressives and socialist candidates winning elections all across this country? The answer in my view is not complicated. The working class of America understands that our current economic system is rigged, that it is designed to benefit the wealthy and the powerful.”

He went on to cite other recent primary wins for the Left: Both Analilia Mejia, a union organizer, and Dr. Adam Hamawy, a surgeon who volunteered in Gaza, are likely headed to Congress from New Jersey; Graham Platner, a Marine veteran and oyster farmer, won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Maine; Randy Villegas, an educator and auto shop owner is running as an economic populist in a purple district in California’s Central Valley; Chris Rabb is a Pennsylvania House representative and DSA member running unopposed for Congress; and Janeese Lewis George is a democratic socialist who will be the next mayor of Washington, D.C.

These candidates are all running on a Sanders’ style agenda of universal social programs funded by taxing the rich to wrest back their hoarded wealth.

In 2024, progressives were largely on their back foot, defending (and in some cases losing) seats they’d won in previous cycles. But now the momentum has turned, as a restive electorate is fed up with the status quo and willing to take a chance on a politics of redistribution and solidarity. 

It’s fair to question whether full-on democratic socialist politics can fly in more traditionally moderate parts of the country — even DSA National Co-Chair Megan Romer recently told Vox: ​“Predictably, our electoral victories map pretty closely onto blue cities and blue states, that’s not surprising. We’re not blind to this. It is something that is being worked on.”

But what’s clear is that a message of delivering real material change to working people while opposing the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Palestine can build majorities and replace the hollow husk of a gutless Democratic establishment that helped bring us a maniacal second term of President Donald Trump. 

In the hours following the results in New York, pundits and centrist Democrats expressed alarm, fearing the implications of a U.S. socialist upheaval. 

Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville floated the idea of a ​“schism” in the party, saying ​“there’s some shit I can’t be in the same tent as.” Former DNC Chair Jaime Harrison posted on X, ​“If you hate the Democratic Party then please don’t run for our nomination … If you don’t believe in the party then don’t expect its members to carry you across the finish line.” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who has previously supported Mamdani, warned: ​“All of us are a little frustrated with the Democratic Party. But you don’t blow it up. That’s what MAGA has done.” 

The day after the primary, Mamdani responded to some of these criticisms in an interview with MS NOW’s Chris Hayes: 

“What is the Democratic Party if not its voters? And what we saw yesterday evening were Democrats across the city turning out and voting for a new kind of politics. And I’ve been clear time and time again that I believe the only majority in our country is that of the working class,” Mamdani said. ​“And what we saw is that a focus on the working class — whether it’s from Claire, whether it’s from Darializa, whether it’s Brad — is what New Yorkers want to see.” 

It’s a defense that’s hard to argue with: party leadership isn’t meant to choose what Democrats want to see from their elected officials — voters are. And candidates backed by corporate interests, Big Tech and AIPAC are increasingly being trounced by challengers who will name the threat of oligarchy, offer concrete solutions to the affordability crisis, oppose sending military aid to war criminals and challenge Trump’s authoritarianism. Claiming that’s not what the Democratic Party actually wants suggests that the whole premise of democracy might not be the apparatchiks’ top priority. 

Meanwhile, a group of self-proclaimed moderate House Democrats released a letter two days after the primary attempting to distance the party from the DSA-backed winners, asserting, ​“We are capitalist, not socialist.”

There’s no doubt the party establishment is firmly pro-capitalist, but its base is increasingly moving in the other direction: According to a recent CNN poll, within the Democratic coalition, democratic socialism is now more popular than sitting Democrats in Congress, and socialism is viewed far more favorably than capitalism. 

These shifts are a testament to Sanders’ campaigns and the dedicated work of DSA members who have spent years organizing to break the stranglehold of capitalism in defining the bounds of our political debate. They also reflect the fact that ​“the ​‘S’ word” is losing its stigma and steadily being understood by the public as DSA founder Michael Harrington described it in a February 1988 issue of In These Times: ​“Socialism was conceived of as a program of democratic socialization from below, as a movement to put the people in control of the economic conditions which determine so much about their lives.” 

Some Democratic functionaries are responding to the upsurge by crying foul and demanding a socialist expulsion from the party. Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) told CBS, ​“Zohran Mamdani and every other democratic socialist should create their own party because I don’t want that in my party,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) said to CNN, ​“if you’re a socialist, you’re not a Democrat” and former Andrew Cuomo chief of staff Melissa DeRosa called democratic socialists ​“parasites” in a Fox News interview. 

But attempting to stamp out the source of energy and enthusiasm in your political coalition is a surefire way to ensure minority status, and further degrade the Democratic Party brand. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said of democratic socialists in response to such comments, ​“you can’t tell them to get out and then in a presidential cycle tell them they have an obligation to vote for you.” Politics is, as always, a two-way street. 

There are plenty of other democratic socialist and progressive candidates running in upcoming primaries who are also rallying behind a platform of antiwar class politics this cycle, including Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado (whose primary is tonight), Cori Bush in Missouri, Justin Pearson in Tennessee and Francesca Hong, a Milwaukee DSA-backed Wisconsin State Assembly member who has surged to the top of the pack in the race for governor. Hong tells In These Times, ​“Right now, a lot of people are asking whether democratic socialism can win outside places like New York City. People are hungry for a politics that names the problem clearly: when corporations and billionaires control the economy, working people pay the price.” 

These campaigns are bound together by a belief that the working class should be at the center of our politics rather than a cabal of billionaires. And the successes already this primary season, along with potential victories down the road, could lead to the largest cohort of left-wing members of Congress in a generation. 

With the 2028 presidential race two years away — and with Ocasio-Cortez being floated as an heir apparent to the rising democratic socialist movement — the wins so far this primary season are a clear signal that, whoever decides to run, a lane is open for a campaign willing to further jostle the political order from the left.