Bill Maher delivered the line on "Real Time" on July 31: "It's so ironic from the people who obsess about colonization. You know what's being colonized now? The Democratic Party" [1]. He put his own ballot behind it, saying "Yes, my vote is in play," and said he would vote for Sarah Palin before he would vote for a DSA-backed candidate in his district [1].
Colonized means captured, occupied, run by somebody else. That is a claim about control. Control is countable, and Michigan and Missouri vote tomorrow, which makes tonight a useful night to put the count on the table. This is an opinion and it stays one here. The numbers below neither confirm it nor refute it. They are what is on the board while he says it.
The shift Maher is reacting to is documented. A democratic socialist is the mayor of New York City. The Michigan Senate primary is competitive enough that Democratic strategist Adrian Hemond told the Washington Examiner that "if [primary voters] care most about advancing progressive ideological priorities, Abdul [El-Sayed] will win the primary" [3]. Outlets report DSA's dues-paying membership climbing since the 2025 mayoral run. The energy inside the party has moved toward its socialist wing, and that is a checkable observation rather than a talking point.
Where the claim runs past the roster is on the question of who holds seats.
Two currently serving House Democrats are confirmed DSA members: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan [2]. The House has 435 seats. Two of 435 is 0.46 percent. Measured against all 535 members of Congress, it is 0.37 percent.
That same article also lists Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani as sitting DSA members in Congress [2]. We did not adopt that count. Sanders sits as an independent, and Mamdani is the mayor of New York City, not a member of Congress. A four-name caucus and a two-name caucus are different objects, and this piece uses the two that hold House seats and can be confirmed.
The sharpest number in the story comes from a paper that is not friendly to DSA. The Washington Examiner keeps its own tracker: "the DSA has backed 29 House candidates this cycle. Of those candidates, 11 were already defeated in primaries, and seven have advanced to the general election" [3]. Eleven defeats against seven advancements, with the remaining 11 unresolved by our own subtraction from the Examiner's figures. An organization is losing more House primaries in this cycle than it is winning, in the same cycle its profile has never been higher. Both of those things are true simultaneously, and a reader is entitled to hold them at the same time without picking one.
Membership does not resolve cleanly either. Charlie Hunt, a political scientist at Boise State University writing in The Conversation on July 7, put DSA's total official membership "at around 100,000" [2]. The Daily Signal reported on July 4 that the organization had passed 120,000 members [4]. We fetched the first and did not fetch the second. Both numbers are in circulation, neither has been reconciled against a DSA count page we could retrieve, and the gap between them is roughly the population of a mid-sized city. Printing one and quietly dropping the other would tell a reader something we do not know.
Tomorrow is the part that settles arguments. The Michigan Senate primary, with Abdul El-Sayed against establishment-backed rivals, and the Missouri primary are falsifiable in a way a television segment is not. A takeover framing predicts particular results. By Wednesday morning there will be results, which is the only denominator in this story that actually closes.
