Democrats who attack their party’s nominees for being socialists have a problem: the Democrats.
A Gallup poll from September showed that 66 percent of Democrats—that’s two out of every three—had a positive view of socialism, while just 42 percent had a positive view of capitalism. A YouGov poll from April, sponsored by the libertarian Cato Institute, showed the same level of favorability toward socialism among Democrats (67 percent), while just half (50 percent) had a favorable view of capitalism.
In the polls, respondents under 30 show the highest levels of favorability for socialism and those over 64 the lowest, both within Democratic ranks and among the public at large. It’s disproportionately the young, of course, who are bearing the brunt of an economy that isn’t hiring, along with the cost of housing and child care. Moreover, those under 30 were born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, while those over 64 were around for right-wing attacks equating Democrats’ support for social democratic programs such as Medicare and Medicaid to Soviet Communism.
The American right, and various Andrew Cuomo supporters, are leveling the same kind of attacks on Zohran Mamdani’s social democratic platform, which, they say, has been devised to mask his attraction to Joseph Stalin’s gulags. It’s not only New York’s younger voters who view such assertions as they would an offer to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.
A more significant breakdown of the crosstabs in these polls is that which YouGov performed by type of region. In an article for NOTUS, the redoubtable John Judis found that “56% of suburbanites, 69% of those from small towns, and 70% from rural areas disapproved of socialism.” (Those figures are for the public at large rather than just Democrats. My guess is that at least 50 percent, but probably not much more than that, of suburban Democrats have a favorable view of socialism.)
When I look at such data, it confirms what is already apparent in American politics: There’s an urban-to-rural ideological continuum that runs left to right (and not just in the United States). That raises a question for Democrats’ electoral prospects: How do they handle that divide?
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