The DSA Reckons With a Leader Going Viral for All the Wrong Reasons

Megan Romer’s interviews with The New Yorker and Fox News have drawn groans even from some supporters of the Democratic Socialists of America. But what do other DSA leaders think?

The verdict was swift and unequivocal: Megan Romer’s interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick was a disaster for the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Romer is the national co-chair. And it wasn’t just the likes of the notoriously anti-DSA New York Post, which wrote that Romer “appeared clueless.” “What does the DSA actually want?” the Forward asked. “Its national co-chair can’t say.” The Independent wrote that Romer sounded “completely lost,” while Mediate said she “metaphorically stepped on a banana peel and tumbled into a thorny bush.”

Inside the DSA, opinions of Romer’s performance were more nuanced. Some said they were happy with how she portrayed socialism on camera. But the interview also concerned many inside a group desperate to keep itself unified amid explosive growth since 2024, when their own Zohran Mamdani launched his electrifying campaign for New York mayor. “I do think she’s caused damage,” one DSA member in a position of leadership said. “People from all across the political left have been messaging me and some others, begging us to take her off the air.”

It wasn’t Romer’s first media stumble. Just weeks earlier, she went on Fox News and went viral for her one-word affirmative answers—“yes,” “absolutely”—to rapid-fire questions about abolishing everything from the presidency to borders to prisons. That could be shrugged off as a right-wing trap. But the optics of the New Yorker interview weren’t much better, as Romer’s bubbly energy and bright-red eyeglasses clashed with Remnick’s calm, paternalistic tone. The editor spoke at times like a bored scholar holding office hours with a pupil. After the interview, Romer expressed annoyance with Remnick on X, calling him a “debate bro.”

“Listening to a lot of David’s questions, I don’t necessarily think they were bad,” said City & State reporter Peter Sterne, who covers the DSA and is a former member of the organization. “But I do think that they were hostile.”

Romer, who did not respond to my request for comment, certainly made some eyebrow-raising statements in the interview, such as saying she “probably would have” attended the controversial pro-Palestinian rally held in New York City on October 8, 2023, if she’d been able to. The DSA did not organize the rally—which was criticized by many as condoning Hamas’s attack on Israel the day prior—but promoted it on social media at the time before backpedaling with a statement apologizing for the “confusion” and calling for “peace, equality, and freedom for all Palestinians and Israelis.”

NYC-DSA member Eric Blanc said he was disappointed to hear Romer endorse the rally three years on.........

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