Democratic Socialists of America

The Democratic Socialists of America is a membership organization founded in 1982. It backs candidates in Democratic primaries, supports union organizing, and campaigns for policies including Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

Membership, with the figures corrected

The growth story is real and the numbers this page previously carried were wrong.

NPR, reporting in July 2018, recorded membership growing sevenfold from around 6,000 in 2015 to 43,000 by early that month, and 45,000 later in the same piece. The organization now states that it has more than 80,000 members in campus and community chapters across all fifty states — its own figure, which no independent source cited here confirms.

An earlier version of this page said membership rose “from roughly 8,000 to over 56,000 members during Trump’s presidency”. Neither endpoint matches any source found, and both have been replaced with figures that carry a date and an attribution.

Finances

The national organization files under EIN 13-3109557, with a tax-exempt ruling dated July 1988.

Revenue roughly doubled between FY2019 and FY2021 and fell back in FY2022, which tracks the membership account above rather than contradicting it.

Local chapters file separately under their own EINs — Chicago, Maine, Birmingham, Columbus and Dayton among them — and none of their revenue appears in these figures. The national totals understate the organization’s aggregate finances by an amount this page does not attempt to estimate.

What it is not

Bernie Sanders, whose 2016 campaign is credited with the organization’s growth, is not a member of it and his positions do not fully align with it. NPR reports both points, and they are worth stating on a page that records a catalyzed-by connection to him.

The organization is also not doctrinally uniform. Maurice Isserman, a historian and DSA charter member, describes it as “a big tent — at least on the left”, with members identifying as libertarian socialists, social democrats or anarchists while remaining in the organization. Chapters set their own priorities.

Context

Gallup found in September 2025 that roughly two-thirds of Democrats view socialism positively, up from 50% in 2010, while Americans overall continue to view capitalism more favourably. That is context for the organization’s growth, not evidence of it; the figure concerns attitudes to a word, not membership of a group.

Collection placement

This page was in content/movements/ until September 2026. It was moved here during the movements citation pass (01m048yg9), which found that its subject is an organization with chapters, officers and a membership roll — and that content/movements/CLAUDE.md says such a body belongs in organizations. The broader current it belongs to is documented at movements/socialist and movements/left-populist-anti-inequality.

What was removed

The version of this page in the movements collection carried a three-phase chronology and six claims of political impact, including that the organization shifted “Democratic Party discourse toward economic populism and Medicare for All policies”, mobilized young voters through campus chapters, and coordinated campus protests in 2024. Those are unsourced causal claims about a party’s politics and about specific events, and they have been removed.