Photo

Senator Bernie Sanders’s speech on Thursday explaining his democratic socialist ideology carried little risk among supporters and other Democrats: A solid majority of them have a positive impression of socialism, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll released this month.

Fifty-six percent of those Democratic primary voters questioned said they felt positive about socialism as a governing philosophy, versus 29 percent who took a negative view.

In an address Thursday afternoon at Georgetown University, Mr. Sanders argued that the redistribution of wealth was at the heart of the American social contract, seeking to link himself with the legacies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin D. Roosevelt. The applause he drew should come as little surprise: Sixty-nine percent of Sanders supporters see socialism in a positive light, versus just 21 percent who view it negatively.

Even most of those supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination approve of socialism, 52 percent to 32 percent.

Still, Mr. Sanders’s unabashed use of the term could become a liability were he to reach the general election. Just 32 percent of all Americans rate socialism positively, compared to 52 percent who view it negatively.

Over all, Democrats are just about as keen on socialism as they are on capitalism. In a Gallup survey from November 2012, 53 percent of all Democrats gave socialism a positive rating, while 55 percent did so for capitalism.

This is a needle that Mr. Sanders attempted to thread in his remarks on Thursday. “The next time you hear me attacked as a socialist — like tomorrow — remember this: I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street, or own the means of production,” he said. “But I do believe that the middle class and the working families of this country, who produce the wealth of this county, deserve a decent standard of living, and that their incomes should go up, not down.”

According to a Gallup poll from this year, 52 percent of Americans – and three-quarters of Democrats – believe that government should raise taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth to poorer Americans, a key component of Mr. Sanders’s agenda.

Socialism gets some of its highest marks from Democratic voters under 30, 63 percent of whom rate it positively, and from another crucial demographic that has largely eluded Mr. Sanders — African-Americans, who say they support socialism by a ratio of 2 to 1.

Giovanni Russonello is a member of The Times’s news surveys department.

This is one of an occasional series of posts taking a deeper look at polling during this campaign cycle.

