Meet the millennial duo behind the Democratic Socialists of America’s burgeoning power grab

Led by two millennials with a vision of an empowered working class and an end to capitalism in the U.S., the Democratic Socialists of America have grown into one of the most powerful grassroots forces in the Democratic Party.

Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique, the DSA national co-chairs, came to socialism as part of a generational wave of young left-wing activists frustrated with a Democratic Party they see as dominated by big‑money donors and drifting away from working‑class struggles.

For Ms. Romer, 43, the movement is about seizing power from corporate and political elites she calls “bosses.”

“Power only cedes itself to a greater degree of power,” she said at the DSA’s convention last year, according to a report by The Daily Economy. “We win by making conditions so intolerable for the ruling class that they would rather give in to our demands than continue to live with the disturbance we cause, until we are able to fully seize power ourselves.”

From trailer park to socialist leader

A left-wing political consultant who spent much of her career in the nonprofit arts industry promoting folk music, Ms. Romer describes herself online as a “Socialist with Presbyterian characteristics.”

She has talked about growing up “very poor in a trailer park” in rural upstate New York, the daughter of a paramedic and a nursing aide who couldn’t afford groceries despite, she says, working in life‑saving jobs.

She stresses her public‑school education and brief stint at community college as proof that people don’t need academic credentials to build political power.

In her 30s, she says she followed politics through Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and considered herself a “John Stewart lib.”

She was once enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton — the idea of a woman in the White House — but after two church trips to Cuba and clashes with a local Democratic women’s club after Mr. Trump’s 2016 win, she walked into a DSA meeting in Louisiana and never left the movement.

In the DSA, members call one another “comrade” and rally around a platform that calls for free migration across borders and abolishing prisons, the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate. They would replace the presidency with something closer to a prime minister.

“We don’t think that’s extreme,” Mr. Siddique said on CSPAN this week. “We want to transfer power from the 1% to the working class, and to replace capitalism with socialism.”

He said the plan is to “shift power from the ruling class to working-class people.”

Son of Bangladeshi immigrants turns anti-capitalist

Born in 1988 and raised in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, Mr. Siddique grew up in a Bangladeshi Muslim family hearing stories about Bangladesh’s war of independence and its split from Pakistan in 1971.

“Then 9-11 happened when I was 13 years old, so that was totally formative, and it was just a very weird paranoia time to be part of the muslim community in New York City,” he said on a DSA podcast, adding that most of his classmates were also from immigrant families from Asia and Eastern Europe. “So there was not the baked-in patriotism and very intense hyper-nationalism that was the case across the country at the time.”

“We saw the ways that 9-11 was being used as a pretext to just expand this surveillance state and drive toward militarism,” he said. “We realized it was bull- – – -, but there also wasn’t anything we really could do about it.”

After graduating from Wesleyan University in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts in neuroscience and behavior, he studied PTSD at a veterans’ hospital and immersed himself in the Occupy Wall Street movement against economic inequality, capitalism, and corporate greed. He also got involved in Bernard Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and joined DSA the following year.

He unsuccessfully ran to serve on the Advisory Neighborhood Committee in the District of Columbia. He also co-authored policy papers for the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based liberal think tank, arguing that the U.S. wasted tens of trillions on militarization since the Sept. 11 terror, money that could have transformed the economy and climate policy.

Now, he says DSA’s mission is “to reframe politics around class lines.” He often invokes Martin Luther King Jr. as the most famous democratic socialist in American history, linking civil rights and economic rights.

Explosive growth, modest budget

The growth of DSA has been explosive. Founded in 1982, it jumped from roughly 6,000 members in 2016 to more than 120,000 today — the largest socialist organization in U.S. history.

Powered by small‑dollar dues rather than major donors, DSA’s financial footprint remains modest. It had $6.4 million in revenue and $5.5 million in expenses in fiscal year 2024. Still, it boasts a national staff, chapters in all 50 states, and more than 250 elected officials nationwide.

The group’s national political committee comprises 25 elected members and the two co-chairs of the Young Democratic Socialists of America.

No more than half of NPC’s elected members may be “cisgender men,” and at least eight must come from nationally marginalized racial or ethnic groups.

Ms. Romer, Mr. Siddique, and DSA did not respond to requests to participate in this report.

The socialists’ shift from a protest movement to a governing force is most visible in New York City, where the DSA’s largest chapter helped elect New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez. Primary wins in Colorado and Pennsylvania are expected to add more House members, and the group is fighting to re‑elect former Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri.

Across the country, DSA‑aligned officials now chair city councils and hold seats in state legislatures. In Kentucky, Robert LeVertis Bell, a public school teacher, is set to become the first self‑described democratic socialist in the state House in modern history.

Sharp backlash

House Speaker Mike Johnson warned this week that the DSA wants to eviscerate the nation’s constitutional fabric.

“The barbarians are in the gate,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters on Capitol Hill. “This is not a game. Everybody has to understand: these crazy little mini‑Mamdanis, who are popping up all over the country — they are a danger to you and your family.”

The socialists’ rapid ascent has also drawn criticism from centrist Democrats.

Matt Bennett of Third Way recently told C‑SPAN’s Washington Journal that DSA’s platform is “dangerous” and “so far out of mainstream” that it almost reads like “parodies made up by Republicans,” pointing to positions he said amount to emptying prisons of violent offenders, opening the nation’s borders entirely, and nationalizing most industries.

Mr. Siddique rejected that characterization in a separate appearance on the same program.

“We are not pro‑crime. We are pro‑community,” he said, arguing that DSA’s approach to public safety is about investing in neighborhoods so “crime goes down exponentially,” not eliminating consequences for violent offenses.

He pointed to a drop in violent crime in New York City since Mr. Mamdani took office as evidence of that approach, and said the group also wants stronger scrutiny of the wealthy and powerful, citing the Jeffrey Epstein case as an example of accountability he believes has been lacking.

President Trump has also seized on DSA’s rise, warning the group is anti‑American. “They’re communists. They want to destroy our country. We’re not going to let that happen,” he told reporters this month.

Mr. Siddique waves off those attacks as outdated, saying that Republicans have labeled everyone from Barack Obama to Ms. Clinton as communists.

“Socialism is losing its scare factor,” he said on the left-wing news outlet Democracy NOW! “We had so many decades of red scares and Cold War propaganda that set in before most people who are politically active today were even born. I’m in my 30s now, and I fully came of age after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Romer has worked to demystify what the group means by “revolution,” offering a characteristically self‑deprecating explanation.

“I’m a fat 40‑year‑old woman,” she joked on a 2024 podcast. “When we talk about revolution, we’re just saying the system as it is cannot be reformed into socialism. It has to be knocked down and rebuilt in some kind of way.”