Making Wagers: How Smart Electoral Strategy Can Build the Socialist Movement

Socialist electoral strategy is about making wagers. Let’s work together to make sure our bets pay off.

by Anthony D., Frances R., JM

In January, Detroit DSA hosted the second in a series of panel discussions on electoral work, bringing forward comrades’ different perspectives. These conversations helped us see the wide range of political approaches at play in the chapter, and highlighted the need for us to synthesize our positions into a clear strategy that builds the socialist movement locally. DSA’s “big-tent” nature is its strength, but being in an organization with different opinions doesn’t mean we abdicate our collective responsibility to decide where we are going and why.

Based on our experience as organizers and leaders in the Rashida and Prop 3 campaigns, we believe the chapter should prioritize three tasks in order to develop an electoral program that is coherent, exciting, and helps to shape the working class into a fighting force that can take on the bosses and billionaires. Our chapter should:

1. Come to an understanding of the strategic purpose of electoral work and how it moves us closer to socialism. Without that, we are in danger of drifting into a role as an unthreatening left appendage of the Democratic Party.
2. Help members understand that our role in every election is not to endlessly canvass just to win votes — it’s to build our connections to the wider working class, to help build an actual working-class movement that can take power. This is especially true of campaigns like Prop 3 where we will not have an impact on the outcome.
3. We should focus our electoral work on creating our own party-like infrastructure so we can recruit and train socialist candidates from within our own ranks, who will think of themselves primarily as organizers of the working class, rather than purely as legislators.

Learning from Rashida and Prop 3

Our experiences from the recent Rashida and Prop 3 campaigns make it clear that many in DSA still see the goal of our participation in elections as primarily putting in shoe-leather work to win votes. This is natural, since we live in a depoliticized society where voting is understood to be the only and ultimate political action we can take. But the goal of DSA’s Rashida and Prop 3 canvasses was first and foremost to meet other activated people and bring them into DSA’s orbit — not primarily to win votes and signatures.

This tension between winning votes and building our connections was felt in both campaigns. Although chapter members voted in big majorities to take on both campaigns, the number of people who came out to meet non-DSA Rashida and Prop 3 supporters while knocking doors was quite low.

In reflections on this campaign, some have noted that we have a tendency to vote “yes” for any campaign that sounds worthy, without thinking through what that means for personal commitment or for chapter resources. We also heard comrades say repeatedly that the low member turnout was due to the sense that these campaigns were going to win with or without us.

This was not an irrational assumption; although we knocked thousands of doors in both campaigns, we made at most a negligible impact on the number of people who voted. Between these two campaigns and our previous Detroit 4 All campaign, we can assume our absolute maximum capacity for knocking doors, let alone securing votes, is around 2,000 per month. Both Rashida’s re-election campaign and Prop 3 would have won safely without that contribution.

The problem with this analysis is that we didn’t take on this work in order to win votes, we did it because socialism will not succeed unless and until socialists have a “sea to swim in” — a layer of politically conscious people and groups inside and outside DSA that we can interact with and influence. We were making a wager that those campaigns would be a step toward forming that sea.

Both of these campaigns offered us a chance to go out and meet activated people outside of DSA: volunteers from Rashida-world and the thousands of people who’d signed up to volunteer for Prop 3 through the Reproductive Freedom for All campaign we partnered with. At a canvass, we have a lot of chances to show volunteers that DSA is an exciting place to be, through speeches, partnering with a non-DSA volunteer for a turf, post-canvass socializing, and generally showing off our organizational competence and energy.

Socialist strategy is about making wagers. We have very little power, numbers, or resources right now, so when we take on work it should be because we believe it can have outsized influence relative to our strength.

Other “wagers” like Prop 3 and the Rashida primary will come up again — popular campaigns that seem certain to win, but which might allow us to meet and politicize new people. Here are the questions we should be able to answer before committing to similar work in the future:

1. Is there a “sea to swim in” — a pool of people who are not yet socialists but might be interested in our socialist message (like Rashida volunteers)?
2. Does the average chapter member feel responsible for going out to swim in this sea, to meet and talk to these volunteers — beyond just voting yes to approve the campaign?

It’s important to note that in the case of the Prop 3 work, the wager about a sea of politicized people did not play out. We texted over 7000 local people who’d signed up to volunteer to fight for abortion rights, but very few of them followed through on coming to a canvass. We believe this may tell us something about the value of hosting canvasses and hoping individual people will show up. If we take on work like this again, we likely should try to interact with groups that already have a semi-organized working-class base, like unions.

The fact that so many of us default to conceiving of electoral activity as canvassing to win elections is an understandable consequence of DSA’s inexperience as a modern but young political force. Any serious attempt to use DSA to change the world needs to reckon with this situation, because the potential consequences of continuing to act from within this status quo, for our organization and for the socialist project, are really very dire.

DSA at a Crossroads

In addition to our organization as a whole not being able to agree on why we as rank-and-file DSA members should participate in electoral work, there is a second complication to our electoral problem: there’s no shortage of impressive elections that we’ve won across the country — victories we certainly brag about — but there is no sense of what they are intended to add up to. Are we hoping to win “change from the top” by electing enlightened individual socialists who will go into the halls of power to try to win reforms for their constituents? This seems to be the strategy of our most prominent electeds and their backers in NYC DSA — but it’s impossible to tell because this wing of DSA has never made a case explaining its approach or what it is intended to accomplish.

One way out of this organizational drift is to commit to developing candidates who understand themselves as champions of a movement and organizers of the working class first and foremost. Instead of endorsing progressives who may or may not work with us after we knock doors for them, and may or may not be prepared to risk their careers upsetting the leaders of the capitalist-controlled Democratic Party, we should prioritize endorsing “homegrown” candidates, or candidates who have spent time organizing within DSA.

This can help us choose to make future investments in dedicated socialists, and not progressives that approach us just to add another logo to their literature, or because they want “grassroots” canvassers for photo ops. We can also look at prioritizing candidates who come from within other organized struggles, especially the labor movement.

An important separate but related question is how to define our relationships with our current group of elected but unendorsed members, each of whom have varying levels of commitment to socialism, involvement with our chapter, and wider movements.

What Should Electeds Do?

At our recent electoral panel discussion, our comrade Rep. Abe Aiyash said he believes the most important role of socialist legislators is to “legislate,” meaning to pass legislation. But we believe this is exactly backwards: socialist candidates/electeds should be organizers first and legislators second, if at all.

There are two reasons: one, it will be difficult or impossible for socialists elected in ones and twos to ever pass radical legislation in state or national bodies controlled by Democrats and Republicans. The inside-baseball compromises they will need to make even to get close are corrosive to our project and have nothing to do with building any sort of movement. Two, the mass social change we want cannot be accomplished unless millions of ordinary people are brought into militant action to fight on their own behalf — and socialist electeds have a historic role to play in bringing this organized activity about.

Without an organized working class, we simply cannot hope to win disruptive, transformative change. No other group besides socialists understands this, and no one except us will work to build this class force. Therefore socialist electeds organizing for labor rights, Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, and other radical legislation must do it by using their bully pulpits to agitate and build organized pressure within their districts. These elected leaders are key to organizing workers to use real power to force the hand of legislative bodies, rather than relying on a very small number of politicians to win weakened reforms (if they’re lucky) on their behalf.

These candidates should also be prepared to work on changing their constituents’ common-sense understanding of politics, so they understand that democratic socialist electeds aren’t sent to Lansing or Washington to pass bills, but to grow a movement.

We recognize this is a tall order and flies in the face of the usual path of individual advancement that American politicians follow. But if it were easy to change the world, someone would have done it by now! Getting serious about an electoral program that builds power for a transformation of society will require people willing to serve as tribunes of the movement, putting their individual advancement second.

We recently witnessed an example of this kind of agitation from a member of our chapter: Dylan Wegela, a former teachers’ union leader and newly elected State Representative, took a very public stand against corporate handouts in the state budget, a move that was highly unpopular with the Democrats and which exposed their routine corruption in Lansing.

Locally, this kind of organizing could look like politicizing constituents who constantly lose power in winter storms to fight for public utilities and to dismantle private corporations like DTE that sacrifice robust infrastructure in pursuit of endless profit. Socialist electeds could also take a page from Bernie Sanders’ playbook, and use their volunteers and lists to turn constituents out to picket lines and rallies in support of striking workers. They could encourage constituents to organize their workplaces with support from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and attend local Labor Notes Troublemakers’ Schools or the national Labor Notes Conference. We want our electeds to help build a militant, multiracial working class capable of fighting alongside them, rather than simply for their re-election every few years!

How We Can Win

The upcoming chapter convention offers us all a chance to look ahead and ask ourselves where we want to be in five years and what it will take to get there. It would be the easiest thing for us to head down the path of least resistance: becoming an organization with radical posturing and progressive politics that don’t challenge the status-quo distribution of power in society. We should take ourselves and our historic task seriously and develop a clear strategy for bringing thousands, and then millions, of ordinary people into political activity — which means taking on campaigns with an eye toward organizing the working class, and working with elected officials who commit to doing the same.

This article is part of a series that shares different perspectives about electoral work within our Metro Detroit DSA chapter. To read the other articles in the series click, check out this section of the article for hyperlinks and stay up to date with The Detroit Socialist.

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