Democratic socialist surge tests Democrats as DSA wins pile up
A Rolling Stone commentary says DSA-backed Democrats are gaining ground, but their platform could become a national liability.
By Georgia Hale · Staff Writer
3 min read
The democratic socialist surge inside Democratic politics is no longer being treated as a fringe nuisance, according to a Rolling Stone political commentary that argues the movement is now trying to do more than push the party left.
The piece frames the fight as a shift from an old divide between moderates and liberals to a newer clash between liberals and socialists. It cites Ken Baer, a centrist Democrat who served in Barack Obama’s budget office, as having warned years ago that this was where the party was heading.
Bernie Sanders sits at the center of that story. The commentary says Sanders, an independent who identifies as a democratic socialist and has long caucused with Democrats in Congress, helped bring socialist politics back into the Democratic conversation through his presidential campaigns and signature proposals such as Medicare for All and higher taxes on the rich.
What is the democratic socialist surge?
In this context, the democratic socialist surge refers to candidates running under, or closely identified with, the democratic-socialist banner winning important Democratic contests and city offices. The commentary describes democratic socialists as more organized than a pressure movement because they have members, officers and a party structure through the DSA.
Rolling Stone points to recent wins by democratic-socialist candidates, including mayoralties in New York and Seattle, an expected mayoralty in Washington, D.C., and congressional primary victories in Colorado and New York. The commentary says those results make it likely that at least one major democratic-socialist contender will run in a future Democratic presidential primary.
The piece compares the moment to Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, arguing that weak national parties can be captured by candidates with intense supporters and enough money. It says Barack Obama also reshaped the Democratic Party around his own political brand in 2008, though the commentary presents Trump as the sharper model for a hostile party takeover.
Why national Democrats may face a harder road
The commentary also lays out why a DSA-style push may be harder to scale nationally than Trump’s rise. It says Democratic presidential primaries run through states with large numbers of Black voters, a bloc that posed problems for Sanders in 2016 and for Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in 2020.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is described in the commentary as a potential nonwhite standard-bearer with stronger political gifts than Sanders or Warren. Still, the piece cautions that Trump’s movement was built around celebrity as much as policy, while the DSA could be left searching for a messenger if its biggest names do not run or do not catch fire.
The biggest obstacle, the commentary argues, is the DSA platform. It says the organization’s website calls for policies including nationalizing major industries such as real estate and insurance, ending private-industry health care, eliminating fossil fuels, closing foreign military bases, withdrawing from NATO, ending enforcement of immigration laws, abolishing the Senate and changing how presidents are chosen.
Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, co-founders of the centrist group Third Way, were quoted in a Washington Post op-ed calling the organization’s ideas “electoral poison.” Rolling Stone says Democrats who nominate a DSA-aligned presidential candidate should expect Republicans to highlight those platform positions in ads and mailers.
The commentary also cites Zohran Mamdani, saying he praised “the warmth of collectivism” in an inaugural speech and used a July Fourth address to describe U.S. history through oppression, betrayal and class struggle. Rolling Stone presents that worldview as another potential weakness with the broader electorate.
The conclusion is blunt: democratic socialists may become a stronger institutional voice inside the Democratic Party, but winning nationally could require creating distance from the movement’s own platform and brand.
This story draws on original reporting from Rolling Stone.