These statistics quantitatively express a significant shift in political mood and perspective that has occurred over just the last year, as the COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged the US and the world.
This is the thing that I think the comrades who say "they don't really want socialism they want social democracy!" are missing. Yes, technically correct, the people surveyed probably don't have a correct definition of socialism that they're working with. But in the US, the first and biggest obstacle we face in getting to real socialism is getting over this weird boogeyman of "eeeeevil socialism" that we learned from decades of cold war propaganda. Just being open to something called "socialism" is progress. And tbh have huge numbers of people open to social democracy isn't the worst thing in the world, I think.
This is the thing that I think the comrades who say "they don't really want socialism they want social democracy!" are missing. Yes, technically correct, the people surveyed probably don't have a correct definition of socialism that they're working with. But in the US, the first and biggest obstacle we face in getting to real socialism is getting over this weird boogeyman of "eeeeevil socialism" that we learned from decades of cold war propaganda. Just being open to something called "socialism" is progress. And tbh have huge numbers of people open to social democracy isn't the worst thing in the world, I think.
I mean, the biggest obstacle would probably be some alphabet agency, per usual