The Democratic Socialists of America have discovered some interesting primary victory in the past several weeks. In New York, two DSA members defeated Democratic candidates — including the sitting chairman of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus — in the primary. In Colorado, Melat Kiros defeating a 30-year-old member in another Council primary. It’s all about the supremacy of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is seen as the Democratic kingpin after his endorsed candidates won last month.
It’s been a long journey for DSA, which began its current rise a decade ago with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Since then, the party has slowly come together popularity and the left wing of the Democratic Party, branding themselves as “warriors” with a populist economic message.
Megan Romer is the national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. He joined Today, It’s Explained co-host Noel King to explain what the DSA stands for and how it got here – as well as, some of the controversies surrounding its candidates.
The following is part of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so take a listen Today, It’s Explained wherever you get your podcasts, incl Apple Podcasts, Pandoraand Spotify.
DSA has had a major primary victory in New York; in Colorado; in the mayoral race in Washington, DC. Why do you think DSA candidates are doing well in the elections right now?
I think there’s a kind of anger that people have about seeing any vestiges of our social safety net dismantled. I think they’re seeing their wages stagnate as inflation continues to rise and the cost of living continues to rise, and I think that’s overwhelming people.
I also think they are looking for answers, and solutions, and for things that will change their lives for the better. When we talk about expanding child care for all, or Medicare for all – the child care debt, and the medical debt, those are real issues for real people. So I think they’re glad to see someone not just saying, “Well, the other (option is) worse,” but actually saying, “Look, we’re going to rethink some of these things and come up with a solution together.”
Your economic message seems to burn with Americans who really feel like life is too expensive, but DSA’s positions on some domestic issues like borders, like policing, open you up to claims that DSA is too extreme for ordinary Americans. I know you are aware of this charge. How do you answer that?
A lot of the costs come from documents or, sometimes, panels where they cut people talking about this long-term view, because we’re not just trying to fix small problems. We try to get to the root of these social problems and imagine what life could be like and what society could look like if we changed it.
Things like ending the cancerous government as we know it – people say, “So you’re going to fire all the police?” Well, no, the goal is free childcare, free health care, free college, these kinds of things that will keep crime down. We know crime is strongly linked to poverty. We don’t say, “Yeah, let the murderers run free in the streets.” We say, “If we eliminated, in this long-term vision, many of these crimes of poverty, crimes of desperation, what would the system look like?” And it will have to be different.
Even in the best of worlds, people will still kill other people. This is an unfortunate fact. And voters hear “end the rogue state,” whether it’s next week or 50 years from now, and they feel like you’re not where they are.
Working-class voters in the last election moved to President Donald Trump, in part because, as we understand from the polls, many people felt like the Democrats were too outspoken. Really? They were very extreme in cultural matters. And so, I wonder if the DSA considers that while the economic platform is very attractive, ending the carceral state is not.
We think it is important to connect those two things. The reason for doing something is important too. (If) they say, “Okay, you want to stop the police,” it’s like, well, we’re not doing that right now, but we’ve invested in “Care Not Cops” programs, because the long-term goal is to stop prosecuting people for poverty crimes. It’s not to make you less safe; is to make you safer. Because, right now, the system as it works doesn’t make us any safer.
There are real concerns about some of the candidates who are DSA affiliates. Darializa Avila Chevalier has won the general election in New York City. He said inside posts on X one time that he wiped his dirty hands on the American flag, because he had no napkins. He suggested that white people should not be in interracial relationships. There is much more. He has apologized and, independently, deleted his X account. My colleague Astead Herndon told me that he finds it better not to spend too much time online.
But, I wonder: If you’re working with anti-establishment candidates, there’s a level of scrutiny that won’t be the same as establishment candidates. Do you think you will have difficulty finding strong candidates for your economic message, but you don’t need to make this embarrassing apology?
That’s an interesting place we’re in. We don’t create our candidates in a lab, do we? We don’t adopt Model UN children and send them to—
Oh, come on. A perfect example of UN children? Shouldn’t white people have interracial relationships?
No, I agree. No, that’s the way out there. What I’m saying is: We’re dealing with imperfect, messy people, of course. And I don’t know why he tweeted that. I think she had a bad divorce and was just tweeting too close to the sun or something.
That’s a bad tweet. He apologized for that. Trump made some nasty tweets this morning, didn’t he? That will be the reality of running for candidates who did not enter adulthood thinking that they will become a candidate.
I want to ask you about an issue that has become very sensitive in the last few years. DSA’s attitude toward Israel makes some people wary, and perhaps even hostile.
Let me give you a few examples that I see mentioned frequently. On October 7, after Hamas attacked Israel, the DSA issued a statement to show solidarity with Palestine. It condemned the killing of all civilians, but added, “This was unprovoked.” Recently Mayor Mamdani put some Jewish leaders on edge when he referred to AIPAC as “crime.” He said he was quoting the philosopher Antonio Gramsci. The DSA candidate in Colorado who scored a big win last night, Melat Kiroshe was recently asked by a reporter whether the firebombing of a peaceful Jewish gathering in Boulder was an act of anti-Semitism. And he said, “I do not know what is in the heart of the criminal.”
Now, there is an argument that these types of things taken together show that there is hatred within the DSA. There is also the more misguided argument that DSA is not hateful, but fosters a culture that allows its members to speak in ways that are. What do you say to American Jews who think the way DSA-affiliated politicians talk about Israel goes beyond foreign policy arguments and into something darker?
That is something that we think about a lot, but what we see is that Israel is carrying out genocide. People are mad and they should be mad. It is genocide. We are not equal on that definition or that understanding of events. We see the state of racism. We see people in an open concentration camp, basically, in the Gaza Strip.
People are crazy. And sometimes, yes, people are crazy and won’t change their words like they should. I think it’s very important, obviously, that we stand up against anti-Semitism in all its forms, but I don’t see the Israeli situation as something we should defend on any grounds. It’s a racist government, and I’m not apologizing for that.
In 2024, DSA deleted confirmation of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – a fierce critic of Israel – after attending a panel with Jewish leaders on hatred. A lot of people looked at that and said, you have a strong critic of Israel who votes like a strong critic of Israel, who attended the anti-Semitism panel, and the DSA revoked their endorsement. You can see the calculation here. You can kind of see where the brain goes from here. Why did DSA revoke its AOC accreditation?
That was really a difficult process. We did not actually revoke our AOC certification that way. What we did was we did an endorsement that came with a number of conditions, which was the first time we had ever done that.
We said, we want you to promise not to fund the Israeli army in any way – no defense, no offense, no weapons for Israel. We want you not to sign up for any of them. I think he voted for the current one at the Iron Dome. We want him in the same voting line as Rashida Tlaib, who is one of the most fearless advocates for Palestine and the Palestinian people in Congress. So the AOC had voted for some of them, and had supported others. And so we said, well, you can’t do that anymore. The AOC has since pledged to vote no on any funding of any kind to the Israeli military.
So in the end, he came to your opinion? Did the pressure work?
We have been told, and you can confirm, that DSA wants to run as a presidential candidate in 2028. Tell me what that means about your ambitions.
The Bernie Sanders campaign changed the face of the American left a little. He was the first person to go on stage and say, “I am a Democratic Socialist.” And it seemed like it gave a lot of people permission to speak out. It broke the dam a little by using that big scary S word. So if we’re going to run for president, we can at least make sure there was a voice in the primary to hold people accountable.
When Bernie was in the primary, standing up for Medicare For All, he got a bunch of other candidates to sign the Medicare For All pledge – that’s good stuff. And so, we would like to win the presidency. We would also, at the very least, like to move the needle by having a real Democratic Socialist voice in the debates – fighting for working families, fighting for unions, fighting for health care for everyone, and fighting against the military industrial complex.
