The Democratic Socialists of America have notched some impressive primary wins over the past couple of weeks. In New York, two DSA members beat Democratic establishment candidates — including the sitting chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — in House primaries. In Colorado, Melat Kiros beat out a 30-year incumbent in another House primary. All of that is on top of the ascendency of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who’s looking like a Democratic kingmaker after his endorsed candidates triumphed last month.
It’s been a long journey for the DSA, which began its current rise a decade ago with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Since then, the party has slowly amassed popularity with the left wing of the Democratic Party, building a brand as “fighters” with a populist economic message.
Megan Romer is a national co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. She joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down what the DSA stands for and how it got here — plus, some of the controversies surrounding its candidates.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
The DSA has had big primary wins in New York; in Colorado; in the mayoral race in Washington, DC. Why do you think DSA candidates are doing so well in elections right now?
I think there’s the kind of rage that people have about seeing any remnants of our social safety net be dismantled. I think they see their wages stagnating while inflation continues to go up and cost of living continues to go up, and I think that has people really on edge.
I also think that they’re looking for answers, and for solutions, and for things that are actually going to change their lives for the better. When we talk about expanding child care for all, or Medicare for all — child care debt, and medical debt, those are very real issues to real people. So I think they’re excited to see someone not just saying, “Well, the other [option is] worse,” but really saying, “Look, we’re going to rethink some of these things and come up with solutions together.”
Your economic message seems to have caught fire for Americans who really do feel like life is too expensive, but the DSA’s positions on some domestic issues like borders, like policing, open you up to claims that the DSA is just too extreme for regular Americans. I know that you’re aware of this charge. How do you respond to that?
A lot of the charges come from documents or, sometimes, panels where they’re clipping people talking about this long-term view, because we’re not just trying to fix little problems. We’re trying to really get to the root of these societal problems and think about what life could look like and what society could look like if we change them.
Things like abolishing the carceral state as we know it — people say, “So you’re just going to fire all the police?” Well, no, the goal is free child care, free health care, free college, these sort of things that will actually make there be less crime. We know crime is inextricably linked to poverty. We’re not saying, “Yes, let murderers run free in the streets.” We’re saying, “If we have eliminated, in this long-term vision, a lot of these crimes of poverty, crimes of desperation, what can the system look like?” And it will have to be different.
Even in a much better world, people will still murder other people. This is an unfortunate fact. And voters hear “abolish the carceral state,” whether it’s next week or 50 years from now, and they sense that you are not where they are.
Working class voters in the last election moved toward President Donald Trump, in part because, as we understand it from polling, many people felt like the Democrats had gotten too pie-in-the-sky. Right? They were too extreme on cultural issues. And so, I wonder whether the DSA considers that while the economic platform is very appealing, abolishing the carceral state simply isn’t.
We think it’s important to connect those two things. The reason you do something matters too. [If] they say, “Well, you want to abolish the police,” it’s like, well, we are not doing that right now, but we have invested in “Care not Cops” programs, because the long-term goal is to stop prosecuting people for crimes of poverty. It’s not to make you less safe; it’s to make you more safe. Because, right now, the system as it works does not make us more safe.
There are real concerns about some candidates who are affiliated with the DSA. Darializa Avila Chevalier just won a big election in New York City. She said in posts on X at one point that she wiped her dirty hands on an American flag, because she didn’t have napkins. She suggested that white people shouldn’t be in interracial relationships. There’s a lot more. She has apologized and, independently, she deleted her X account. She told my colleague Astead Herndon that she finds it better to not spend too much time online.
But, I wonder: If you are working with anti-establishment candidates, there is a level of vetting that it just isn’t going to be the same as with establishment candidates. Do you think you’re going to have difficulty finding candidates who are strong on your economic message, but don’t have to issue these embarrassing apologies?
That is an interesting spot we’re in. We’re not forming our candidates in a lab, right? We’re not raising perfect Model UN children and sending them to—
Oh, come on. Perfect model UN children? White people shouldn’t be in interracial relationships?
No, I agree. No, that is way out there. What I’m saying is: We are dealing with imperfect, messy people, for sure. And I don’t know why she tweeted that. I am imagining she had a bad breakup and was just tweeting too close to the sun or some terrible thing.
That’s a bad tweet. She apologized for it. Trump did bad tweets this morning, right? That is going to be the reality of running candidates who did not come into adult life thinking they were ever going to be a candidate.
I want to ask you about an issue that’s become very sensitive over the past few years. The DSA’s focus on Israel strikes some people as obsessive, possibly even tipping into antisemitic.
Let me give you a couple of examples that I see cited frequently. On October 7, after Hamas attacked Israel, the DSA released a statement expressing solidarity with Palestine. It did condemn the killing of all civilians, but it added, “This was not unprovoked.” Mayor Mamdani recently set some Jewish leaders on edge when he referred to AIPAC as “monsters.” He said he was quoting the philosopher Antonio Gramsci. A DSA candidate in Colorado who had a big win last night, Melat Kiros, was recently asked by a reporter whether a firebombing attack on a peaceful Jewish gathering in Boulder was an act of antisemitism. And she said, “I don’t know what’s in the perpetrator’s heart.”
Now, there’s an argument that these types of things taken together illustrate that there is antisemitism within the DSA. There’s also a more nuanced argument that says the DSA isn’t antisemitic, but you’re fostering a culture that allows your members to talk in ways that are. What do you say to American Jews who think the way that DSA-affiliated politicians talk about Israel goes beyond taking issue with foreign policy and into something darker?
That is something that we think a lot about, but what we see is that Israel is perpetrating a genocide. People are mad and should be mad. It’s a genocide. We don’t equivocate on that definition or on that understanding of the events. We see an apartheid state. We see people being in an open-air concentration camp, essentially, in the Gaza Strip.
People are mad. And sometimes, yeah, people are mad and they’re going to not nuance their words as much as they should. I do think it’s very important, obviously, that we stand against antisemitism in all its forms, but I do not see the state of Israel as something that we should be defending on any grounds. It’s a genocidal apartheid state, and I am not apologizing for that.
In 2024, the DSA rescinded an endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — a fierce critic of Israel — after she attended a panel with Jewish leaders on antisemitism. A lot of people looked at that and said, you have a fierce critic of Israel who votes as a fierce critic of Israel, who attended a panel on antisemitism, and the DSA rescinded their endorsement of her. You can see the math here. You can sort of see where the brain goes from here. Why did the DSA rescind its endorsement of AOC?
That was actually a complicated process. We didn’t actually rescind our endorsement of AOC in that way. What we did was we made an endorsement that came with some strings attached, which was the first time we’d ever done that.
We said, we want you to pledge to not fund Israeli military anything — not defense, not offense, no weapons for Israel. We want you to not sign on to any of that. I think she voted present on the Iron Dome. We want her in the same voting line as Rashida Tlaib, who is one of the most fearless defenders of Palestine and the Palestinian people in Congress. So AOC had voted present on some, and she had equivocated on some. And so we said, okay, you can’t do that anymore. AOC has since pledged to vote no on all funding of any kind for the Israeli military.
So ultimately, she came around to your point of view? The pressure worked?
Yeah, yeah.
The DSA, we are told, and you can confirm it, wants to run a presidential primary candidate in 2028. Tell me what that means about your ambitions.
The Bernie Sanders campaign changed the face of the American left a bit. He was the first person who went out there on stage and said, “I am a Democratic Socialist.” And it felt like it gave a lot of people permission to say it out loud. It broke the dam a little bit on using that big scary S-word. So if we run a presidential candidate, we can at least make sure that there was a voice in the primary holding people to account.
When Bernie was in the primary, standing strong for Medicare For All, got a bunch of the other candidates to sign a Medicare For All pledge — those things are good. And so, we would love to win the presidency. We would also, at the very least, love to move the needle by having an actual Democratic Socialist voice in the debates — fighting for working families, fighting for labor unions, fighting for healthcare for everybody, and fighting against the military industrial complex.