Young Americans are surging to socialism at record rates

Cristian Spariosu used to believe in Making America Great Again. He was president of his Republican club at Siena University, New York state, became a member of Turning Point USA and canvassed for President Trump in his 2020 re-election campaign.

“I liked how Trump spoke about conservative family values, preserving tradition and that he wanted to put America first rather than drag us into foreign wars,” he said.

But almost a year after voting for him in the 2024 presidential election, the 25-year-old New Yorker began to lose faith in the capitalist system he once supported. Last year he cast his first vote for a Democrat and became one of the estimated 60,000 Trump voters to support Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral election.

Zohran Mamdani, centre, with the left-wing senator Bernie Sanders and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ANGELA WEISS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

He wore a “Maga for Mamdani” hat, fell out with family members over his leap across the political aisle and now considers himself an “independent socialist”.

“I was a huge believer in the American Dream throughout my life, and now I just think it’s a rigged system and the rich don’t pay their fair share,” he said. “A lot of people feel hopeless about affording a house and having a family. The American Dream: a lot of us think it’s dead.”

Support for socialism, an ideology long seen as politically toxic in the US, has been growing. A sweeping Times-YouGov survey to mark the nation’s 250th anniversary asked 1,821 people which philosophy could deliver the American Dream for all and found that 21 per cent of Americans said capitalism, compared with 16 per cent who chose socialism. However, among Americans under 30, socialism came out on top with 25 per cent choosing it against 14 per cent who chose capitalism.

Support for the ideology is nearing levels not seen since Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party leader, won 6 per cent of the national vote in the 1912 presidential election. At around that time the Socialists held 1,200 public offices in 340 cities, including 79 mayors. Debs, who was imprisoned in 1919 over an anti-war speech, ran for president again from jail in 1920 and received almost one million votes.

The Socialist presidential ticket of 1904, led by Eugene Debs, below addressing a crowd six years later GRAPHICAARTIS/Getty IMAGES

But as the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union intensified, many Americans saw socialism as a threat to their democratic way of life and it became a dirty word.

Christopher Galdieri, a political science professor at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, said younger generations did not have the same fears their parents had. Perhaps that is because mainstream democratic socialists advocate for practical reforms within capitalism rather than embracing an entirely new socialist system.

“For them, socialism isn’t this scary thing that the Russians do, it’s just a viable alternative,” Galdieri said. “It’s something that they look at saying, ‘Oh, this might make life more liveable.’”

In the past decade, this sentiment has led to a noticeable shift in American politics. In 2016 Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who has long extolled the virtues of democratic socialism, ran for the Democratic presidential nomination and not only won nearly 45 per cent of primary votes but more youth votes than Trump or Hillary Clinton won in their primary campaigns combined.

Two years later, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was elected to Congress and had especially high support among the young.

Ocasio-Cortez in 2018 ERIK MCGREGOR/Getty IMAGES

Last year, however, was the turning point. While youth turnout for elections is historically low Mamdani, 34, attracted an unprecedented number of voters aged 18 to 29 for a mayoral election — and won 75 per cent of their support. Harnessing social media, pithy campaign promises and an ability to tap into voters’ fears about affordability, the populist political outsider proved that socialism resonated for young people.

His popularity has boosted DSA membership, which ballooned from 5,000 in 2016 to now more than 100,000, according to Megan Romer, DSA’s national co-chair.

Romer said many of the DSA’s members were aged between 23 and 30 and turned to socialism because of the affordability crisis and the sense society was tipped unfairly against them. In the third quarter of 2025, the top 1 per cent of households owned 31.7 per cent of all US wealth — the highest share since the Federal Reserve began tracking household wealth in 1989.

“If you came of age in the post-2008 era, the odds are that you have never had a chance to even believe that you could be financially comfortable in the United States,” Romer said. “The idea of home ownership is outrageous to most millennials and younger [generations] because the economy is stacked in favour of billionaires.”

Romer suggested there was a large block of people who felt capitalism was “working exactly as intended — to funnel money to the top, leaving them to ask: ‘How can we make the economy work for everyone?’ And I think people are landing on democratic socialism.”

Mamdani energised young people to turn out ADAM GRAY/Getty IMAGES

“We’re a generation or two away from the Red Scare now,” she said, adding that the idea “Stalin’s gonna put me in a gulag” had faded.

Gallup has also reported that the number of Americans with a positive view of capitalism is slipping, from 61 per cent in 2021 to 54 per cent in 2025. While those with a positive view of socialism remained in the minority, they increased from 36 per cent to 39 per cent.

Spariosu’s early views of socialism were shaped by his eastern European parents. His father, John, 79, moved to New York in 1979 from what was then Yugoslavia and became a taxi driver. He liked aspects of socialism, such as universal healthcare, but his mother, Eva, who was born in Poland to Ukrainian parents, told a “dark story” of Russian occupation and the Soviet Union. His parents live in upstate New York, where his mother works as a cleaner at a hotel.

Spariosu, who lives in the apartment where he was raised in the New York City borough of Queens, felt his politics began to shift when he spent time abroad and saw how countries in Asia and Europe treated their citizens.

While in Japan, he had to go to hospital for a thyroid disorder and was stunned at the experience. “It was great quality care, and I only paid like $20 to $30 out of pocket … for most people in America one of the number one causes of personal bankruptcy is medical bills. Even though Japan is arguably the most conservative first world country, especially culturally, they have one of the best healthcare systems in the world.”

When Spariosu went on to visit his family in Sweden, he was blown away by the generous 16-month paid parental leave. “They don’t pay much more taxes than we do, but we don’t get anything from our taxpayer money,” he said.

The traditional trope that young people usually grow out of their liberal ideas may be eroding, Galdieri said, because the milestones that used to push people toward conservatism now feel out of reach.

“If you’ve been stuck in a studio apartment that you moved into when you were 23, if you and your significant other can’t find a place to live together, or if you can’t imagine affording a place in a good school district, suddenly those things that might make you a little more conservative in outlook aren’t on the table,” he said.

Enthusiastic support for Mamdani before a mayoral debate in October ANGELINA KATSANIS/AP

Evan Roth Smith, a political consultant at Slingshot Strategies and a friend of Mamdani’s, said young Americans felt an “incredible amount of disillusionment with the status quo … I don’t necessarily know that young Americans have read Das Kapital [by Karl Marx] and are thoroughly persuaded. I think what’s happened is they’ve been so thoroughly persuaded away from the system we have because it’s simply not serving them anymore.”

Spariosu trusts the Democratic Party as little as he trusts Trump, but he attended a Sanders “Tax the Rich” rally in the Bronx last month and said he would “love” more populist, socialist candidates to run for office.

While he still believes in Christian values and the right to gun ownership, Spariosu no longer wants to spend his life chasing money by getting a job in finance. Instead, he has decided to leave his job at a gym to train as an English teacher to give back to the community. He has also applied for Polish citizenship with the hope of moving to Europe.

“I see how our capitalistic society has become such a rat race, just to get that new car or that new house or whatever,” he said. “It’s created a more individualised society where people care less about one another.”

This article is part of a series examining the American Dream as the US turns 250. Read more here