Democratic Socialists of America

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is a political organization of left-wing activists in the United States. The group is the largest of its kind in the country to claim the “socialist” label, having more than 100,000 members in 2026 and chapters in all 50 states. Its declared goals include the strengthening of labor unions, the establishment of universal health care, ethnic and gender equality, and a Green New Deal to address global warming.

In 2025 a self-described democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, was elected mayor of New York City. Less than a year into his first term, Mamdani endorsed and campaigned for three progressive candidates, including two democratic socialists, in the New York state Democratic primary races for the House of Representatives. The victory of all three, along with Mamdani’s own election, indicated a sharp turn toward the left among Democrats and progressive independents in New York. The same trend seemed evident in certain other states, including Colorado, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Mission and organization

Despite its name, the DSA is not exclusively made up of democratic socialists. The organization consciously operates as a “big tent” for leftists (as described by Maurice Isserman, a charter member of the DSA), lacking a rigid orthodoxy to which participants must adhere. Such ideological diversity often leads to fractious debate within the group, but members are united in the basic belief that capitalism is fundamentally unjust and must be replaced by a more democratic system that economically and socially empowers all people, regardless of ethnicity, gender, or age.

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This broad mission translates into a wide variety of programs, most of which are initiated by individual chapters according to their own priorities. Projects might focus on electoral politics, protests, labor unions, educational initiatives, or any number of other activities. Atlanta’s DSA chapter, for example, devoted a significant amount of its energy in 2023 to resisting the construction of a new police training facility in Weelaunee Forest.

Some oversight of the overall organization is maintained by the National Political Committee (NPC), which is composed of DSA members elected at DSA conventions and a small number of members belonging to the DSA’s Youth Section, a suborganization geared toward young persons and students.

History

The DSA resulted from a merger in 1982 between two other socialist organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). Their combination benefited both groups: The older cohort of DSOC had need of NAM’s youthful energy, while NAM lacked DSOC’s leadership and organizing skills. However, some negotiation was required, as the groups hailed from different traditions. DSOC was an offshoot of Eugene Debs’s Socialist Party of America, whereas NAM had originated within the Students for a Democratic Society, one of several activist movements within the international “New Left” of the 1950s and ’60s. 

Among the primary sticking points were the organizations’ contrasting perspectives on communism and Israel. DSOC veterans were anti-communist and pro-Israel, whereas NAM activists supported communist governments and an independent Palestinian state. In the end, it was DSOC’s position on communism that would become standard among the membership, but NAM’s insistence on Palestinian statehood remained.

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Importantly, the DSA also inherited DSOC’s electoral approach of working from within the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, rather than attempting to run its own members as independent candidates. This strategy of “realignment”—slowly transforming the Democratic Party into a socialist party—was the brainchild of DSOC founder Michael Harrington, a professor best known for his book The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962). Harrington became the DSA’s cochair immediately after the merger, sharing the position with Barbara Ehrenreich. He remained in the position until his death in 1989.

At its inception, the DSA had roughly 6,000 members. That number varied modestly from the 1980s through the early 2000s, owing in no small part to a waning interest in socialism generally. During that time the organization’s membership grayed and its youth chapters collapsed. Indeed, some chapter meetings came to be attended mostly by retirees.

Two events lifted the DSA out of its political irrelevancy. The first was the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011, which radicalized a new generation of young activists against capitalism. The second was the 2015–16 presidential candidacy of Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders. While not a member of the DSA himself, Sanders did identify as a democratic socialist, and the new attention that democratic socialism thereby received resulted in the DSA’s membership increasing from 6,500 in 2014 to 8,500 by Election Day in 2016. Several thousand more people signed up after Republican Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

These new members, most of them young, revitalized the organization. In 2018 DSA-supported candidates won not only 40 more state and local offices but also two seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. These victories—particularly the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman to be elected to Congress—further encouraged DSA sign-ups, so that by the end of the year the DSA could boast of nearly 55,000 new participants.

In 2020 a second run for the presidency by Sanders once again increased growth and activity in the DSA. The election cycle ended without a Sanders victory but with two additional members elected as Democrats to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Following Trump’s election to a second presidential term in 2024, DSA membership increased again, reflecting leftists’ continued frustration and discontent with the established leadership of the Democratic Party. By the middle of 2026, the organization had some 100,000 members.