Class Alignment Electoral Strategy Part 2: Class Struggle & Cadre Elections

Passed January 24, 2026
March 3, 2026

Class Struggle Elections: Polarizing Politics Along Class Lines

A class struggle campaign is an election in which labor and capital stand in unmistakable opposition. The candidate may not be a fully integrated DSA cadre, but the campaign itself mobilizes our class and puts its interests on a collision course with those of the capitalist elite. This is why Bernie Sanders’s presidential bids were transformative: they revealed the fault lines of class conflict for millions.

The task of a class struggle campaign is to develop class consciousness at scale and help unite labor, tenants, and progressive forces into a left-labor coalition to confront the capitalist leadership of the Democratic Party. Class struggle elections are necessary at this moment to build the base required for a party and to solidify a fighting organization with a shared program. We need this sort of campaign as a first step to build class alignment, both at the local and national level, but as we build DSA as a party, we must move away from class struggle elections toward cadre elections.

The goal of a class struggle campaign is to politicize workers along class lines, and to cohere a left-labor coalition and aid class alignment by polarizing the electorate against the establishment along class lines. These races should be prominent and able to move working-class people. These candidates should actively solicit the chapter’s endorsement, be DSA members, and publicly identify as democratic socialists.

• These candidates should not cross any of the organization’s red lines at the time of their campaign. This means that while some campaigns in the past may have qualified at the time and advanced a chapter’s goals, they should not be endorsed in the present context because they violate some of the chapter’s positions that have been democratically decided as non-negotiable demands. What these red lines are depends on the chapter and its stage of development.
• A class struggle candidate does not mean any candidate who has strong policies on labor, but a candidate who will actually cohere labor and the progressive movement behind their candidacy.
• Some candidates may qualify as class-struggle campaigns (e.g. uniting all of labor and progressive organizations against capital and polarizing the electorate along class lines) but should not be endorsed because they did not actively solicit the chapter’s endorsement, join the chapter, publicly identify as democratic socialist, or agree to the chapter’s positions.
• Not all class struggle candidates should be endorsed at all times. Class struggle candidates will need to be organized while in office. They will likely vote against the chapter’s position at times. They will almost inevitably cause internal conflict within DSA as members demand public accountability. They may also cause public conflict with the organization. All of this needs to be accounted for while considering endorsement. The benefits for class alignment, building a left-labor bloc, and material gains for the working class need to be weighed against these costs. An important, though not definitive, test to weigh here is the candidate’s willingness to commit to joining the chapter’s Socialists in Office Committee.

Class struggle elections like Bernie Sanders’s have shown what is possible from engaging with electoral politics as it exists, even without DSA in a leading role. They also show the limits of engaging in mass politics without working class organization. Bernie’s campaigns energized millions, but they were constrained by the absence of mass working-class institutions, unable to bring enough power to bear against the establishment. Electoral politics is not a clash of individuals or ideas, but of organized blocs with material interests. We cannot win real power without an organized working-class base powerful enough to take on the capitalist class as part of an independent, democratic organization. Mass politicization must be matched by institution-building. Class consciousness without organization cannot endure. But organization cannot be built without politicizing workers at a massive scale.

There’s a balance in our work toward class alignment: between pure devotion to party-building and disciplined cadre, and engaging in class struggle as it exists in the millions. These poles often appear in tension, but they are mutually constitutive. A small party running only cadre candidates does not move people at scale. But engaging as just one part of a large coalition in which we are not a leading force risks liquidating ourselves into the broader progressive movement, doing nothing to build the party we need. Engaging in electoral politics must be a strategic act: a calculation about how a campaign contributes to class alignment, builds our base, and moves us closer to independent power. The goal is to move toward a base that allows us to run exclusively disciplined candidates — something we have done in some places and are close to doing in many others — but that base must be built through strategic intervention in moments of class conflict and often through working in coalition.

DSA’s strength has been our ability to act as a pole of class struggle in electoral politics, not by retreating into sectarianism or liquidating ourselves into progressive coalitions. The goal is not simply to win more elections. It is to win them in a way that builds our capacity to act as representatives of the working class.

Cadre Elections: Building Socialist Governance and Transformative Reform

Where class struggle campaigns build mass consciousness, cadre campaigns build the party and the capacity to govern. These are races where a DSA member, deeply rooted in the chapter’s internal political life, can win office and use state power to pass transformative reforms that shift power away from capital. Cadre candidates should have a viable path to victory, due to the organization’s limited resources, and be running for non-symbolic offices — executive or legislative offices — where they can function as either a socialist pole in a legislature or govern and implement transformative reforms that build working-class organization.

A cadre campaign is not merely about electing a socialist. It is about building a party-like organization capable of coordinating electoral, legislative, and movement work in a unified strategy. Our goals here are building party infrastructure, building loyalty to DSA as DSA among workers, building a distinct socialist pole and socialists-in-office grouping within a left-labor bloc, and eventually winning a majority for DSA candidates at levels of government that can govern and pass transformative reforms through DSA as a party.

The goal for DSA in the next few years should be running and winning significantly more cadre campaigns at every level. This requires long-term strategy, discipline, and a base receptive to our message. Chapters like New York City have been able to do this, first by cohering a base for socialism through agitation and campaigns like Bernie Sanders and Cynthia Nixon, then by running and winning cadre candidates who can carry out our program in places where an existing politicized working-class base exists.

Candidates who do not meet either of these criteria laid out — of class struggle or cadre campaigns — should not be endorsed and are highly unlikely to advance socialism, build DSA as a party, or grow the organization. While many candidates along these lines (long-shot agitational candidates, candidates who are not members of DSA or open socialists, and more) have applied for DSA endorsement, and some have received it, often on the idea that they will build capacity in for the organization, this has never once happened. Even if there is internal political pressure to endorse these candidates, members should oppose endorsement. DSA campaigns must either gain DSA an electoral foothold, or move and politicize workers at a mass scale.