Mamdani and a dozen other local candidates across the U.S. won in November 2025 with the DSA’s help in get-out-the-vote operations, outreach, and other campaign efforts. DSA candidates asserted more control over the Democratic Party in June with three primary wins in New York, prompting criticism from more centrist Democrats.
In addition to helping Mamdani’s rise, the DSA has spent more than a decade supporting high-profile Democrats such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a former 2016 presidential candidate, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and former Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, who is running again for her former seat. The leftist magazine In These Times boasted in 2018 that Congress had more socialists than ever in U.S. history, thanks in part to the DSA, after Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ocasio-Cortez won office.
President Donald Trump has taken notice of DSA candidates’ rising popularity. He portrayed communism as a threat to America’s freedoms in his Saturday night Independence Day speech in Washington, D.C.
MAMDANI-BACKED CANDIDATE RAILS AGAINST BILLIONAIRES DESPITE HER CAREER BENEFITING FROM ONE
“America will never be a communist country, won’t happen,” the president told his audience. “Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world, only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America. We’re not going to let it happen. We’d like to stop a threat like that immediately, and before it begins. Just like a cancer, you’ve got to cut it out, you’ve got to cut it out fast.”
Trump also dismissed notions last week that so-called democratic socialists are meaningfully different from communists in comments to reporters.
“They use the word ‘Social Democrat’ because it sounds so nice, but it’s really communism you’re talking about,” he said.
