Members of the Democratic Socialists of America have staged electoral coups this summer, unseating several high-profile incumbents in Congress. The party counts New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and Washington, D.C., mayoral hopeful Janeese Lewis George among its members.
While the DSA projects public unity, the organization is a web of interlocking and sometimes competing internal caucuses. The DSA does not publish caucus membership figures. Yet, its caucuses play an outsize role in filling leadership positions, forming policy platforms, and resolving debates at its national conventions.
Here are six of the most prominent caucuses shaping the DSA’s political ascent.
Groundwork and Socialist Majority Caucus: The electoral pragmatists
The Groundwork and Socialist Majority Caucuses topped the ballot at the DSA’s 2025 convention in Chicago. The caucuses captured 19.6% and 16.6% of the first-rank vote share, respectively, for the National Political Committee, the DSA’s most important leadership body.
Both caucuses believe that socialists can use the Democratic Party for electoral gain, even if they disagree with its political positions.
“Starting a third party with its own ballot line from scratch has not been a viable strategy in the United States for a century, and it is not a viable strategy in the current moment,” the Socialist Majority Caucus’s platform reads. The caucus began in 2019.
Groundwork describes the need to “continue to struggle against the capitalist Democratic Party,” even as it sees value in using Democratic primaries to “cleave the bourgeois/managerial elite of the Democratic Party from its working-class base.” Groundwork was founded in 2023.
Four Socialist Majority Caucus and five Groundwork members sit on the DSA’s National Political Committee. Ashik Siddique, a Groundwork member, serves as one of the DSA’s two national co-chairs.
Bread & Roses and Marxist Unity Group: The mass-party socialists
Whereas the electoral pragmatists prioritize victory at the ballot box, caucuses such as Bread & Roses and Marxist Unity Group are focused on movement-building and class politics.
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Bread & Roses characterizes itself as a “Marxist caucus” seeking to “build the foundations for a new and independent party of the working class.” The caucus believes in remaining “completely independent from the Democratic Party apparatus.”
Bread & Roses opposes “all forms of military intervention,” supports Medicare for All, and encourages public employees to create a “political crisis” by striking. Bread & Roses emerged in 2019 after it split from an earlier DSA caucus.
Marxist Unity Group hopes to unify Americans around the “dream of a socialist revolution in the United States.” It lists the “fight to overthrow” the U.S. Constitution, which it sees as an instrument of “perpetual oligarchy,” as one of its seven core positions. Since its founding in 2022, the caucus has also encouraged a “defeatist stance against our country’s wars,” including those “engaged by proxies” such as NATO.
Bread & Roses and the Marxist Unity Group received 11.4% and 10.3% of the 2025 first-round National Political Committee vote, respectively.
Springs of Revolution and Red Star: The left-wing revolutionaries
Left-wing caucuses such as Springs of Revolution and Red Star share goals with the mass-party socialists.
Springs of Revolution grew out of an anti-Zionist slate that contested the DSA’s 2023 party elections. The caucus now aims to advance “anti-imperialist politics” with “Palestine as our compass.” It has publicly rebuked Ocasio-Cortez for being too pro-Israel for its taste.
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Red Star, a self-described “Marxist-Leninist” arm of the DSA, hopes to unify a broader “Vanguard Party” on the American Left. The caucus believes that “one is either working to support American imperialism or to oppose it.” DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer belongs to Red Star, which was founded in 2019.
Springs of Revolution received 14.7% of the first-round vote in 2025, compared to Red Star’s 11.4%.