Fifty-eight percent. That's the share of Democrats who told pollsters they prefer socialism over capitalism. With a midterm election three months away.
The other 32 percent still picked capitalism. So roughly one in three Democrats can look at a grocery store with fully stocked shelves and think, "Yeah, let's keep that." The rest apparently looked at the same shelves and thought, "Needs more government."
The numbers come from a new poll and they represent a continued leftward lurch in a party that spent the last decade insisting it wasn't lurching anywhere. We were told socialism was a fringe position in the Democratic Party. A Bernie thing. A college campus phase that people would grow out of once they started paying rent.
They did not grow out of it. They doubled down. Nearly six in ten Democrats now openly prefer the economic system that has produced bread lines on every continent it's been tried. And they're not whispering it at faculty lounges anymore — they're telling pollsters, on the record, ahead of an election cycle where they're asking swing voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin to trust them with the economy.
We're sitting at $35 trillion in national debt. Inflation spent the better part of four years making groceries feel like a luxury purchase. And the Democratic Party's response to "How do we fix the economy?" is apparently: "Have you considered socialism?"
Now, the standard rebuttal from the left is that they mean "democratic socialism" — the Scandinavian kind, with free healthcare and bicycle lanes and tasteful minimalist furniture. The kind that sounds great on a podcast and falls apart the moment you check Sweden's tax rates or Denmark's strict immigration enforcement. Funny how the "be more like Scandinavia" crowd never seems to mention those parts.
What the poll actually reveals is something the Democratic leadership has been trying to paper over since Bernie Sanders nearly hijacked their primary in 2016 and again in 2020: the base moved, and the suits didn't follow fast enough. The professional class still talks about "market-based solutions" and "public-private partnerships" at fundraisers. But the voters filling out the surveys — the ones who actually knock doors and show up to primaries — they've decided capitalism is the problem.
That puts every Democratic candidate running in a competitive district in November in an interesting position. Do they run on the platform their base actually wants? Or do they spend six months pretending 58 percent of their own party didn't just say what it said?
Republicans don't need to exaggerate this. They don't need to run attack ads with hammer-and-sickle graphics or dramatic voiceovers about the fall of the Berlin Wall. The poll is the attack ad. The number is the argument. Fifty-eight percent, in their own words, from their own voters.
The 32 percent still holding out for capitalism within the Democratic Party might want to start asking themselves a harder question: whether they're in a party that tolerates their views, or one that's already moved past them.
Either way, they're on the ballot in November. Both versions.