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A new poll demonstrates that voters are more likely to support a self-described democratic socialist candidate for office than someone who calls themselves a supporter of the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Trump-endorsed political movement.
The CNBC survey, published last week, asked respondents to say whether they’d be more or less supportive of candidates with those labels. Thirty-two percent of voters said they’d be more likely to back a person calling themselves a democratic socialist.
Conversely, 27 percent said the same thing when the candidate in question calls themselves a MAGA-backer, while only 29 percent said they’d be more likely to back a candidate who was directly endorsed by President Donald Trump.
The poll’s results indicate that democratic socialism is presently more popular in the U.S. than the president’s MAGA movement.
The poll shows that democratic socialists still face challenges in courting voters, with 50 percent of respondents saying they would be less likely to support a candidate who identifies as one. But the numbers suggest that democratic socialist candidates may nonetheless have better prospects in a general election than Republicans endorsed by Trump, as 52 percent of respondents said they would be less likely to vote for a Trump-endorsed candidate, while 57 percent said the same of a self-described MAGA candidate.
The poll demonstrates that establishment Democrats’ concerns over democratic socialists winning in primaries — and their claims that such candidates are “unelectable” in the general election races — are likely overblown. Indeed, several other polls have shown that voters support many of the positions that democratic socialists are advocating, including:
- Expanding workers’ rights and supporting unions;
- Expanding access to health care, including implementing a Medicare for All system above the current capitalistic model;
- Funding additional public services by raising taxes on the rich and on extreme wealth;
- Abolishing problematic federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which voters have lost confidence in over the past year;
- And substantially raising the current federal minimum wage.
Other past polls have shown that the term “socialist” isn’t as harmful politically as centrist and establishment Democratic Party members may think — a Gallup poll from 2019, for example, found that 44 percent of voters would be open to “some form of socialism.” That number could actually be much higher, as several federal programs are socialist by definition (including Medicare and Social Security).
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Despite growing acceptance of democratic socialism among the U.S. voting public, Democratic politicians and centrist supporters of the Democratic Party have spent considerable time this election season criticizing the movement.
“Yes, we want our Democratic Party to be a big tent,” CNN’s Van Jones recently wrote on X. “But we don’t need ‘party poopers. So STOP pooping in the punch bowl.”
Following New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsement of democratic socialists in House Democratic primary contests (and their subsequent wins) this year, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) took an antagonistic tone, stating that Mamdani has “work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward.”
However, some Democratic politicians are taking the opposite approach, and have been more welcoming of democratic socialists into the party.
“I think that it’s actually a sign of a party that is alive and growing when there’s a contest of ideas inside the party,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) said in late June.
“I’m not a democratic socialist, but I do believe that the Democratic Party has been historically way too timid in taking on corporate power,” Murphy added. “I think our party should have bigger ideas.”
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