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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 C.N.A. 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.