Ballotpedia’s latest weekly email highlights a development that should alarm every American who values the constitutional republic that has endured for more than 250 years. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its local chapters endorsed 164 candidates across 32 states and the District of Columbia for the November 3 elections: one for the U.S. Senate, 10 for the U.S. House, 64 for state legislatures, and 89 for local offices. They also took positions on 72 ballot measures. As of November 10, 79 of those candidates had won and 24 had lost, with 61 races still uncalled. Eight DSA-endorsed candidates won or are leading in U.S. House races, raising the number of DSA-aligned members of Congress from two to as many as eight. Fifty-one of 64 state legislative candidates prevailed, and DSA-backed candidates captured mayoral races in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.

These are not marginal protest candidates. The DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States” and a “member-driven mass organization” committed to the principle that “working people should run both the economy and civil society.” Its current “Workers Deserve More” program is explicit about the end goal: winning “the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” That is not reform. It is a demand for a fundamentally different country.

Here are ten core elements of the DSA platform, drawn directly from its official program, that illustrate the scale of the transformation sought:

1. A new constitution and democratic socialist republic. The organization states that complete victory requires “building a new society from the ground up” and drafting a new constitution to place the working class in charge of government.

2. Abolition of the Senate and creation of a single federal legislature. The program calls for replacing the two-party system with multi-party proportional representation, expanding the House, implementing ranked-choice voting, and abolishing the Senate entirely—ending the bicameral structure the Framers designed as a check on majoritarian excess.

3. Replacement of the President and Supreme Court. DSA proposes abolishing the Electoral College and replacing the independently elected President and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Separation of powers and judicial independence would end.

4. Public ownership of major corporations and essential industries. The largest corporations, along with key transportation, energy, and natural-resource infrastructure, would be placed under public ownership and democratic control. Private property in the means of production on any significant scale would be eliminated.

5. Universal, no-cost healthcare for all. This includes full coverage of reproductive and gender-affirming care, with medical education and training made public and free. Healthcare would cease to be a private or mixed system.

6. Housing as a human right under public control. The program demands new publicly owned social housing, universal rent control, strict regulation of investment properties, and a guaranteed right to counsel for all tenants—effectively nationalizing large segments of the housing market.

7. Abolition of ICE, open borders, and universal amnesty. DSA calls for ending all immigrant detention and deportations, legalizing migration without visa caps or quotas, granting amnesty to every immigrant regardless of status, and extending full voting rights to all permanent residents, including noncitizens.

8. Steps toward abolishing police and prisons. Demilitarizing police departments, disempowering police unions, redirecting funding, ending qualified immunity, and treating addiction solely as a health issue are presented as intermediate steps “towards fully abolishing the police and prison system.”

9. Defunding the Department of War and closing overseas bases. The program seeks to end all foreign wars, close overseas military bases, end sanctions and economic pressure on regimes such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran, and subject U.S. officials to international prosecution.

10. A 32-hour workweek, free college, student-debt cancellation, and aggressive wealth taxes. Combined with a federal jobs guarantee and massive public investment under a Green New Deal, these measures would restructure work, education, and taxation around state provision rather than private enterprise and individual effort.

Taken together, these positions do not seek to operate within the existing constitutional order. They require its replacement. A unicameral legislature subordinate to which both the executive and judiciary answer is not the separation of powers established in 1787. Public ownership of major industry abolishes the private-property foundation of the free-enterprise system the Constitution protects. Open borders with voting rights for noncitizens redefines the sovereign people of the United States. Abolishing the police and prison system removes the state’s basic capacity to secure rights and maintain order. Defunding the military and ending overseas basing would abandon the security posture that has underwritten American independence and prosperity for generations.

The American republic was designed as a constitutional system of limited government, federalism, individual rights, private property, and representative institutions that restrain both majority tyranny and concentrated power. DSA’s program rejects that design in favor of a working-class state that owns the commanding heights of the economy, subordinates the other branches of government, redefines citizenship, and treats national borders and traditional security institutions as obstacles rather than essentials. The Ballotpedia numbers show that this vision is no longer confined to campus chapters or protest marches. It is winning offices at every level of government.

Americans have defended the constitutional republic through war, depression, and political turmoil for more than two and a half centuries. The DSA’s own documents make clear that its electoral successes are steps toward replacing that republic with something else entirely. Citizens who value the Constitution and the way of life it has sustained should take notice of what is being advanced, not as ordinary policy debate, but as a deliberate project of systemic replacement.