Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Long Island) has a specific complaint about the Democratic Socialists of America: he doesn’t believe they’ve earned the first word in their name.
“I don’t like the idea of them using ‘democratic,’” Suozzi told Fox News Digital earlier this month. “I think that we should be, as the Democratic Party, should be fighting against that and saying, ‘You know, you shouldn’t be using the word democratic… that’s us, that’s not you.’”
Suozzi represents New York’s 3rd Congressional District, a Long Island seat Donald Trump carried in 2024. The NRCC named him as one of 26 vulnerable House Democrats it is targeting to grow the GOP majority this fall. He’s also facing a rematch against Republican Mike LiPetri, who lost to him by about 3.6 percentage points in 2024 and is back with a Trump endorsement and a spot on the NRCC’s “Young Guns” list. Prediction markets currently favor Suozzi to hold the seat.
He compared the DSA’s rise inside his party to the House Freedom Caucus’s rise within the GOP: “Much like the Republicans have had to deal with the Freedom Caucus, the Democrats are going to have to deal with this group.”
‘We are capitalist, not socialist’
In late June, Suozzi launched the Promise to America, a pledge whose text declares, “We are capitalist, not socialist,” alongside lines like “We are mainstream, not extreme” and “We are proud, not ashamed of America.”
News coverage of the launch put the number of signers at 13 House Democrats. Suozzi told Fox News in early August that 10 sitting members had signed on, with roughly 200 state and local officials and 10 additional candidates in the pipeline. The launch came two days after a slate of candidates endorsed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won Democratic House primaries in New York City.
Suozzi wants November to be a referendum on affordability of groceries, gas, health insurance, and energy bills under the Trump administration, all of which he argues have climbed on the administration’s watch.
“I think it should be less about Trump himself,” he said. “It should be a referendum on this administration’s performance addressing the things in your life.”
Bigger than New York
The clearest sign of the DSA’s momentum landed Tuesday, when Donavan McKinney unseated Rep. Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th District primary, backed by Bernie Sanders and endorsed by DSA.
It’s part of a run that has hit deep-blue seats coast to coast: in Colorado, 29-year-old Melat Kiros unseated 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette, putting her on track to become the first Gen Z woman in Congress. In New York, Darializa Avila Chevalier ousted five-term Rep. Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District. Altogether, DSA has endorsed roughly 150 candidates this cycle, and more than 30 have won their primaries or run unopposed thus far.
DSA held its national convention in Chicago the weekend of July 31, drawing some 600 members. The organization now counts 120,000 dues-paying members—more than any American socialist organization has had since Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party of America peaked at 118,000 in 1912. “I never thought this would be possible in my lifetime,” DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique told the Washington Post.
Members at the convention also adopted an updated platform that, among other things, calls for the abolition of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Senate, and casts the Democratic Party as “asleep at the wheel” and itself as the group filling the vacuum.
Not a clean sweep
For every DSA win this cycle, there’s nearly been a loss: Of the roughly 150 candidates the group has endorsed, 34 have lost their primaries outright.
Axios’ tally of a multi-state primary night on June 2 (California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico and South Dakota all voted that day) found the same split: a moderate beat a progressive in Iowa’s Senate primary, a Sanders- and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-backed candidate won a plurality in a crowded New Jersey House primary, and a prominent leftist challenger lost in the California district once held by Nancy Pelosi.
Built on swing voters
Suozzi isn’t new to this district. He represented an earlier version of the 3rd District from 2017 to 2022, left to run unsuccessfully for governor, then returned by flipping the seat in a February 2024 special election after Republican George Santos was expelled from Congress. He beat Republican Mazi Pilip with about 54% of the vote in that race, then held the seat again that November by a far tighter 3.6-point margin over LiPetri.
Both wins relied on the same coalition of moderates and independents in a district that has demonstrated its ability to swing either way.
He’s built his brand around that swing-voter appeal. Suozzi co-chairs the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus with Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), and has said he’s willing to work with the Trump administration on border enforcement and deporting people with criminal records — a position well to the right of most national Democrats, and one that fits a broader pattern of putting distance between himself and his party’s left flank.
That positioning gets tested on taxes. Suozzi has spent years fighting to repeal the SALT deduction cap—the $10,000 ceiling on how much homeowners can write off in state and local taxes, a fight that’s earned him the nickname “Mr. SALT” in a county where property taxes run high.
In 2025, however, he voted twice against the Working Families Tax Cuts Act, a GOP-backed bill that would have raised the SALT cap from $10,000 to $40,000 alongside other provisions he opposed. LiPetri has made SALT relief part of his own platform, and Suozzi’s vote against a bill that included it is likely to be a line of attack heading into November.
Rep. Suozzi’s office and DSA’s national press desk did not respond to Courier New York’s requests for comment.
