It has not been a good summer for socialists in the U.S. Congress, who are seeing their already meager representation in the House of Representatives, the body’s lower chamber, cut in half. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) was ousted in his Democratic primary race in June, thanks in part to a large expenditure by the pro-Israel lobby group American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Earlier this month, the same fate befell Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who also lost her primary to a challenger heavily bankrolled by AIPAC. Both Bowman and Bush were members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and both were targeted by AIPAC because of their fierce criticism of Israel for its brutal collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza.
Their defeats mean that Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are the only remaining DSA-endorsed congressmembers. (Ocasio-Cortez did not receive the national organization’s endorsement for her reelection campaign this year but was endorsed by her local chapter, New York City DSA.) It is unclear what influence they and nonsocialist progressives, like fellow “Squad” members Ilhan Omar and Summer Lee, will have under a Kamala Harris administration should the Democrats win the White House in November. AOC’s primetime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention this month, and Harris’s choice of progressive Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, are at least symbolic nods to the left flank of the Democratic Party — though AOC’s speech, which claimed falsely that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza,” was a serious disappointment for the pro-Palestine left. And Harris is so far running a rather centrist campaign, renouncing her prior support for a Green New Deal and federal jobs guarantee and promising that the US will continue funneling weapons to Israel.
If the socialist political project looks to be in a rather sorry state at the federal level, there is perhaps more room for optimism if we turn to the city and state level. DSA continues to build its presence in city and state offices all across the United States, where socialist city councilors and state legislators are advocating for greater protections for tenants and workers, fully funding and expanding public services, and taxing the rich.
To be sure, these socialist electeds are not, as of now, fundamentally transforming the country’s economic or political systems. In this they somewhat resemble the “sewer socialists” of the early twentieth century, who focused on good governance and building and improving city infrastructure like parks and, well, sewers. It remains to be seen whether the Left can build on these city- and state-level efforts to create a hegemonic national political project in a way that the socialists of that earlier generation ultimately could not.
Socialists in State Office
Looking at state legislatures, socialists have had the most success by far in New York State. DSA now boasts three state senators — Julia Salazar, Jabari Brisport, and Kristen Gonzalez — and five state legislators: Emily Gallagher, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, and Sarahana Shrestha. They will soon be joined in the state assembly by Claire Valdez, who won her Democratic Party primary election in June of this year and will advance unopposed in the general election.
DSA began building its bench in the New York state legislature in 2018, the same year AOC and Rashida Tlaib were elected to Congress, with the election of Salazar. But it was in 2020 that socialists really broke through, with the election of Brisport, Forrest, Mitaynes, Mamdani, and Gallagher; the group expanded its foothold further in 2022 with the addition of Gonzalez and Shrestha. The eight legislators coordinate legislative strategy and priorities through what’s known as the New York State Socialists in Office (SIO) Committee, along with representatives from their local DSA chapters.
Since 2018, socialist electeds have championed a number of progressive policy priorities, and with the help of progressive allies in the legislature have been able to push through some of these reforms. These include a significant expansion of tenant protections in 2019 and higher taxes on the rich to fund COVID-19 relief programs and public schools in 2021. One of the SIO’s most celebrated achievements was the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) of 2023, which directs New York State’s public power authority to build out and own renewable-energy sources to help the state meet its goals of phasing out fossil-fuel-based power. According to a July 2024 op-ed by Salazar and Shrestha, however, New York governor Kathy Hochul “has done virtually nothing to fulfill the people’s mandate for public power,” and there’s been “no public commitment to build enough clean energy to meet our climate goals, which the law requires.”
Socialists have not built benches of similar size at the state level outside New York, but they do have representation in state houses across the country. For instance, socialists have three seats in Minnesota’s state senate (Omar Fateh, Zaynab Mohamed, and Jen McEwen) and two in its state legislature (Athena Hollins and Samantha Sencer-Mura). In 2023, senators Fateh and McEwen authored a bill to raise pay and expand worker protections for Uber and Lyft drivers that passed both chambers of the legislature. The bill was vetoed by Gov. Tim Walz under pressure from the companies, though he signed a less generous version of the bill into law earlier this year.
In Pennsylvania, DSA-endorsed Nikil Saval has been a senate senator since 2020, with Elizabeth Fiedler in the state House of Representatives since 2019, joined by Rick Krajewski in 2021. And socialists have now won multiple seats in state legislatures in Colorado, Michigan, Wisconsin, Vermont, and elsewhere.
Municipal Socialism in the 21st Century
The most electorally successful socialist organization in the United States before DSA was the Socialist Party of America (SPA), which peaked in the 1910s. According to Jack Ross, writing for the Mapping American Social Movements Project, “More than 1,000 Socialist candidates were elected to public office in the first two decades of the 20th century. They included two members of Congress, dozens of state legislators, and more than 130 mayors.” At the height of its presence in state legislatures in 1914–15, Chris Maisano wrote in Jacobin, Wisconsin had the greatest number of state legislators at nine, followed by Oklahoma at six. At the state and federal levels, then, DSA appears to be near the electoral strength of the SPA.
But “sewer socialism,” particularly associated with the Socialist Party stronghold of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was more a municipal-government phenomenon. And DSA is also making major inroads into office at the city level. New York City has two DSA-endorsed city councilors; the Minneapolis City Council now boasts four DSA-backed members; and Chicago has the largest delegation, with six democratic socialists on its council. Chicago’s democratic socialist councilors have mostly been strong allies of progressive (but nonsocialist) mayor Brandon Johnson.
Socialists have been winning municipal office outside left-wing strongholds like NYC and Chicago too. In 2021, DSA candidate Richie Floyd won election to the city council in St. Petersburg, Florida — hardly a bastion of radicalism. In 2023, socialist Jesse Brown won election to the city council in Indianapolis, Indiana, a position he has since used to publicly agitate against the Republicans who control the state government and to call for a cease-fire in Gaza. In Louisville, Kentucky, this year, J. P. Lynginer won his Democratic primary for the city council on a platform of redirecting money from the police budget to public services, like afterschool programs for kids and jobs programs. He is also proposing a municipal grocery-store system to address the problems of food deserts in the city.
In 1912, the Socialist Party held seventy-eight mayorships across the US. Mayor’s offices have been less of a target for today’s democratic socialists, though DSA-endorsed candidate India Walton made national headlines when it looked like she would win the mayoralty in Buffalo in 2021. In Richmond, California, the progressive political group the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) has long battled the influence of fossil-fuel giant Chevron, which owns a refinery in the city, as well as other local polluters and powerful real-estate interests. Over the past several years, the local DSA chapter has typically supported RPA’s city-council candidates; RPA now holds a majority on the city council, including the mayor, Eduardo Martinez.
DSA now has its eyes on the mayor’s office in Sacramento, California, where progressive activist Flo Cofer looks to have a real shot at winning in November. And in New York City, socialist assembly member Zohran Mamdani is apparently considering running for mayor next year.
A Long March Through City, State, and Federal Governments?
Looking at all this electoral activity at the city and state level around the country reveals a socialist left that is more vibrant than its numbers in Congress might suggest, especially given the recent high-profile defeats of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. It signals that socialism has a real presence in American life, one that isn’t going anywhere soon.
The ultimate trajectory of socialist work in city and state government remains unclear. In most places, socialists remain a tiny minority in both the electorate in legislatures, and the vast majority of socialist elected officials run in Democratic Party primaries and/or publicly identify as Democrats. This association with a corporate-dominated party is a long-term problem for building a popular project based on the idea that workers and capitalists have fundamentally opposed interests.
Just as important, enacting the kinds of large-scale reforms that were at the heart of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns — single-payer health care, a federal jobs guarantee, free college for all and full student-debt forgiveness — will require wielding major political power at the national level. So too, of course, will the more fundamental democratization of the economy that is socialists’ ultimate horizon. Hopefully, electoral and legislative victories down ballot can be used to root the socialist left in a real base that, along with growing militancy in the labor movement, can eventually power greater national breakthroughs.
Nick French is an associate editor at Jacobin.
