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I recently explored how the Democratic Party has been captured by the Democratic Socialists of America. This week, meet some of the people doing the capturing, and the workers who want no part of it.
Look closely at who fills these Democratic Socialist rallies and then casts their votes for Democrats, and you get a picture the movement would rather keep blurry.
The face of American socialism in 2026 is the graduate student holding a six-figure diploma and a five-figure paycheck. It's the young professional in a freshly gentrified neighborhood who has decided the system that educated her still owes her more. It's the Yale- and Harvard-educated DEI advocates, the NYC, Chicago, and Martha's Vineyard guilt-ridden white leftist socialists, most of them women.
The movement's own numbers tell the story. In its last comprehensive national membership survey, about 85 percent of the Democratic Socialists of America identified as white. More than 80 percent of members over twenty-five have at least a bachelor's degree. Even among those who joined in the past year, two-thirds of survey respondents identify as white. These are the teachers, adjuncts, nonprofit staffers, coders, and feminist/gender/queer studies majors whose grievance is the gap between what their diploma promised and what their paycheck delivers. They've looked at that gap and blamed capitalism for it.
You can see it the moment one of them faces the voters he claims to speak for. In New York, Zohran Mamdani ran as a tribune of the working class, promising frozen rent, "free" buses, "no-cost" child care, and city-owned and operated "bargain" grocery stores. His fattest margins came out of the gentrified corners of Brooklyn and Queens, the neighborhoods of cold brew and cargo bikes.
In November's exit polls, 57 percent of voters with a bachelor's degree or more broke for him, while Cuomo took just 38 percent. Among voters without a degree, Cuomo actually won outright, 47 percent to 42 percent. The diploma, not the paycheck, put Mamdani in Gracie Mansion.
Michigan is the one that really gets me, because the numbers are so blunt. Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate running against billionaires and dark money on behalf of the forgotten worker. Then CNN went looking for those workers in his results and couldn't find them. Of the fifteen Michigan counties with the fewest college graduates, El-Sayed won zero. Zero. Of the fifteen with the most, he won thirteen.
He pulled better than sixty percent in Washtenaw County, home to the University of Michigan, and he swept the state's college towns. Where the degrees are scarce, it was a different story: in counties where fewer than three in ten adults hold a bachelor's degree, his opponent, Haley Stevens, won a majority. Detroit didn't want him either. Stevens took better than sixty percent in the state's largest Black-majority city, and El-Sayed failed to carry a single county in metro Detroit.
Wisconsin shows the same, even in defeat. DSA member Francesca Hong ran for governor out of Madison, the ultimate leftist college town. She entered the final stretch leading the polls by more than twenty points, just as old posts resurfaced in which she had called to cancel Thanksgiving because "we should stop celebrating colonialism." She later brushed the posts off as jokes, yet lost the nomination by less than a point to a Black county executive whom the sitting governor had endorsed. Madison couldn't carry her.
A movement that claims to speak for the worker most often can't win the worker. The families with the least saw through the party of “free everything” and walked, while the graduate degrees and the tasteful zip codes lined up to cheer. Socialism has become a luxury belief in America, held most fiercely by the people who can most afford to be wrong about it. Marx told the workers of the world to unite. County by county, they looked at the vanguard sent to rescue them, and they picked somebody else.
What happened in New York and Michigan isn't a new phenomenon. It is one of socialism's oldest ironies: educated, disproportionately white elites proclaim themselves champions of workers and minorities, while people with the least financial cushion are left to absorb the consequences of their luxury beliefs. And history offers one final warning to the idealistic students, elitist intellectuals, and the over-educated revolutionaries cheering it on: movements like these have a habit of discarding people like them once they have served their purpose. The useful idiots are only useful until they aren't.
What this has to do with Mississippi
Plenty of readers will file all of this under somebody else's problem, the business of blue cities a long way from here. That's the exact comfort this movement of the left is banking on.
Mississippians need to know this: The Champagne Socialists have no intention of staying in New York and Michigan. The same national Democratic ecosystem in which DSA-backed candidates are gaining tremendous power is now investing heavily in our state.
We got an early warning in Gulfport's 2025 mayor's race and the campaign of former state Rep. Sonya Williams-Barnes, who was endorsed and funded by the Southern Poverty Law Center's political arm. Stacey Abrams endorsed and gave money to Williams-Barnes, and a PAC launched by former DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison joined other leftist groups in putting money and organizational muscle behind an effort to turn Mississippi's second-largest city blue. They fell short, 53 to 46, but they came far too close for comfort.
Now national Democrats are looking much higher up the ballot. Chuck Schumer has been steering national donors toward Scott Colom's challenge to Cindy Hyde-Smith; PAC funded by George and Alex Soros directed $1 million into a super PAC supporting Colom. Bill Gates’ son also gave money. Colom has held or attended two penthouse fundraisers in New York City and he’s campaigned with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The national progressive attention is hardly subtle: Cory Booker was just here campaigning with Colom in Gulfport.
Nor does national Democratic money stop with Colom and the U.S. Senate race. Democrat nominee Cliff Johnson had raised more than half a million dollars against Congressman Trent Kelly as of June 30th, and former Massachusetts congressman Joe Kennedy III came to Oxford to host a fundraiser for him. Johnson has held campaign events as far away as Martha's Vineyard, Chicago, and New York and is benefiting from national Democratic and socialist support. Johnson and Colom are even using strikingly similar attacks and talking points, a pattern Republicans say reflects a coordinated national effort to build Democratic power in Mississippi.
National Democrats are investing in Mississippi for a reason. As DSA-backed candidates gain influence inside the Democratic Party, turning even one more Senate or House seat in a red state like Mississippi would be a major symbolic and political victory for the national Democratic ecosystem that movement is reshaping.
Here's the good news, and it's the one thing the movement can't fix. It keeps losing the very people it claims to fight for, because a family living paycheck to paycheck knows the difference between a plan and a slogan. We can still raise kids who know it too. We just have to start way before the academia makes its pitch.
So do the boring work. Find out who's cutting the checks for the candidates on your local ballot, and show up for the primaries, where these things actually get decided months before November. And teach your own kids real economics and honest history at the kitchen table, because the schools that produced these voters aren't going to volunteer for the job.
Socialism is winning the classroom while it loses the paycheck. Our job is to make it lose the classroom, and the ballot box, too. Let's keep the Champagne Socialists out of Mississippi.
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