To Rally After Trump’s Second Victory, DSA Must Look Past 2016
SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the author and republished from Democratic Left.
It is natural to compare the 2024 election to Trump’s first victory — but DSA can learn more from the aftermath of the 2004 presidential race.
Donald Trump’s victory on Nov. 5 has led people to look back on his win in 2016, but we can draw lessons from the political aftermath of the 2004 presidential election. During the 2004 race, I was an elected leader in the Young Democratic Socialists of America. My experiences then, and a DSA staff member in 2016, give me insights into how we best activated new and rejoining members during those election cycles.
The 2004 election was the last time until this year that a Republican White House hopeful was victorious in both the popular vote and the electoral college. As in 2024, Republicans also won a federal trifecta via the Senate and House elections. In both elections, the Democrats couldn’t assuage people on a central issue. Then, a significant number of voters felt that the George W. Bush administration made them safer. This time, many people want to return, probably impossibly, to the lower prices of the Donald Trump era. Inflation truly is a killer for the consumer and incumbent party.
John Kerry and John Edwards on the campaign trail in 2004 (photo by Richard Block, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).
But there are two other ways 2024 more closely parallels events two decades ago than Trump’s first victory. Both have lessons for today’s DSA leaders and activists.
First, both defeats stoked a desire for the left-of-center to compete in media dominated by the right-wing. In mid-aughts, there was an effort to create liberal talk radio such as Air America, which floundered and went bust within a few years. Today, people are pushing to create or get a new audience for progressive podcasts and streaming shows to match the conservative dominance in this space.
And dominate they do. Well over half the top ten podcasts on Spotify are right-wing of some nature, from explicitly reactionary types including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Charlie Kirk to the buffet conservatism of Joe Rogan and David Portnoy.
Like the failures in the Bush era to replicate Republican radio success, I am dubious broad anti-Trump forces will find the so-called liberal Rogan. For one, leftist media infrastructure is already way better developed — in 2004 there was no equivalent for Jacobin, a socialist magazine which reports 75,000 subscribers and a web readership of three million each month, or the broader constellation of progressive and socialist publications, podcasts, and personalities.
Progressive, even radical, podcasts and streaming services already exist — and some have significant reach. Lefty Hasan Piker has 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube (one-twelfth of Joe Rogan’s following, but still large). Calls for creating new leftist media remind me of calls for a socialist party — these calls sometimes ignore that such media and parties already exist and the structural barriers to their success.
Second, and more directly relevant for groups such as DSA, the aftermath of 2004 saw the creation of few new liberal-left groups and the death of other anti-Bush nonprofits. In 2016, on the other hand, existing groups like DSA boomed — quadrupling in size by 2017 — and new formations such as Indivisible and the Women’s March took root across the whole country.
In 2004 and after, there was no equivalent of #resistance, even if you count the anti-war movement. The anti-Iraq War coalitions did bring hundreds of thousands to Washington, DC in the years after Bush’s reelection — but the Women’s March mobilized around a million around the country in a single weekend in 2017.
An anti-war rally in 2005 (photo by Richard Block, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).
The 2004 Democratic presidential primary did help birth two new chapter-based progressive organizations: the now-defunct Democracy for America (DFA), from the Howard Dean campaign, and still-going Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), out of Dennis Kucinich’s candidacy. This year lacked a meaningful Democratic primary that could generate such new collectives.
Trump’s first election was electrifying. The reelection of Bush was evidently demobilizing. DSA, which had formally backed John Kerry, saw no growth after his defeat as possible new recruits went into DFA and PDA or into existing and more dynamic socialist formations. We might worry that Trump’s reelection will have similar consequences, with dire consequences for organizations like DSA, but this ignores changes in DSA and the institutional ecosystem in which it operates in the last two decades.
DSA is now a place where those who want to elect socialists and challenge the Democratic Party establishment go. Legal developments have made DSA a more attractive vehicle for this cause. In a pre-Citizens United era, political committees under section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code blossomed. These PACs could basically expend unlimited money as long as they didn’t endorse a candidate. America Coming Together (a 527) spent millions against Bush in the 2004 race, but its raison d’être ended in his victory. Since the Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, 501c4 nonprofits such as DSA can spend unlimited partisan money as long as it is technically independent of the politicians they support.
This court ruling creates electoral space, somewhat contradictorily, for both the billionaire class and DSA. Both now have more incentive to spend directly for and against candidates independently than coordinating with the elected hopefuls.
The Supreme Court, however, is not the main reason we might expect the aftermath of the 2024 election to offer new opportunities for DSA.
If 2024 is like 2004, DSA is not going to be competing with as many groups for newly activated (or reenergized) progressives seeking a political home to fight Trump as we competed with in 2016. No Democratic primary means no new formation like Our Revolution or Indivisible, which in the past eight years have charted clearly different paths from DSA.
In a less crowded field, DSA has a head start in attracting new and renewed activists. While DSA is now smaller than its height of around 90,000 members, the organization has much more infrastructure and capacity to take on new people than in 2016 when we had a few dozen chapters, including our campus wing, and about 7,000 dues-payers. In 2016, only a third of states even had a DSA chapter while, today, nearly every state does, and most members are covered in a chapter’s jurisdiction. DSA has been able to take in hundreds of new people in individual chapter meetings across the country after the 2024 general election.
This difference means DSA can chart a new course and not merely try to repeat the successes of previous election bumps. My major advice is chapter leaders should find projects and asks that build capacity and give them to new members. This can be plugging people into a political campaign, asking them to table, or helping put together an event. Recent joiners are looking for something to do and should be plugged in — not left to figure it out on their own.
We want to make it as easy as possible to get involved to resist the new Trump administration. People are ready and we need to be too.