Democrats are in big trouble because Black and brown voters don’t want socialism

The Democratic Party is being hijacked, and the people it claims to fight hardest for are the first ones bailing out.

The Democratic Socialists of America have gone from a fringe debate club to a governing faction inside the party in the span of a single election cycle. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani sits in Gracie Mansion. The organization is reportedly drafting a new platform calling for abolishing the U.S. Senate. This is not a healthcare plan. This is not a "tax the rich" bumper sticker. This is socialism, and in places its more radical wings openly flirt with communism, gaining real traction inside one of America's two governing parties. Democratic leadership is too terrified of its own base to say so out loud.

Here is what should terrify them more: the coalition they need to win national elections is not buying what the DSA is selling.

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Start with New York City, ground zero for this movement. In the June primary, Mamdani lost to Andrew Cuomo among Black voters by nearly six points citywide, and he got wiped out in Brownsville and East Flatbush, two of the city's poorest neighborhoods where more than 60% of residents are Black.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, left, hugs Rep. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right during an address marking his first 100 days in office at the Knockdown Center, Sunday, April 12, 2026, in New York. (Andres Kudacki/AP Photo)

It took Mamdani months of dedicated outreach and a general election pivot toward pocketbook issues like housing costs before he clawed back enough of that support to win in November. That is not a story of Black and brown voters embracing democratic socialism from the start. It is a story of a Democratic Socialist having to run away from his own movement's brand to survive a primary.

The pattern held again just weeks ago. In New York's 13th Congressional District, DSA member Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, 49.4% to 45.9%, but the coalition that put her over the top looked nothing like the district's base. The New York Times reported Chevalier held just a 5.1-point advantage in higher-income areas, while Espaillat won lower-income areas by 9.1 points. 

Espaillat also dominated majority-Hispanic precincts with 56%, particularly in working-class neighborhoods like Morris Heights and Kingsbridge, according to VoteHub's analysis of the results. Chevalier's win was built almost entirely on a 24.5-point advantage with younger voters and a 20-point advantage in college-educated precincts, the same coalition that carried Mamdani, not the working-class Hispanic voters who anchor the district.

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That tension finally boiled over. A senior Mamdani campaign adviser called Black homeownership "a weapon of White supremacy masquerading as 'wealth building' public policy," prompting Queens Borough President Donovan Richards to accuse the DSA of acting like White supremacists.

The head of a Bedford-Stuyvesant organization founded in 1978 to keep Black families in their homes pushed back hard: homeownership is the thing generations of Black New Yorkers fought redlining to secure, not their oppressor. When a mostly White socialist movement tells Black homeowners their biggest asset is a tool of oppression, it should not be surprising that the movement struggles to hold their votes.

That tracks with who the DSA actually is. Its own 2021 internal membership survey found the organization is 85% White and only 4% Black, with a median age of 33. More than 80% of members hold a college degree, and better than a third hold a graduate or professional degree, more than double the national rate, with nearly a third clearing six-figure incomes. That is not a working-class movement. It is an upper-middle-class ideological project wearing working-class language as a costume, and Black and brown voters are not fooled by the costume.

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I am not the only one saying this. Democratic political analyst Van Jones, no one's idea of a conservative, called out DSA activists directly, warning that "no police, no prisons, no borders" is not progressive, it's regressive, and it threatens to drag the party somewhere voters do not want to go.

HBO "Real Time with Bill Maher" host Bill Maher has spent months warning Democrats that embracing Mamdani and Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders as the party's future is a gift to Republicans, noting that Vermont couldn't sustain single-payer healthcare for 626,000 people, let alone a nation of 340 million.

And former Biden White House aide Yemisi Egbewole has described the DSA's rise as a socialist cub that establishment Democrats let grow into a full-sized lion because nobody had the nerve to stop it while it was small.

That is not a story of Black and brown voters embracing democratic socialism from the start. It is a story of a Democratic Socialist having to run away from his own movement's brand to survive a primary.

These are not Republican talking points. These are Democrats watching their own party get eaten from the inside and saying so publicly, because the alternative is pretending it isn't happening.

Look at what the DSA actually wants once you get past the slogans. Abolish the police. Abolish prisons. End cash bail and misdemeanor prosecution outright. Decriminalize prostitution. Strip mayoral control of public schools. Advocate for government seizure or replacement of private housing and grocery markets.

These are not modest reforms. They are a rejection of property rights, of public safety, of the basic bargain that working people in Black and brown neighborhoods have fought for generations to secure: safe streets, stable schools and a shot at ownership. The National Black Empowerment Action Fund, a Black-led advocacy group, put $2 million behind ads warning that the DSA agenda threatens decades of social and economic progress built by Black Americans.

Let me be honest about where I sit in this. I am a Republican. The collapse of the Democratic Party as a functioning, majority-coalition institution is no sweat off my brow. If the party wants to hand itself over to an organization that thinks abolishing the Senate is a serious policy position, I will not lose sleep over the electoral consequences.

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But there is a bigger stake here than partisan advantage, and it is worth saying plainly: watching an avowedly socialist faction consolidate control over one of America's two major parties should worry every American, not just Republicans.

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Socialism has a track record, and it is not a good one. Every serious attempt to centralize economic control at scale has ended in scarcity, corruption, or authoritarian consolidation, usually all three. The DSA's defenders will tell you this is just Scandinavian-style social democracy with better branding. The platform documents say otherwise. So do the voters, and now the Black homeowners and political leaders, who keep pushing back against it.

For the sake of a Democratic Party that might someday remember it needs Black and brown voters to win anything outside a handful of gentrifying ZIP Codes, and for the sake of not letting a genuinely dangerous ideology dress itself up as compassion, the DSA should have no place in serious American politics. From the mayoral primary to the homeownership fight, the coalition it claims to represent keeps telling it no. Democratic leaders can keep pretending otherwise, or they can look at the numbers.