The democratic socialist organization is building something much bigger than an email list.
by David Duhalde August 19, 2026 (Prospect.org)
Harold Meyerson’s piece “Why Have Less Than One Percent of American Socialists Joined DSA?” tackles a question that those from supporters to opponents of socialism have pondered. If socialism now has millions of stated adherents, why have very few of them opted to join the most prominent socialist organization? Alternatively, how can groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mobilize and activate the millions sympathetic to their broad views?
One barrier, for Meyerson, is a “cocoon culture” where activists—DSA or not—begin to believe ideas in their immediate world are more popular than they truly are. Specifically, he fears the advocacy of policies such as defunding the police is alienating potential voters for DSA candidates. He notes, accurately, that many of the most successful democratic socialist politicians, such as Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, support police reform but have publicly distanced themselves from the defund movement. While Meyerson doesn’t explicitly say it, one can conclude such a “cocoon culture” may be an explanation for why nearly all socialists have not joined DSA.
For Meyerson, should DSA and leftists aligned with it shed this cocoon culture, they could make bigger inroads in places outside the heavily blue districts where they’re winning. His argument gained some support with Francesca Hong’s defeat in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary. The DSAer and state assemblymember, despite being ahead in the polls for some time, eventually lost as the Democratic establishment coalesced around one candidate, much like how Joe Biden defeated Sanders in the 2020 presidential primary. Sure enough, Hong’s past comments rejecting Thanksgiving got more attention than her popular stance against AI data centers.
In my view, Meyerson is putting too much explanatory weight onto one candidate and her past tweets. At the very least, there is an overemphasis on democratic socialists’ unique takes explaining electoral defeats and seemingly low membership numbers.
It is more plausible that DSA’s membership numbers reflect the death of civic society in the United States much more than the group’s limitations. Perhaps Hong might have eked out a win if she had not been burdened by a history of inflammatory positions, but even if every DSA candidate were moderate-coded with a squeaky-clean social media history, it is highly unlikely that would cause a flood of sign-ups. If that were possible, more moderate social democratic membership organizations that reject DSA’s radicalism would be growing explosively, and they aren’t. On the contrary, the fact that DSA is full of outspoken radicals might be the reason it is as large as it is.
As Meyerson notes, DSA just hit 120,000 members. That makes it the largest socialist group in U.S. history, though without adjusting for population. Indeed, that figure is more impressive than it sounds, because DSA—almost uniquely among the current crop of nonprofit membership organizations, as well as the Democratic Party—requires members to pay dues, unless you apply for a waiver.
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Many other peer activist organizations allow people merely to sign up with an email and get a de facto lifetime membership. Unlike the member-funded DSA, many of those groups rely on big donors and foundations to sustain the financial health of the group. DSA, for obvious reasons, can have no truck with such funding tactics targeting the wealthy.
DSA almost certainly could have a million or more “members” even without rich backers if it just asked people to sign up with emails and never worry about renewal. But that’s not what DSA is building. It is attempting something much more difficult and ambitious: It is building a democratic model of political self-organization, for good and ill.
Danish sociologist Fabian Holt chronicled this energy rebuilding civic society in his new book, Organize or Burn (which I discussed on a recent Left Anchor podcast), which covers New York City DSA’s successful effort to pass environmental legislation at the state level in 2023. Holt studied the New York political scene and observed that young DSA activists were simply reviving the social function that party machines and other political actors have abandoned. This is a tremendous challenge in the age of smartphones and social media, but conversely, precisely because of our rotted civic society, organizations that can really build punch far above their weight. DSA is making the old new again—with policy and election wins to show for it.
While Holt is sympathetic to DSA, CNN commentator and erstwhile leftist Van Jones is not. But he agreed with Holt inasmuch as DSA’s strength is its social culture that builds community. Last June, he posted:
The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) can beat moderates in a growing number of blue strongholds. Why? Because the DSA has patiently built an army of on-the-ground organizers—who go to meetings, help each other, study together and THEN work to turn out voters on Election Day. That army grows every day—election or no election. Their investment in real people grows (and compounds) with each election cycle. The DSA has a bigger army, every time, win or lose.
This culture change, Jones notes, cannot happen overnight.
We even have an example of moderation failing to attract a mass membership in DSA’s own history. As Meyerson notes: “DSA, which had just 6,000 or so members when [Sanders’s first presidential] campaign began, didn’t yet exist as a political force; it was his campaign that effectively rebirthed the organization.” That old DSA was much closer to the politics of Sanders today. But now a more radical version is 20 times larger.
One might respond that conditions are more favorable for socialism today. That’s true. But we have not seen groups like Our Revolution, founded in Sanders’s image along traditional nonprofit lines, outorganize DSA, not by a long shot. It isn’t getting as much press, or achieving mass membership either—certainly not by the dues-only standards.
People are joining DSA and voting for its candidates because they see it winning, an honest force for change, and standing up to a Democratic establishment that has failed to defeat Donald Trump twice. Electing radicals like Hong with a history of saying what they really think, even if that might be unpopular or unworkable, is a key part of its credibility, for good and ill. A movement whose leaders are perfectly airbrushed and poll-tested will sound phony to a cynical voting public and struggle to attract attention in a cacophonous media environment.
And on balance, it’s working. Hong’s loss aside, DSA looks to be sending nearly half a dozen comrades to Congress next year—many more than the Socialist Party or older versions of DSA ever did. That demonstrates mass support, dues-paying or not, from the millions of voters in this country who identify with democratic socialism.
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David Duhalde
David Duhalde is a democratic socialist organizer who has held positions in both the Democratic Socialists of America and its sister nonprofit, the DSA Fund. More by David Duhalde
