AOC, Bernie and Zohran are Socialists – but so are Kamala and Joe

How left and liberal Democrats come from the same socialist tradition

This piece is the first in a series on the joint ideological roots of liberalism and socialism that will explore their current relationship in US politics, the place of the US Democratic Party in global socialist politics, and the Democratic Party’s roots in socialist history and economic debates. For today, we’ll focus mostly on what socialism means to the US population in public opinion polls.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: the headline above is shameless click‑bait, calculated to irritate sectarian leftists and corporate‑funded “centrists” alike. But the provocation captures a truth that most Democratic voters understand, namely that: Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden agreed on roughly 90 percent of economic programs that matter, whatever their arguments on political tactics, and that overlap is rooted in an American socialist tradition that stretches from Eugene V. Debs through Franklin Roosevelt to Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez.

If anyone still doubted that the socialist label no longer terrorizes Democratic voters, the shock primary victory of Queens Assembly‑member Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s 2025 mayoral contest should settle it. Mamdani, a self‑described democratic socialist backed by the Democratic Socialists of America, beat former governor Andrew Cuomo by twelve points after ranked‑choice tabulations, piling up a record‑breaking 545,000 votes. This is the largest primary tally in the city since 1989.- when socialist DSA member David Dinkins won the primary and became the first socialist mayor of NYC (something most reporters seem to have forgotten in all the recent discussion on the significance of Mamdani’s primary win.)

Beyond New York City, Bernie Sanders just last month was rated the most popular active national politician among ALL voters, with a net favorability of +10. For comparison, Donald Trump sat at –7 and President Biden at –9. Sanders’s ranking vindicates the dozens of Democratic candidates who brandished his endorsement in 2024 and 2025 primaries – candidates who span the ideological gamut from DSA firebrands to AFL‑CIO lifers.

Viewed against that backdrop, it is almost quaint to recall Vice‑President Mike Pence’s 2020 redbaiting jeremiad at CPAC. “There are no moderates in this Democratic field,” Pence thundered, insisting that every candidate had “embraced Bernie’s socialist agenda.” The line earned the desired standing ovation, but five years later its inadvertent accuracy is more interesting than its intended smear. From expanding ACA access and Medicaid to a $15 minimum wage to universal pre‑K – all planks Pence condemned as Marxist – the Biden‑Harris administration spent four years trying (often blocked by the GOP filibuster) to push most of those policies through a fifty‑fifty Senate.

The electorate, particularly Democratic voters, have grown more comfortable with the term socialism than at any point since pollsters first asked. Polls continue to show broad approval of socialist candidates in many Democratic primaries even if for strategic reasons, many voters may choose more moderate candidates to compete in general elections. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that 65 percent of Democrats viewed socialism positively, ten points higher than the share who felt warmly toward capitalism. Strikingly, two‑thirds of Black Americans – the very voters who resurrected Joe Biden’s primary bid in 2020 – expressed a favorable opinion of socialism.

What, then, do voters mean when they call something “socialist”? According to this 2020 YouGov poll commissioned by The Victims of Communism Foundation – hardly a pro‑red front –68 percent of Americans explicitly rejected the definition of socialism as “government owning all property.” Instead , 56% of respondents defined socialism as either “more or less what the Democratic Party in the US supports” or a free market economy with more social benefits like Scandinavia- basically what the Democrats tried to enact with their Build Back Better agenda but were blocked in passing by the filibuster. Democrats in particular point to Sweden, Denmark and Norway as their models of socialism.

Because that sixty‑vote filibuster choke‑point routinely deletes ambitious items from the Democratic agenda, casual observers often conclude that the party is more conservative than it actually is. Remove the filibuster, and Democrats have already unified around what looks suspiciously like the platform of every European social‑democratic party: expanded public healthcare, paid family leave, child allowances, sectoral union bargaining and aggressive climate investment. Biden was the first sitting president ever to walk a picket line; Vice‑President Kamala Harris has campaigned for the PRO ACT right to organize bill that would allow card check union recognition and binding arbitration. Neither labeled those goals socialist, but the substance would draw bearded nods from the old German socialist theorist Eduard Bernstein.

Indeed, the phrase “socialist tradition” in the United States has always been messy, sprawling and internally disputatious – precisely the point Michael Kazin made in a New Yorker Q&A long before the 2020 primaries. From the mutualists of the 1840s to Debs’s industrial syndicalists to the New Deal coalition’s “socialistic” Social Security Act, American socialism has functioned less as a blueprint for nationalization and more as a moral vocabulary for shifting power from capital to labor. Liberals call the results “reform,” radicals call them “non‑reformist reforms,” but the lineage is unmistakable.

Contrast that reality with the cartoon socialism heckled at CPAC each year. Pence’s straw‑man socialism demands the abolition of private coffee grinders; Democratic socialism, as understood by most Democratic voters, demands that baristas earn a living wage and decent health insurance. In CBS News’s 2020 battleground survey, Democrats across the country, in both Texas and California, rated socialism favorably at identical levels – ~ 57 percent – yet it was Texas Democrats who expressed deeper hostility to capitalism. Red‑state experience with corporate extraction, not blue‑state latte sips, seems to breed socialist sympathies.

Generational churn will only accelerate the trend. That 2019 YouGov/Victims of Communism study reported that roughly 50 percent of millennials and Gen Z were favorable towards socialism. Today those millennials are approaching forty, raising children and running for school board, while Gen Z forms the backbone of Mamdani‑style insurgencies. In Mamdani’s race, turnout surged especially among voters under thirty‑five in one of the few races in memory were voter under age 30 were voting at a higher rate than middle age and older voters.

All of which leaves the Democratic Party with a simple arithmetic fact: you can call the programme socialism or you can call it common sense, but you can’t win national elections without the voters who like it. Joe Biden understood that when he stitched the Sanders platform into the 2020 unity task forces. Kamala Harris, understood it when she promised to resurrect an expanded child tax credit that cut poverty by nearly half before Capitol Hill inertia let it lapse. Zohran Mamdani understands it when he pledges free public buses and municipal grocery stores in the nation’s media capital.

For the left, that acknowledgment should cool the impulse to treat every compromise as betrayal; for the center, it should cool the impulse to mistake marketing language for ideology. The debate that matters inside the Democratic coalition is not between “socialism” and “capitalism” but between minimalist and maximalist version of various policies to move the country in a socialist direction. Biden, Harris, Sanders, Ocasio‑Cortez and Mamdani operate on different parts of the same spectrum, not different planets.

Pollsters have also watched class resentment tighten its grip across the electorate. In the same Victims of Communism survey, 78 percent of Americans said the gulf between rich and poor was a serious problem, and more than a quarter favored “the gradual elimination of capitalism in favor of a more socialist system.” We’ve had nearly two centuries of left quarrels over various approaches to reining in that massive inequality, but Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Albert Parsons, Bayard Rustin, Michael Harrington and Angela Davis whatever their disagreement– all pushed for expanding workers rights and a broader social welfare state.

In that sense Harris and Mamdani, Biden and Ocasio‑Cortez are not opponents in an intraparty civil war but partners in a very American experiment: salvaging the dynamism of markets while civilizing them through collective power. Call the project by FDR’s old name – the Economic Bill of Rights – or by Sanders’s new one – the Green New Deal – and the argument remains the same. The real question is less what policies to pass than how to gain the political strength and procedural courage to overcome blocks like the filibuster to align public policy with that public opinion. If Democrats can, the click‑bait headline tormenting sectarians and centrists alike will someday look more like a statement of obvious historical fact – when Americans finally admit they had been socialists all along.

Other entries in this series include:

• The Democratic Party is as Socialist as European Social Democratic Parties