Ignore Fetterman: Look at the 250 socialists quietly taking his party

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) recently told a Republican convention that he rejects socialism. That a sitting Democratic senator would go out of his way to say so is worth noticing. The occasion was the Republican National Committee’s first-ever midterm convention in Dallas, to which Fetterman sent a video that introduced his home-state senate colleague, Republican Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA). After his party immediately lit him up, Fetterman was publicly promising he’s still a lifelong Democrat, still caucusing with them, and that the video only meant he and McCormick are both “Team PA.”But that public fight over one senator’s loyalty is a sideshow. The telling question is why a Democrat now feels he has to disavow socialism at all. The quieter and more consequential change is happening underneath the noise, as the most organized faction on the party’s left keeps gaining ground: the Democratic Socialists of America, a group that holds the candidates it backs to strict litmus tests and withholds support when they fall short. So it is worth knowing what the DSA actually is, because most news coverage won’t tell you.The DSA calls itself the largest socialist organization in the country, and for once, a political label is not inflated. It explicitly states its goal is not a bigger welfare state inside capitalism, which is the Scandinavian model Americans think of as “socialist,” but the end of capitalism itself.DSA’s membership passed 120,000 this year, up from a few thousand a decade ago. It does not run candidates under its own banner, where you would see them coming. It runs them as Democrats. It endorses them, canvases for them, and staffs their campaigns with organizers. Then it expects them to govern like socialists once they win. The agenda is no secret: Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and a housing-and-labor program well to the left of the Democratic Party’s mainstream. In 2025, the DSA went further, making anti-Zionism a formal condition of membership and endorsement.So, when average people look at their ballot, it appears an ordinary Democratic primary is happening. But in fact, they’re witnessing a slow, patient takeover of one of America’s two major parties, one city council and one state legislature seat at a time.This interpretation is not theoretical. The clearest case, Zohran Mamdani, who won New York’s mayoral race last year, is just the best-known edge of a movement whose program runs much deeper. By mid-2025, DSA members held roughly 250 local offices nationwide, from 96 city council and county seats to eight mayors and other executives, by Rolling Stone’s count, with almost all of them elected just since 2019. The group’s own electoral shop keeps a running list of the campaigns it backs, and the map penetrates a long way beyond the two coasts.For a deeper dive into the DSA, its history, and its hoped-for future, see the profile of the DSA published by my colleagues at the Capital Research Center’s InfluenceWatch website. It documents how this important group is organized and funded, and where it sits in the broader progressive world.One of the most surprising things in that profile is the revelation that the DSA runs on a shoestring. Its most recent IRS filing shows about $6.4 million in revenue, mostly from membership dues, a rounding error next to the roughly $638 million that the Left’s tax-exempt voter-registration machine spent in the 2024 cycle alone. That means the DSA does not win elections by outspending anyone. It wins by placing its people inside the party that already has the money. None of this is an accusation. It is a matter of public record.THE ‘AMERICA FIRST’ LEFT IS HERE — AND REPUBLICANS ARE MISSING THE TRAPA party that comes down so hard on a stray senator who rejects socialism, while a disciplined socialist faction quietly reshapes the party from below, is a party whose center of gravity is shifting. That is a story worth following.The good news is that the hard part is already done. Anyone who wants to understand how the American left wing is organized can start with the record. We have spent years documenting it. All I ask is that you read it.Scott Walter is president of Capital Research Center.