America’s most prominent democratic socialist, the man who stamped that political tendency on the current American map—Bernie Sanders—is not now nor has he ever been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. As a young man, Sanders belonged to some fringe leftist organizations and apparently swore off such affiliations—whether the groups were fringe or not—as he grew older.
Sanders is hardly alone in avowing that he’s a democratic socialist, yet not a member of DSA. According to a late-July poll conducted by SSRS for CNN, 34 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaners say they’re democratic socialists, too. Depending on the unavoidably imprecise tallies of just how many Democrats and Democrat-leaners are actually out there, that would mean that roughly 20 million Americans describe themselves as democratic socialists. If your gut, like mine, thinks that number may be implausibly high, let’s call it 15 million real American socialists. Even at that level, however, DSA’s total membership of roughly 120,000 constitutes less than 1 percent of the Americans who’ve chosen to call themselves democratic socialists.
Any number of polls show that Americans’ views of socialism and socialist candidates are considerably higher than anyone would have guessed 20 years ago. (In 2009, I wrote in my Washington Post column that the only socialist I knew in Washington besides Sanders was “the guy I see in the mirror when I shave.”) A July Morning Consult poll from the libertarian Cato Institute shows that 37 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of socialism, with an identical 37 percent registering an unfavorable opinion. The CNN poll shows that 73 percent of Democrats feel either “enthused” or “okay” about democratic socialist candidates.
According to recent polling, 32 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaners say they’re democratic socialists, too.
So what is it that separates the 99 percent of avowed American socialists from the not quite 1 percent who belong to DSA? Both groups are disproportionately young, though the kind of activism that is common to DSA members puts demands on one’s time that grow more difficult to meet if one has children. For that reason and more, DSA’s culture is distinctly generational. Many of its strengths and weaknesses are those of youth groups: zeal, enough time for activism and strong social bonding, a relative dearth of real-world experience, and a cocooned sensibility that can lead one to think that beliefs within that cocoon traffic well outside that cocoon as well.
All the polling indicates that some core democratic socialist tenets are trafficking fairly well outside the cocoon: more comprehensive social insurance, governmental assumption of necessities now left to the private sector (e.g., child care, senior care, health care, college), vastly more worker power, greatly increased taxation on the wealthy to fund such policies. My hunch (as I haven’t seen any polling on this precise issue) is that when the 99 percent of those describing themselves as democratic socialist would be asked to define what they mean by that, their answers would focus on these economic issues—broadly, expanding public control over areas of the economy where private control has failed to meet the public’s needs.
That also pretty much defines Bernie Sanders’s brand of democratic socialism, which, as he himself has repeatedly said, is in many ways just a social democratic updating and expansion of the New Deal’s landmark innovations. What you won’t hear from Sanders are the kinds of policies that abound within much of the DSA cocoon and don’t abound outside it, such as abolishing the police. I’m confident that most socialists and most nonsocialist liberals understand that American police forces usually come complete with racism and brutality, but that that doesn’t obviate the need for law enforcement that must be able to resort to violence if necessary. (Norwegian police do not carry guns, for instance, but they have them in their cars.) Every socialist I know of who’s won an election, from Zohran Mamdani on down, understands that, too. Some DSA candidates, by contrast, have been so incubated within the campus or college-town cocoon—Daria Avila Chevalier and Francesca Hong come to mind—that their Sanders-esque economics are weighed down by the cultural norms of the grad student left.
Sanders’s personal popularity demonstrates the benefits of not being seen as part of the campus left. In YouGov’s 2026 poll on the popularity of political figures, he placed second, with a 57 percent approval rating, to Barack Obama. Moreover, at a time when socialism is presumably anathema to the white working class, Sanders actually did better among noncollege voters—especially white voters without a four-year degree—than Hillary Clinton did in the 2016 Democratic primaries. That advantage was strongest in many predominantly white, working-class states and was a major part of his victories in places such as Michigan and Wisconsin.
There are a host of reasons for those outcomes, very much including white working-class resentment at Clinton, who was both female and might have appeared more “politically correct” than old guy Bernie. By 2020, however, Bernie lost the Michigan and Wisconsin primaries, and the white working-class voters therein, to Joe Biden—just as old and white as Bernie himself. Since 2016, as The New York Times’ Nate Cohn has noted, “the progressive left—including Mr. Sanders himself—simply hasn’t been able to win such broad support, instead running up the score in young and heavily Democratic urban areas.”
In 2016, of course, Sanders himself was able to personify and define the progressive left, and most particularly, the socialist left. It was a definition uncomplicated by the outer reaches of what later would be termed “woke.” DSA, which had just 6,000 or so members when his campaign began, didn’t yet exist as a political force; it was his campaign that effectively rebirthed the organization. Today, DSA’s legions are essential to the electoral victories of socialist and progressive candidates in left-leaning terrains. The brand of socialism widely identified with DSA, however, can come complete with the kind of cocoon culture that may impede victories outside such terrains. Successful DSA elected officials like Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understand that and generally focus on socialism’s core economic issues. Their road map is certainly one that candidates like the Democrats’ new Michigan senatorial nominee, Abdul El-Sayed—who, by his own account, is neither a DSA member nor a socialist, but clearly agrees with Sanders about almost everything—should follow.
