In fact, to many (including many of us who aren't communists or socialists), it's dumb move. Maybe the dumbness of having only two parties is getting through to many Americans. They might even consent to look back to the era when we had socialists in power and things worked out pretty damn well.
I lived in Italy for a year or so during the height of the period when Italy changed governments about every day and there were strikes about every other minute. Trains would come to a stop suddenly because there was a "sciopero" at the next station. "Sciopero" was almost the first word I learned in Italian. Train rides of 45 minutes could stretch into an overnight.
The only well-run area at one point -- a place where strikes were at a minimum and government offices stayed open and public services were uninterrupted by riots -- was Bologna. This was a time when Bologna's regional government was dominated by Communists.
We've had socialists in America who did administrative jobs a lot better than much of what we've come to count on since then. In a long, eloquent comment at a discussion about the goings-on in Wisconsin, a long-time Wisconsin resident reminds us of Wisconsin verities.
...If one looks at states on a scale that has communitarian values on one end and individualistic values on the other, Wisconsin is likely in the top 2 or 3 on the communitarian end. That's not to say Wisconsin is liberal; it's not, although it has been trending blue the past few election cycles (with the obvious exception of 2010). But a combination of immigration patterns in the 19th and early 20th century, a deep “good government” tradition, a long history of labor activism, and the importance of the Catholic Church in the state, and its emphasis on social justice, have all left a deep mark on values - deeper than what just shows up the raw election returns, especially as extrapolated to what they'd mean in other states.
And Wisconsin has a distinctive political tradition. Milwaukee was the home of so-called “sewer socialism,” being run for long periods of time by Socialist politicians (that's “Socialist” as in “member of the Socialist Party,” by the way) who learned that what people wanted was good public services, and provided them. The Progressive movement was very important in Wisconsin in the first decades of the 20th century, and “Fighting Bob” La Follete is still regarded as a towering figure here.
Wisconsin has had a long history of clean government and a very high level of public services which, until recently, was regarded as a good thing by both Democrats and Republicans. Most of state and local government is regarded here as quite benign in intention and efficient in execution. (It's not an accident that the only publicly owned team in the NFL is the Green Bay Packers, and Wisconsins are both surprisingly aware of that fact and proud of it.)
The last Republican governor, Tommy Thompson, was not only a very able politician but was something of a policy wonk as well. When he proposed welfare reform, it went way beyond getting people off the welfare rolls; it involved day care, medical insurance, and the understanding that transition from welfare to work was far more than telling people to go get a job. (And he was a big fan of high speed rail as well.) Wisconsin has been remarkably free of ideologues in its major elected positions. Joseph McCarthy was likely the last one.
Far as I'm concerned, people who sling the word "socialist" around as though it were an insult are only telling the rest of the world how ignorant they are. Socialist? It's a proud word. "Conservative" was once a proud label,too. Ironically, it's the very people who claim the label now who have robbed it of its pride, starting with Joe McCarthy -- maybe the only blot on Wisconsin's escutcheon. Looks like Scott Walker, "conservative," is in the running for Next Big Blot.
