Rashida Campaign Reflections
by Anthony Dellicolli
Rashida Tlaib, Detroit DSA member and U.S. Congresswoman, won her primary for re-election by 44 points against a field that was led by Detroit’s current City Clerk, Janice Winfrey. Compared to 2020, Rashida defeated then Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones by 32 points. Despite over a million dollars being funneled into Winfrey’s campaign by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel apartheid organization that endorsed 109 of the Republican Congressmen who voted to overturn the 2020 Presidential Election results, Rashida increased her win margin by 12 points this cycle compared to last.
Background
Looking back to 2018, our support for Rashida’s campaign was limited to two canvasses and 30 volunteers. In 2020, our organizing potential was stunted by the pandemic and we primarily ran joint phone banks for her and our other endorsed candidate for State House in Hamtramck, Abraham Aiyash. In a few instances, we organized 5–10 DSA members to canvass the neighborhoods where their districts overlapped, launching from Aiyash’s campaign office.
Detroit DSA’s first in-person electoral work after the onset of the pandemic came about in 2021 with the Detroit For All electoral slate: homegrown candidate Landis Spencer for Board of Police Commissioners (a civilian police oversight board) in Detroit’s District 6, Rashida’s Communications Director, Denzel McCampbell, for Detroit City Clerk, and a ballot initiative, Proposal P, to amend the city charter and guarantee numerous human rights. All lost decisively. The upside was that we had an impressive ground game, knocking on 12,000 doors in the district and organizing 104 people to participate in the campaign in one form or another. We did not organize many people to participate beyond DSA’s own numbers but were able to activate and develop many members that had been inactive prior to the campaign. Rashida joined us to launch the first slate canvass of the campaign.
2022 DSA For Rashida campaign
For Rashida’s 2022 campaign, we formally endorsed her at our February General Meeting. We began our DSA For Rashida campaign with a kick off event on March 27th in Northwest Detroit with around 30 attendees split into groups for Field, Events, and Communications to start brainstorming ideas, plans, and goals for the campaign.
At the outset, we vowed to do more than Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) and prioritize work that could help build connections in the community with events like town halls on college campuses, especially where we have YDSA chapters. This did not materialize fast enough prior to summer break (but will be attempted again soon for the fall semester), and we mainly did GOTV, with a focus on meeting Rashida volunteers at canvasses and pairing them up with DSA members to canvass together. In one instance, I paired up with a Dearborn Public Schools teacher that was interested to learn about DSA and after some encouragement, was somewhat convinced that she should get more involved in her union.
We ran seven DSA For Rashida canvasses on a bi-weekly basis, starting at the end of April, from within the Rashida campaign infrastructure with around 20 attendees at each and a near-even split of DSA to non-DSA members. This was the first cycle that we made a serious effort to host DSA canvasses in coordination with the campaign and turn out our members. The canvasses were run entirely by DSA members in which we talked about joining the organization as part of the canvass launch. Rashida’s campaign knocked 28,000 doors, 2,000 of which came from Detroit DSA. According to Rashida’s team, 70–80% of their doors were knocked by their eight Field Organizers on staff with a vast majority of the remaining volunteer doors done by Detroit DSA.
In collaboration with our Newspaper Committee, our most significant communications contribution was the creation of a .money website highlighting the dark money spending in Rashida’s race that was circulated to local media. As of now, it hasn’t been mentioned in any articles published by local or national journalists.
Members of the Electoral Committee meet weekly with a group of Rashida staffers — both Communications Directors, a Field Organizer, and their Volunteer Coordinator — to coordinate our campaign work and have political discussions about orienting towards class struggle. This meeting formation came about after our endorsement of Denzel in our 2021 Detroit For All campaign in which we established bi-weekly meetings with him and Rashida’s former Campaign Manager. Together, we’ve done readings on the labor movement like the success of the West Virginia teachers’ strike in 2018. The concept of building working class power and exerting leverage through workplace organizing was an unfamiliar but exciting concept for some of the staffers.
A day before the primary, the DSA For Rashida shirt was launched through Rashida’s campaign store. The first quantity of 50 shirts sold out in under 20 minutes just through social media posts. An additional quantity of 50 was re-stocked and sold out again. A final quantity of 100 is currently being sold. This started as an idea that we pitched to Rashida’s staffers at one of our weekly meetings and eventually gained Rashida’s enthusiastic support after seeing the initial design concepts.
Rashida has been posting about Detroit DSA more frequently lately (see here, here, and here as a few examples). Our relationship and coordination with Rashida and her campaign team is the best it has ever been. Rashida has been willing to speak at our events like the May Day picnic, a Woodbridge neighborhood social event, and two rallies in support of unionizing Great Lakes Coffee baristas (here and here).
Much like the Bernie campaign provided DSA a larger ecosystem in which to organize and recruit socialists, the Rashida campaign has been a space to engage locally with thousands of people about mass politics. Rashida’s campaign attracts a demographic more representative of Detroit and Dearborn compared to DSA’s membership in those same cities. If we want to build the socialist movement to be representative of the multiracial working class, we need to be more present in the same spaces as Rashida and her campaign to build those relationships.
Challenges within Detroit DSA
There was a huge divide between the 200 Detroit DSA dues-paying members who voted to endorse Rashida and the very few who organized on the campaign. When we vote to make electoral endorsements, we should think about how we can best put the full strength of our organization behind them. Almost no other chapter has an elected like Rashida and we have the rare opportunity to organize alongside her campaign to talk about nearly anything we want — Medicare For All, Green New Deal, taxing the rich, defunding the police, Palestinian liberation, cancelling student debt, and more. We can acknowledge members may not have felt compelled to knock doors in a race that Rashida was essentially guaranteed to win but with broader membership participation we can get creative about the ways that we relate to the campaign and how we use it to develop more socialist organizers. A lot of the ideas put forward at the kick off event fell by the wayside due to the limited capacity of a small campaign committee.
Admittedly, conversations that we have with voters on the doors can be limited since most already know about Rashida. They are typically no more than 5 minutes long and offer limited opportunities to go beyond the standard canvassing rap to talk about participating in the campaign, much less joining a socialist political organization. The standard canvassing turf only allows us to reach older homeowners that, while they may be enthusiastic about Rashida, are not our primary demographic for recruiting to DSA. We should be creative about finding ways to extend the reach of our electoral organizing so that we can have a majority of our conversations with renters and younger folks in spaces like concert venues, street fairs, block parties, and other spaces where people are already out in public and more willing to hold a longer conversation with us. We should think about canvassing as not only a way to talk to voters about Rashida and her platform but also as an opportunity to meet Rashida volunteers that are already doing political organizing work and that might be interested in continuing to do so through DSA after the campaign ends.
Looking to the future with Rashida
If we are to win back abortion rights and put a halt to the avalanche of hellworld rulings by the Supreme Court, we need to build a mass movement comprised of millions of Americans to create strikes and protests capable of disrupting the economy until the federal government meets our demands. No doubt we need Rashida to play a part in this beyond her campaign’s current plans to canvass for the Reproductive Freedom For All ballot initiative that is on the ballot in November. Our role must be to formulate a strategy that properly utilizes Rashida in this movement building.
Cribbing from tactics used by Bernie in the past, Rashida should use her massive lists of supporter email addresses and phone numbers to turn them out to picket lines and rallies in support of striking workers. There will be a number of unionized workers negotiating new contracts throughout 2023, including 150,000 UAW auto workers, 350,000 UPS Teamsters, and thousands of Dearborn & Detroit public school teachers. We should collaborate with Rashida to use her substantial infrastructure to educate her supporters on why it is so important to show up for organized labor a la “an injury to one is an injury to all”. With some encouragement from Rashida, it is not a stretch to imagine that her supporters could begin to understand themselves as working class agents of change that can foment class struggle from within their workplaces and unions.
A significant part of the Rashida campaign’s canvassing training is built around class struggle rhetoric like fighting back against billionaires and corporate environmental polluters. If Rashida is truly to take after ‘Amo Bernie’, why not call on her supporters to take an active role in winning a better world by organizing their workplace with support from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), attending local Labor Notes Troublemakers’ Schools or the national Labor Notes Conference so that they can help build a militant, multiracial working class capable of fighting alongside her rather than simply for her re-election every two years?
The Detroit Socialist is produced and run by members of Detroit DSA’s Newspaper Collective. Interested in becoming a member of Detroit DSA? Go to metrodetroitdsa.com/join to become a member. Send a copy of the dues receipt to: membership@metrodetroitdsa.com in order to get plugged in to our activities! Detroit DSA’s Electoral Committee meets biweekly on Tuesdays.
