Gallup’s August poll put socialism at 43 percent positive — its highest rating since the firm began asking the question in 2010, after years of hovering just under 40. Branko Marcetic reads that finding together with a batch of late-summer surveys and finds a Democratic electorate that has been radicalized beyond what most coverage assumes, and a commentariat arguing about people nobody has heard of.

The numbers, and what’s behind them:

  • The rise isn’t Democrats. Their roughly two-thirds positive view of socialism is flat since last year. It’s independents, up 8 points to 45 percent.
  • Socialism still loses the head-to-head: capitalism sits at 55 percent, “free enterprise” at 77 percent. But “big business” hit a new low of 35 percent.
  • Regionally it’s underwater everywhere — best in the West (-8), worst in the South (-27).
  • The young-professional stereotype doesn’t survive the crosstabs. Socialism polls better with people of color and with people earning under $100,000 than with white or higher-income adults, and support is about the same with or without a college degree. People of color are the only group rating socialism above capitalism.
  • In the nationwide Times/Siena poll, black and Latino voters were the only ones net positive (+4 each). White voters were at -26.
  • Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani split the field in interesting ways. Mamdani runs +14 with independents and nonvoters and leads with voters under 45; Ocasio-Cortez leads among Democrats and holds +52 favorables with voters over 45 and +54 with white voters — the demographics that actually turn out in primaries.
  • The DSA’s own membership is still 60 percent white, down from 85 percent five years ago. Marcetic’s read: the gap is organizational, not evidence that non-white and non-college voters dislike socialism.
  • Media fixation doesn’t equal salience. Outlets ran 327 stories about Hasan Piker in three months; 51 percent of Democratic voters and 54 percent of Michigan voters have never heard of him.
  • On policy, Democratic voters back expanding the Supreme Court, abolishing the filibuster, and zoning reform, and say billionaires shouldn’t exist by a 6-point margin. Michigan voters prefer a pro–Medicare for All candidate by 29 points and oppose a US war with China over Taiwan by 16.

Marcetic is careful with the caveat that matters: 43 percent is not a majority, and polls are not elections. His counterexample is that MAGA was at 24 percent in April 2023, eighteen months before it took full control of the federal government. Favorability is not a vote, but it does describe the room a candidate gets to work in.

The piece lands as Ocasio-Cortez weighs a 2028 run, and its real argument is about where socialist support lives. Not in a bubble of white graduates, and not in the press’s obsessions — in the same non-white, non-college working class the DSA has historically struggled to recruit. That’s an argument about organizing capacity as much as about polling.