The DSA’s Own Numbers Prove the Socialist Sales Pitch Is a Con

Funny how the people who loudest claim to speak for the working class can’t get the working class to vote for them.

The Democratic Socialists of America spent the last election cycle convincing themselves they’d captured the soul of the Democratic Party. Zohran Mamdani sits in Gracie Mansion. A DSA-backed candidate just knocked off a five-term incumbent in a New York congressional primary. Abdul El-Sayed barely scraped through a Senate primary in Michigan. The headlines say the left is on a roll.

But ask yourself who actually voted for these people. The numbers tell a completely different story than the narrative.

Karamccurdy (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

In New York’s June primary, Mamdani lost to Andrew Cuomo among Black voters by nearly six points citywide. He got steamrolled in Brownsville and East Flatbush, neighborhoods where more than 60% of residents are Black and nobody would confuse the median income for the Upper West Side. Mamdani only clawed back enough support to win in November after months of outreach and a deliberate pivot away from socialist branding toward pocketbook issues like rent. That’s not a movement. That’s a candidate running from his own label to survive.

Then there’s the 13th Congressional District, where DSA member Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated Rep. Adriano Espaillat 49.4% to 45.9%. The New York Times reported she won higher-income areas by just 5.1 points while Espaillat carried lower-income areas by 9.1. Espaillat won majority-Hispanic precincts with 56%, including working-class neighborhoods like Morris Heights and Kingsbridge. Chevalier’s margin came from a 24.5-point advantage with younger voters and a 20-point edge in college-educated precincts.

So the DSA’s coalition is young, credentialed, and comfortable. Not exactly the proletariat.

Here’s where it gets really good. The DSA’s own 2021 internal membership survey found the organization is 85% White and 4% Black. Median age 33. More than 80% hold college degrees. Over a third have graduate degrees, more than double the national rate. Nearly a third make six figures. This isn’t a working-class movement. It’s an upper-middle-class ideological project that puts on working-class language like a Halloween costume, and the people it claims to champion can see right through it.

Matthis Volquardsen / Pexels

A senior Mamdani campaign advisor actually called Black homeownership “a weapon of White supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth building’ public policy.” Let that sit for a second. A mostly White socialist movement told Black homeowners, people whose grandparents fought redlining to buy those houses, that their biggest asset is a tool of oppression. Queens Borough President Donovan Richards accused the DSA of acting like White supremacists. He’s a Democrat. Not exactly a right-wing hit job.

Van Jones, also not a conservative, warned DSA activists that “no police, no prisons, no borders” isn’t progressive, it’s regressive. Bill Maher has spent months saying the same thing on television. Former Biden aide Yemisi Egbowole called the DSA a socialist cub that establishment Democrats let grow into a lion because nobody had the guts to stop it.

And the DSA’s platform? Abolish the police. Abolish prisons. End cash bail. Decriminalize prostitution. Strip mayoral control of schools. Replace private housing and grocery markets with government-run alternatives. They’re reportedly drafting a document calling for abolishing the U.S. Senate. The Senate. The most deliberative body in the American government. Gone. Because a 33-year-old with a master’s degree and a six-figure salary thinks it’s undemocratic.

The National Black Empowerment Action Fund, a Black-led group, dropped $2 million on ads warning that the DSA agenda threatens decades of progress built by Black Americans. That’s not the Republican National Committee talking. That’s Black organizers spending their own money to push back against people who claim to be on their side.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority (CC BY 2.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Funny how that works. The establishment keeps telling you the DSA represents the future of the Democratic coalition. The DSA keeps telling you they speak for the marginalized. And the marginalized keep voting against them. Every single time. The polls keep getting it wrong, the experts keep getting surprised, and nobody in the leadership asks the obvious question.

Ask yourself who benefits from a major American party being run by people who think abolishing the Senate is a serious idea. Not the working families in Brownsville. Not the Hispanic voters in Morris Heights. Not the Black homeowners in Bedford-Stuyvesant who got told their houses are weapons of supremacy.

The little guy keeps getting played. The only difference now is the people doing the playing carry reusable tote bags and call it liberation.