Why Hasn't the NPC Changed DSA's Electoral Strategy?
SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the author.
At the 2021 DSA National Convention, the then-recently formed Reform & Revolution caucus brought forward a resolution entitled “Campaign for a Democratic Socialist Party.” The short resolution had only a few directives—launch a campaign to form a new working-class political party with a fundraising drive, a membership drive, and public communications; hire two staffers to coordinate it; and “seek to collaborate with unions, progressive organizations, and prominent left figures” toward that end. The resolution did not have enough support to make it to the convention floor.
DSA instead adopted an electoral strategy, which I helped author, “Toward a Mass Party in the United States (Electoral Priority),” that committed DSA to a version of the post-2016 “party surrogate” strategy: building DSA into the mass working-class party we want while continuing to run our candidates on the Democratic ballot line as necessary. At the time, I viewed the Reform & Revolution proposal to move expeditiously toward launching a new political party with an independent ballot line as both a bad idea and a major political overreach. But over the past year, it has struck me differently. I still think abandoning the use of the Democratic ballot line would be a massive error. But when compared to the approach of the NPC today, the 2021 Reform & Revolution proposal reads as a sober and thoughtful attempt to put the idea of starting a third party into practice. Instead of a program like the one proposed by Reform & Revolution, or other concrete steps toward their ostensible goals, the current NPC has ramped up rhetoric about starting a third party without delivering on any substantial change to DSA’s electoral strategy.
“In my view, the reason this NPC hasn’t put forward a replacement for the party surrogate strategy is straightforward: they don’t have one.”
When this NPC was elected at the 2023 convention, I worried that our electoral strategy would be derailed by a new NPC with a different political vision. As Marxist Unity Group (MUG) member and NPC member Amy Wilhelm put it after her election, the convention results represented a “Jump to the Left,” “a new chapter for DSA,” and an opportunity for DSA “to forge an identity for itself, and to express a socialist message independent of the Democratic Party.” Members of the new NPC have advocated for big changes: investing in the party infrastructure necessary to break with the Democrats as soon as possible, joining with left-led trade unions to form a labor party, beginning “experimentation” with running third-party candidates, running more “cadre” or “tribune” candidates, and exercising stricter “discipline” over DSA-endorsed candidates, including demanding DSA elected officials themselves do more to promote the third-party strategy.
Yet the NPC has neither attempted nor made any real progress on these fronts. They have not tried to form any kind of coalition for a third-party effort with labor or other groups. They have not invested in building DSA’s independent electoral infrastructure. DSA chapters continue to overwhelmingly use the Democratic ballot line in partisan races, and the NPC continues to endorse that approach. The only major shift on the electoral front was an attempt at increased “discipline” in the relationship with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Whatever you think of this effort on the merits, it could only have worked with a strong national infrastructure. The NPC's effort to impose "discipline" absent a serious organizing program backfired: it has only achieved the decentralization of our electoral project.
In my view, the reason this NPC hasn’t put forward a replacement for the party surrogate strategy is straightforward: they don’t have one. Launching a full-fledged third party with its own ballot line, akin to the Green Party, is a doomed strategy, one that cannot succeed under the current conditions of the US’s resilient two-party system, and neither the NPC nor any DSA chapters have produced a compelling plan for how to change that.
Whatever NPC members say in tweets, articles, and statements, the party surrogate strategy remains the only one suited to political conditions in the United States, so it is the one DSA continues to follow.
Despite Gaza, DSA didn’t consider a third-party strategy in 2024
In a year when the genocide in Gaza drove an extraordinary wedge between the left and the Biden/Harris administration, not a single member of DSA’s NPC used the 2024 presidential election to advocate for a break with the Democratic party. No member or caucus moved to formally support Cornel West (a former DSA honorary co-chair), Jill Stein (the strongest third-party candidate in the election), or Claudia De la Cruz (the candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has played a visible role in pro-Palestine protests and continues to influence the international line of some elements of the NPC majority bloc). Despite a rhetorical commitment to “breaking with the Democrats,” the easiest way to do so–endorsing a third-party candidate for president–was never proposed or debated by any member of the NPC.
The NPC did consider and vote down a “No Votes for Genocide” resolution, initially brought forward by MUG, which would have called on DSA members to withhold their votes from Harris. But even had that resolution passed, it had little to do with actually breaking with the Democrats. The resolution as drafted was explicitly a plan for a minority of voters to pressure presidential candidate Harris around a particular decision (achieving a ceasefire), not a plan to present an alternative to her in the general election.
Novotesforgenocide.org, a project listing YDSA and and a handful of DSA chapters as sponsors, went further than the NPC proposal, calling for voters to withhold votes from Kamala Harris and “all Congressional Democratic Party candidates.” No member of the NPC has consistently supported this position. Rashida Tlaib’s endorsement on the Democratic ballot line passed the NPC unanimously, with NVFG’s staunchest NPC supporter speaking in favor of the endorsement. Most of the NPC members in the majority bloc from MUG, Bread & Roses, Red Star, and their aligned independents have voted for other national endorsements of Democrats in federal races that DSA made this year: Congressional candidates Cori Bush in St. Louis and Devin Davis in New Orleans.
Even the DSA chapters that signed the Novotesforgenocide.org pledge don’t exhibit a consistent opposition to using the Democratic ballot line down the ballot—Denver DSA and Connecticut DSA are both listed on the website as pledging to “withhold our votes from Democratic Party candidates in our upcoming general election,” but each endorsed multiple local or state-level candidates in Democratic primaries in 2024.
In 2024, DSA chapters continued to run candidates on the Democratic party ballot line, and the NPC continued to endorse them, in line with the party surrogate strategy.
We aren’t experimenting because we already know the results
The Bread & Roses caucus has traditionally recognized that forming a new party with a new ballot line can’t happen immediately, and has instead advocated we should continue using the Democratic ballot line for now, while consciously pursuing a split—a strategy termed the “dirty break.” Recently, as they flirt with their “clean break era,” their members have promoted the idea of taking more active steps toward a break by “experimenting” with actually running candidates on third-party ballot lines.
In his article “The Real Bernie Model,” caucus leader Neal Meyer made the case that socialists should not be afraid to run and lose third-party races, even at the risk of “spoiling” elections in favor of Republicans, pointing to the example of Bernie Sanders’s six failed third-party campaigns for statewide office in Vermont. Similarly, in an interview on the Left On Red podcast, Bread & Roses NPC member Alex Pelliteri stated clearly that while “right now we do run almost exclusively in Democratic primaries, we should begin experimenting running on independent ballot lines and running in general elections.” This apparent strategic commitment from Bread & Roses has not translated to real organizing in DSA, though.
“The lesson we learned was that in partisan races, winning the Democratic primary is the more promising tactic.”
Experimenting with third-party ballot lines is actually not very hard. In 2017, as co-chair of the brand-new NYC-DSA Brooklyn Electoral Working Group, I helped develop and facilitate our candidate recruitment process, which led to our members endorsing Jabari Brisport on the Green Party line (as well as an independent socialist line for which we successfully petitioned) and Khader El-Yateem, a Palestinian faith leader, on the Democratic Party line. Jabari did better than any third-party candidate in a New York City general election in living memory: 29%, or forty points behind his opponent. Khader’s campaign also failed, but by only 8 percentage points, and because of lower turnout in primary elections, that difference was a much smaller number of votes.
The lesson we learned was that in partisan races, winning the Democratic primary is the more promising tactic. The win numbers in Democratic primaries are lower, there are working-class voters who will vote for a socialist in a Democratic primary but will not do so on a third-party line, and making use of the Democratic ballot line does not give the party establishment power over our candidates or organization. Since 2017, NYC-DSA has not tried to run a third-party campaign, and we successfully elected Brisport as a State Senator in 2020—on the Democratic line.
Across the country, DSA members seem to have reached the same conclusion regardless of tendency. There are at least three DSA elected officials who are members of the Bread & Roses caucus: JP Lyninger in Kentucky, Jesse Brown in Indiana, and Richie Floyd in Florida. Lyninger and Brown were both elected to office on the Democratic ballot line, and Floyd was elected in a non-partisan race but is a registered Democrat. During the entire 2024 campaign cycle, the NPC endorsed only a single third-party candidate—Marek Broderick, who was elected on the Vermont Progressive Party line in Bernie’s hometown of Burlington.
In a year of profound dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, with a majority on the NPC who are actively hoping to end the use of the Democratic ballot line, and with unprecedented support within the organization for that perspective, there has been no meaningful experimentation to speak of with the third-party strategy.
Why are we scaling back DSA’s electoral infrastructure instead of growing it?
Of course, actually launching a new party nationally would take a lot more than a few local experiments. Maintaining ballot line access outside of the Democratic Party requires legal, technical, and financial resources that are out of reach for many of our chapters and would require significant investment from the national organization. Tech tools connected to the Democratic party like ActBlue and the Voter Activation Network (VAN) are used by the vast majority of winning DSA-endorsed electoral campaigns. The 2021 Reform & Revolution proposal included a national fundraising program and two dedicated staff, to start, as a recognition that an up-front investment in infrastructure would be necessary. In an article in The Call this year, Nick Conder of Bread & Roses also agreed on the need for a real fundraising program, noting that:
The most important piece of the missing party infrastructure for DSA is an apparatus to raise the funds necessary to sustain our electoral project. Currently the only significant fundraising effort for our endorsed campaigns is a tandem ActBlue form that is rarely publicized . . . [I]n most states our spending will be limited unless DSA is able to help coordinate the launch of PACs on a state by state basis. Some chapters, like Chicago DSA, have launched PACs and the lessons from these experiments will help determine how we can raise the money we need to take on big money opponents like real estate developers and AIPAC.
This is not a new insight. I served on the 2019–2021 National Electoral Committee (NEC), where we helped develop and launch the tandem ActBlue program. Our multi-tendency NEC had consensus at the time that, unless DSA could raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for targeted campaigns in the way that the Justice Democrats or the Working Families Party do, we would not be able to compete seriously in federal elections (even using the Democratic ballot line).
Nick served on the 2021–2023 NEC, where he was the architect of the new “commission” structure, and he remains on the NEC Steering Committee today. Reading the article, one has to ask—why hasn’t there been a push from the majority on the NPC to invest in such crucial programming if it is the most important step to lay the groundwork for a break? Who should be held accountable if it isn’t happening?
We also have yet to see progress with a VAN replacement. When the Brooklyn Electoral Working Group formed our first data committee in 2017, building a replacement for VAN (the committee deemed it ROSA) was one of the earliest projects that developed. Ultimately, the ROSA project was shelved, not because it’s not a worthy cause, but because we learned that developing a piece of software that can compete with VAN would require a major project development team with full-time staff and substantial financing—things that were out of reach for NYC-DSA then and now.
“The decision to gut DSA’s staff capacity is sharply at odds with bold ambitions for developing DSA’s infrastructure or making it more like a mass political party.”
At the 2023 convention, Bread & Roses made developing alternative tech tools a key part of their Act Like an Independent Party resolution, which passed easily. The National Tech Committee has promised to have a working iteration of a VAN prototype by 2025. Yet so far, members are in the dark about the progress on something that was until recently characterized as an urgent part of the party-building project.
The truth is, though, a VAN replacement and a stronger fundraising program will not make a third-party ballot line suddenly become a viable path to power for socialists in the US. But if this NPC really believed that those pieces of infrastructure were decisive, they should be investing in them. Instead, they’ve done the opposite. The most substantial decision this NPC has made, by far, was to resolve DSA’s budget crunch through significant staff layoffs, something they were at pains to clarify was a “political decision” to reduce staffing in favor of what they characterized as a “member-led” vision for the organization. In fact, had the outrage of thousands of DSA members not forced a compromise at the last minute, the NPC was days away from laying off our sole electoral staffer and our entire data and tech team. The decision to gut DSA’s staff capacity is sharply at odds with bold ambitions for developing DSA’s infrastructure or making it more like a mass political party.
Who is coming to the Party?
Virtually every faction in DSA agrees that we want a true political vehicle for the working class (be it a party surrogate that uses the Democratic ballot line, or a third party), and that building one will require a much broader array of social forces than those currently in DSA. The biggest area of consensus is that trade unions that are reformed, democratized, and under militant/left leadership are essential to the party-building project. This was also recognized in the 2021 Reform & Revolution proposal, which called for immediately starting those conversations with potential allies.
In the run-up to the 2024 general election, the left-led United Electrical (UE) put out a statement that should be music to DSA members’ ears: a call for “an independent political organization, based on a political program that can unite us, which can fight for that platform in the electoral arena — in short, a labor party.” A prominent MUG member suggested that DSA “should be in talks with the advanced section of the working class (like UE) about forming a socialist labor party.”
Why isn’t this happening? Not only does UE’s political line make them a promising organization to approach about starting a labor party formation, but DSA already has a formal relationship with UE through the EWOC program. MUG member Rashad X is even the NPC-appointed liaison to it. Even where the organizational relationships and political alignment exist, this NPC has failed to move forward conversations about electoral cooperation with the left wing of the labor movement.
“The third-party ballot line strategy demands a level of ideological commitment, risk, and frankly poor strategic analysis that will continue to prevent even militant, democratic, left unions from adopting it.”
Of course, UE is a small union, with a smaller membership than DSA, and so probably not the basis for a new labor party. But this NPC is serving during an unprecedented moment in the modern labor movement. Two major international unions, the Teamsters and UAW, have seen reform leadership come to power, the fruits of decades of rank-and-file organizing in which the left heavily invested in part because such transformations are essential to developing a politically independent labor movement. There hasn’t been a better time since the 1970s to start talking to labor about an independent political vehicle. But other than a deflated post from NPC member Laura Wadlin about apparently failed efforts to meet with Senator Sanders, there is little indication that this NPC is doing anything at all to try to bring the forces together that would be necessary to build an independent vehicle for the working class, much less one with a third-party ballot line.
The reality is that the NPC’s commitment to the idealist third-party ballot line position is itself a major obstacle to our best chance of building a labor party formation. The “unions, progressive organizations, and prominent left figures” (as Reform & Revolution put it) that we would need to form a true party surrogate don’t share the same naive illusions that the two-party system can be broken by copying a political strategy that has been failing the Green Party for 40 years. Even UE, in their election statement, recognized the danger of spoiling the election in favor of the Republicans, and called for working-class voters to vote to keep Trump out of the White House. In the aftermath of Trump’s election, a center-left coalition of hundreds of organizations, including UAW and other major unions, sponsored a mass call with 140,000 attendees, but DSA’s NPC majority voted down the opportunity to participate in a formation with many of the groups we would need to form a labor party, claiming it was too liberal for us to be involved.
DSA should be creating a pathway for left unions to support democratic socialist politics, not demanding that to do so, they must erode the power and rights of their members by adopting a strategy that requires losing winnable elections and empowering Republicans through the spoiler effect. The third-party ballot line strategy demands a level of ideological commitment, risk, and frankly poor strategic analysis that will continue to prevent even militant, democratic, left unions from adopting it. The NPC’s commitment to chasing a bad strategy is squandering an extraordinary political opportunity for socialists in the labor movement.
The NPC is not making DSA’s electoral work more disciplined
The biggest area of consensus among critics of the party surrogate strategy at the last convention is that more “discipline” of our members in elected office was needed, especially when it came to federal elected officials—DSA’s endorsed members of the Squad. Despite promises from the new NPC that a federal Socialists in Office program would be a top priority, they didn’t attempt to meet with Ocasio-Cortez’s office for several months after a single productive meeting last November. In the absence of an actual organizing approach, their biggest attempt at increasing discipline in practice was a botched attempt at a “conditional endorsement” of AOC less than 48 hours before the New York Democratic primary, which sparked a conflict with the NYC-DSA chapter and led to Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez retaining the local endorsement but no longer being nationally endorsed. The end result of their efforts is a more decentralized electoral program, not a more disciplined one.
Ocasio-Cortez is still a member of NYC-DSA and endorsed by the chapter, and has been moving toward more collaboration with the chapter. In terms of policy, she has introduced federal social housing legislation tied to NYC-DSA’s statewide social housing initiative, and endorsed Zohran Mamdani’s pro-Palestine “Not on Our Dime” legislation at a press conference with United Auto Workers Region 9A and many other NYC-DSA elected officials. The national non-endorsement has not had a noticeable impact on her relationship with the chapter, and she recently headlined a recruitment event (a YouTube recording reached over 50K views).
Personally, I am very proud of the work my chapter has done—far more successfully than the national organization—to build a relationship with AOC, while working with her to help us build our organization and advance our priorities. But to the extent that things are moving in the right direction, it’s due to the NPC making themselves less relevant, not anything helpful about their intervention.
Some members, of course, will feel that NYC-DSA shouldn’t be working with the Congresswoman, but the national organization frankly has very little power in the situation. Nick Conder identified the issue well in his article: “[National] DSA currently endorses too many candidates nationally to have significant impacts on individual elections. The endorsement that matters the most in a material sense now is the chapter.” This is certainly true for NYC-DSA with its powerful electoral operation, but it’s really true across the board—there is probably not a DSA elected official in the country who has a stronger relationship with the national organization than their own chapter.
As long as DSA’s national electoral apparatus remains so “underdeveloped and disorganized” as Nick deems it, and as long as chapters remain the crucial political actors vis-á-vis DSA’s electoral project, hamfisted attempts to enforce discipline by the NPC will continue to achieve the opposite. Their main effect is reducing the number of chapters that apply for national endorsements, leaving more of our electoral efforts and power in the hands of locals pursuing our electoral strategy relatively autonomously.
The true path to a disciplined cadre of democratic socialist elected officials, an aspiration shared across DSA tendencies, is through building the power that stems from our mass-membership-engagement organizing model, and building unity across our chapters, members, and elected officials on a shared political strategy. As long as pushes for “discipline” continue to be carried out erratically, factionally, and reactively based on social media outrage rather than a consistent program or strategy with organizing muscle behind it, they will do nothing but continue to decentralize the electoral project—a direction incompatible with building a mass party.
DSA needs Unity of Theory and Practice
The failure to move DSA toward the NPC majority’s goal of a third-party is not solely due to poor execution. The bigger issue they face is that the goal of an independent ballot line itself is wildly out of step with the conditions of the US electoral system, and out of step with DSA’s practice, including the on-the-ground practice of DSA chapters. Across the country, (including in chapters aligned with the NPC majority such as San Francisco, Portland, Denver, Connecticut, and Louisville) chapters continue to pursue electoral politics on the same party surrogate model that has allowed DSA to elect hundreds of democratic socialists to office over the last decade. Our electoral strategy is incredibly contested at the level of theory, but at the level of practice, we all appear to agree.
“DSA should not and cannot give up on our historic task—forming a political vehicle for the US working class to win socialism.”
Maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising. Many chapters sent delegates to convention who voted for NPC candidates who promised they had a way to resolve the contradictions of using the Democratic ballot line. But unless and until those contradictions are actually resolved, those same chapters need to navigate them on the ground, and they overwhelmingly do so by continuing to use the Democratic ballot line in partisan races. It’s easy to say on a podcast that someone should start experimenting with third-party runs, but it’s harder to convince a chapter with a real chance to elect a serious socialist candidate to office in a Democratic primary that they should instead pursue an extreme long-shot third-party campaign to prove a theoretical point.
Investing in party-like infrastructure in terms of staffing, tech, and fundraising would be a worthy project—necessary for building a strong party surrogate—but the NPC’s politicized push to reduce DSA’s staff capacity has only set it back. And despite what should be an historic opportunity to unify with elements of the labor movement, the NPC’s idealist commitment to a third-party ballot line has paralyzed us.
The only way the NPC is even trying to deliver on their promised change to DSA’s direction is by continuing to ramp up a factional campaign of “discipline” against disfavored chapters and elected officials. But as long as they continue to flounder at achieving genuine political unity and a stronger national organizing model, this will achieve little except the further decentralization of our project.
DSA should not and cannot give up on our historic task—forming a political vehicle for the US working class to win socialism. The election of Donald Trump and the dangerous slide to the right among US working-class voters of all races make it more important than ever. We need to elect democratic socialists to office who can oppose the Trump agenda, inspire the working class, and demand an alternative to the corporate politics of the Democratic Party establishment. But right now, we are operating in an untenable situation, where we have committed on paper to an idealist articulation of our political strategy that is seriously at odds with the real lessons coming from the material experience of DSA chapters and members.
To build a genuine party with a mass constituency, we will need to invest in learning from and replicating our successes, not bringing them to a halt while hoping without evidence that another strategy will materialize.