CHICAGO — Officially, the summit for democratic socialists across the country here this weekend was taking place in a hotel conference facility.
But on Friday night, the real action was at a corner bar two miles away, where dozens of members of the Democratic Socialists of America crammed into a patio in the middle of a summer storm.
As the rain poured down, two DSA leaders put it bluntly: If they wanted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) to run for president — and if they wanted DSA to endorse her — it was time to start now.
“We’re in the moment of the presidential question,” Katie Sims, an electoral organizer in Ithaca, New York, said at the “DSA for AOC” gathering. “Doesn’t it just make sense now?”
That was, for many, the question looming over the Democratic Socialists of America’s summit, right in the middle of the group’s most consequential summer ever.
A self-dubbed big-tent group that was essentially dormant a decade ago, DSA has ballooned into one of the largest and most disciplined operations on the U.S. left.
The Chicago summit hosted about 600 dues-paying members who flew in from across the country to attend workshops and swap organizing strategies as their group faces greater momentum — and greater scrutiny — than ever before.
After helping elect Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York, DSA-backed candidates won a string of Democratic primaries this summer in deep-blue cities. The victories intensified a broader fight with centrist Democrats, some of whom expanded a pledge declaring themselves “capitalist, not socialist.”
If upcoming primaries in Michigan and Missouri go their way, some speculated, the democratic socialists might be able to start their own small caucus on Capitol Hill.
“Before, we were putting our shoes on, or lacing our shoelaces,” said John Lewis, an engineer in New Orleans who serves as a member of DSA’s National Political Committee, the group’s top decision-making body. “Now we’re getting ready to run.”
What’s not totally clear is for what — or, with whom at the helm.
DSA’s 120,000 members are supposed to make decisions democratically, and there is still broad disagreement about whether and how the group might make an endorsement for the White House.
Divisions often arise over key questions: Should the DSA work within the Democratic Party or break from it? Should they back only the most committed socialists or also support those who might stray from their platform sometimes?
In the case of Ocasio-Cortez and the 2028 Democratic primary, a potential endorsement is a test of how flexible it might be to take its message on a national stage.
Ocasio-Cortez became one of the DSA’s first two members elected to federal office when she won her initial race for Congress in 2018. But her failure to adhere to the group’s red lines on the war in Gaza prompted the national DSA to withdraw its endorsement two years ago.
She has also publicly declined to support abolishing the Senate, a moonshot goal for DSA, in favor of more targeted moves like ending the filibuster.
Lewis, a member of the Marxist-Leninst “Red Star” caucus within DSA that has repudiated Ocasio-Cortez, said he expected her to run. She is active in DSA’s New York chapter and has since shifted again on some Israel-Palestine issues, he pointed out.
But his former chapter was split apart by a similar endorsement question in 2020, and he cautioned against a “paper endorsement” that might fall flat with DSA’s base.
“It has to be something that people can deeply believe in,” he said, “and someone that people deeply trust to do this.”
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In the halls of the hotel conference center in Chicago, an independent bookstore sold titles on mass incarceration, Palestinian poetry and theories of engineered conflict. Chapters set up tables offering T-shirts to “Melt ICE” and stickers to “stop arming Israel.”
Similar messages appeared on DSA members themselves. Some wore green “Groundwork” hats, for the environmentally-minded group within DSA that advocates for working within the Democratic Party. Others had coffee mug tattoos to rep their allegiance to the Marxist Unity Group — MUG for short.
At one workshop on Friday morning, the standing-room only crowd was instructed to break out into small groups with a prompt: what they didn’t think was possible beforehand that feels attainable now.
In the back corner, a group of three from New York, California and Kentucky went around introducing themselves — the name tag for each “comrade,” as some call themselves, list only first names and last initials, but nothing more.
The woman from New York answered the prompt by mentioning Ocasio-Cortez. (DSA members, aside from those in elected office or on the NPC, were instructed not to talk to reporters at the conference, and that member declined to share their last name for privacy reasons.)
“We’ve all known Alex. We’ve all organized with her over the years,” she said. “This is the first time in 10 years I feel like she has a real shot at the presidency.”
Like many other DSA members at this summit, Ocasio-Cortez worked on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. The future New York congresswoman was, of course, still years away from making it to Congress and nearly a decade away from the minimum age to run for the White House.
If DSA had previously functioned as a home for some politically frustrated millennials, it grew into much more than that. A series of galvanizing events over the last few years — Trump’s reelection, the war in Gaza, Mamdani’s victory — have ballooned DSA in size, with more than 140 chapters around the country.
Some have been wrapped into each chapter’s social events. Others were drawn in by local causes or campaigns.
The ability to put all those people to work — out knocking doors and phone-banking voters — is what has made DSA an electoral force in some cities.
Sims, who leads DSA’s national electoral strategy, said chapters carefully decide if they have the capacity to boost a candidate before endorsing them — or sometimes recruiting them. Only those candidates endorsed by local chapters go to national leaders for a possible endorsement later on.
To beat campaigns with more money, Sims said, “we really gotta put our feet where our mouth is.”
Still, debates over how exactly to put that electoral strategy into practice have roiled DSA in recent years.
Some of the more staunchly Marxist factions hold a harder line against candidates who don’t always talk about being a socialist or adhere to all parts of the group’s platform. Other caucuses, like Groundwork and Socialist Majority Caucuses, which dominate the New York chapter, may be more open to putting resources behind such DSA members.
There’s an added challenge with congressional candidates like Will Lawrence and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who have not formally adopted the DSA label or received the group’s backing — perhaps intentionally — but back platforms that resemble those of democratic socialists.
A presidential endorsement would amplify that debate — and do so across every DSA chapter.
DSA’s 2020 endorsement of Sanders followed intense internal debate, though participating members ultimately approved it.
“Everybody is well aware that everything we’re doing right now as DSA is either setting us up or not setting us up to be serious political players in the 2028 election,” said Frances Gill, a Los Angeles psychiatrist and NPC member.
Alex Pellitteri, a union organizer in New York City who is leading DSA’s “presidential exploratory group,” compared the upsides to Mamdani’s citywide race in his hometown.
Before the campaign, DSA’s New York chapter — by far its largest, making up about 1 in 8 of the group’s members — had largely only supported campaigns in its strongest bases of support in Brooklyn and Queens.
Part of the argument for endorsing Mamdani’s mayoral campaign was to get its muscular canvassing operation into parts of the city where they had never knocked a door. Backing a presidential candidate, he said, could enable the group to do the same across the country.
But there are still questions over what that might look like — and risks.
Some people who want to sketch out a “model of co-governance” for SIOs — socialists-in-office — at the presidential level before endorsing. Others want to reconcile an endorsement with the group’s platform, formally dubbed the “national program,” which advocates for replacing the presidency with a parliamentary system.
And then there’s the reality that Ocasio-Cortez could very well choose not to seek out the White House.
At the “DSA for AOC” event at an off-site bar on Friday night, a fellow comrade came up to Sims to ask the second question on everyone’s mind: Is there anyone else they’d want to encourage?
Sims paused and thought for a second.
“Well,” they said, “no one.”