Socialist Candidates Won More Seats Than Ever in 2020 Election

The list included below in this article shows the election victories and losses for socialist and far-left progressive candidates running for office during the 2020 general election. The list was created by a team of researchers at StoppingSocialism.com and The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank.

How Did We Define ‘Socialist’ and ‘Progressive’ When Constructing This List?

This list includes candidates for U.S. House, U.S. Senate, and state legislative seats endorsed by Our Revolution, the Democratic Socialists of America, and/or the Progressive Democrats of America.

Our Revolution is a nonprofit organization advocating for the policy agenda of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a self-described socialist. Our Revolution supports socialist policies such as single-payer health care and the Green New Deal as core parts of its agenda.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization (not a political party) in the United States. According to DSA’s website, “We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.”

The Progressive Democrats of America is a nonprofit organization founded in 2004 “to transform the Democratic Party and our country” by promoting far-left policies within the Democratic Party and across the nation. It supports, among other policies, a national government-managed health care system, dramatic tax increases, an expansion of government social programs, and energy policies similar to those proposed in the Green New Deal.

Important Highlights

• The biggest takeaway from our research is that the far-left progressive and socialist wings of the Democratic Party gained significant ground in 2020 compared to previous elections, and that a greater proportion than ever of legislative seats will be filled by far-left progressives or socialists in 2021 and 2022. It appears as though the socialist and progressive wings of the DNC are quickly taking over.
• Our full list includes 266 separate races in 29 states and Washington, DC. We tracked 200 state legislative seats, 60 U.S. House seats, and six U.S. Senate seats.
• We discovered socialist or progressive candidates won 239 of those races and lost just 24 (three races were still undecided when we put our final analysis together). That means socialists or far-left progressives won more than 90 percent of their races.
• If uncontested races are excluded, socialist or far-left progressive candidates won by an average of more than 25 percentage points, indicating clearly socialist and progressive groups targeted during the primaries districts that they knew Democrats would win in the general election.
• In 2018, we conducted a similar analysis and found there were fewer progressive and socialist candidates (we only identified 86 in 2018, based on endorsements from far-left groups), and that those candidates were much less successful. Fewer than 40 percent won their races, and the margin of victory in contested races was slim.

NOTE: You can also download this report by clicking HERE.

Socialist, Other Far-Left Candidates in 2020 Election

To suggest corrections, please contact Justin Haskins at [email protected] or [email protected].

PHOTO: New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Photo credit: Ståle Grut / NRKbeta. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Justin Haskins

Justin Haskins is editor-in-chief of StoppingSocialism.com, a New York Times bestselling author, and the director of the Socialism Research Center at The Heartland Institute. Follow him on social media @JustinTHaskins.

Chris Talgo

Chris Talgo ([email protected]) is the editorial director and a research fellow at The Heartland Institute, as well as a researcher and contributing editor at StoppingSocialism.com.

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