Are DSA Mayors the Future of the Democratic Party?

Urban liberals are flirting with the young socialists. It's unlikely to end well.

Courtesy Paul Morigi/SPACEs in Action/Getty.

Although the results are not yet fully in, it seems likely that Janeese Lewis George will be the next mayor of Washington, D.C. With 65 percent of votes counted as of this writing, Lewis George leads fellow city council member Kenyan McDuffie by 16 percentage points; she may even clear the 50 percent threshold required to avoid a run-off. That’s a decisive conclusion for a race that pitted the more moderate McDuffie against Lewis George, an endorsee and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). If the down-ballot results hold up, last night looks to have been a rout for the Left in general, and the DSA in particular.

Assuming she wins, that will make Lewis George yet another DSA member running an important American city. She’ll be added to the list with not just New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, but also Seattle mayor Katie Wilson. There are other aspirants, including most notably council member Nithya Raman, the DSA member who unexpected bested reality star and right-wing insurgent Spencer Pratt to take second place in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. (Raman is unlikely to beat incumbent mayor Karen Bass in the run-off, although the betting markets give her better odds than they gave Pratt.)

These new, openly socialist mayors have a certain allure to more traditional Democrats. With their party’s popularity in the pits, and its leaders increasingly aged, more moderate Dems see the obvious appeal to the hot new force in local politics. The DSA electeds also form their coalition from politically activated Americans under 50—a must-win group among Democrats, but also one increasingly dissatisfied with the party. The fact that some of these mayors have at least nominally leaned into pro-housing YIMBYism makes it all the easier for some on the “abundance” center-left to wonder if they’re better aligned with the socialist than they are with the establishment.

That’s all understandable. But the DSA’s electoral success should not be confused for policy success—much like the establishment Dems they replace, the DSA mayors are confusing class warfare for actual solutions to the affordability crisis. And in embracing them, mainstream Democrats also risk welcoming in an organization that has quietly grown disturbingly radical, a fact that could prove politically disastrous in the long run.

The wave of DSA mayoral candidates—and local candidates more generally—is the product of careful planning. It in part reflects Mamdani’s upset victory over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, which proved that a socialist could win a mayoralty in a city as significant as New York. But it is also the result of a concerted effort on the part of the DSA to establish itself as a separate power center in blue-city politics.

For example, as Michael Lange wrote recently, the New York City DSA has moved to muscle out the city’s unions, embodied in the Working Families Party. That looks like the current primary in New York’s seventh congressional district, which features WFP-backed Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso in a fight for his political life against DSA-backed insurgent Clare Valdez. Mamdani is consciously building his “machine,” New York Magazine’s David Friedlander writes—a machine that includes his “Office of Mass Engagement,” an officially sanctioned activist wing of City Hall.

The DSA’s strategy is built on a distinct electorate. Traditional Democrats—like Bass, Cuomo, McDuffie, and Bruce Harrell, whom Wilson defeated in Seattle—tend to rely on the backing of the institutional Democratic machine to turn out votes. That machine, in turn, often relies on working-class voters activated by unions and by the party’s infrastructure.

The DSA generally has no access to the latter, and is not necessarily influential in the former, though some unions are increasingly divided between traditional and socialist factions. What it has instead is a cohort of thousands of ideologically committed young(ish) adults, willing to knock on doors to get out the vote for its candidates.

DSA candidates’ priorities are often shaped by the concerns of these constituents. Mamdani’s affordability messaging, as Manhattan Institute president Reihan Salam has argued, was tailored to the concerns of credentialed but downwardly mobile Millennials—people who feel the city is too expensive to afford them the kind of life they expected. Wilson, Lewis George, and Raman have similarly emphasized housing affordability. At the same time, many of these candidates tell a consistent story about why costs are too high: greed on the part of their cities’ ultra-wealthy, who are unwilling to pay their fair share, and of whom punitive taxation is therefore appropriate.

In spite of this, the DSA’s willingness to seize on the affordability narrative—especially on housing—has made them appealing to the pro-housing “abundance” wing of the Democratic Party. That’s helped by DSA electeds’ and candidates’ willingness to endorse moderate reforms to permitting and other minor barriers to housing—as, for example, in Raman’s platform or Mamdani’s SPEED reforms. Against the sclerosis of the Democratic establishment, an apparent bias for action may make the DSA appealing to more moderate Democrats eager for change.

To be sure, concessions on permitting reform are welcome, no matter whom they come from. But the high cost of living in America’s major metros are not simply the result of minor procedural hurdles, but of a more comprehensive opposition to allowing the market to supply what is demanded. And the DSA’s open hostility toward the people who do the supplying is incompatible with actually existing abundance.

This hostility manifests itself in policy. Mamdani’s administration has worked to seize property from landlords while pushing the city’s business community out. Lewis George has promised to strengthen D.C.’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, which gives tenants the right of first refusal to purchase—and which has helped cripple the city’s housing market. Wilson has dismissed millionaires fleeing Seattle—even as they are taking with them the tax base needed to sustain her promised expansion of government—and “abundant” construction using union-built social housing. Raman has taken meaningful steps toward reform, like pushing to fix Measure ULA, but she also emphasizes the need for new housing to be built by “well-paid union labor”—a dogwhistle for preserving prevailing wage standards.

This ideological posturing can have real economic consequences. Permitting reform can only get you so far if investment dries up and no one wants to build for fear that their property will be seized in a questionably constitutional taking. Cities are subject to exit-based vetoes—scaring off talent and capital risks killing the golden goose.

Even if they weren’t so explicitly appropriative, these mayors would still be hemmed in by their unwillingness to target ideologically inconvenient cost drivers. As my colleague Eric Kober has written, Mamdani’s housing aspirations are limited by his unwillingness to attack destructive policies like Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, the requirement that “a sizable percentage of units in new buildings in rezoned areas be offered at below-market rents.” Raman and Wilson’s nods to union-built housing similarly indicate that they still feel beholden to organized labor—a major driver of housing costs.

At its best, DSA YIMBYism gives with one hand while taking with the other. That’s a political strategy that’s palatable to their voters, but it’s not one that gets at the root causes of our affordability crisis, which is government’s comprehensive chokehold on the private sector.

But the biggest question about the rise of the DSA mayors is not so much their approach to policy as it is the organization with which they are aligned. In 2020, many moderate Democrats found themselves in rooms with true radicals—people who had for years pushed police and prison abolition, and who took the opportunity to advance their goals when the time came. Making bedfellows with the DSA today runs the risk of the same dynamic emerging in the Democratic party tomorrow.

To be sure, Mamdani has tried to present a more moderate image in office. But other DSA electeds are not so circumspect. As my colleague Stu Smith has reported, DSA members in other local positions have been quite open in their willingness to use public office to advance their political interests, including rerouting public funds to activist-led “mutual aid” efforts and picking fights with Democrats to their right.

Meanwhile, the national DSA—the group with which all these mayors are ultimately affiliated—has veered further and further into extremism. As Smith has reported, the DSA just passed a platform that calls for abolishing the Department of War and “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state” among other policy initiatives. It has also begun building a “self-defense” wing in part charged with preparing for a “national uprising,” and put a pro-political violence self-identified Maoist on the committee in charge of that effort. And it’s increasingly found common cause with groups likely funded by the Chinese Communist Party, and worked to advance the interests of the regime in Cuba.

Not every member of the DSA endorses these priorities, of course. But that supporters of political violence and sympathists for hostile foreign powers hold sway in the DSA’s institutional infrastructure is a reason to ask: are these really the sort of people to get in bed with?

One of the worst habits of the respectable liberal is to see in the far-left ideologue something admirable, however disagreeable. The center-left’s flirtation with DSA politics is not new; it is a repetition of an age-old pattern in American political life. Historically, Democrats embrace of radical Leftism has ended not in bold change, but electoral tears. But maybe this time will be different.