He’s a Long-Shot Senate Candidate With a Message: ‘Capitalism Unchecked is a Complete Disaster’

JAY, Maine — Zak Ringelstein, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine, grew up working class and paid off $150,000 of student debt after he and his wife founded a successful education technology startup. Many politicians would treat such a rags-to-riches tale as a parable about entrepreneurship, but for him it is more complicated.

Like a growing number of people his age and younger, Ringelstein, 32, thinks American capitalism does not work. For him, it is a system that has fostered inequality, robbed young people of opportunity and perverted the values of a just society.

“We’re a group of young people who are coming of age at a time when there is not only an extreme unfairness that is felt, but where you have a Trump administration that is not even trying to hide its own corruption,” he said last month, driving in a red pickup truck from one campaign stop to the next. “Capitalism unchecked is a complete disaster.”

Ringelstein, who is the only Democratic Senate candidate to be endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, is a long shot: the Democratic Party of Maine has offered scant support, seeming to prefer instead the incumbent, Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats.

His message, is also — to put it lightly — something of a hard sell in Washington; even Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the only democratic socialist in the Senate, dwells less on critiques of capitalism than on policy ideas like a $15 minimum wage, which he has been unable to get passed.

But Ringelstein is playing a long game.

The first two years of the Trump administration have seen a surge of energy on the left, with socialist-oriented ideas like Medicare for All and free public college gaining more support among both Democrats and the public at large, according to opinion polls. That trend has been powered, in part, by a general disillusionment toward capitalism among people who came of age after the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.

While the unemployment rate, 3.9 percent, is lower than it was before the financial crisis, young people face a sobering list of economic challenges that make the middle-class lifestyle enjoyed by earlier generations seem out of reach. Wages are largely stagnant and student loan debt has ballooned to $1.4 trillion, saddling young people with payments that make it hard to start a family or afford to buy a home in a market with tightening mortgage rules and rising prices.

“A lot of us were told go to college, get a degree, and so many of us then got into horrible debt and now they can’t get a job in their field,” said Mikayla Damon, 26, vice chairwoman of the Maine chapter of the DSA. “The whole American dream promise they were sold has kind of died.” According to a 2016 poll conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics, only 42 percent of Americans between the age of 18 and 29 said they support capitalism (the gender breakdown: 49 percent of men and 35 percent of women). Fifty-one percent said they opposed it, and when asked if they thought of themselves as capitalists, 67 percent of men and 83 percent of women said no.

The figures among Democrats tell a similar story. A poll in August found that the number of Democrats who express a positive view of socialism — 57 percent — has remained relatively consistent since 2010, when it was 53 percent. But the number of Democrats who held a positive view of capitalism has fallen by almost 10 percentage points since 2016, from 56 percent to 47 percent.

“Given everything that we see in the news every day, it is a disheartening time to be a young American,” said Alyssa Thompson, 18, a certified nursing assistant from Greene, Maine. She worked long hours at a gas station kitchen to pay for her CNA certification and said the first words she associated with capitalism were “greed” and “abuse.”

“In the short term I don’t think we can end capitalism or do away with corporations,” she said. “But with democratic socialism I think we can bring those corporations under democratic control, hold them more accountable and encourage them to act in the interest of the public by paying higher wages, improving working conditions and creating jobs on American soil.”

This election year, the Democratic strategy for winning control of Congress relies largely on moderate candidates in a mix of urban, suburban and rural districts and battleground states like Nevada. A handful of democratic socialists have been nominated, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, in reliably Democratic House districts.

There are also several democratic socialists poised to win state legislative seats around the country in November. That would give them a platform to put pressure on the Democratic Party, not unlike some deeply conservative Republican candidates for the House and Senate who have a shot at winning this November as well.

But Democratic leaders have shown little appetite for a debate about capitalism.

At a forum hosted by New York University last year, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, pushed back on a student who asked if the party should “move left on economic issues” and told her young people were skeptical of capitalism. Listening to the question, she looked incredulous.

“We’re capitalist,” Pelosi replied. “That’s just the way it is.”

The Maine Democratic Party appears wary of Ringelstein, who ran unopposed in its June primary. He said he has received grudging support since then from the party, whose leaders he said discouraged him from running and did not call to congratulate him when he won.

Advisers to his campaign said the party’s canvassers do not talk him up or distribute his campaign literature to voters, focusing instead on Janet Mills, the Democratic candidate for governor, and Jared Golden, a candidate for the House. Phil Bartlett, the state party chairman, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Ringelstein’s electoral prospects look remote: a Suffolk University poll released last month showed him more than 40 points behind King, a former governor. But Ringelstein stands out because of the progressive dynamic that has developed, slowly but perceptibly, in some parts of the country.

The growth of the DSA is one barometer of that trend. It has grown from 4,300 members in 2016 to roughly 50,000 today, with 166 chapters nationwide, not including 57 campus chapters at colleges and high schools, according to a spokesman, Lawrence Dreyfuss. It had 43 chapters and roughly two dozen campus groups in 2016.

Damon said the group’s membership in Maine ballooned to more than 300 people after President Donald Trump was elected, with the average age of its members dropping from around 60 to around 30. She called it “a demographic shift.”

Ringelstein and many who share his feelings toward capitalism are often circumspect in their argument that the economic system is incompatible with living wages, dignified working conditions and the pursuit of happiness. They compare their ideas for a “moral economy” — Medicare for All, free college, a federally mandated minimum salary for teachers — to the New Deal or the economies of modern-day Scandinavia.

“You could call that anti-capitalism, or you could call that just capitalism with a conscience, or you could call it a better way of doing society,” Ringelstein said.

Mike Connolly, a state representative and DSA member in Massachusetts, echoed that caution. He said “the politics of the moment” make it wiser to focus on specific issues like the cost of housing than to rail against capitalism.

“When we’re trying to convince people or trying to make the case for things, these huge policy areas are a key step in getting to a place where we can have a democratically controlled economy that is more consistent with socialism than with capitalism,” Connolly said.

Kaniela Ing, a Democratic state representative in Hawaii, agreed. He said his doubts about capitalism were not “dogmatic” but were based on conditions in his Maui district, where the cost of living is high.

“Often these debates get framed in an academic sense, which -ism is better, but that’s not the conversation I am hearing,” said Ing, who lost a Democratic congressional primary in Oahu this year. “It is that we know the current system isn’t working — it is guttural and common sense. People feel it.”

“I’m not looking for a better system because I am ideological; it is because I am pragmatic,” he added. “If capitalism worked and we were able to live and most of us were able to make it when we tried, then I’d support it.”

Ringelstein made a similar argument at a candidate forum in the rural town of Jay last month. Standing in a drafty VFW hall strung with American-flag bunting and Christmas lights, he told an audience about the time he went to a White House event on education reform. Once he got there, he realized he was the only person in the room who had ever worked as a public-school teacher.

“Everyone else stood to profit from the policy that they were creating,” he told the mostly gray-haired crowd, which applauded when he announced his intention to more heavily tax the rich.

“If you want to call that socialist, fine,” he said. “But I stand with the people, not with any party or any corporation.”