Democrats who attack their party’s nominees for being socialists have a problem: the Democrats.
A Gallup poll from September showed that 66 percent of Democrats—that’s two out of every three—had a positive view of socialism, while just 42 percent had a positive view of capitalism. A YouGov poll from April, sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute, showed the same level of favorability toward socialism among Democrats (67 percent), while just half (50 percent) had a favorable view of capitalism.
In the polls, respondents under 30 show the highest levels of favorability for socialism and those over 64 the lowest, both within Democratic ranks and among the public at large. It’s disproportionately the young, of course, who are bearing the brunt of an economy that isn’t hiring, along with the cost of housing and child care. Moreover, those under 30 were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while those over 64 were around for right-wing attacks equating Democrats’ support for social democratic programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to Soviet Communism.
The American right, and various Andrew Cuomo supporters, are leveling the same kind of attacks on Zohran Mamdani’s social democratic platform, which, they say, has been devised to mask his attraction to Joseph Stalin’s gulags. It’s not only New York’s younger voters who view such assertions as they would an offer to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
A more significant breakdown of the crosstabs in these polls is that which YouGov performed by type of region. In an article for NOTUS, the redoubtable John Judis found that “56% of suburbanites, 69% of those from small towns, and 70% from rural areas disapproved of socialism.” (Those figures are for the public at large rather than just Democrats. My guess is that at least 50 percent, but probably not much more than that, of suburban Democrats have a favorable view of socialism.)
When I look at such data, it confirms what is already apparent in American politics: There’s an urban-to-rural ideological continuum that runs left to right (and not just in the United States). That raises a question for Democrats’ electoral prospects: How do they handle that divide?
66 percent of Democrats have a positive view of socialism, while just 42 percent have a positive view of capitalism.
Let’s look at that question through a lens focused on the banks of the Hudson River. On the east bank, New York City, avowed democratic socialist and Democratic Party nominee Zohran Mamdani is poised to win the city’s mayoral election tomorrow. On the west bank, New Jersey Democratic Party nominee Mikie Sherrill is poised for a close gubernatorial election tomorrow, having done her damnedest not to take any positions that might ruffle a voter presumed to be in the middle of the ideological spectrum.
That the New Jersey race has become a cliff-hanger is not just due to the limitations of that strategy, but also to Sherill’s general political ineptitude. When asked one of the softest of softball questions during a television interview—“If you could pass one piece of legislation, what would it be?”—her befuddlement was such that Republican opponent Jack Ciattarelli turned it into one of his ads. As much as anything, she has been running on her biography as an exemplary member of the military and opposition to Donald Trump. While Mamdani may have close to 100,000 volunteers pounding the pavement for him tomorrow, Sherrill will be lucky to have 15,000 canvassers, both volunteer and paid, walking statewide for her. Having effectively declined—partly by design, partly by temperament—to have a clear political profile, a postmortem for her campaign, should she lose, might well be a line from Lear: “Nothing will come of nothing.”
That doesn’t mean that Democratic moderates can’t campaign effectively in swing states and districts. The affordability agenda that Mamdani has tailored to New York can be tailored in ways that appeal to non-big-city voters, too. Nebraska’s Dan Osborn, the blue-collar worker who ran for Senate in that state last year on a platform of progressive economics and centrist social issues (such as closing the border) ran 14 points better than Kamala Harris, though it was not enough to win in that very red state. (He’s running for the state’s other Senate seat next year.) In Virginia, where Democrat Abigail Spanberger is heavily favored to win tomorrow’s gubernatorial election, she has campaigned, as has Sherrill, as a woman with a background in national security (she’s worked for the CIA) and bipartisan initiatives, but has also emphasized her own affordability agenda, including requiring the tech companies now gobbling up regions of the state (such as D.C. exurb Loudoun County) with their AI facilities to pay for the increases to Virginians’ electricity bills that rise in tandem with each new AI plant.
Clearly, it takes a range of Democrats to win in a range of political terrains. It doesn’t appear, however, that all Democrats, or all Democratic elected officials, understand that. In the suburbs of Long Island and northern New Jersey, respectively, Democratic House members Tom Suozzi and Josh Gottheimer have opposed Mamdani’s candidacy, his decisive victory in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary notwithstanding. That may be because they view their districts as today’s equivalent of suburban Detroit’s Macomb County in the 1980s, where historically Democratic white voters had come to view the party as the tool of big-city Blacks. More remarkably, Rep. Dan Goldman, whose congressional district encompasses Lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, has also refused to endorse Mamdani, though Mamdani is poised to win Goldman’s district by a wide margin tomorrow.
On the other hand, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—who, along with Mamdani and Bernie Sanders, is one of the three leaders of American democratic socialism—has reached across the Hudson to endorse Sherrill, their political differences notwithstanding. For that matter, she’s reached across the country, too: She’s one of the national figures now appearing in television and social media ads for California’s Proposition 50, along with Barack Obama. That campaign’s leader, Gov. Gavin Newsom, apparently concluded that the pluses of showing AOC validating his redistricting measure, which would counter the Republicans’ gerrymandering in Texas, outweighed the minuses.
The through line that had better connect Democrats of all regions is a progressive economics.
This difference in standards for cross-ideological endorsement isn’t only regional; it also is a function of the very different identities of the Democrats’ donors. AOC, whose low-dollar donations from rank-and-file supporters have given her the single-largest campaign treasury of any member of Congress (Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is number two) isn’t constrained by donations from corporations and the wealthy to her coffers. Suozzi and Gottheimer, by contrast, both of whom have waged unsuccessful primary campaigns for statewide office and may do so again, may have reason to fear that the corporations and the wealthy who fund their campaigns may pull back were they to signal that a socialist in Gracie Mansion would merely hark back to Fiorello La Guardia rather than raise the specters of Lenin and Mao.
Here’s what Democrats need to understand: New York will be just one of most major cities to be led by left-wing, social democratic Democrats for the foreseeable future, whether those Democrats proclaim themselves socialists or not. (The ideological differences between Mamdani and the current mayors of Los Angeles and Chicago are negligible; their chief difference is that Mamdani is simply a much better pol than Karen Bass and Brandon Johnson.)
Likewise, more ideologically moderate Democrats will dominate in less urban terrains, and a far-left Democratic primary challenge to a moderate incumbent in a pro-Trump district isn’t likely to end happily. But that moderation, if those moderates are actually going to win elections, will come chiefly on the culture-war issues that Mamdani has rigorously avoided during his mayoral run. On economics, success will require the kind of progressive populism of a Dan Osborn, or at least the affordability-over-corporate-power stances that Spanberger has shown toward our tech giants.
The through line that had better connect Democrats of all regions is a progressive economics, particularly as the job market appears to be going into long-term stagnation or worse, and as economic inequality continues to reach ever more dizzying heights. After all, it’s not as if the Democrats have never been rent by social and cultural differences before. In the 1920s, the party was split down the middle by the gulf between the ethnic mishmash of its big-city machines and the Protestant fundamentalism and xenophobia of its Solid (and all-white) South. On immigration, on Prohibition, on a host of issues, the two sides of the party appeared to be irreconcilably divided, which is why it took the party two weeks and 103 ballots to agree on a presidential nominee (whose appeal was that he was almost totally unknown) at its 1924 convention.
Then the Depression came, and the economic rescue policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt were all that mattered to both camps. This is not 1929, much less 1932, I readily acknowledge, but the short-term and long-term prospects for the economy look pretty bleak, and the through line of progressive-populist economic policy looks to be the one line to which Democrats of all regions and persuasions would do well to cling.