A new Gallup poll shows that a majority of Democrats, 57% to be exact, view socialism favorably compared to a new low of only 47% who positively view capitalism. Meanwhile, 37% of Americans overall hold a positive view of socialism with 58% seeing it as negative. And not surprisingly, 71% of Republicans hold favorable views of capitalism, while only 16% think socialism is viable. Given the deadly effects of socialism everywhere it’s tried, we’d like to see 0% of Americans support it. But that’s government education for you.

With Democrat numbers like this, it’s not surprising to hear Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new socialist face of the Democrat Party, assert, “The whole country is further left than Congress. The whole country. The electorate is way further left than Congress, [but] we have low voter turnout.”

The most interesting aspect to these latest poll numbers is the change in Democrats’ opinion of capitalism. In 2010, 53% of Democrats had a favorable view of socialism, which increased to 58% in 2016, most likely due to the popularity of Bernie Sanders. But that same year 56% of Democrats also had a positive view of capitalism. That’s dropped by a whopping nine percentage points in just two years.

What happened? Trump Derangement Syndrome. As Gallup notes, “It’s possible that the drop in Democrats’ positive views of capitalism is related to Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump is an enthusiastic capitalist, and his administration’s efforts to roll back regulations on business and industry, as well as the tax cut law that is advantageous to businesses and corporations, may have caused Democrats to view the entire capitalist enterprise with less positive eyes.”

The Gallup poll also notes, “The question wording does not define ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ but simply asks respondents whether their opinion of each is positive or negative.” This is an important caveat given how poorly many Americans, particularly young people, understand what socialism actually is. Again, much of the reason for this is that the Left within media and academia has long preached the myth of socialism as a positive system that brings equity and fairness, whereas capitalism is allegedly a system primarily organized to support only the greedy interests of the wealthy and big business. With the hard-Left’s increasing takeover of the Democrat Party, it’s only logical that support for capitalism would severely wane, as the eventual goal of these leftists is to create a political boogieman out of capitalism that must be overtly opposed and attacked. The more Democrats go down this extremist road, the more average Americans will walk away. Will Republicans be able to capitalize on the Dems’ socialist bent?