Democrats hold more favorable view of socialism than capitalism: Survey

Fifty-eight percent. That's not a fringe caucus or a few loud voices at a college town hall, that's a majority of Democratic respondents telling a pollster they view socialism favorably. Only 18 percent said the opposite. Meanwhile capitalism, the system that built the phones they took the survey on, gets treated like the awkward relative nobody wants to defend at Thanksgiving. This isn't a gotcha stat. It's a data point that's been building for years, and it finally showed up in black and white.

What's strange is how little the party establishment seems bothered by it. Democratic politicians still run ads in front of American flags and talk about the middle class, but the base they're courting is telling pollsters something different about the economic system underneath all that language. You can't paper over that gap forever. Either the leadership starts being honest about where its coalition actually stands, or it keeps pretending this is a fringe sentiment while the numbers say otherwise.

None of this means every Democrat wants Venezuela's economy. Plenty probably mean something closer to European-style welfare capitalism when they check "socialism" on a survey. But words mean things, and when a majority of one party's voters pick the word "socialism" over "capitalism" in a head-to-head poll, that's a signal worth taking seriously rather than explaining away. Americans built the most prosperous country in history on free markets and private enterprise, imperfect as they are. A party whose base is souring on that idea has some explaining to do, not to us, but to the voters who still believe in it.