The socialist wave seeking to take over the US Democratic Party

As the US mid-term elections draw nearer, the Democratic left’s gamble is taking on unexpected risks: within this strand of transatlantic progressivism, there is indeed a growing hope that the country – or at least a significant portion of it – is ready to go further than ever before in envisioning a nation that has been revised and corrected – indeed, sanitised – following the Trumpian poisoning. And all this is based on the debatable belief that a collectivist sentiment is on the verge of supplanting America’s deep-rooted individualistic ethos, as part of a profound rethinking of the platform upon which to rebuild a national identity. A fascinating hypothesis if analysed by a think tank, but it remains to be seen whether it will stand the test of the ballot box in a general election.

And yet this exotic whiff of socialism is in the air and in people’s conversations; it is on university campuses and in television debates. And the first figures coming in lend credence to the hypothesis, however difficult it may be to give it credence.

American politics has always experienced visionary summers – moments when an impassioned minority becomes convinced, and for a few months convinces others, that the country is on the brink of a mass conversion. Such is the case with this gradual rise of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who are already in power in New York, will soon be in power in Washington, and are currently testing the waters in Michigan and Wisconsin – with mixed results – to see whether this fervour is anything more than a flash in the pan fuelled by anger. The results of the last few weeks are nonetheless surprising for a group that, four years ago, was described as condemned to eternal purgatory, because in the 2020s, if a Democrat were to win over America, they could at best resemble Joe Biden. Then Trump exploded onto the scene, with all that entailed. And now we find ourselves with Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York, with Janeese Lewis George – a candidate backed by the DSA – on course to become mayor of Washington, and with other politicians supported by this organisation who have made their voices heard in various congressional primaries.

On 4 August, Abdul El-Sayed defeated the centrist Haley Stevens in Michigan to secure the Democratic nomination for the Senate, but things did not go quite so well for the favourite, Francesca Hong, a DSA representative contesting the Democratic primary for the governorship of Wisconsin, who was narrowly defeated by the more moderate David Crowley – further evidence that the electorate’s mandate for candidates who are heavily skewed to the left remains, for the time being, somewhat ambiguous.

This remains a new development on the American political scene: the DSA is not a party but an organisation that fields its own candidates on the Democratic ticket, with the aim of changing the party from within rather than competing against it. Within the group, decisions are voted on by members rather than imposed by the executive committee, and activism extends to trade union organising, which keeps the group mobilised even beyond election cycles. And in an era in which the major parties have replaced the old system of door-to-door canvassing with paid advertising, the DSA still has an army of volunteers willing to knock on the doors of American homes: a real, rather than rhetorical, structural advantage.

Herein lies the paradox, and it is a demographic paradox rather than a political one. The DSA presents itself as a working-class party, but its membership bears no resemblance to the working class. In the latest survey from 2021, four out of five members aged over 25 hold a degree – double the proportion in the general adult US population – a third hold a PhD or a master’s degree, a third identify as homosexual, and those reported to be working as police officers are excluded from activism strategies. The average supporter identifies with one basic characteristic: they are under fifty and do not own their own home – the definitive hallmark of classic American identity. In short: ‘young voters wanted’, in an attempt to finally engage the latecomers in political affairs – an issue marginalised for far too long in the interests of the under-30s, but now brought to the fore through mobilisations around major international crises. This gives rise to the profile of the well-informed millennial on a downward social trajectory, certainly not that of the unionised worker.

National polls confirm this pattern even on a large scale: according to Pew Research, only 32 per cent of Democrats support leaders who describe themselves as democratic socialists, and those who do are white (40 per cent, compared with 21 per cent of Black people and 20 per cent of Hispanics), young, university-educated (41 per cent compared with 26 per cent of those without a degree) and of medium-to-high income (40 per cent compared with 24 per cent of those in lower income brackets). We are a long way from the coalition that Bernie Sanders had built in 2020, when he was popular amongst white people without a degree and garnered more support amongst Latinos than amongst Black people: today’s American socialism, having grown in visibility, has been reshaped in terms of its composition.

The gap is striking when it comes to the issues. Only half of the working class believe that dismissing or evicting a trans person is illegal, compared with 82 per cent of left-wing graduates; and ‘taxing the rich’ features among the top ten priorities only for white, left-wing graduates, not for working-class voters, who remain wary of the expansion of the welfare state and committed to a meritocratic ethic. The group’s platform, with a vaguely Leninist flavour, goes so far as to speak of the need to “cultivate class consciousness”. In fact, in Los Angeles, the local DSA branch has grown from 1,000 members in 2018 to over 5,000, and holds four of the fifteen seats on the city council. In California, the group has just made its first openly socialist endorsement for a state office, with Oliver Ma standing as a candidate for lieutenant governor. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the case of Summer Lee is somewhat different: in a post-industrial constituency that is poorer and more working-class than the average progressive urban area, Lee is the first Black woman to represent the state in Congress, albeit as a representative of the moderate Working Families Party, a Democratic splinter group whose membership base, compared to the DSA’s, more closely resembles the actual working class it claims to represent. In San Francisco, meanwhile, the limits of this expansion are plain to see: the moderate Daniel Lurie was elected mayor, proving that not even the city that symbolises the Californian left is a sure thing for the DSA.

Some are already venturing a comparison between the DSA and the European Greens, because the typical profile of the Green voter – young, university-educated, urban, with a medium-to-high income – resembles that of the American socialist sympathiser: both belong to what political scientists call the ‘new middle class’, people with sufficient financial security to be able to commit to long-term causes. The Greens had their moment (peaking in the 2019 European elections), followed by a setback in the 2024 European elections, where they lost eight seats in France and nine in Germany, partly due to the climate issue losing ground in the face of inflation, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis, alongside the simultaneous rise of the populist right. There is, however, one difference: the European Greens stand as separate parties in proportional representation systems, condemned to remain a permanent minority force. The DSA in Washington already holds seats in Congress, albeit just a handful out of the Democratic Party’s more than two hundred seats in the House of Representatives. Their strategy is one of engagement rather than secession, and for this reason the prospect of a DSA presidential nomination for 2028 (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?) is not as far-fetched as it might seem.

It is true that the DSA can only grow as far as the Democratic Party is willing to allow. But under the US electoral system, a presidential candidate need only ensure that their minority base is sufficiently organised and motivated to decide the primaries in a couple of key states. This is the mechanism that worked in New York, through which the DSA is banking on a rise to national electoral success. But in the meantime, there is the test in November. Even today, it seems unlikely that the Democratic electorate will ultimately decide to align itself with certain socio-cultural snobberies of the DSA’s proposal, finding them compatible with traditional American pragmatism. Yet it is a fact that, aided by the psychological emergency caused by Trump’s second term, a socialist vision has never come so close to becoming genuinely competitive. If it were ultimately to crumble and America were to confirm itself as what we suspect it has irreversibly become, the New York season risks remaining what summers usually are: a hot and memorable episode, followed by unexpectedly cold and biting autumns.