- President Donald Trump has mentioned communism at least 81 times since the June 23 primary elections.
- Candidates belonging to Democratic Socialists of America won in New York, Colorado and Washington, D.C.
- DSA is led by a coalition of self-described Marxists — and its founder said Karl Marx was a democratic socialist.
The Democratic Party lurched toward socialism in congressional primaries in New York, Colorado and Michigan last month with self-described democratic socialists winning elections or leading in the polls.
President Donald Trump led the Republican reaction to these upsets, labeling Democrats as “communists” and warning that communism is the most significant threat facing the country as the midterm elections approach.
Since the June primary, Trump has invoked the term at least 81 times, according to Reuters — including 14 times in his semiquincentennial speech at Mount Rushmore — and made it his final message at this week’s NATO summit.
“I want to get the word out, because what’s forming is communism in the country,” Trump told reporters in Turkey. “Communism’s a disaster. It’s been proven to be for thousands of years under different names.”
Some Democrats recoiled at the term. Brad Lander, one of three democratic socialists who won their congressional primaries in deeply Democratic New York seats on June 23, said the ideology is “not in the communist ballpark.”
Despite Lander’s desire to distance himself from the revolutionary philosophy developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, America’s democratic socialist movement appears to be communist in all but name only.
And sometimes in name, too.
Since 2023, the DSA’s National Political Committee has been controlled by a coalition of caucuses that define themselves explicitly as communists and Marxists. Delegates voted for even more radical leadership in 2025.
Lander’s fellow New York City primary winners — community organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier and New York state assembly member Claire Valdez — are both members of the Democratic Socialists of America.
As are New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and recent primary victors: Melat Kiros in Denver, Janeese Lewis George in Washington, D.C., and Nithya Raman in Los Angeles.
Groups within DSA disagree on whether the organization should try to shift the Democratic Party by messaging to a big tent of voters through “mass politics,” or by backing only DSA members with a strict “sectarian” platform.
But they agree on their destination: eradicating America’s free market system, and replacing it with a socialist one, featuring public ownership of entire industries and universal programs for housing, healthcare and more.
“We are trying to abolish the system of capital and replace it with a system of socialism,” Salt Lake DSA co-chair Matty Jackson said. “Ultimately our goal is to show people that when we organize to change the world that we can.”
What do socialists believe?
Jackson entered socialist activism after joining his WinCo Foods co-worker, who was a DSA member, in voting to unionize their supermarket in South Salt Lake. Months later, the corporation had yet to bargain with employees.
While he did not consider himself political, Jackson said the experience prompted him to view the world in a stark binary of opposition between those who must work for a living and those who own the things they need to live.
It is not that “capitalists” are colluding against the working class, they are simply doing what those in power have always naturally done to secure their piece of the pie at the expense of others, Jackson told the Deseret News.
“As soon as there was extra stuff around, well, somebody wants to control it,” he said. “And so they use violence, or they use structures, or they use stories, like the religious stories, to tell people why they deserve to control it.”
To Jackson, the existence of billionaires is “offensive.” He believes entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, each worth hundreds of billions of dollars, are not responsible for the value their creations have brought to society.
He believes the workers at Amazon and Tesla deserve all the credit.
Raising taxes on the rich is not enough for Jackson. Reforms that weaken business interests and support workers — like the free childcare, nationalized utilities and shorter work weeks of Europe — are good steps, but they are just means to the end of overhauling society.
Classic socialism means no billionaires at all — no capitalist influence on the economy; just government ownership.
Tragic experiments with socialism where leaders murdered, starved or imprisoned millions in Russia, China, Cuba and elsewhere — while impoverishing millions more — are no cause for concern among America’s democratic socialists.
“If something fails the first time, that doesn’t necessarily mean it can’t succeed,” Jackson said. “Capitalism is something that failed a few times and then began to succeed. I think the same thing can be true of socialism.”
Over the past 18 months, Utah’s DSA chapter has doubled to more than 700 members. That may not seem like many compared to a million registered Republicans in the state, but it highlights a national trend of surging membership.
Beginning with the presidential bid of democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016, DSA’s official membership has multiplied from around 6,000 members to 120,000 — making it the largest socialist organization in U.S. history.
The organization formed in 1982 from a merger between groups representing the Old Left, focused on labor rights, and the New Left, focused on gender equality. DSA initially served as a small advocacy group for a large welfare state.
Longtime DSA chair Michael Harrington believed in slowly “realigning” the Democratic Party through pragmatic efforts to influence policy. But he made no attempt to hide his view that Marx was “a democrat with a small d.”
“Karl Marx ... was a democratic socialist in the most profound sense of the phrase,” he wrote in 1981.
Is the Democratic Party becoming socialist?
DSA’s website lists its immediate policy goals as achieving single-payer Medicare insurance for all, defunding the police, passing the Green New Deal for clean energy and ending Israel’s “occupation of all Arab lands.”
Long term, the group seeks to implement “democratic planning” of the economy and other methods of redistributing wealth. No mention is made of the nation’s $40 trillion in debt crowding out government spending.
Despite America’s economic forecast, socialism has lost its taboo among Democrats: 40% have a favorable view of the Democratic Socialists of America and 20% have an unfavorable view, a Marquette Law School poll found.
The remaining 40% hadn’t heard enough to answer.
“This is an emerging group within the party,” poll director Charles Franklin said. ”An awful lot of Democrats are just beginning to learn about what democratic socialists are and what they stand for. So we’re at an early stage."
Most voters learn about political ideologies from campaigns. The typically slow process is sped up when high-profile candidates like Sanders and Mamdani identify as democratic socialists, Franklin told the Deseret News.
One reason democratic socialists have found an opening to influence the Democratic Party is because it is historically unpopular with its own members for not doing more to confront President Donald Trump, according to Franklin.
Trump is a unique figure pushing the liberal wing of the Democratic Party toward more radical places. But in some ways the democratic socialist insurgence is exactly how parties have evolved for more than a century, Franklin said.
“That doesn’t mean for a minute that the DSA is going to come to dominate the party,” he said. “Whether one of these groups ultimately succeeds in shifting the balance of the party is a matter partly of these primary elections.”
Utah is an example of how attention does not always translate into change.
A November Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll found 51% of Utah Democrats had a favorable view of socialism, 65% approved of Mamdani’s plans for office and 70% had a favorable view of democratic socialists.
Yet in the state’s first competitive Democratic congressional primary in decades, voters in the deep blue 1st District opted for moderate former Rep. Ben McAdams — not one of his three democratic socialist opponents.
Upcoming primary and general elections in swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan will reveal whether the Democratic Party’s democratic socialist momentum will morph into a broader political realignment, Franklin said.
If it does, Republicans may have played a part in preparing the way, according to Franklin.
“To the extent Republicans and the president have been labeling Democrats socialists for years now, has that kind of diluted the meaning of the term and, ironically enough, helped normalize someone calling themselves a socialist?”