Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A 43-year-old community organizer with little management experience challenges the incumbent establishment Democratic mayor of a deep blue city. If you think this story is about socialist Katie Wilson defeating Mayor Bruce Harrell in Seattle last week, you are wrong.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has a well below 50% approval rating, is now being challenged by Rae Huang, another Democratic Socialists of America party member with no professional experience outside of working for far-left nonprofit groups that push socialist policies in Democratic Party-controlled states and cities.
Like Wilson, Huang is running on a platform of free public transit, rent control, replacing police with social workers, and, of course, higher taxes on high-income individuals and businesses. She is relatively unknown and underfunded at the moment, but the same was true of not just Wilson before her most recent campaign, but also New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who garnered just 1% in February 2025 polling before he defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in June’s Democratic primary.
Huang would join not just Wilson, but also Mamdani and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson as admitted socialist mayors of Democratic cities. Outright socialism can no longer be dismissed as some fringe movement within the Democratic Party. They are winning elections across the country in the heart of urban blue America.
According to Gallup, a record high 66% of Democrats have a positive view of socialism, while just 42% have a positive view of capitalism. According to Pew, support for socialism among Democrats is strongest among those under 30. The DSA is actively spending money to cultivate these young voters into a powerful electoral movement. Investments are being made in communications, campaign infrastructure, and candidate recruitment. And the DSA is winning the hearts and minds of Democratic voters. According to DSA Fund polling, when given a choice between a socialist vision that includes “public ownership of key industries” and private sector ownership, an overwhelming 74% of Democrats chose the socialist vision.
One might hope that if Mamdani fails to deliver on his promises to make New York City more affordable, Democrats would wise up and reject their new socialist obsession. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Johnson has been a complete and total failure in Chicago, failing to deliver on his own promises of city-owned grocery stores and affordable public housing. The best you can say about Johnson’s tenure so far is that he has failed to pass the tax hikes he desperately needs to fund his socialist dreams. Instead, he has run the city deeper into debt, taking out an almost $1 billion loan that doesn’t pay a cent of principal for 20 years.
Voters in Chicago may have noticed that the community-organizer socialism of the DSA is a complete and total failure. Johnson’s approval rating is currently hovering somewhere south of 30%, but it is not a story that a sympathetic media wants to tell nationally, hence Mamdani and Wilson’s easy paths to electoral success.
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Hopefully, the imminent failure of Mamdani’s socialism in New York City will get more national media attention than Johnson’s has in Chicago. Hopefully, Democratic Party primary voters will learn the same lessons that Argentinians, Bolivians, and Venezuelans have all recently learned: that socialism never works, no matter how many times Democrats tell themselves this time will be different.
How many cities does DSA have to ruin before the Democratic Party rejects socialism’s false promise? How many years will it take for this socialist fever to pass? One can only hope it burns out before Democrats reclaim the White House and inflict lasting damage on America’s freedom and prosperity.