Energized by Zohran Mamdani’s primary triumph, 1,200 DSA members came to Chicago to chart the group’s future.
BY EMMA JANSSEN
AUGUST 14, 2025 (Prospect.org)
ZACH CADDY
The Democratic Socialists of America meeting in Chicago this month
https://trinitymedia.ai/player/trinity-player.php?pageURL=https%3A%2F%2Fprospect.org%2Fpolitics%2F2025-08-14-dsa-convenes-argues-and-celebrates%2F%3Futm_source%3DActiveCampaign%26utm_medium%3Demail%26utm_content%3DDSA%2520Convenes%252C%2520Argues%252C%2520and%2520Celebrates%26utm_campaign%3DDaily%2520Prospect%252008-14-2025&GDPR=%24%24GDPR_MACRO%24%24&GDPR_CONSENT=%24%24GDPR_CONSENT_MACRO%24%24&contentHash=9da0e5f6989f0f025ac9bfe511454f5c4e731de923bcf942c199bcce5ddf1811&unitId=2900001720&userId=a143de11-b5db-4fd1-bdec-b0e6b692767c&isLegacyBrowser=false&isPartitioningSupport=1&version=20250806_0a5cc818db4a5e97910f842e941d2c543416f1d1&useBunnyCDN=0&themeId=140&isMobile=0&unitType=tts-player
CHICAGO – It’s been a tumultuous decade for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and an even more intense year. So when 1,200 delegates from across the country came to Chicago last weekend for the group’s biannual convention, there was much to debrief. And argue about. And celebrate.
Most recently, New York City DSA member Zohran Mamdani burst into national attention after winning the city’s Democratic mayoral primary, beating Andrew Cuomo and becoming a national target for Republicans (and some Democrats). It’s impossible to ignore DSA’s hand in his win: The organization created a network of tens of thousands of canvassers who spent months going door-to-door in all five boroughs to bring voters Mamdani’s socialist message, tightly focused on basic economic issues.
DSA badly needed that victory. Last summer, the organization was hit with three major electoral defeats. First, in the most expensive House primary in history, AIPAC money and corporate Democrats pushed Rep. Jamaal Bowman from his New York seat. Bowman had a complicated history with DSA over his record on Israel (some members had sought to expel him) but nonetheless was endorsed by the group and had been proof that socialists could gain federal office.
More from Emma Janssen
Just two months after Bowman’s loss, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush lost her seat in much the same way. The third defeat was the dispiriting presidential campaign and Trump’s eventual election, which left many DSA members all the more disillusioned with American electoral politics and the Democratic Party’s stance on Palestine.
Every two years, DSA delegates from across the country meet to vote on resolutions and elect their National Political Committee (NPC), which largely steers the group’s direction, though local chapters retain a great deal of autonomy. This year, reckoning with the wins and losses of 2024 and 2025 was top of mind, along with crafting the organization’s response to the genocide in Palestine.
Walking around the massive Chicago convention center that housed the convention, I could see the organization’s concerns and tensions just by looking around. Members wore keffiyehs on their heads or draped over their shoulders. Some caucuses (ideological groups within the DSA) had their own hats (green for the electorally focused Groundwork Caucus), T-shirts (the communist Emerge Caucus had a nice cherry blossom design), and bandanas (worn by the moderate Socialist Majority Caucus). I worried at first that some of these caucus dynamics would unfocus the group and push so-called “sectarian” debate to the forefront. But I left with a much stronger view of the organization, which emerged united on many of its most crucial questions.
“I think it is a critical juncture for the organization. This moment is clearly very dire,” said Colleen Johnston, who joined DSA after President Trump took office in 2017. “Fascism is barreling through the country. And so the urgency is definitely there. And the question for us is: How seriously and clearly are we going to be meeting the moment with urgent, focused power-building demands that are going to unite a broad coalition of people to fight fascism?”
Though some might be concerned by the infighting they saw at the convention (or on social media), I have a more optimistic view after three days of observing debate and speaking to delegates from across the ideological spectrum. Regardless of what happens at the convention, serious material work is being done on the local chapter level across the country, which builds local power.
The Mamdani Effect
One obvious route to power is by winning elections at all levels of government. The majority of DSA members, delegates told me, support its moves into the American electoral system, regardless of their ideological leanings. Many of the group’s furthest-left members, those who might otherwise reject the Democratic Party, actively canvassed for Mamdani, who ran as a Democrat—as have virtually all DSA elected officials who’ve run in partisan elections.
Sammy Zimmerman, a member of the left-wing Emerge Caucus, is one of those members. “I volunteered for several canvassing shifts and petitioning shifts for Mamdani. It was really, really heartening,” they said. “It was definitely the most helpful I felt about a candidate for office in a long time.”
Expand
LEV RADIN/SIPA USA VIA AP IMAGES
Democratic nominee for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani
That hope helped kick-start a massive growth in NYC-DSA’s membership. Grace Mausser, a co-chair of NYC-DSA and longtime adviser of Mamdani’s, said that the chapter has grown by several thousand members since the June victory. That brings the total number of members in the chapter to 10,500.
These new members are eager to build on Mamdani’s momentum, Mausser said. “[They’re] very excited to see what the organization will be doing in 2026 with our electoral work.” Mausser also noted a number of legislative campaigns built around Mamdani’s agenda, such as their effort to pass revenue-raisers in Albany, which still controls the tax funding necessary to any city initiatives.
Electoral Philosophy
Today, DSA is looking to replicate Mamdani’s success across the country. Minnesota State Sen. Omar Fateh is a democratic socialist running for mayor in Minneapolis. DSA’s National Electoral Commission has endorsed 12 candidates from across the country in municipal elections this year.
And the group made their first 2028 move, passing a resolution called “Unite Labor & the Left to Run a Socialist for President and Build the Party,” which encourages the group to run a presidential candidate in the next election. After Rep. Rashida Tlaib gave a fiery speech to open the convention—“The working masses are hungry for revolutionary change,” she said—some DSA members both on X and in person suggested that she could be a good fit for the role. Whomever the group runs, it will likely be on the Democratic ballot line, in recognition that third parties are not currently viable in the U.S.
Kareem Elrefai, a New York member who was elected to the NPC at the end of the convention, said that resolution was one of his biggest takeaways from the weekend, steering DSA in a power-building direction. He recounted that the body debated whether their 2028 candidate should run as a Democrat or a third-party candidate, but he was happy with the ultimate outcome. “There was an amendment that would have strongly urged us to go independent. I am very excited that it has kept us on the Democratic Party ballot line, not because I’m a proud Democrat, certainty not by any means,” he said. “Third-party agitational campaigns fail pretty consistently.”
It was a Democratic presidential primary campaign that first brought Elrefai to DSA. While working on the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020, he met dozens if not hundreds of democratic socialists who were eager to build power together. On the day Sanders dropped out, just as the pandemic came crashing down on the country, Elrefai signed up to join DSA “through tears.” He certainly wasn’t alone: The group’s membership shot up by the thousands each time Sanders ran for president (indeed, membership growth had been moribund for three decades until Sanders first declared his candidacy in 2015).
A common criticism of DSA is that its members aren’t serious about gaining electoral power and making material change; the delegates I spoke to fervently denied this claim.
“We’re more electorally focused than we [were] five, six years ago,” said Mausser from NYC-DSA. “There are no longer live debates about whether socialists should participate in electoral contests.”
Now, Mausser said, the debates focus on “how we engage in those electoral contests.” The question of running candidates as Democrats versus as third-party candidates is still one such debate, as Elrefai mentioned.
Zimmerman believes that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to party politics. “A strategic relationship with the Democrats necessarily looks very different in different parts of the U.S.,” they said. “You have places like New York where, basically, the Democratic primary determines the mayoral election. That’s very different than somewhere like Idaho, where … a plurality of people [is] more conservative and wouldn’t vote for a Democrat anyway.”
Some caucuses value electoral politics above other forms of organizing, while others prefer instead to prioritize mutual aid work or labor organizing. But the vast majority of DSA members don’t see these goals as mutually exclusive. “We want to win and wield power,” Johnston summarized. “One of the ways we can do that is through the power of the state, by actually changing conditions in people’s lives. I think there are a lot of other ways that can be done that are not oppositional to electoral politics but actually very complementary.”
Ethan, a member from New York, identified some of those other methods of organizing: “Our theory of change is defined by a diversity of tactics,” he said. “We have members of the organization that are really actively doing labor organizing, running people in elections, doing field organizing in elections and doing street organizing, organizing on college campuses.” The list goes on.
Red Lines for Palestine
Delegates also debated the criteria that would determine their support for politicians’ views and votes on Israel. One resolution passed by the group, “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA,” called for DSA members and endorsed elected officials to be expelled from the group if they give material support to Israel or related lobbying groups like AIPAC or longtime two-state advocate and Likud critic J Street. Members could also be expelled for statements like “Israel has a right to defend itself.” An amendment that would have removed the expulsion clause was voted down. Fully 40 percent of the delegates opposed the unamended resolution, however, and by its criteria, DSA’s NPC could vote to expel Sanders if he were a member, and might also expel Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The resolution’s passage comes after years of public disagreement within DSA about how to approach Israel and Palestine. Both AOC and Bowman faced censure from DSA due to their votes and comments on Israel. In 2021, Bowman voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome, attended a trip to Israel sponsored by J Street, and met with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. These actions prompted DSA’s NPC to re-evaluate their endorsement of him; they eventually decided to publicly condemn his actions but didn’t expel him from the group.
Last June, the NPC voted to endorse AOC if she followed a short list of demands on Palestine. Less than a month later, the committee withdrew their endorsement (she remained endorsed by NYC-DSA) in part due to her support for the Iron Dome, even as she has consistently joined Sanders in opposing the sale of offensive weapons to Israel and decrying the nation’s bloody apartheid policies.
Expand
NICK WEBER
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) speaking at the convention
After October 7, 2023, some longtime members of the organization left, citing comments other DSA members made in the wake of Hamas killing 1,200 Israelis, as well as the increasingly sectarian politics of many DSA caucuses. My colleague at the Prospect, Harold Meyerson, was one such DSA member. Since late 2023, when Meyerson left the group, DSA has worked to articulate a clear anti-Zionist position. The new resolution comes in response to the debates around Bowman, AOC, and the nature of DSA’s policy on Palestine and Israel, drawing brighter red lines on the issue for members and elected officials alike, even as a sizable minority of delegates opposed it.
It was just one time of many that Palestine animated the convention’s attendees. One of the most pressing reasons that DSA is looking toward gaining more power in 2028 is Palestine. In 2024, DSA worked with the Uncommitted movement for delegates to the forthcoming Democratic convention as a way to protest the Biden administration’s continued support for Israel’s war on Palestine, and joined the call for a Palestinian American speaker at the Democratic National Convention. That call was rejected by nominee Kamala Harris and her team. In the early days of her campaign, Harris had tried to signal a superficial difference between her and Biden on Israel, but ultimately toed the party line. Now, Trump sits in the Oval Office and, of course, hasn’t put a stop to Israel’s destruction of Gaza, either. Sixty-one thousand Palestinians have been killed by Israel, and half a million are living in famine conditions.
“I think we as the left really felt the void that was left in 2024 with no presidential candidate,” Elrefai said. “There was nobody up there to anchor our ideas … and that was a mistake, especially in the midst of an ongoing genocide.”
DSA is looking to 2028, but also hopes to make change in the three years before then. “Whether we’re talking about the genocide that’s happening in Gaza, the climate crisis, the rise of fascism, [or] the dismantling of civil society, we don’t have the luxury of time to be setting a plan for figuring things out in two or three or four years,” Johnston said. We have to be acting urgently now.”
Public Struggle
DSA’s debates—whether over Palestine, elections, or anything else—tend to get broadcasted to outsiders (especially over social media). After scrolling on X during the convention, it would be easy to take a cynical view of DSA, whose convention was chock-full of niche arguments, caucus callouts, and oblique and obscure references. But at least some DSA members say that disagreement within the organization is a feature, not a bug.
“Every organization has this level of dissent and disagreement, and we’re just open about it,” Mausser said. “Our debate and our disagreement [are] intentional.”
And on Palestine, Johnston said: “We’re not really interested in … focusing on that inward-facing stuff about who has the perfect position. If you’re against the genocide and you want to stop it, we want to work with you.”
It will remain to be seen if Johnston’s hope for unity comes true, especially due to the newly passed resolution’s expulsion clause. But it seems that years of debate on Israel and Palestine have cohered the organization around a set of guiding principles, including support for the BDS movement.
That’s not to say that all delegates welcomed the disagreements or supported everything the convention did or didn’t do. Elrefai and Mausser both pointed to losses in the convention that deeply concerned them. Elrefai, along with his caucus, Groundwork, wanted to amend the convention agenda to put two issues up for discussion: transgender rights and the Green New Deal. That effort failed.
“The reason I find that as upsetting as I do is that, at a moment where the Democrats have completely failed to be a bulwark against trans rights, at a moment when they’ve largely stopped talking about climate change, that’s an opportunity for us,” Elrefai said. “And if we don’t fill that void, somebody else will.”
Expand
ZACH CADDY
The NYC-DSA choir leading convention-goers in song
Mausser echoed that frustration. “I am a little disappointed that at the convention we’re not spending a lot of time on the floor talking about some of the biggest existential fights of our time,” she said. “We’re not spending too much [time] on the floor talking about Trump himself, not spending too much time talking about trans rights, but we do have active programs on those things.”
Paul Garver, a longtime DSA member from the Boston chapter, said that he understands why delegates spent less time talking about Trump than they did about, say, Gaza. When it comes to Trump, he said, chuckling, “there’s nothing controversial, so people don’t think it’s interesting!” But speaking more seriously, he reflected on his own activism during the Vietnam War and said that he too had had a narrow focus on the atrocities he saw abroad. “It’s perfectly understandable that Trump didn’t come up” as frequently as some might have expected, he told me.
Mausser, despite her own disappointment about the lack of debate on Trump’s policies, cautioned against seeing convention arguments as definitive statements about DSA. “I think sometimes at convention, we focus on what we disagree on, which is actually pretty small in the scheme of things,” she said. “And it seems like we’re deprioritizing [things we agree on], but in reality … once we go home after this, that’s where most of the work is going to live.”
Marina, a member of the Emerge Caucus from NYC-DSA, said that she came to conference to build coalitions around resisting ICE, work that would follow her back home to New York. After working to pass a resolution calling for action against ICE, she started making connections with kindred members from across the country.
“I was also here to create a national network of immigrant justice organizers, which has now become an ongoing chat and a series of meetings,” she said.
Going Home
After I left the convention hall, I wondered if I’d been swept up in the excitement of being among so many hopeful people, all striving, roughly, in the same direction. At the end of the convention, the NYC-DSA choir led the thousand-strong ballroom in song. Delegates stood for “The Internationale,” some taking their hats off, others waving massive red flags over the crowd. Behind me, a man swayed with his fist held high for the whole song. The singers bounced and smiled as they sang; someone strummed a guitar. But I think there was really something there, behind all the singing.
“Things are starting to feel very real,” Zimmerman said. “I think that’s the vibe at this convention. It really feels like eyes are on us right now, and what we do next as an organization really matters.”
And now delegates have made it back to their home chapters, where the outside world awaits them: Metro DC DSA is organizing against Trump’s takeover of their city; NYC-DSA returns to canvas for Mamdani; DSA-LA teaches their ranks to resist ICE.
“People always say [DSA] is a big-tent organization,” Zimmerman said, “and that really allows it to be this dynamic thing that is able to adapt to the moment and what people are thinking and needing in the moment. So I think what DSA becomes is really always up for debate.”
Emma Janssen is a writing fellow at The American Prospect, where she reports on anti-poverty policy, health, and political power. Before joining the Prospect, she studied political philosophy at UChicago and worked as an editor and freelancer.
