How far left is the Democratic Party willing to go?

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It’s 17 months until the first 2028 presidential primaries, and already an important part of the Democrats’ rhetoric is evident in a church assembly hall of a New Hampshire town where a likely candidate is searching for applause lines.

“We can’t have the same status quo, incremental politics,” Representative Ro Khanna of California is telling voters in this community of 7,699, where the handwritten election results showed a 278-vote margin of victory for Donald Trump in 2024. Later, in an interview in the hallway of the First United Methodist Church, he says that “Democrats have to regain the sense of systematic change,” explaining, “If there’s one thing we can learn from Donald Trump, it’s to be bold.”

That’s the kind of language also being employed by Abdul El-Sayed, a Rhodes scholar and one-time Columbia University epidemiology professor who is the favourite to win the Michigan Democratic Senate primary Tuesday.

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But being the favourite in a midsummer primary in one state doesn’t make Mr. El-Sayed − or the rhetoric he, Mr. Khanna and increasing numbers of young Democratic candidates are using − the favourites of the party establishment and figures such as Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, whose impulses often tug them to the centre of U.S. politics rather than to the left.

“If you’re Chuck Schumer and your whole approach is that you get to go talk to the money people and then dole out their corporate money to help elect the people who are going to do the things that corporations want,” Mr. El-Sayed, 41, told the news outlet Politico recently, then “yeah, I’m a threat to your system. So of course they’re freaking out.”

His opponent in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in a vital swing state is Representative Haley Stevens, 43, who has the support of Governor Gretchen Whitmer and the sorts of congressional leaders Mr. El-Sayed is portraying as feckless in the fight against the wealth gap and resistant to embrace a broad health care program.

Hence the range war in the Democratic Party − one that, for the first time in more than a century, includes a struggle over the place of socialists in the country’s mainstream politics.

Democratic socialists surge in mayoral races across the U.S. as anti-Trump fervour rises

Neither Mr. Khanna nor Mr. El-Sayed is a socialist. Nor is either a member of the Democratic Socialists of America movement, whose views are not the same as those of European socialists. And, though Mr. Trump insists the contrary, no plausible U.S. congressional candidate is a communist or holds views remotely like those of Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong or even Clement Attlee.

But despite these sorts of distinctions, dozens of candidates in this fall’s midterm congressional elections are engaged in what can only be called a battle for the soul of a major American political party − a phrase that for the past 38 years has been repeatedly used to describe the debates within the Republican Party.

The Democrats’ battle is over how far leftward the party and its candidates should lean in a political atmosphere still controlled by Mr. Trump but with a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives, and perhaps even the Senate, increasingly possible if not likely. It also involves cold calculations of the power of Independents, who support Ms. Stevens by a large margin in Michigan polls and increasingly hold the balance of power in U.S. politics − and whose instincts and impulses often resist major shifts in the ideological profiles of the two established parties.

This issue inched to the fore with the election last November of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York and with the increased appearance of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the side of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at anti-Trump rallies. All three are members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

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Then three Democratic Socialists won high-profile New York primaries: Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in congressional contests and Aber Kawas in a state Senate contest.

About a third of Democrats now consider themselves democratic socialists, according to a CNN poll, though not all those voters support the Democratic Socialist Party − it only has about 120,000 members. Nor do they likely support many of its policy planks, such as abolishing the Defense Department, the police and the Senate and redrawing how the president and Supreme Court are chosen.

And while three-quarters of Democrats expressed openness to supporting a democratic socialist for president, 55 per cent of all voters said they would not, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

For years Mr. Trump has said that a winning strategy is to paint an opponent “as being a communist or a socialist or somebody who is going to destroy our country.” This June, in an appearance at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, he warned, “They will close your churches in this country if they go communist, and they’re trying to. They will kill your people, and that’s what they’re about. They want to end religion.”

Opinion: Socialist Zohran Mamdani is transforming the Democratic Party

The Washington Post-Ipsos survey showed that 30 per cent of Americans believe democratic socialism is similar to communism, while 32 per cent disagree. The demographic groups with the greatest openness to democratic socialists are the young (46 per cent of those 18 to 29 years old) and the highly educated (44 per cent of those with a bachelor’s degree and 51 per cent of those with a postgraduate education).

The last major socialist figure in U.S. politics was Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, winning 6 per cent of the vote in 1912. His last campaign, in 1920, was run from prison, where he was serving a 10-year sentence for sedition for his opposition to the First World War. He still won almost a million votes, and Republican president Warren G. Harding commuted his sentence the following year on Christmas Day.

He met with Mr. Harding the next day. “Well,” the 29th president said, “I’ve heard so damned much about you, Mr. Debs, that I am now glad to meet you personally.”