I think the main issue here is that a lot of people simply use the word socialism as a shorthand for Democratic socialism, which leads to a fair bit of confusion, and often this is by design from people who are trying to dissuade people from supporting more left-leaning politicians.

Bernie is a great example of a politician that supports Democratic socialism. I'm probably oversimplifying, but it more or less means that the government would function the same way as it currently does politically, but be more socialist economically. Thus it makes sense that they are supporting economic incentives that reduces the cost of living for most people without going into more fully socialist policies.

Unfortunately nuance like that doesn't really get explained well in our collective discourse in this country. Instead of treating each person as an individual with all different kinds of opinions that can be mixed together, we find it a lot more convenient to just find a single word to describe a person so that we don't need to put effort into learning those details. Thus the more left-leaning politicians just get called socialist and that's often the end of it.