There's Probably a DSA Member on Your City Council. Here's What You Weren't Told.
Two hundred and fifty DSA members hold elected office. Ninety percent were elected after 2019. Voters are unaware about the arrangement they signed up for.
As of August 2025, more than 250 members of the Democratic Socialists of America held elected public office in the United States. Roughly ninety percent of them were elected after 2019. The list includes 96 city councilors and county commissioners, eight mayors or county executives, and significant blocs on major city councils. Seven of fifty seats in Chicago, where they formed an official Democratic Socialist Caucus. Four of twelve in Portland. Four of thirteen in Minneapolis. Four of fifteen in Los Angeles.
You probably know about Mamdani, who was elected Mayor of New York City. You probably know about AOC. There are exactly two DSA members of Congress, between them, and the political press has built every conversation about democratic socialism around those two faces.
The actual concentration of DSA influence isn’t in Congress. It’s on your city council. Your school board. Your county commission. The bodies that decide your zoning. Your housing policy. Your public safety budget. Your school curriculum. The places where your tax dollars get allocated at the level closest to your actual life. And the way the DSA’s elected officials operate at that level isn’t what you think. It isn’t what they told you on the campaign mailer either.
There’s a word for the arrangement they enter when they win. The word is “co-govern.” It’s their word, not mine. It’s printed in their own censure letters. It’s discussed openly in mainstream political coverage that almost nobody outside New York reads. And it changes the answer to a basic question every voter should be able to answer about every official they elect: Who is this person actually accountable to?
Most voters don’t know to ask. The reporters who could explain don’t bother. So let me explain it.
Spencer Pratt asked the question
Spencer Pratt is running for Mayor of Los Angeles. If you just rolled your eyes, that’s the reaction the political class is counting on. Reality TV guy. The Hills. Lost his house in the Palisades fire. Now he wants to be mayor. Cute.
Then the latest Ethics Commission filings came out, and Pratt had raised nearly $540,000 since January. Out-fundraising the sitting mayor in her own city. The UCLA Luskin poll puts him second, ahead of every other challenger, including Councilwoman Nithya Raman. A USC political science professor told the LA Times Pratt is now a “legitimate top-tier candidate.” Forty percent of LA voters are still undecided heading into the June 2 primary.
We did this once. In 2016, the political class watched a reality TV guy who talked like a person instead of a consultant, dismissed him because he wasn’t “serious,” and were genuinely shocked when he won the presidency. Ten years later, they’re doing the same thing in LA. They’re going to do it again somewhere else after that. The lesson never lands.
I’m bringing this up because Pratt went on Joe Rogan and asked a question about one of his opponents that almost every political reporter in America should have already been asking. He pointed at Nithya Raman, the DSA-LA councilmember now running for mayor, and said she had signed a “contract” agreeing to “co-govern” with the DSA. Where, he asked, was her allegiance: with her constituents, or with the chapter?
While Pratt got the mechanism wrong, he didn’t get the question wrong. There is no contract. But there is a real, named, published arrangement called co-governance, and DSA chapters use it openly. Voters mostly have no idea it exists, because nobody is bothering to explain it to them. The reporters who could explain it would rather dismiss a former Hills star’s electability than tell you what’s actually there.
What’s actually there: Socialists in Office
When a candidate seeks a DSA endorsement, they fill out a long questionnaire. NYC-DSA’s is 87 questions long. They sit for a candidate forum. Multiple internal endorsement votes are held, branch level first, then citywide. If endorsed, the chapter doesn’t just slap a logo on a yard sign. They effectively run the campaign. According to City & State New York, which is mainstream NY politics coverage and not a right-wing site, first-time DSA candidates “tend to rely on fellow DSA members to staff their campaigns, run as a slate with other DSA-endorsed candidates and work closely with the DSA to organize volunteer canvasses and other campaign events.”
Then, if the candidate wins, the real arrangement begins. The official becomes a “Socialist in Office,” or SIO, and joins a committee that meets regularly with the chapter to coordinate strategy on legislation, votes, and public positions.
That isn’t a contract. A contract would be visible. Signed. Legally enforceable. It would be tangible.
What’s actually there is opaque, ongoing political pressure. Voluntary on paper, with real consequences for officials who break ranks. And unlike a contract, the public can’t see the terms because there are no terms. Just an expectation, repeated in chapter materials, that you will “co-govern.”
Here’s how it works in New York City, where the DSA’s bench is deepest.
After winning, a DSA-endorsed official can join a State SIO Committee (for state lawmakers) or a City SIO Committee (for city council members). Per City & State, as of January 2026, there are eight State SIOs in New York — Senators Julia Salazar, Jabari Brisport, and Kristen Gonzalez, plus Assembly Members Emily Gallagher, Phara Souffrant Forrest, Marcela Mitaynes, Sarahana Shrestha, and Claire Valdez — and two City SIOs, Council Members Alexa Avilés and Tiffany Cabán.
The State SIO meets weekly virtually and monthly in person. The committee includes the elected officials, their staffers (who are often DSA members themselves), plus representatives from NYC-DSA’s Citywide Leadership Committee, geographic branches, and working groups focused on specific issues.
Now read this next part slowly, because this is the sentence that matters most:
“Any member — not just those in elected office — able to suggest that the committee adopt a collective position on a certain issue or piece of legislation.”
So a dues-paying DSA member in Brooklyn — not a constituent of any of these legislators, not someone who voted for them, just someone who paid their dues and showed up to a meeting — can propose how a state senator should vote on a bill. The proposal gets debated. The committee votes. The senator is one voice among many. And the expectation is that the senator will then go support whatever the chapter decided.
City & State, again hardly a hostile outlet, describes the arrangement plainly: “In some limited but very real sense, SIOs are willing to share the power they have as legislators with the DSA, agreeing to support the collective goals of the socialist organization despite their own personal beliefs.”
Despite their own personal beliefs. That is the design.
And here’s Mamdani himself, speaking at the 2023 DSA national convention as a sitting state assemblyman, giving his own theory of the case:
“We are special as DSA electeds not because of ourselves; we are special because of our organization.”
That’s the man who is now Mayor of New York City describing where his power as an elected official actually comes from. Not himself, not his constituents, the organization. He said it on stage, on the record, to a national audience of his own supporters. And to make sure the point landed, he told City & State the same thing in shorter form: “To be an unorganized socialist is a contradiction in terms.”
He’s not hiding it. The political press just doesn’t print it because it doesn’t fit the “moderate Bernie-bro social democrat” frame they’ve built for him.
Mamdani’s not a hypothetical here either. He served on the State SIO Committee throughout his time in the Assembly. According to the NYC-DSA cochair writing in Jacobin, the SIO mechanism continues into his mayoralty: “The elected officials and their staff meet with NYC-DSA leadership every week to share information, collectively choose priorities, and cohere on key votes. The primary purpose of this co-governance model is to enable an inside/outside strategy.”
Their phrase. Co-governance model. Used by the cochair of the largest DSA chapter in the country, in a flagship socialist publication, to describe how the Mayor of New York City is currently running his office.
The obvious next question is whether this applies to House members too — AOC, Tlaib, the federal-level names everyone knows. The answer is yes, with a caveat that’s more revealing than a clean yes would be.
