In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.Peter Turchin has a theory called elite overproduction. A society trains more people for high-status positions than it has positions to give them. The surplus doesn’t disappear. It becomes a pool of credentialed, underemployed people who did everything they were told and received less than promised.A movement’s demographics are not incidental to its politics — they are close to the whole explanation. Turchin traced the pattern to revolutionary France, where a surplus of law graduates shut out of the aristocracy’s professional class became disproportionately represented among the revolution’s leaders.
Nate Silver recently found a remarkably similar pattern in contemporary American politics, drawing on the Cooperative Election Study, a large national survey of the electorate, not the Democratic Socialists of America’s own data, to conclude that the country’s strongest Democratic-voting demographic is graduate-degree holders earning $30,000 to $60,000 annually, almost exactly DSA’s demographic sweet spot.The same CES data complicate the picture, though. That bracket makes up a relatively small slice of the overall electorate, because education and income usually rise together. Even within it, only about 1 in 5 identifies as very liberal. By that measure, the DSA’s strongest recruiting ground is a minority within a minority, not a hidden national majority waiting to be mobilized.That is the national picture from a survey of the broader electorate. The DSA’s own numbers come from a different source: its 2021 internal survey, based on nearly 13,000 self-selected responses. Where the two sources align, particularly on education and income, the picture is persuasive. Where only the DSA’s internal survey speaks, it is best understood as describing the organization’s most engaged members rather than the membership as a whole.According to that 2021 survey, the median respondent is 33. More than 80% of members over 25 hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Median household income falls between $60,000 and $80,000, while 45% earn under $60,000, more than double the comparable share among college graduates nationally.These are not traditional blue-collar workers. Many are teachers, scholars, nonprofit employees, or technology workers. They followed higher education’s script and found the promised rewards had diminished.The DSA does not measure homeownership, but ownership rates are likely below already-depressed national averages for young adults, concentrated as members are concentrated in some of the U.S.’s most expensive metropolitan areas.The survey’s broader demographic profile is revealing. Seventy-seven percent identify as white alone, down from 96% in 2013. Sixty-four percent are male, 27% female, and 10% non-binary. Thirty-two percent identify as LGBT. Sixty percent describe themselves as agnostic or atheist. Only 21% belong to a union, down from 31% in 2013, and just 5% have military service, concentrated in the organization’s oldest members.Britain’s Socialist Workers Party scandal helped popularize the term “brocialism,” describing the gap between egalitarian rhetoric and male-dominated organizational culture.The DSA’s largest Marxist caucus, Bread and Roses, borrows its name from a feminist movement founded because women believed their concerns were treated as secondary inside left-wing organizations. Today, the caucus is no longer a women’s organization but one of the factions behind the DSA’s communist-aligned National Political Committee majority — a leadership that has disciplined members drifting toward the center.Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman’s 2024 censure for seeking support from Democrats for Israel illustrated how narrow the acceptable range of moderation has become. Raman is now running for mayor, having broken with former ally Karen Bass and advanced to a November general election.She has since said she will no longer accept an endorsement from Democrats for Israel Los Angeles, the group whose backing triggered her censure, a concession that secured only a “recommendation” in the DSA-LA’s voter guide, not a formal endorsement.A “No Kings” march in New York denouncing President Donald Trump and his administration on March 28, 2026. (Gina M. Randazzo/ZUMA Press Wire via Newscom)
