Progressives are winning in American cities. Can they win rural voters too? | Bhaskar Sunkara

I joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in April 2007 at the age of 17. DSA back then was a small group with an ageing membership and an almost negative amount of buzz. If you’d told me its candidates would someday sweep primaries across New York City, I would have been surprised to say the least.

Last week, they did. Darializa Avila Chevalier, an organizer in her early 30s, beat the five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in a Harlem-and-Bronx seat. Claire Valdez, another socialist, took the open seat Nydia Velázquez is leaving in Brooklyn and Queens. Add the state races, and DSA will seat at least 15 of its endorsed candidates in Albany next year. The movement that made Zohran Mamdani mayor is starting to look less like a pressure campaign and more like a bloc that can govern.

As a New Yorker and a socialist, I won’t pretend I’m not thrilled. But the wins sparked rebuttals from centrist commentators that deserve a serious response. Within a day, ABC News had run an analysis under the headline “Mamdani won big, but it’s a mistake to think all Democrats swung left,” noting that on the same night a moderate won the swing-seat primary up in NY-17 and a centrist beat the progressives in Utah.

Andrew Mamo, a spokesperson for the centrist recruitment outfit The Bench, put a number on it: leftwing candidates have “a ceiling of 30% in swing districts”, even as they clear 50% in New York City.

The easy reply is that DSA now has chapters in 47 states across the country and a few wins in the heart of Trump country. That’s true, and it isn’t enough, because even if we don’t trust Mamo’s number, the broader progressive movement is plainly struggling across much of the country.

As Jared Abbott of the Center for Working Class Politics noted, of the nearly 100 members of the Congressional Progressive caucus in 2024, exactly one represented a mostly rural district: Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico.

Bernie Sanders, the most successful socialist in American history, endorsed nobody like her in 2022. Rural and rural-suburban districts make up 41% of the House and a larger share of most state legislatures. Democrats have often figured out how to win a thin majority without them. They haven’t figured out how to keep one, and they won’t, because the system isn’t built for a party crammed into a dozen metros.

This is the wall the American left keeps hitting. The Senate gives Wyoming as many votes as California. In our undemocratic political system, you can win more votes than the other side and still not be able to govern. The math doesn’t work unless we contest rural America.

Yet Abbott’s research suggests the cause is far from hopeless. Rural voters are whiter and older than the country as a whole. They’re likelier to own guns and go to church, and they hold more conservative convictions on immigration than their urban peers.

On economics, however, they seem closer to Mamdani than to libertarian Rand Paul. Majorities support a $15 minimum wage and Medicare for All. More than 80% even want background checks on gun sales. When the Race-Class Narrative project tested the line “in small towns and rural communities, we believe in looking out for each other, whether we’re white, black, or brown, tenth generation or newcomer,” 89% of rural respondents agreed.

Being competitive in these districts doesn’t require radical voting shifts. By Abbott’s count, 29% of rural Trump voters back a $15 wage and oppose banning abortion. Those persuadable voters are enough to truly reshape American politics.

Dan Osborn provides an instructive example of what progressive populism can do in some of the most conservative areas of the country. A machinist who led the Kellogg’s strike, he’s again running for Senate in Nebraska as an independent and polling far ahead of where Nebraska Democrats usually land. Osborn wants to protect social security and tax the rich, and he’s foregrounded a demand around “right to repair”: the unglamorous idea that if you bought a tractor, you should be allowed to fix it without the manufacturer’s permission.

It’s the type of demand that feels locally rooted but taps into a cross-partisan opposition to monopoly. Backed by unions like the United Auto Workers, Osborn, who led in a May poll, is proof that the anti-corporate pitch, delivered plainly by someone voters take for one of their own, can land in “Trump country”.

A politics aimed squarely at the plant closings and capital flight that devastated small towns in roughly the same way they devastated the urban working class a generation before can win everywhere. But it will take rhetorical discipline from progressives, and a willingness to have hard conversations in every part of the country.

• Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist. He is the president of the Nation, the founding editor of Jacobin, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality