Because the DSA is not a political party. The FAQ I helpfully linked to explains this. And the DNC itself welcomed him to the race. So if the DNC doesn’t have a problem with it, I’m not sure why you should.
And he is affiliated with the Democratic Party since he caucuses with them in Congress and always has. He has also been one of the fiercest critics of the Republicans in Congress. He has supported some things that the Obama administration has done while decrying others, which is unsurprising since he is an unabashed liberal and Obama is a centrist.
Also, Sanders isn’t a Socialist. He is a Democratic Socialist. They are not the same thing just as neither of them are the same thing as the National Socialist Party.
As a matter of fact, the DSA, the SPUSA, and the Social Democrats, USA (which hardly exists at all any more even as a website) all emerged from the wreckage of and claim to be the successor of the old Socialist Party of America, which broke up in 1972 over the issue of the Vietnam War (some were against it for all the obvious reasons, others were for it because ever since 1917 the SPA had always distinguished itself from the Communist Party USA by being solidly anti-Soviet, which meant taking the Western side in all Cold War conflicts).
And the Stalinist/Trotskyite split is a completely different thing from the above.
Sanders has never been affiliated with any of these parties/organizations, BTW.
Also – and to my mind quite curiously – Sanders has never been affiliated with the Vermont Progressive Party either, even though it originated with his campaign for Mayor of Burlington, and I can see no point on which he would disagree with it politically.
Another answer is that Sanders is not running for the Socialist Party USA nomination because he has never in his political career been associated with it (see above), for reasons best known to himself. Perhaps he thinks the SPUSA an irrelevant joke – which it is, electorally – while the Democratic Party is, for all its flaws, at least a thing worth taking over or trying to, Tea-Party style.
The fact is, I’m in my 70’s, rather well off, and I would never vote for any Republican. They want to damage social security, medicare, ACA, education, job training, infrastructure projects, etc. etc…why do any people vote for them? I can’t figure it out.
That’s why people in your age bracket vote for Republicans. They believe that the Democrats want to take their money away in the form of taxation (to be used for social security, ACA, medicare, etc.) Some of them actually benefit from those programs, but don’t seem to see the disconnect.
Other older Americans fondly remember a time when their more conservative social values were the openly expressed societal norm (although not necessarily the actual societal norm).
That would be an interesting test for Warren, who by any standard she professes to believe in, should endorse Sanders.
But I think it’s more likely she’ll just withhold any endorsement past the time Sanders drops out, and then endorse Hilary when there are no other choices left.
Actually, no, what I was saying was that there aren’t a lot Democratic candidates from the Baby Boomers and Generation X, because there aren’t a lot of Democrats compared to Republicans (or vaguely minarchist independents) in those age brackets. It’s not the over-70 group that are the problem. It’s the Me Generation and their shell-shocked children that grew up in their aftermath.
The Baby Boomers voted in Reagan and tried to replace both labor unions and the state with big dollop of Jesus-flavored guacamole.
Gen X, their children and younger siblings, are a generation of individualism, cynicism, and despair. We grew up on death metal and Stephen King. We outnumber the Baby Boomers, but we don’t think we do. Our waters filled up with medical waste and we shrugged. We are not capable of civic engagement as a generation. The politicians in our age bracket are in it for the “business” model of politics: Give the donors what they pay you for.
If you dare to hope in anything larger than yourself, business, or a fast buck, we’ll beat it out of you. And if you talk about raising taxes to accomplish anything, we will laugh at you. The world doesn’t work that way, and no one can reinstitute any abandoned tax program, including progressive taxation, in a modern democracy.
My corner of the country may be non-standard, but I’m not sure I haven’t met more Ron Paul libertarians among my peers than New Deal Democrats.
In time, we shall pound the idealism out of the Global Teens and the Millennials if we have to set them on fire. Who are they to think they get a living wage? The world sucks ass and then you die. Good luck, Bernie, but you simply don’t have a constituency here in God’s Own Hell. You’re the last gasp of a dead social liberal idea.
ETA: Or maybe that’s just my weird corner of the country. It does seem like things are starting to turn around for labor in this country. Maybe there’s hope.
My goodness, I’m Generation X and I’m not cynical. I might be fair exhausted though. There are so many fights that I’m surrounded! I don’t know where to aim my time, my money and my energy.
I really hope I have a distorted viewpoint on this. And generational personalities are kind of a joke. But yeah, I feel like I’m in a lost generation somehow. Granted, I think it’s not really a Gen X thing, exactly.
