Save for Mackler and people like him. The Oakland-based candidate is gearing up for his 2020 campaign for the White House, with planned rallies and meetings from Kentucky to Maine. “We don’t expect to win. We’re going to be write-in candidates in maybe a dozen states,” he said. “But we will win if we build our party.”

In Florida, Elijah Manley, a college student, activist, and former staffer for Senator Mike Gravel’s 2020 bid, is also running a socialist protest campaign. A member of the Green Party and the Socialist Party of the United States of America (SPUSA), Manley told me that his goal is to talk about justice wherever and however he can. “A lot of that comes from my background—there are issues that as a black person from the South and a queer person, I don’t think are reflected in politics,” he said, also citing the need for more focus on generational justice and the rights and representation of young people.

Read: Will the left go too far?

His campaigning has involved delineating his policy preferences, building a social-media presence, and going on Fox News to represent the socialist perspective. “One of the commentators said that people buying avocado toast at Starbucks is why they are poor,” he said, adding that he got a more receptive response on the channel than he imagined.

These candidates differ from the Democrats on policy, putting forward far, far more sweeping proposals than even Sanders has. Mackler scoffed at Warren’s plan to tax fortunes over $50 million at 2 percent a year, recalling a time he suggested a 100 percent levy on income over $150,000 a year. Manley said he supports proposals like Medicare for All and free college tuition, but nevertheless wants to keep workers controlling the means of production as a north star. “I’m not the type of person to attack other people on the left,” he said. “But those policies aren’t socialism.”

Monica Moorehead, the once and perhaps future presidential candidate for the Workers World Party, supports reparations, guaranteeing all Americans a decent standard of living, and ending the carceral state. “We see this as class struggle,” she told me. “Are you on the side of the bosses and the bankers who exploit workers around the world? Or are you on the side of working people, including people of color?” Within that class struggle, the socialists’ goal is not to hem in capitalism’s excesses, as Democrats largely want to do, but to end the hegemony of capitalism.

Of course, for many Republicans and conservative commentators, everyone from Manley to Joe Biden represents a socialist threat. “We will never be a Socialist or Communist Country. IF YOU ARE NOT HAPPY HERE, YOU CAN LEAVE!,” the president tweeted in July. McConnell has used the term to bash Democrats’ voting-rights legislation, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and expanding statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, repeatedly expressing shock that the Democrats want to destroy free enterprise.