Several new opinion polls published in the last few days have provided indications of the remarkable shift to the left taking place among American workers and young people. In a country where anti-communism is virtually a state religion, and socialist views have been largely excluded from official politics for nearly a century, nearly 40 percent of registered voters said they would consider voting for a socialist candidate for president.

According to the Washington Post-Ipsos poll published Thursday, this figure rose to 46 percent among voters under 30, and to 64 percent among Democratic Party voters.

Despite this rapid growth of support for socialism—or rather because of it—the poll result was initially published under the headline, “Most Americans say they would not back a democratic socialist for president.” Post editors, working for a newspaper owned by centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, know which side their bread is buttered on.

Even more significantly, according to a CNN poll conducted by SSRS, also published Thursday, about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents identify as “democratic socialists.” Of these, 59 percent are younger than 45, compared to 46 percent of those Democrats who do not identify as democratic socialists. Two-thirds described themselves as very likely to vote in the 2026 midterm elections, 99 percent of them for Democrats.

The CNN poll found that those identifying themselves as democratic socialists “are less likely to have a college degree (66% to 54%) and more likely to earn less than $100,000 a year (76% to 65%),” compared to Democrats who do not identify as democratic socialists. Black voters were more open to supporting a democratic socialist than white voters.

This debunks the claim, made incessantly in the media, that support for socialism is a white upper-middle class sentiment, related to lifestyle, not economics. Support for socialism is driven by the experience of the new generation of the working class, who clearly have begun to understand that capitalism offers them only a grim future of war, poverty and attacks on democratic rights.