A Small Band of Socialists Is Sowing Panic in the Democratic Party

Voldemort used the issue of immigration to win two elections. The issue of progressive socialism will similarly tank the Dems hope for gaining ground on the GOP.

The people who vote in a primary in local elections don't represent the majority of Americans who elect our president or determine the composition of Congress.

A Small Band of Socialists Is Sowing Panic in the Democratic Party

Once a fringe wing, the movement is wielding surprising political power, capitalizing on popular discontent. Mainstream Democrats see a ‘fundamental threat.’

Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani with Democratic Socialist candidates at a rally in New York on June 18.

By James Fanelli, Joshua Chaffin, Eliza Collins and Kevin T. Dugan, WSJ

July 28, 2026 9:00 pm ET

Democratic Socialists of America candidates are winning primary races, causing concern among mainstream Democrats.

Megan Romer likes to spend her free time sewing costumes for school plays, picking blackberries in her backyard in rural Cayuga County, N.Y., and watching her partner play the fiddle in folk bands.

In her day job, she is seeking to overthrow capitalism.

Romer, 42 years old, is the national co-chairwoman of the Democratic Socialists of America, the far-left organization whose candidates have swept to victory in several recent high-profile races by preying on Democratic incumbents. The next showdown comes next Tuesday, when Congressional primaries in Missouri and Michigan again pit Democratic socialists against incumbent Democrats.

“This is what we’ve been building toward,” Romer said. “We see the excitement growing. We see the people on the street being more and more tired of the status quo and being ready for a change.”

Megan Romer, national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Already, the DSA’s advances are stirring consternation—and sometimes panic—among mainstream Democrats dreading their own Tea Party moment in which a radical fringe hijacks the party and taints their brand just as they are trying to appeal to swing voters to win control of Congress in November’s midterms.

Just this month, the DSA called for defunding the Defense Department, abolishing police and getting rid of the Senate, and replacing the president and Supreme Court with representatives “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”

“The DSA poses a fundamental threat to the Democratic Party and to the nation as a whole. Based on their own platform, they are working to undermine our society, our economy and our form of government organization, including our constitution,” said Jamie Metzl, a veteran of the Clinton National Security Council and State Department, and one of more establishment Democrats sounding the alarm lately.

DSA national leaders like Sara Almosawi, 24, scarcely hide their disdain for a Democratic Party they view less as a partner than a hostile takeover target. “Ultimately, the strategy of the DSA has been to primary mainstream Democrats. And we’re going to continue to do that,” she said on a recent afternoon as she sat in a Yemeni coffeehouse in Brooklyn. “We’re gonna take it over. We’re done with this. They’re not meeting the American people where they are.”

Once a baby boomer relic, the DSA now counts more than 120,000 members, about half of whom joined since late 2024, after Israel’s war in Gaza ignited campus protests nationwide and energized young recruits like Almosawi. Some want to dismantle prisons and overturn America’s free-market system. Some yearn to fulfill progressive promises like Medicare for All. And then there are those who are simply attracted by “Zohran vibes,” as one member put it, of DSA star and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has been hyping up a new pied-à-terre tax as a big win for his push to get the wealthy to pay more.

People at a rally hold signs saying "Tax the Rich" and "Fund Child-Care!"

New York City Democratic Socialists hold a November rally marking the start of a campaign to tax the rich and win universal child care. Selcuk Acar/Anadolu/Getty Images

In New York, the base of America’s two most powerful establishment Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, a trio of Congressional candidates endorsed by Mamdani and the DSA won Democratic primaries in June, upsetting two longstanding incumbents in the process. One of the victorious DSA candidates was arrested just last year for protesting outside Schumer’s Manhattan office over U.S. military aid to Israel.

The DSA’s insurgents also claimed recent victories in Pennsylvania and Colorado, with all eyes now on races in Detroit and St. Louis on Tuesday.

U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi, a centrist Democrat, has watched the far-left grow over the last decade from his home state of New York. He worries that many Democrats underestimate the threat posed by a group that has figured out how to organize and capture attention as successfully as MAGA does.

“Those of us that disagree with those ideas are kind of talking about the problems we see, wringing our hands at cocktail parties, but we’re not as organized as we need to be,” he said.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat whose moderate, pro-Israel stance is at odds with the DSA, accused his new colleagues of trying to hijack the party. “They’re interested in throwing bombs,” he said, “not actually solving problems.”

Romer plays down any suggestion that she is a modern day Jacobin, a radical group at the forefront of the French Revolution.

“I’m not building a guillotine in my backyard,” she said.

Knock four times

The DSA, with 250 chapters and counting, has an annual operating budget of just $9.3 million—less than what a single Democratic super PAC has committed so far to this year’s New Hampshire Senate race. But it commands an army of devoted volunteers. When canvassing, they say, their aim isn’t merely to knock on every door in a given neighborhood—but to do so four times.

Such zeal has been inspired by candidates, like Mamdani, who have given voice to a younger generation’s fury about the cost of housing, education, healthcare and much else. They have also capitalized on a listless Democratic Party as they position themselves as the only ones willing to stand up to the Trump administration.

“People are not seeing an alternative that’s fighting for them,” Romer explained. “They see the Democratic Party as kind of rolling over and taking it.”

Signaling the DSA’s growing sway, some Democrats are courting them and trying to harness their energy. Kamala Harris, the former vice president and 2024 Democratic nominee, called Mamdani after the DSA wins in New York in June, which follows other conversations since he won, according to people familiar with the conversations. Some read the move as an attempt to boost her standing with the party’s left wing as she mulls another presidential run.

If she enters the race, she could face off against a DSA dignitary. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) is also considering running for president, according to a person familiar with her thinking.

Justin Buell, an adviser to ultra high-net worth Democratic donors, said the majority of those he works with believe the DSA is sparking an important conversation in the party—though none of his clients have donated to DSA candidates or groups.

“I’m not hearing angst from my clients,” he said. “What I’m hearing is recognition that the DSA wing is channeling something real—prices keep climbing and paychecks aren’t keeping up.”

The pipeline from the campus protests to the DSA

The DSA is an overnight success decades in the making. It was formally born in 1982—amid the Reagan revolution—when two socialist organizations merged. Michael Harrington, one of its founders, described the DSA’s pragmatic approach as “the left-wing of the possible.” At the time, it had just 6,000 members.

It exploded onto the national political scene after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ first 2016 presidential campaign. While he lost to Hillary Clinton, Sanders’ unabashed argument for Democratic Socialism took flight; though not a formal member, he identifies as a Democratic Socialist. Many of its current stars cite “Uncle Bernie” as their political inspiration.

“I think Bernie was one of the first candidates that talked about solutions that are really bold for where we are at today and spoke about it with the level of just like, this is common sense,” said Melat Kiros, 29, an Ethiopia-born lawyer who last month beat a 15-term incumbent in the Democratic primary for a Denver-area House seat.

Kiros came to prominence weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel for publishing an open letter accusing law firms of hostility toward student protesters and arguing it wasn’t antisemitic to question the Jewish state’s legitimacy. After that, she lost her job at a New York City law firm.

The war in Gaza has been a galvanizing cause for a movement otherwise devoted to issues like tenants rights and unionization. It has also attracted droves of new members, many of whom were baptized in the campus protests the way a previous generation was during the Vietnam War.

Among them is Darializa Avila Chevalier, 32, a graduate student and organizer of the demonstrations at Columbia University who has suggested illegal immigration shouldn’t be prevented and stood by her decision to attend a pro-Palestinian rally the day after Hamas’ attacks.

Last month Avila Chevalier knocked off a five-term incumbent in a Democratic primary for a congressional district that includes upper Manhattan and the Bronx. It was her first run at elective office.

“I think it changed my entire life trajectory,” Almosawi, a former Cornell student, said of the campus protests. She is now the national co-chairwoman of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, the DSA’s youth arm.

Like Avila Chevalier, Almosawi is a daughter of immigrants and, through one lens, an exemplar of the American dream. Her parents immigrated from Iraq and Indonesia, met in Alabama, and settled in Orlando, Fla. Her father drove a truck while her mother mostly worked restaurant jobs.

She landed at Cornell after the school offered her generous financial aid—a “golden ticket,” as she called it. Then came Oct. 7th during her first semester in upstate New York.

“It was just horrific,” she said of Israel’s retaliation. “It was like, you see a livestreamed genocide on your phone, and the normal reaction for any person is, like, how can I stop this?”

As at other universities, the student protesters built an encampment. They expressed disbelief that mainstream Democrats hedged over whether to call Israel’s conduct in Gaza a “genocide.”

The DSA, with a long record of pro-Palestenian activism, was a natural vessel for those who joined the protests. In places like Denver, DSA chapters ferried supplies to encampments and held meetings there in a show of support.

“With the encampments came a huge learning curve. Many young adults saw a world where socialism can be attainable,” said a July 2024 post on the national DSA’s blog. “It wasn’t a dog-eat-dog world that the bourgeoisie want everyone to think is acceptable.”

To many Jewish students, those protests unleashed antisemitism that later led to a reckoning for elite universities.

By late 2024, Almosawi faced her own reckoning. Cornell suspended her for disrupting a career fair that included defense contractors. Despite her parents’ misgivings, she has spent the past year nurturing YDSA chapters around the country while serving on the DSA’s national political committee.

“My intention was to graduate. But this is the most important time for socialism in America since the 1920s,” she said. “The iron is hot. The moment is now.”

The DSA prides itself as being uber egalitarian. Two weeks after his mayoral triumph, Mamdani walked into a Manhattan church for a DSA meeting. The most-talked-about New Yorker was made to wait in line just like everyone else for an allotted 90 seconds to speak.

“It’s good for him to have a place where he’s humbled,” Romer quipped.

There are trappings of a leftist graduate-student seminar. DSA members often address one another as “comrade.” At the Las Vegas chapter’s July convention, a book-swap table included essays by Karl Marx, works on American imperialism and copies of a pamphlet titled “Public K12 Education as a Capitalist Industry.”

While New York and Los Angeles remain DSA’s center of gravity, chapters are opening in spots like Catawba Valley in North Carolina and Concho Valley in West Texas. The DSA has tended to focus on local races with low turnout, where its grassroots organizing can be decisive. It is now working its way up the electoral chain. After June’s wins, as many as 16 DSA-backed candidates could sit in New York’s state legislature next year. “I expect us to launch another big-budget fight next year in Albany to tax the rich,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-chairwoman of the NYC DSA chapter, said after the primaries.

The chapters are also highly social, befitting a generation that came of age during Covid’s lockdowns and loneliness. In Pinellas County, Fla., they hold beach parties. For some Brooklynites, the local DSA chapter anchors their social life. Overall, DSA relies heavily on member dues, typically $15 a month—though there is a sliding scale.

All that begs the question: How radical is the DSA? The answer isn’t straightforward, in part because its chapters are too dispersed to fit one label.

At one end, are the modern-day “sewer socialists”—named for Milwaukee leftists who focused on incremental, pragmatic local governance in the early 1900s. Mamdani appeared to echo them in April, when he made a media event of filling a pothole in Staten Island.

But the DSA’s big tent also accommodates dedicated Marxists and communists, including several of its 27-member National Political Committee.

The DSA’s platform—released recently—is titled “WORKERS DESERVE MORE!” and imagines a world without capitalism: a 32-hour workweek, free education, universal healthcare and rent control. Along with abolishing police and the prison system, they would do away with ICE. Israel would no longer receive U.S. economic or military aid.

“Some of these demands may be won under our current system, but we know complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up,” the authors wrote. They propose to pay for it all by gutting defense and police spending, among other categories, and raising corporate and inheritance taxes.

A number of high-profile Democrats publicly distanced themselves from the proposals.

Van Jones, a prominent Democrat and media personality, unloaded in a video, saying the DSA was mixing good progressive ideas, like universal healthcare, with other ones, like getting rid of prisons, “that are completely nuts.”

The path to ‘comrade’

Romer grew up in a trailer park in New York but moved to Lafayette, La., as a young adult with her partner. Chatty and social, she volunteered in soup kitchens and tutored non-English speakers. After the 2016 election, she wanted in on politics but felt shut out of the local Democratic Party.

Then came an invitation to a DSA meeting. It turned out to be what she was looking for: a group launching campaigns and community projects. She eventually moved to New York, and in 2023 was elected national co-chairwoman. She is also a member of the DSA’s “Red Star Caucus,” whose stated goal is to “abolish capitalism and, ultimately, to achieve communism.” In simpler terms, Romer said, she believes “in a different structure of economic policy that puts working people first.”

She laughs off critics who post pictures of her with devil horns, saying she’s really just a PTA mom.

“People really do think we’re evil,” Romer said. “If they’re billionaires, they’re right. We do actually want to tax you back down into the seven figures.”

After the DSA’s recent primary wins, she trolled the losers on social media. “We told you bro, we f—in’ warned you,” she posted on X, linking to an opinion piece she wrote last year criticizing Democratic consultants who believed the party’s best strategy was to do nothing against Trump and let Republicans self-implode.

When Jeffries appeared on a TV screen at an election-night party for a DSA candidate, the crowd began chanting, “You’re next!” Soon after, Schumer was booed walking in New York City’s pride march.

The DSA will likely hold few House seats next year, but in a tight majority, every vote counts. If the group acts as a bloc, or more frightening for leadership, teams up with other like-minded progressives, it could make all kinds of demands.

Party leadership has been caught flat footed as DSA candidates, and closely aligned progressives, built support in their primaries. Because those primaries mostly played out in solidly Democratic House seats, most Democratic groups haven’t spent to support their incumbents—despite backing from Jeffries and other House leaders—arguing the money is better spent in the seats that could decide the majority in November.

In terms of policy, DSA members believe they have already shifted the Democratic Party’s debate about Israel and Palestine. It’s now common for some supportive members of Congress to say Israel has gone too far. Meanwhile, the DSA has succeeded in making Aipac, the pro-Israel lobbying group that once enjoyed bipartisan support, toxic for many Democrats.

In June, 58% of Democrats said the U.S. is too supportive of Israel, up from 45% in January 2024, according to an AP-NORC poll. “The student movement… was absolutely influential in shifting the Overton window around Palestine,” said Almosawi, the national co-chair of the DSA’s youth arm. “In just two years.”

Recently, Romer touched down in Las Vegas to speak at the local DSA chapter’s annual convention, held at a union hall for culinary workers. A sign, “One job should be enough,” adorned the auditorium. Romer was introduced as “comrade” to the cheering room.

She is already looking beyond Tuesday’s contests, she said later, setting an aspirational target: 10 DSA-aligned candidates holding House seats next year. “Ten is great,” she said. “It’d be a lot better with 30. It’d be a lot better with 60.”