DSA has existed since the 1980s, but our organization has changed dramatically since 2016. Our membership is more than 10 times larger than it was a decade ago, and these quantitative changes have translated to qualitative shifts in how we organize and relate to each other. Ninety-seven percent of the current membership joined after 2016, joining in periods of intense growth. A majority of members joined after 2019. This growth was not even across chapters and took different forms over that period.

The 2023 National Convention tasked the Growth and Development Committee with publishing a “State of DSA” report to study “(1) tactics that have led to victories, (2) chapter-level processes and structures that have helped them grow, and (3) to identify common issues that chapters face and identify shared solutions” (pages 66 and 67 of the Convention Compendium). We are releasing this first analysis on recruitment trends to update the membership on our progress, share some initial findings, and spur feedback and engagement with our upcoming listening sessions.

As we potentially enter another period of rapid membership growth, the first since 2021, I’ll try to describe the growth over the previous eight years through national trends and cross-chapter comparisons to plant the seeds of future investigations into what works to grow our organization.

Why Research Recruitment?

We are studying the “lifecycle” of a DSA member: initial engagement, consistent participation, politicization within the organization, and long-term retention. This framework helps us contextualize the different roles members play in our organization — the membership is not a monolith!

Recruitment is obviously the cornerstone of DSA’s growth. We started with an exploratory data analysis of membership rolls to find trends using methods similar to previous analysis I’ve previously conducted on DSA SF’s membership retention. This forms a baseline to identify case studies for follow up interviews. Soon, we will host listening sessions to connect with members and hear your experiences. These will be structured on specific topics related to chapter organizing and the member lifecycle. Please be on the lookout for RSVP forms!

An Imperfect Picture

This type of data analysis has real limitations. Although this report is data driven, our project is only using these methods as a starting point for identifying interview subjects.

Our data are fairly surface level and not as clear-cut as we would like. We took a pseudonymized snapshot of membership data that stops at August 1, 2024 which includes past and present members’ first join date (when the first dues are paid). When it’s relevant, we take into account the lapse date (when someone stops paying dues) but we can’t account for people who lapse and rejoin versus someone who has been in good standing throughout.

We also have data on members’ most recent chapter (or at-large status) and dues type. We cannot trace someone’s history, so small incongruities might be present when we give credit to someone joining a particular chapter, even if they’ve been a member in another one previously. For attentive readers, you might note that the overall membership numbers are approximately 10-15% higher than previously published NPC data.

An Organization with a Long History but Short Member Tenures

For decades, DSA hovered around 5,000 members. Then, suddenly, from 2016 to 2020, DSA’s membership ballooned to about 50,000. An average of about 2,400 new members joined every month with over 125,000 members joining over the period. In 2021, DSA topped out at just under 79,000 members in good standing. Since then, in the doldrums of the Biden presidency, DSA slowly declined to about 51,000 members in October 2024.

From forming new chapters to building out existing chapters: 2016 to 2017 vs 2018 to now

Because the vast majority of DSA’s organizing happens at the chapter level, most members experience DSA through their local chapter, rather than as a single national organization. These experiences can vary dramatically between chapters. 

The initial growth spurt in 2016 came in the form of a torrent of new chapters coming into existence for the first time. Since then, these chapters have either grown and become a stable force or unfortunately ceased to exist. Although few in number, the largest chapters with over 1,000 members have also served as the largest recruitment centers.

As of August 2024, while most chapters (greater than 70%) have fewer than 250 members, the 10 largest chapters (top 5%) range from around 1,200-7,000 members each and are home to almost 40% of members. At-Large membership (members without an affiliated chapter) represent about another 3,200 members (or 6%) and would be the second largest chapter.

Over the last eight years, the composition of our organization and its chapters have changed significantly. The early growth period in 2016 and 2017 featured a rapid rate of chapter formation as new members were joining and creating new chapters simultaneously. 2018 and 2019’s even faster membership growth bolstered existing chapters. 2020’s intense period of membership growth was even more concentrated in large chapters with half of 2020’s new members joining a chapter with over 1000 members — the first and only time this has occurred from 2016 to August 2024. Since then, a slow and steady decline in membership has evened out the distribution of new members across chapters of different sizes.

There are several well-known events which have triggered large membership increases nationally. Bernie’s campaign and Trump’s election in 2016, AOC’s victory in 2018, and the overlapping 2020 Bernie campaign, the COVID pandemic lockdowns, George Floyd uprisings, and DSA’s 100k membership campaign drove both national and local chapter membership trends.

But there has always been cross-chapter variation in recruitment rates. Some chapters overperform and recruit more members, proportional to chapter size, than their peers. We want to know: Are there any common attributes or patterns for successful recruitment? Can we identify common challenges faced by chapters who are unable to recruit as well?

Beyond the sum of our parts

We’ve already learned things just by examining cross-chapter variation by the size of the chapter. As I mentioned above, those large chapters served as important recruitment hubs. Does the size of a chapter have a meaningful effect on its ability to attract new members? A small chapter of 100 members has a different organizing environment than a chapter with over 1,000 members — does this translate to different recruitment rates?

Below we have plotted the distribution of chapters’ percentage of new members for every year from 2015 until August 2024 (2024 is incomplete). The graph on the left plots all chapters together in a single line (median) and region (25th to 75th percentile). On the right, we segment chapters by their membership and draw the same graph.

Overall, chapters have been recruiting at similar rates in recent years. Chapter size does not consistently correlate to different recruitment rates – larger chapters are not able to recruit at higher rates than smaller chapters or vice versa. Put another way: in any given year, a chapter’s ability to recruit is roughly proportional with the size of their membership.

Although they have more members and therefore the potential for more sophisticated techniques as a function of more member volunteer time, larger chapters have not developed their ability to attract new members faster than smaller chapters.

Identifying possible case studies by examining outliers

Let’s zoom in to take a more granular look at the distributions for “small”, “medium”, and “large” chapters. We’ve drawn separate distribution-across-time graphs for each chapter size segment — some outliers have been (arbitrarily selected and) labeled. Underneath, there is a reference for the number of chapters in each category and total number of members in those chapters.

Methodology note: we omit chapters below fifty members because they introduce too much noise into the graphs. Although these <50 member chapters represent ~25% of all chapters, they are home to less than 4% of members in August 2024.

While 2020 was a period of high growth across segments, there are chapters who far outperformed their peers. Other chapters struggled to recruit as many new members. What are the common themes to their successes or challenges faced? Were there specific recruitment strategies or campaigns that took effect in those outlier chapters?

Our next steps are to look at local variations which buck national trends to see if there are interesting wins or commonly shared challenges in local organizing. Did the Los Angeles chapter in 2020 or the Orlando chapter in 2022 do something unique that set them apart from similarly sized chapters and allowed them to recruit faster? Did the Richmond and Pittsburgh chapters face challenges in 2020 that held them back more than similar chapters?

Next Steps

Recruitment is only the beginning of the story. Our power comes from our organization and its capacity to retain, mobilize, and direct that membership at our goals. We want to ask: are chapters able to meaningfully engage their new members during an influx? Are new members being organized in their chapters and actively organizing? Are there trends across chapters or across time that impact the engagement or retention ability?

Please give us feedback. We need your input to contextualize our findings and guide our inquiry. What questions do you have? What surprised you? What do you want to know more about? 

• Join the GDC and help draft the State of DSA Report! We are looking for both data nerds and qualitative folks alike! This kind of data analysis is barely the beginning of the story and we are diving in much further with in-depth interviews to better understand local chapter conditions.
• Join our listening sessions starting in March 2025. These sessions and discussions will form a critical portion of our analysis.