Democratic socialists see their moment in Zohran Mamdani’s rise
By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN
(CNN) — Standing in the lobby of the art deco theater where Zohran Mamdani held a raucous rally last week, just hours after Israeli hostages were freed by Hamas in a ceasefire deal, the organizer was dressed the part: A black T-shirt with the phrase “Land Back” on the top of a circle, “Democratic Socialists of America” on the bottom, a Palestinian flag in the middle.
The pitch was the same to each prospect he sidled up to: “You look like you might want to sign up with the DSA.”
Mamdani’s emergence is the biggest electoral achievement the DSA has ever had, well beyond the scattered state legislature and city council seats flipped their way in recent years, or even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez going from being a one-time bartender to a potential top presidential contender. Here in Mamdani was a candidate who’d been a regular of their conventions and organizing Zoom calls, toppling an opponent in Andrew Cuomo as proud of his standing with the establishment as his own famous last name.
Amid a larger bipartisan pull toward populism and mounting anger toward corporations and billionaires, DSA members tell CNN their meetings around the country are attracting more people than ever. Socialist chapters in cities have turned mass Signal chats into de facto National Guard and ICE monitoring groups, and affiliated candidates build up volunteer lists and fundraising beyond anything they’ve seen to date.
They insist that moderate Democrats panicking and Republicans salivating over pinning their ideas to progressives at large have it backward, even as the DSA calls for the overthrow of the capitalistic system in favor of more government ownership in addition to abolishing the police, emptying prisons, creating single-payer health insurance.
“I certainly believe,” Rhode Island state Rep. David Morales, a 27-year-old DSA member who last month launched his own 2026 primary challenge to the incumbent mayor of Providence, told CNN, “that the future of the Democratic Party has to be a party that’s going to stand up for the working class and be unapologetic about it.”
But there’s a huge catch: The DSA remains tiny and fractured internally.
According to organizers, DSA’s New York City chapter membership has doubled since the end of June. The new number is about 11,000. DSA national leaders refer to their “Mamdani bump,” sizably bigger than 2018’s “AOC bump,” driving their national membership to a record-high 80,000, with 26,000 people joining since January.
By comparison, 545,000 New Yorkers voted for Mamdani in June’s Democratic primary.
That night in the Upper Manhattan theater, only a few in the excited crowd of 3,000 Mamdani supporters signed the organizer’s clipboard, even after Chi Ossé, a city councilman from Brooklyn who is also considering a challenge to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, ended his speech from the stage by declaring, “If you want this movement to continue, you guys got to join New York City DSA!”
Democrats increasingly seem open to socialist ideas
What the crowd did do is sign up for many of Mamdani’s ideas, chanting back his slogans like classic song lyrics and grabbing from a table of buttons: “FREEZE THE RENT” in red, “CHILDCARE FOR ALL” in yellow and “FAST FREE BUSES” in blue. They bounced along with excitement as he declared that he had already won the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, weeks before the general election.
Those opposed to Mamdani’s politics are terrified of how he’s propelling democratic socialism. Other DSA members, though, see not just inspiration, but a model and a warning to the Democratic Party status quo, even as some fret quietly that if Mamdani wins and has problems governing, that could set them back not just in local races, but in trying to position Ocasio-Cortez for a potential 2028 presidential run.
A Gallup poll from September showed much more support among Democrats for socialist-aligned figures than the current non-socialist leadership, though Republicans viewed socialism much more negatively. But that poll also showed a record low, 54% overall, approval for capitalism, with only 42% of Democrats saying they viewed it positively, as compared to 66% of Democrats who say that they view socialism positively. (Just 14% Republicans and 38% of independents have a positive view of socialism.)
Gustavo Gordillo moved to New York initially to be an artist but has since started working as a union electrician. He liked Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, but it was only after Trump’s first election that he joined the DSA. Now the co-chair of the New York City chapter, he was involved early with Mamdani’s campaign, helped craft his platform, worked with most of his senior staff, and is now helping organize members to get him over the finish line.
The DSA energy is “a response to a power vacuum in the Democratic Party establishment where very few people could tell you what the Democratic Party stands for,” Gordillo told CNN in a coffee shop on the edge of Chinatown hours before Mamdani’s big rally. “And we’ve seen multiple cycles of establishment Democrats failing to defeat fascists – that that has caused a huge number of working-class people to come to understand that we need a very different kind of political agenda.”
As for helping other campaigns learn from Mamdani’s success, though, Gordillo admitted the group “could be more rigorous.”
Ryan Clancy, a Wisconsin assemblyman and DSA member who started an interview by saying, “I love to talk about socialism,” and joked that he was offended when Republicans called Joe Biden a socialist because the former president wasn’t nearly left enough, encouraged mainstream Democrats to read those numbers as a reason to stop trying to recapture the middle, even in his ultra-swing state.
Voters are “simply demanding more. They don’t want a Hakeem Jeffries, they don’t want a Chuck Schumer, they don’t want people to say they can’t do anything because they’re not in power. That’s bulls**t. They want folks who will fight for them and will use different strategies to do that,” Clancy told CNN. “That idea as a bigger tent expressed as just taking the tent and moving it to the right is really turning off a lot of real progressives and folks on the left who are never going to vote for a Trump but they’re not going to engage with the Democratic Party as it is.”
Factionalism and purity tests
Even as the DSA has moved more toward local races than federal ones, it still faces factionalism and other internal issues.
DSA members across the country tell CNN that Donald Trump and Democrats’ failure to stop him have more to do with their rise than even Sanders, the Vermont senator who came in a close second in both the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primary races.
Despite being the godfather of the democratic socialist revival in America, Sanders has never himself been a DSA member and has no plans to join. He likes being an independent and is also no fan of how purist DSA members de-endorse and boot officials they say have betrayed them.
Ocasio-Cortez was one of those the party de-endorsed in 2024 over co-sponsoring an event on combating antisemitism. Then she was the subject of a censure resolution at this summer’s DSA convention for her “tacit support of Zionism in the face of liberal betrayal of international law, and her dogged support for the Democratic Party establishment to the detriment of DSA’s member-led organizing,” even as in the same packet of resolutions obtained by CNN, the organization lauded her “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Sanders.
The DSA’s embrace of the Palestinian cause, especially since Oct. 7, has become central to the organization’s identity, from the T-shirt of the organizer recruiting members at the Mamdani event to the group’s “Until Palestinian Liberation” statement on the ceasefire which makes no mention of the word “hostages” but is full of paragraphs decrying Israel.
For some, that’s been an appeal. For others, it’s made the DSA toxic, even if they agree with many of the positions on issues like affordability and healthcare.
Mamdani’s comments on Israel have long been essentially in line with the DSA’s, though he has denounced Hamas and visited synagogues and Jewish groups to affirm that he would fight antisemitism and ensure police protection as needed. But that hasn’t stopped some members from already talking about how they expect to use his potential win as an opening for a wider DSA agenda and demand that he not waver from it at all.
Following in Mamdani’s footsteps
One campaign trying to tap into the same energy and tactics as Mamdani is the Minneapolis mayoral run of Omar Fateh, the state senator who won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor endorsement at its convention over the summer, only to have that support revoked on claimed technicalities shortly after.
Fateh told CNN that the revoked endorsement “supercharged” his campaign, both because of the incident itself and what he said it represented about a party he contends is in sway to rich donors.
“What we don’t want to see is continued tension that extends into the midterms and beyond,” Fateh said. “Democratic leadership has to listen to the folks in the party that are really energizing new voters, energizing young people, bringing on new people to come out, not only to vote, but to volunteer and to spend time and effort helping build out the broad coalition in the party. And because that’s what it’s going to take to win.”
In Seattle, Katie Wilson is waging a strong challenge to the incumbent mayor in November. She’s still waiting on an upcoming meeting of the local DSA to see if she’ll get their endorsement.
Wilson isn’t a DSA member herself. She came up as a founder of the local Transit Riders Union and branched out to wider progressive activism.
“I’m a socialist. I’m fine being called a democratic socialist,” Wilson told CNN. “We’re in a moment where most people don’t care that much. People are not that hung up on labels and want to see results on issues that affect their daily lives.”
Asked how her socialism would define her mayoralty, Wilson said she’d encourage outside organizing to keep up pressure on her administration and community wealth-building models, but said, “it’s really more of a long-term, big picture vision for me.”
“In the next four years, maybe it won’t look that different from a progressive Democrat,” she said.
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