A new Fox News national poll finds 55 percent of registered voters view the Democratic Socialists of America unfavorably, and Republicans are building their entire midterm playbook around that number.
The Fox News survey, conducted September 11, 14, 2026, puts the DSA's favorable rating at roughly 30 percent among registered voters. The gap is wide enough that GOP strategists see an opening to reframe what might otherwise be a standard midterm referendum into something more useful: a choice election that forces voters to pick between Republican candidates and a Democratic Party increasingly shaped by its far-left wing.
President Trump made the case bluntly at the GOP midterm convention, held September 9 at American Airlines Center in Dallas:
"In state after state, the Democrat establishment has been overthrown and replaced by crazed lunatics and radicals. They call themselves Democrat socialists, but actually, they're communists."
House Speaker Mike Johnson echoed the framing. He told Fox News Digital the November contests amount to a stark comparison.
"This really is a contrast election between common sense candidates... and crazy, and that's what the other side represents."
The language is hot. But the underlying strategy rests on something concrete: a string of 2026 Democratic primaries in which progressive and socialist-aligned candidates beat establishment-backed moderates. The most prominent example came in Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed, a far-left candidate aligned with the DSA movement, topped Rep. Haley Stevens, a more moderate incumbent, to win the party's Senate nomination in August.
El-Sayed spoke at the Michigan Democratic Party convention in Lansing on August 29, fresh off his primary win. For Republicans, the result was a gift. It put a self-identified progressive at the top of a Senate ticket in a battleground state, exactly the kind of matchup the GOP wants voters to see as a binary choice.
And Michigan is not the only place where the party's left flank is gaining ground. A June 18 rally in New York City drew a roster of DSA-aligned figures: Mayor Zohran Mamdani and congressional candidates Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier all appeared together on stage. The optics reinforced the Republican argument that the DSA is not a fringe outfit but a growing force inside the Democratic coalition.
Republican strategist Erin Maguire, a veteran of the 2020 Trump reelection campaign who later ran communications for Sen. Ted Cruz, told Fox News Digital the poll numbers confirm what her party already suspected:
"Democrats continuing to lurch further and further to the left with their socialist base is not something Americans want."
Maguire added that the data validates the broader GOP approach. "I do think it validates Republicans because Republicans are aiming to make this a choice election," she said.
The concern is not limited to Republican war rooms. Ty Strong, founder and president of the Moderate PAC, told Fox News the DSA's growing influence inside the Democratic tent is a liability heading into November.
"I think it's a big problem."
Strong went further, warning that the midterms "should be a much bigger wave, but I don't think it's going to be as big as it could have been if we didn't have this DSA and attacks that Republicans are going to use." That is a striking admission from someone on the Democratic side of the ledger: the party's own allies see the socialist brand as a drag on candidates who might otherwise ride anti-incumbent sentiment to easy wins.
The DNC, for its part, tried to change the subject entirely. Deputy Communications Director Kendall Witmer told Fox News Digital that Republicans "are facing record-low approval numbers and have no midterm message after spiking costs, raising gas prices, and driving up inflation." Witmer did not address the DSA's unfavorable numbers or the primary results that put socialist-aligned candidates on general-election ballots.
Shannon Jackson, a key consultant and adviser to Rep. Ro Khanna of California, pushed back hard on the idea that the socialist label will stick. Jackson, who held leadership roles in Sen. Bernie Sanders' 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, argued Republicans are grasping.
"I think they're reaching for things. I think the DSA issue is something they're trying to make something, but it is not."
Jackson pointed to Sanders as proof the communist-labeling playbook fails. "You can do these broad strokes of painting it as communist and things like that," he said. "They tried to do that for Bernie, and now he's the most popular senator and politician in America."
That claim, Sanders as the most popular senator in America, is Jackson's assertion, not a verified fact from any poll in the record. And it sidesteps a basic problem: Sanders never won a general presidential election. He lost two Democratic primaries. Whatever his personal favorability, the socialist brand he championed did not carry him to the White House. Republicans are betting the same brand will weigh down Democrats who lack Sanders' name recognition but carry the same ideological baggage.
Jackson also insisted that "Republicans are in a very tough spot right now." But the Fox News poll tells a different story about which party has the tougher sell. When 55 percent of registered voters already hold an unfavorable view of your most energized activist wing, the burden falls on Democrats to explain the gap, not on Republicans to justify pointing it out.
Midterm elections typically function as referendums on the party in power. The president's party loses seats; voters punish whoever holds the gavel. Republicans know that dynamic could cut against them. Their answer is to change the question voters are asking, from "Are you happy with Washington?" to "Do you want socialists running your government?"
The DSA's own candidates are making that reframe easier. Every primary win by a socialist-aligned Democrat gives the GOP a new name and a new district to nationalize. El-Sayed in Michigan. Mamdani in New York. Valdez, Lander, and Avila Chevalier on the same stage in June. These are not hypothetical threats invented by Republican ad-makers. They are real candidates, chosen by real Democratic primary voters, running on platforms well to the left of where most registered voters say they want to be.
The Fox News poll, released September 16, quantifies what many voters already sense. The Democratic Party's activist base has moved left faster than the broader electorate. And the primary calendar has turned that movement into a roster of nominees who will appear on November ballots with the Democratic brand next to their names.
Republicans did not create the Democratic Party's socialist problem. Democratic primary voters did. The GOP's only job now is to make sure every swing-district voter in America knows about it.
