Democratic socialists are done being on the fringe. But are they Democrats?

CHICAGO — In the halls of a Hyatt, serviced by unionized employees of course, hundreds of young, mostly college educated democratic socialists are milling about. It’s a bit too corporate for what is happening in the rooms: conversations on how they can expand, grow and fight back more.

The session names are the tell: “Winning Socialism in the South,” “Legislating as Socialists,” “Power Shift Opportunities.” 

What you won’t find are the stars of the movement. No Mamdani. No AOC. No Bernie. 

Instead, it’s the door knockers, the city council types, the local stewards who have gotten disillusioned with American politics and have taken their energy  elsewhere. And in a lot of cases, that fight is aimed as much at the Democratic Party as at President Donald Trump.

Which raises the question that hung over the  entire weekend,  which nobody answered the same way twice:  Are these people Democrats, or not?

Ask plainly and a half-dozen answers from people wearing the same label will give you the same answer. 

“I think if the Democratic Party was actually delivering on the things that they say they care about and what is listed in their platform, I would feel comfortable saying yes to that,” said Hayley Banyai-Becker, a Democratic Socialists of America leader based in  Portland, Oregon,  who helped plan the summit told MS NOW. “The answer is no.”

Washington state Representative Shaun Scott, sitting next to her and running unopposed, wouldn’t take the yes-or-no. “I think that DSA is at the mainstream of American politics right now,” he said, then flipped it. “If we were to be considered part of the left wing of the Democratic Party, I would wonder what happened to the right or the center of the Democratic Party.”

Robert Levertis Bell, a public school teacher running for the Kentucky state house  with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endorsement, went further.

“I see many elements of the Democratic Party as absolutely being my enemy because I stand with the working class, and if you don’t represent the interests of the working class, if you’re not trying to build political power for the working class, and you actually are trying to build power for the capitalist class, then you are my enemy,” Bell said. “And the capitalist class runs the Democratic Party.”

Enemies or opponents? He split it. “Some of my enemies, some of my opponents, some of my friends.”

National co-chair Ashik Siddique explains the strategy rather than the sentiment. For him, the only way to gain electoral power is through the Democratic door. “All it takes to run in a Democratic primary is to be a registered Democrat, so that’s what we’re doing for the most part.”

Why not run outside it, like the Green Party: “There’s a clear ceiling to that strategy.”

Not exactly on the fringes anymore

The Democratic Socialists of America are in the midst of a year that has fundamentally begun to change their place in the country. The idea of it being a fringe is fading. By now the shock of the movement’s insurgent victories against tenured congressional incumbents in New York and Colorado has worn off and one of their own could soon win a competitive primary for governor in the presidential battleground of Wisconsin.

Asked why now, and they point you to 2016.

“Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016 showed how much space there really was in American politics for democratic socialist politics,” Siddique said. “I don’t think I was aware of what socialism really was, other than something in the history books, until he ran for president.”

Membership went from roughly 5,000 before 2015 to more than 120,000. Siddique rejects the lightning-strike version of that.

“Now is the moment where seeds that we started to plant a decade ago or even earlier are now bearing fruit,” he said. “In 2017, the year after Bernie had run for president, so many of us who had been motivated by his campaign just thought, okay, now what? It feels like we’re in the wilderness here with Trump as president, and we don’t know what to do.”

But those seeds can’t grow in bad soil. The conditions matter, and the conditions right now are a Democratic Party with approval ratings in the tank,, a base that keeps telling pollsters it wants someone willing to fight, and a summer of liberal self-loathing that has left an unusual amount of room to the left.

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Insurgencies don’t happen when the establishment is delivering. There is no Zohran Mamdani, no Darializa Avila Chevalier, no runaway primary in Wisconsin, if Democratic leadership is fighting the way its own voters want it to.

Others in Chicago were blunter about the vacuum created by Democratic missteps.

“There is so much inconsistency with how the Democrats operate, and for a while I think they’ve been able to get away with ‘we’re not Trump’ but we’re in the second Trump presidency,” said Chanpreet Singh with the Seattle DSA. “…The absence of a positive political vision is going to continue to be a crisis for the Democratic Party, and, I think, an opportunity for us as an organization.”

Even with possibly ripe conditions, what the DSA is now grappling with in public is its own platform — abolish the Senate, abolish police and prisons, get rid of the Defense Department — and no DSA candidate is running on any of it, and everyone in Chicago says so freely. It is also opposition research that writes itself, and Republicans are enjoying it.

But the pamphlet being handed out in the halls of the convention center is missing some of the language that has created the caricature of the DSA and caused them to be pilloried after interviews. It shows they are still very far away from overtaking the Democratic party establishment. 

“The language that we have in there is abolishing the police and prison system that protects capital over people,” Siddique said. Told it doesn’t roll off the tongue: “It doesn’t. You know, it’s not a great slogan. I’ll admit that.”

Asked whether murder and sexual assault would still be prosecuted: “To us, those are crimes. We want to limit that. I personally have no problem with having something called a prison be the place where people like that are kept.”

The great 2028 hope

A card circulating in one session urged members to line up behind a 2028 presidential run by a candidate who hasn’t said she’s running. Walking into one meeting, attendees were welcomed with that card featuring the face of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the heir apparent to what Bernie’s been able to build in American politics. 

She’s not running for anything other than another term in her current job right now. But a push is afoot to align behind her quickly if she decides to go after the biggest job American politics has to offer. 

“The 2028 Presidential Election is an unprecedented opportunity for the Left in the United States,” the card read before urging the DSA rank and file “to seize the moment, unite Labor and the Left, and elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as our Democratic Socialist President.” 

The real version is less fun. A bloc of democratic socialists is set to arrive in Congress next year, and a movement built on refusing to compromise is about to be represented by people who will have to.

Siddique says the flexibility was always there. He points to the DSA bloc in the New York state legislature, “very agitational when it mattered” and still willing to work with anyone who’d move a bill. Data centers are his example, an issue where the anger crosses party lines and socialists in office “will work with whoever” to stop them.

Banyai-Becker explained how the organization plans to police its own once they’re sworn in. They “are still accountable to the working class, and we are able to talk to them.”

The test starts on Jan. 3, 2027.

Eugene Daniels

Eugene Daniels is an MS NOW senior Washington correspondent and co-host of “The Weekend,” which airs on Saturdays and Sundays from 7 to 10 a.m. ET on MS NOW.

Hunter Woodall

Hunter Woodall covers politics for MS NOW. He’s reported on politics and presidential campaigns for The Associated Press and CBS News and reported on Congress for The Minnesota Star Tribune.