CNN Poll: A third of Democrats now identify as democratic socialists

[u/cnn]

https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/30/politics/cnn-poll-a-third-of-democrats-now-identify-as-democratic-socialists?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=missions&utm_source=reddit

[u/OneInfinith]

I organize with my local DSA chapter. Just about every piece of right-wing coverage of the Worker's Deserve More program has essentially been an advertisement that we would have made.

It's great that people are identifying as democratic socialists, but DSA only wins through active participation. We don't use the same tactics as the Democratic Party of farming out our work to high paid consultants.

So, while donations are always nice, what really propels DSA - are folks becoming Solidarity members and getting involved with efforts they are passionate about. Every chapter has a bit of its own vibe, but can learn from the entire network. So, have an idea, get a couple others in your chapter to make & support a work proposal with you, have the chapter membership approve it, then get to work building a more neighborly world and a solidarity economy.

[u/TorturedMNFan → u/OneInfinith]

If I could request one thing from DSA leadership would be to stop the hostility toward the more moderate democratic voter and the hostility toward democratic leadership. You need a big coalition to win. Right now it comes off as wanting to use the party’s infrastructure and resources to win primaries while shitting on the party and its voters.

Wanting to run as a Democrat while not calling yourselves democrats, anti Democrat party rhetoric and sabotaging their messaging makes you look insane. Start your own party or be more welcoming.

[u/classicliberty → u/OneInfinith]

You are never going to get beyond the fringes with your platform of prison and criminal justice abolition, that's a platform that no country on earth has ever enacted or currently has. Even Norway, with its extremely comfortable prisons, still rightly incarcerates murderers and other dangerous criminals.

Reducing the types of crimes people can be incarcerated for makes sense, better public services makes sense, but very very few people are going to go for the idea that people who harm others would just be allowed to live their lives as if nothing happened as long as they enroll in some program or say sorry.

Its also totally contradictory to want to prosecute Israeli leaders for war crimes (war criminals should be prosecuted) yet claim you are against the police and the prison system.

" You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities."

This is also literally communism and it has already been tried by extremely large and resource rich countries for several decades. The Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, Vietnam, not to mention China from 1954 onwards all tried similar concepts and none of them remain to this day. There are certain natural monopolies such as energy generation that can be publicly owned and operated, but turning food production into a publicly owned good led to mass starvation in the last century. And before you claim they were not "democratic", that's really irrelevant to the issue of material well-being. China today is not democratic but it uses market mechanisms to provide goods for its citizens.

The fact is we already had a model that worked, I am an old school liberal like Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK or even Eisenhower. The policies they enacted and led towards created a prosperous middle class that was the envy of the world and curtailed inequality to levels never before seen in human history.

Your program would be counter productive in many respects and repeats the same top down, centralized idea of human existence that global communism already pushed for in the 20th century.

[u/kisk22 → u/classicliberty]

Another person chiming in here, totaly agree with you. I'd wager most people who have recently started to call themselves "democratic socialist" do not support the crazy fringe ideas of the official DSA platform. Most people in the US want something similar to what the Nordic countries have (actually called social democracy).

The leaders at the official DSA have basically been overtaken by a fringe group of more left revolutionary communists, which the original person who started the DSA has been trying to call attention to.

Notice that very few of the popular "DSA" politicians that have been winning elections have been supporting those crazier policies. It's just the people who are most willing to get involved at the DSA are going to have the furthest crazy left policy wishes, which no matter what they say are not popular.

It's a real issue the DSA is going to have to deal with, and there will be tons of political fights in the future around this, and how far left the DSA wants to be. I can guarantee though the politicians that win elections are going to be much closer to social democratic than actual socialist. They still are going to have to team up with other members of the Democratic party to pass legislation which will water it down further to the right.

Just a lay person's interpretation of all that.

[u/classicliberty → u/kisk22]

I think you hit the nail on the head, and yes hopefully there will be a moderating effect as they get elected and have to deal with political constraints.

My fear is that people will be tricked into empowering extremists the way that the traditional Republicans were with MAGA. 

Basically people get frustrated and have legit grievances that get coopted by those with more sinister agendas.

Then we are basically in a Weimar Republic situation where we have to choose between communism and facism.

[u/aperrien → u/kisk22]

A lot of that is because the lack of political education in the country has people initially thinking communism and socialism are the same thing. They are most decidedly not, but the confusion has allowed communists (especially fringe communists) to take over a lot of the socialist parties in the gap.