By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Six thousand people started the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982. The number didn’t move much for thirty years. Then, around 2016, it did.
By July 4, 2026, DSA had 120,000 members, more than the Socialist Party of America ever had under Eugene Debs, whose dues-paying membership peaked back in 1912.
Four days before that count came out, one of the new members, Melat Kiros of Denver, won a primary against a congresswoman first elected in 1996.
The growth is one story. What the organization actually wants is the more important one.
From 6,000 to 120,000
DSA was born from a merger, not a single founding moment.
In 1982, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, founded in 1973, joined with the New American Movement, founded two years earlier, to create one national group.
“We were 6,000 strong at the time of merger in spring 1982,” the organization says of its own start.
Small was the norm for most of DSA’s history.
That changed in 2016. Bernie Sanders never joined DSA, but his presidential campaign coincided with the growth that followed.
DSA’s own publication, Democratic Left, describes what happened next in its own words.
DSA stayed small for decades. Its own history puts it around 5,000 members for years at a stretch, with a brief run up to 8,000 in 1983.
That changed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her 2018 primary win, with DSA’s New York chapter behind her, gave the group what NPR called “new prominence” at the time.
Membership hit 50,000 by 2020, then kept rising, peaking at just under 79,000 in 2021. It didn’t last. By October 2024, membership had fallen to 51,000.
The current surge reversed that fast.
Washington Examiner reported the increase followed Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York.
DSA broke 80,000 members in good standing that October. By this July, DSA was claiming 120,000.
The group has historically favored a broader count than “in good standing” in its public figures.
Is this just a bigger welfare state?
An organization growing this fast, one that already holds two House seats and has dozens of primary wins this cycle, is worth a serious question. Is DSA pushing for higher taxes and more government-funded health care, the kind of democratic socialism people associate with Denmark? Or is it after something structurally different?
DSA’s own platform answers that. It calls to “draft a new constitution.” It calls to “abolish the Senate.” It calls to “abolish the Electoral College.”
The most drastic change came out of a close vote. In June 2026, DSA’s National Political Committee adopted language committing the organization to “replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” City Journal reported from inside the meeting. The vote was 12 to 11. The full platform, called “Workers Deserve More,” launched publicly on July 14.
Cliff Connolly, an NPC member who spoke in favor of the change, belongs to Marxist Unity Group, a caucus whose own website states its goal outright: “In a word, communism.”
He explained why he supported the change. “…The whole point of having the Senate, the president, and the Supreme Court is so that, if popular legislation passes through the House of Representatives, the ruling class has these other levels they can pull to stop it from happening,” he said, pointing to the Supreme Court’s blocking of President Biden’s student debt plan as his example.
DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique confirmed the same position this month on C-SPAN. Asked whether he’d abolish the Senate, he said, “We just don’t see the point of the Senate. Historically, it was meant to serve very wealthy people who owned a lot of land… That’s part of our platform, and we don’t think that’s extreme. We think it’s a change that would help make this country more democratic.”
What the rest of the platform wants
The structural changes are the frame the rest of DSA’s platform fits inside.
On the economy, DSA’s platform calls for “public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries” to ensure “democratic control and accountability to the people.” On taxes, it wants “aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations.” On voting, it calls to “restore the right to vote for incarcerated people and people with criminal convictions” and extend full voting rights to “all permanent U.S. residents.” On immigration, the platform’s own demand is two words: “Abolish ICE.” It calls to “grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status.”
Policing gets its own section, calling for demilitarized police departments, disempowered police unions and redirected funding “as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.”
A separate DSA body, the National Abolition Working Group, states its own version of the same goal. It wants police budgets cut “annually towards zero.”
The platform calls for “a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits.” Healthcare gets a plank of its own: “universal healthcare at no cost to individuals.” On housing, DSA wants to “establish universal rent control” and “guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.” On education, the platform calls for “free, quality public education from pre-K to college” and to “cancel all student debt.”
What’s mainstream, and what isn’t
Not everything on that list is unique to DSA.
A national popular vote for president draws 56 percent support nationally, according to a June 13-15 Economist/YouGov poll.
The idea isn’t confined to the left: more than four in ten Republicans favor it too.
Ending the Senate filibuster has drawn support from an unlikely source too. Trump himself has pushed Senate Republicans to eliminate it.
Alaska voted in 2024 to keep ranked-choice voting, even though the state leans Republican.
“Undemocratic institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College… make it impossible for the will of the majority to be expressed,” DSA’s 2021 platform says.
A welfare state raises taxes here, expands a program there. DSA’s platform wants to abolish the Senate. Write a new constitution. Subordinate the president and the Supreme Court to Congress. Together, they’re changes to the institutions themselves, not policies passed through them.
The Colorado connection
Denver is one of Colorado’s five active DSA groups, which also include Boulder, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, and La Plata County, covering Durango, per DSA’s own directory. Denver’s own chapter reported roughly 1,800 members as of this July.
One Denver member’s history shows how far the connection to national DSA runs.
A Denver DSA member sat on the organization’s National Political Committee for the 2023-2025 term, representing the Socialist Majority Caucus, one of DSA’s more moderate internal factions, not Marxist Unity Group or a group like it, a detail independently confirmed by another DSA chapter.
DSA’s reach goes beyond its own membership count, too.
An Economist/YouGov poll, conducted June 26-29, days before DSA’s own July 4 announcement, put a number on that shift. Thirty-four percent of Democrats and forty-seven percent of liberals said socialism was a better economic system than capitalism. Twenty-two percent of both groups said the opposite.
The Economist/YouGov poll, June 26–29, 2026, question 13.
YDSA is the DSA’s youth wing. It had about a dozen campus chapters in 2016. Now it has more than 150.
DSA has built influence inside organized labor, as well.
Inside the Teamsters, DSA members are active in a reform caucus, Teamsters for a Democratic Union. It backed the slate that still runs the union.
DSA members also helped start a UAW reform caucus, back in 2019. That caucus backed Fain’s 2022 campaign for union president; he took office in 2023. Two years later, it dissolved amid internal disputes.
Whatever comes of DSA’s platform nationally, the organization behind it isn’t a curiosity anymore.
It has 120,000 members, according to its own count, more than any socialist group in American history. And days before that count was announced, one of its own members had already won her primary for a U.S. House seat in Denver.