CHICAGO — Among democratic socialists, Donald Trump is seen as a symptom of a dire political system, a liar and a failure of a president twice over.
And there’s an understanding that he took advantage of the Democratic Party’s failures and a sense of abandonment from the working class that helped his rise and return.
“You can’t deny that if Democrats had delivered, if people had been taken care of, I don’t think that Donald Trump would be back in office,” said JP Lyninger, a democratic socialist and local elected official in Louisville, Kentucky.
The blame directed at “the establishment” by the Democratic Socialists of America faithful is meant to be a harsh rebuke that Democrats’ approach is flawed and broken after a decade of Trump dominating politics even when he isn’t in power. But for whatever opportunity that gives democratic socialism, there’s a clear risk at alienating people that already have a poor view of the Democratic Party as weak and out of touch.
The democratic socialist blame game
This is a nation where a real estate mogul and former reality television star leads a party whose conservative ruling class once laughed him off, where the opposition managed to beat Trump a single time before divisions over age, electability and aid for Israel fractured coalitions and helped the former president return to power even after he tried to overturn a free and fair election.
All this has given the DSA a delicate path out of the fringes.
“People have become disillusioned with a party that has failed to prevent this sort of fascist insurgency within American politics, not just once, but now two times,” said Bobby Nichols, a DSA member who serves on the city council in Tempe, Arizona. “And there’s a lot of concern that they’re not going to be able to prevent it going forward.”
The Democratic Socialists of America has been legitimized by a series of flashy wins since Trump regained office after the 2024 election. Victory in the New York City mayor’s race by defeating a disgraced centrist former governor. Ousting a congressional incumbent in that city during a primary, as well as in Denver, not because of outright scandal but the prospect of being responsible for political malaise.
What’s applauded in liberal enclaves, however, carries the danger of being alarming elsewhere, especially at a time when the scourges of antisemitism and Islamophobia are well apparent around the country. Those running in overwhelmingly blue districts don’t necessarily “have the appreciation for what the electorate looks like in purple states like mine,” said Chris Pappas, a Democratic New Hampshire congressman campaigning for the U.S. Senate this fall.
“You’ve got to deliver a message that is unifying, that brings people together, that focuses on how you can put some wins on the board for voters,” he said.
The DSA’s aberrant ambitions outline wanting to “draft a new constitution” and establishing “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries” in the name of accountability.
They maintain they are looking out for the working class and promote the idea of a 32-hour work week along with housing and healthcare for all.
But an aspect of their policy vision calls for the near impossible goal of abolishing the U.S. Senate and dramatically reigning in the power of the American presidency.
At the same time, they’re relying on Democratic primaries, part of the system they are deeply skeptical of, to win Congressional seats.
“The Democratic Party, whenever they put someone in office, is fundamentally a nicer face to pretty much what a lot of Republicans are doing anyways,” said Cerena Ermitanio, a DSA leader in Texas.
Swapping elderly President Joe Biden out as the 2024 nominee for Kamala Harris after a maligned debate performance did not save Democrats from another four years of Trump. And there are democratic socialists in the movement who chose not to take a side.
Sara Almosawi, national co-chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America, called former Vice President Harris, “a corporate Democrat” with responsibility for “the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” and called her “a Democrat that refused to work for working people.”
“And then I had Trump, an incredibly racist billionaire, and I knew that the two-party system had made this happen, and I did not feel compelled to vote in either election for either of these candidates,” she said, also warning “if the party chooses another corporate Democrat to run again, it’s not going to work out.”
Mainstream anxiety
The DSA’s growth over the last decade is tied in with progressive leader Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. And its victories this year have inspired unease. At a time when Democrats are trying to show Republicans don’t have the sole claim to patriotism in politics, having fights over how the nation should conduct itself in such an existential way comes with its own clear friction.
Republicans, having been rocked by their own fringes over the years, have already taken to stereotyping Democrats across the partisan spectrum as part of a far out ilk.
“What we see is time and again, the Democrat Party is electing radicals. But that’s where the Democratic Party is today,” said Wisconsin GOP Rep. Bryan Steil.
This all comes as Democrats have limited influence in Washington, though that could change just a few weeks from now where they have a realistic map to winning control of the House in this fall’s midterms, and taking back the Senate is a difficult, but not impossible, task.
Before that even has a chance to happen, there’s already an eagerness for the handful of democratic socialists headed to Congress to test their influence once they get there, and potentially try and prevent New York Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries from becoming the next speaker of the House.
“He doesn’t have anything to run on. He just runs on empty promises. And I wouldn’t even say he’s promising anything. I couldn’t tell you what his platform even is, besides just being a Democrat,” said Matthew Smith, who knocked doors and helped democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier win against a congressional incumbent in New York earlier this year. “That’s all they run on, so I view him as an incredibly weak leader, and partially the reason that we see the rise of facism that we have today.”
After seeing several of his own members lose to DSA-backed candidates this year, Jeffries public attention is on the midterms. During a speech in Pennsylvania recently, the man who could soon become the first Black Speaker of the House said that “unlike the MAGA Republicans, the Democratic Party is not a cult of personality,” and if his party wins “a Congress that stands up to an out-of-control president.”
The complicated path ahead
A major loss can lead a party’s voters to side with the unexpected. For Republicans, eight years of the nation’s first Black president and losses from two moderate styled GOP nominees against him gave way to Trump’s takeover. Democrats answered by picking their oldest nominee ever, and running campaigns that tried to win over distressed former Republicans.
That’s not the kind of tact the DSA is interested in. And so far, its prominent figures have the luxury of focusing on purity rather than having to worry about pragmatism. Compromise means incremental change, if change at all. And their goals lean more towards the aspirational than the attainable.
The DSA’s momentum is already facing limits and there’s sensitivity within their ranks to any perception that they are the weirdos of the political scene.
After victories in starkly blue districts in Pennsylvania, New York and Colorado, the start of August brought a win in a Detroit-area congressional primary for the movement, as well as a loss for a controversial former congresswoman who tried to win back her old St. Louis seat. And ahead of Tuesday’s primaries in Wisconsin, a state Trump narrowly carried two years ago, a democratic socialist has become her party’s front runner in the race for governor.
“This is not a socialist country and they embrace it at their peril,” said Wisconsin Rep. Tom Tiffany, running for the same statewide office on the Republican side.
The resistance flair of the 2018 midterms during Trump’s first term in the White House has given way to a grim view eight years later that leaders on the left haven’t met the moment in a meaningful way. That they have lost the thread when it comes to building and winning against an opponent who threw away the rules of engagement long before he was ever sworn into office.
Not being Trump is simply not enough.
Yet Democrats worrying about their base shifting too far to the left and angering the people they need to win in the midterms and beyond already see omens.
Rallying the DSA one night during a party gathering in Chicago, Illinois, Robert Levertis Bell, running for a state house seat in a reliably blue part of Kentucky, drew cheers from allies even as he conjured critics’ worst fears about the movement.
“We are going to democratize this shitty little country,” Bell said.
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