Stay Dirty

Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 election with third party candidates being a non-entity in the race. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) effectively was neutral in the general election, favoring no candidate but also rejecting a “No Votes for Genocide” effort against the two major-party candidates and all Democratic congressional candidates. This fall’s inaction, however, overlooks how involved DSA and its members were in shaping the Democratic presidential primary through the Uncommitted campaign.

While the general elections did not go as I expected, I was luckily very wrong about the Uncommitted campaign. I assumed it would be a small blip in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary, but instead, it contributed to an incumbent president declining to run again for the first time in over six decades. But its success supports my contention that DSA is stuck in a dirty stay.

A quick recap on the terms:

• Uncommitted was a national campaign to express opposition to Joe Biden’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza by organizing voters to select “uncommitted” or similar options like “None of the Above” instead of a candidate in the 2024 Democratic Party primary. 

• “Dirty stay” is an observation that despite DSA’s stated desire to become a political party, its members and activists largely balk at opportunities to do so and instead continue to use the Democratic Party as an area of struggle instead of other options.

Uncommitted began in New Hampshire’s January 2024 primary and inspired similar campaigns in subsequent primary states. DSA endorsed the effort in March around Super Tuesday and other leftist organizations followed suit, like Socialist Alternative and the Party for Socialism and Liberation presidential ticket. But not all anti-capitalists agreed.

Smaller leftist formations such as the Socialist Equality Party (famous for their World Socialist Website) and Communist Workers Platform USA rejected the effort. The better-known Left Voice summed up their opposition to using the Democratic Party ballot line for Palestine as such:

Herein lies another problem with the Vote Uncommitted campaign: it is a ploy for left-wing Democrats to funnel people back into the Democratic Party, which as an organization has shown its unswerving commitment to Israel. Their perspective has dominated the news outlets, which strengthens the symbolic character of the campaign and the potential weight it carries to benefit the Democratic Party. It also is a clear counter to the movement in the streets, and a compelling way to co-opt the movement back into the parties of capital. 

I remained unconvinced this campaign would have much effect even as I voted “blank” in the April New York Democratic presidential primary. But less than three months later, Biden dropped out of the race. Uncommitted’s vote totals beat all of the president’s other competitors in nearly every primary. DSA members threw themselves into campaigns across the country, many of which were led by members of our Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC), as highlighted in this interview series.

One would think that the national leadership of DSA would like to celebrate our contribution to a historic moment where an incumbent president declined to run for re-election. But DSA’s statement on Biden’s dropping out does not mention Uncommitted at all – a campaign the same national leadership backed! It wasn’t until Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate nearly a month later that the same leadership acknowledged the role of Uncommitted in the Walz pick. (Walz’s attitudes toward Uncommitted were much softer than his rival Josh Shapiro, who had supported attacking student encampers who were standing against the genocide.) So where did the DSA leadership’s hesitation come from? 

One answer can be found in National Political Committee (NPC) member and SMC leader Renée Paradis’s interview on her major contribution to the national Uncommitted campaign:

I think that the Uncommitted campaigns are right in line with SMC’s political vision. If I had to sum up SMC electoral doctrine, it’s that Bernie was right. Bernie’s innovation was that you can actually maintain independence in your rhetoric while intervening in a Democratic primary to run as a socialist. And you have to intervene in the Democratic primaries rather than run quixotic and losing third-party campaigns, because the two-party system is a simple fact of contemporary American politics. 

Simply put, Uncommitted showed that major electoral activity, including electoral activity for socialists, will occur around fights within the Democratic Party. The majority of NPC members know this, and many of them find it to be an uncomfortable truth. Their likely discomfort about the prominence of intra-Democratic Party ballots was backed by the observations of Dave Weigel. Weigel, a mainstream political reporter, noted in a Vox interview about the former independent presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., that some Democrats privately liked Uncommitted because it kept the conversation away from third parties.

But Democrats’ fear of third parties was unwarranted. Third-party support has continued to collapse in our polarized environment. In both 2024 and 2020, third parties combined got less than two percent of the presidential vote. Compare that to the 2016 Libertarian ticket that alone received over three percent - over half the total non-major party vote. Uncommitted, by using the Democratic primary, was able to garner more attention than any other candidate did for Gaza. That effort, along with DSA’s impact, was felt much more strongly in the primary than the general. 

The difference between DSA’s impact in the primary and general election was stark. DSA’s major national political intervention this year was the Uncommitted campaign. However, the socialist organization did not endorse a third-party candidate or the Democratic nominee. The national leadership provided little guidance outside of promoting our political program “Workers Demand More.” Socialist Majority and Groundwork Caucuses, in response, organized “Socialism Beats Fascism,” which supported campaigning in swing states in support of DSA-backed candidates and grassroots efforts to defeat the right in November. 

It is hard to tell how any of these general election efforts impacted the result if they did at all.

This speaks to the Dirty Stay. This is the internal political dilemma wherein DSA’s stated goals (creating a party) are contradicted by reality of how the membership acts. It would be more honest and more effective if DSA’s program aligned with its putative mission, which it currently does not. 

But this isn’t the result of cowardice or lack of clarity on the part of our leadership—the Dirty Stay stems from the fact that we are dependent on the Democratic Party. Regardless of what some may wish to be true, DSA’s most successful electoral programming centers upon intervening in Democratic Party primaries. People may vote for resolutions calling for more political independence and a workers party at conventions, but come election time, they vote with their feet and do activities that center around electing socialists via the Democratic Party line. Even the most straightforward actions toward independence, such as backing comrade Cornel West’s failed democratic socialist presidential campaign, have no political momentum within the organization.

I do not think DSA should return to a realignment strategy of trying to make the Democratic Party into a social-democratic party. I have written that I no longer believe that is a viable strategy. It makes more sense to build a socialist bloc in legislatures and contest for party offices as needed, but without any illusion of moving beyond a faction. For DSA, I especially want us to stop pretending we are building a third-party when a better and more honest orientation already exists, one in which we are fostering a left-wing faction within the Democratic Party, the party which most members will gravitate toward anyway.

A way to overcome this is that members, caucuses, and governing bodies need to have an honest conversation about how our short-term electoral program might actually advance creating a new party. Or are people just saying they want a political independence they have no real intention of fighting for? This is a hard question that DSA must answer or continue to drift around the Democratic Party infrastructure without any of the benefits of being a faction in the party or totally independent of it. Otherwise we will stay dirty.