Democratic socialists like AOC and Zohran Mamdani have made inroads in some cities. Republicans call them communists but the ideologies differ.
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Ahead of a challenging midterm election, Republicans have seized an opportunity to castigate their opponents as extremists after democratic socialists won recent Democratic congressional primaries in New York and Colorado.
GOP leaders have invoked the specter of radical left authoritarianism by calling progressive Democrats “communists,” an echo of Cold War-era messaging from prominent Republicans such as Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy and former President Richard Nixon.
“Ronald Reagan used to warn about communism,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, recently said on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to the late Republican president who confronted the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.
“Now the barbarians are inside the gate,” Johnson said July 5. “So this election is for all the marbles.”
President Donald Trump has also upped the attacks.
“These are hardcore, godless communists,” Trump said at the June 26 conservative Faith & Freedom Coalition conference. “This is the most serious threat to our country since its existence.”
Trump devoted part of his July 4 address on the 250th anniversary of American independence to attack communism.
Democratic socialists and academic experts say the ideology isn’t communism, but rather a belief that the economy should be run for the public’s benefit through democratic decision-making. The government should have an active role in expanding public services to address certain basic needs such as housing or health care, they say.
“The information’s all in the title,” Susan Kang, an associate professor of political science at City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America, told USA TODAY. “We want things that challenge the way capitalism distributes things. It’s never done by force. It’s never done by violence. It’s never done through tricks. It’s always done because we’ve gained majoritarian support.”
Democratic socialists have notched recent wins in deeply liberal cities. In 2025, Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election and Katie Wilson was elected Seattle mayor. In June, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier won congressional primaries in New York City and Melat Kiros won in Denver, while Janeese Lewis-George won the Democratic primary for Washington, DC, mayor. In these deep-blue areas, Democratic primary victories are tantamount to winning the election.
All ran with a heavy focus addressing affordability through measures such as “Medicare for All,” a national program thought to guarantee health insurance for all Americans. They’ve also called for abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and abandoning U.S. support for Israel amid widespread civilian casualties from its wars in Gaza and Iran.
“We want to push these ideas within the existing political institutions of the United States,” Kang said.
Democratic socialism versus communism
The national DSA website said it believes capitalism must be replaced with “a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.” The group said its vision rejects “authoritarian visions of socialism.”
Liberals, progressives and democratic socialists often note the United States has its own popular socialist policies. While that includes social safety net programs such as Medicare and Social Security, they also cite basic services like public schools and municipal water. Most recently, the Trump administration opened Freedom Fuel gas stations, which provide gas at $3.47 a gallon, providing a government intervention in markets amid a deeply unpopular war in the Middle East that has left energy costs skyrocketing.
Communism, as advocated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in “The Communist Manifesto,” envisions a classless, stateless society where there is one-party ruled by the working class. When Americans think of communism, they look to totalitarian, undemocratic governments of the former Soviet Union and North Korea.
Ideologues and elections
Some DSA chapters have Marxist-Leninist and Maoist members, such as in DSA’s Red Star Caucus, although Max Sawicky, an economist and writer in Virginia who is a member of DSA, said they are a fringe contingent with little success running for elected office.
Still, the leftist ideologues hold some sway: The national DSA opposed American military aid to Ukraine following Russia’s invasion, and a delegation embraced now-imprisoned Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, who was widely seen as creating a dictatorship under a socialist government before American officials apprehended him.
But Sawicky, who is not speaking on behalf of the DSA, said its successful chapters have included effective campaign operations, such as in New York City, where organizers have notched several wins in municipal, state and federal offices. According to DSA’s own numbers, it has grown from 5,000 members in 2017 to over 100,000 in 2026.
Mamdani’s proposals of fast and free buses, a freeze on rent increases for rent-stabilized apartments, and public grocery stores are popular with New York City voters, he noted.
Younger people are more likely to embrace socialism than older voters raised during the Cold War, for whom socialism may conjure images of an impoverished, freedom-less society like the former Communist bloc in Eastern Europe. Democratic socialists often instead cite countries in Scandinavia and Western Europe, which have socialist policies on universal healthcare, housing and higher wages enacted within democratic systems.
A July 4 survey by Morning Consult and the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that 53% of Gen Z respondents had a favorable view of socialism, compared to just 27% among Boomers. At the same time, a 2025 Gallup survey found 54% of Americans view capitalism favorably, but support has declined since 2021, when it was 60%.
Often, Kang said, Americans can look to challenges in their own lives, such as affording groceries and housing, compared with prior generations that enjoyed much lower costs for essential goods like housing and higher education.
Rather than being a fully defined political ideology in the United States, democratic socialism can be understood as a reaction to establishment politics that uses somewhat left-leaning principles, such as universal healthcare, creating more affordable housing and reorienting U.S. policy in the Middle East, all of which are popular among Democrats, said Nick Beauchamp, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University.
“These are the things that the candidates are running on, these are things that people care about,” he told USA TODAY. “They’re not necessarily about either democracy or socialism, but as part of that sort of bundle of left policies that people are now associating with these terms.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, is considered the godfather of modern American democratic socialism, almost winning the 2016 Democratic presidential ticket with his vision. Two years later, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, provided a blueprint for upending the establishment when she defeated House Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley.
Others joined Ocasio-Cortez, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Michigan, and former congressional representatives Jamaal Bowman, of New York, and Cori Bush, of Missouri, though the latter two lost their seats to moderates in 2024 Democratic primaries.
More recently, democratic socialists have seen a number of wins in congressional races. Along with Mamdani’s slate in New York City, Chris Rabb won an open congressional seat in Philadelphia. In late June, Melat Kiros unseated Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colorado, who had held her Denver seat for nearly three decades.
Even so, at the federal level, the next Congress will have only a handful of democratic socialists in the 435-member House. Democratic socialists have yet to show success in swing districts.
Do establishment Democrats embrace democratic socialism?
Some moderate and centrist Democrats are worried that the rise of farther left candidates − even if it’s only in safely Democratic districts − will taint their party’s nominees in key swing states and districts by association.
“If they become the face of the Democratic Party, we get hammered in a presidential election,” said Jim Kessler, co-founder and executive vice president of policy at the moderate think tank Third Way.
Kessler said “most of the country thinks” ideas such as abolishing ICE are “insane.”
Republicans clearly agree with Kessler that it’s a liability for Democrats.
“President Trump will keep calling out their radicalism and draw a sharp contrast with his commonsense, America First agenda,” Olivia Wales, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Some mainstream Democrats have been more willing to embrace democratic socialists after they win primaries.
In the wake of the recent democratic socialist victories, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-New York, who is trying to help his party take control of Congress while keeping his job as its legislative leader, told NPR that his caucus has a variety of perspectives, from centrists to progressives.
“Obviously, the overwhelming majority of folks who will be part of that caucus are going to be focused on stopping MAGA extremism on the one hand,” he said, “while most importantly, doing everything we can to make life better for the everyday Americans we’re privileged to represent.”
Republicans typically do not recognize this ideological diversity in the Democratic caucus when casting their opponents as socialists or communists. But whether the terms carry the potency they once did among swing voters remains to be seen.
“They’ve really overused the word socialism to describe anything they don’t like,” Sawicky, the economist, said, adding “if everything’s socialism, then nothing is.”
Contributing: Phillip Bailey and Marc Ramirez, USA TODAY
Eduardo Cuevas is based in New York City. Reach him by email at [email protected] or on Signal at emcuevas.01.
