A column published this Wednesday in Rolling Stone raises a question that unsettles many within American progressivism: Is the electoral growth of democratic socialists dooming the Democratic Party to lose the White House?
What is significant is not just the argument, but who presents it and from what perspective: the columnist Matt Bai publishes it in a magazine historically associated with progressivism, which makes the text a sign of the discontent that is growing even within the liberal camp.
Bai argues that Bernie Sanders acted as a Trojan horse: he infiltrated the party and reintroduced the concept of socialism to a generation that, according to the columnist, "has no memory of Soviet queues, gulags, Cuban emigrants in rafts, or the British Winter of Discontent."
This absence of historical memory, he argues, made it easier for the term to cease being a political stigma.
The columnist distinguishes between socialism as a pressure movement and DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) as an organization with a real structure: members, leaders, and even a product line.
"This movement is not just a movement. It is a real party, with members, leaders, and even merchandise. While other social movements existed to push the Democratic Party to the left, the democratic socialists seek to replace it," writes Bai.
The electoral victories of the DSA are now concrete. Candidates under this banner have won mayorships in New York, Seattle, and are about to do so in Washington D.C., as well as several congressional primaries in Colorado and New York.
Zohran Mamdani took office as mayor of New York on January 2, 2026, becoming the city's youngest mayor since 1892.
But it is the official DSA platform that Bai identifies as the main electoral obstacle. The program includes nationalizing entire industries—real estate and insurance, among others—eliminating private health insurance, closing all military bases abroad, withdrawing from NATO, abolishing all enforcement of immigration laws, and eliminating the Senate so that Congress can elect the president.
Jon Cowan and Matt Bennett, co-founders of the centrist group Third Way, summarized it in an op-ed in The Washington Post: "The organization's ideas are electoral poison."
The debate has a particularly relevant angle for the Cuban community. Bai points out that the new generation of voters no longer remembers the Cuban rafters or the consequences of socialist regimes, which has made it easier for the term to be normalized in American politics.
This generational gap is, for the columnist, one of the factors that explains the rise of the DSA.
The phenomenon is already having repercussions within the party itself. The president of the Florida Democratic Party, Nikki Fried, admitted on July 21 that socialism "doesn't sell" in that state, particularly due to the significant presence of Cuban and Venezuelan exiles who fled from regimes of that nature.
Nancy Pelosi, for her part, has publicly reprimanded socialist candidates for challenging incumbent Democrats, with a direct warning: "You can't win by losing."
Trump, who has labeled Mamdani as "100% communist" and threatened to cut $7.4 billion in federal funding to New York, has capitalized on the debate with sustained anti-communist rhetoric. In July, he declared on Truth Social that Democrats "skipped socialism and fell straight into communism."
Bai concludes his column with a warning that encapsulates the party's dilemma: the movement that Sanders initiated could soon become the institutional voice of the Democratic Party. "Although it is not necessarily a voice that the rest of America wants to hear."
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