Democratic voters are shifting to the left in primaries. Republicans are doing the same with the labels they use to paint them as extreme.
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Months into his first term in Congress, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee) slammed what he called on social media “the Socialist Democrat wing” of the Democratic Party over its role in delaying a bipartisan bill.
Seven years later, he tweaked his language.
“Quit calling them Progressives,” he wrote on X on Wednesday, “they are Communists.”
His post, the morning after a democratic socialist candidate unseated a longtime incumbent in Colorado, reflects a notable shift in how the GOP is leveraging criticism at a Democratic Party it accuses of being too far to the left.
As more Americans take on a positive view of socialism — and more candidates who embrace that label win elections — Republicans are increasingly using a different label: communist.
“When the people we accuse of being socialists admit that they are socialists, it’s not an attack that stings as much,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. “Having a new line of attack makes people pay attention.”
Right-wing influencers and Republicans are talking about communism more than they were a year ago, according to a Washington Post analysis of public statements from high-profile figures on the political right, including social media posts and podcasts using data provided by the National Conference on Citizenship, a nonpartisan group that aims to strengthen civic life.
From January to June, they used the words “communism” or “communist” in an average of about 626 posts per week, up from around 439 per week during the same stretch last year — a 43 percent increase.
Communism has also been mentioned in those statements more often than socialism in most weeks this year. In the last week of June, mentions of communism and socialism hit a yearly high, with socialism being mentioned slightly more often.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), one of two members of the Democratic Socialists of America in Congress, said any focus on ideological labels is missing the point.
“What matters is the legislation, your proposals, the ideas before us,” she said in an interview. “How a person identifies in their economic view of the world is less important to people than if we’re making their groceries more affordable.”
Yet the socialist label itself is less polarizing than it used to be.
About 17 percent of Americans reported a favorable view of political leaders who identify as democratic socialists, a Pew Research Center poll found in January, about the same percentage who did in 2022.
But the percentage of those with a negative view has fallen by about eight percentage points, from 45 to 37 percent, and the percentage of those with a neutral view of such candidates has increased by a similar margin.
Candidates who describe themselves as democratic socialists have unseated three Democratic House incumbents and won primaries for another two seats in deep-blue districts in recent months, often leveraging discontent over the war in Gaza and money in politics.
Upcoming primaries in Michigan, Florida, California and other states could grow the ranks of Democratic Socialists of America members of Congress even further.
Socialists have supported city-owned grocery stores, the socialized health care program known as Medicare-for-all, universal paid family leave, higher taxes on the rich, a more aggressive environmental agenda and ending military aid to Israel. Some have also advocated to abolish police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Their wins have roiled more-moderate factions of the Democratic Party. Some House Democrats started a pledge last month to distance themselves by declaring their commitment to capitalism and political centrism.
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Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a moderate Democrat from New Jersey, unleashed his ire at democratic socialists, saying on Fox News that “they should form their own party,” and later adding on X that they “are bomb throwers, not problem solvers.”
“They’ve declared war on common sense Democrats, which will only lead to more deadlock, dysfunction, and hard-working families paying the price,” he wrote.
Top Republican leaders have seized on democratic socialists’ electoral victories to paint the party as extreme.
At a news conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, top GOP House leaders cast the Democratic Party’s internal debate as “common sense versus communism” and compared the party’s insurgent left to Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution.
And at a rally in North Dakota the following day, President Donald Trump likewise accused DSA-endorsed candidates of hiding their true colors.
“They said they’re social democrats. Doesn’t it sound pretty?” he said. “They’re actually communists.”
He hammered them repeatedly in events at Mount Rushmore and the National Mall over the July Fourth holiday, blaming the resurgence of communism on “newcomers to our country” whom he characterized as “a mortal threat to American liberty.”
“You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot,” Trump said at Mount Rushmore. “You cannot be both.”
Mentions of communism on the right are not rising faster than mentions of socialism, which have grown much more sharply since early 2025. The data also includes Republicans’ use of the label in the context of foreign policy rather than as a domestic criticism.
Megan Romer, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, said that the shift toward using “communist” points to how the power of using “socialist” as a cudgel is fading — in part, she said, because Republicans have used it against people who hardly fit the bill.
“They defanged it themselves by using it against people who by global standards are on the center-right,” she said of the “socialist” label. “There is a bit of a ‘boy who cried wolf’ phenomenon.”
Republicans, she pointed out, labeled Hillary Clinton as both a “communist” and a “socialist” over her health care platform, which was more moderate than the Medicare-for-all plan favored by the DSA.
Now that democratic socialists such as Ocasio-Cortez and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) have been serving in elected office, Romer said, their record chips away at a “bogeyman mentality” that Republicans want to portray.
“No one has been gulagged,” she said. “Folks might still think AOC has crazy politics, but they don’t see her as someone who’s sending the Stasi to your house.”
Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, cautioned that there are “generational differences” and that certain labels may carry a lot of weight for voters who lived through the Cold War or have family roots in Eastern Europe or Latin America.
“That’s a political reality that everyone navigates, but when people get elected, they’re elected by their constituencies, and not every community is copy-paste the same,” she said.
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Scott Clement and Clara Ence Morse contributed to this report.
