Class Alignment Electoral Strategy Part 3: Practical Chapter Strategy

Passed January 24, 2026
March 4, 2026

Ballot Line: Understanding the Terrain

DSA’s approach to the ballot line question has provoked many debates but, in the near term, has cohered around a ballot-line-agnostic party-surrogate approach, recognizing that the vast majority of progressively inclined workers either vote in Democratic primaries or can be activated to do so (as with the Zohran Mamdani campaign).

The specific strategic approach that is practiced in a number of large chapters and forms the basis for DSA’s broader electoral strategy as it has cohered is centered on the idea of a DSA structured as a mass party and of the strategic outlook of “transformative reformism,” making three key assumptions: the Democratic Party itself cannot be realigned into a left party internally, an electoral third party cannot possibly be successful in the current American context, and the Democratic Party is not structured like a traditional mass party and is separate from its state-run ballot line. This strategy was first explicated by Seth Ackerman in Jacobin and provided the theoretical basis for some of DSA’s first forays into electoral politics.

The Sanders campaign made it clear that there was a large constituency primed for democratic socialist electoral politics, and that electoral work could mobilize a mass working-class base around socialism. Understanding that engaging in electoral work can build DSA as a party, spread socialist ideas, and implement these transformative reforms, it’s clear that this work is a key part of DSA’s strategy. The first strategic decision socialists needed to make was our understanding of and orientation towards the Democratic Party. Through analysis and over the course of their electoral work, we can see that the Democratic Party is a fairly unique party globally.

The Democratic Party is a specific realm of electoral struggle that is not directly comparable to internal party elections in social democratic parties in other countries, nor directly comparable to elections that take place entirely outside of a party structure. The Democratic Party is far from a “party” as traditionally understood in other countries. It does not have a membership base, a program, real mechanisms for internal democracy, or strong formal party organizations. In this sense, the party is essentially impossible to “take over” at either the local or national levels, but this structure also creates opportunities because the party has little direct control over who participates in and wins its nominating contests...

Acknowledging the differences between the Democratic Party and a real membership-based political party, the Democratic Party can then be seen as an overarching structure: a specific form of cartel-party. The party, rather than a formal structure, exists as a constellation of consulting firms and nongovernmental organizations that answer to capital and are isolated from the democratic structures of a traditional political party. The institutions of the party are able to exercise soft power over voters as well as more coercive and direct power over candidates and other political actors who must rely on them. - (the author, in the Organizer)

Due to the nature of elections in the U.S., which entirely foreclose a major third party, as well as the success of socialist engagement with the Democratic ballot line since the Sanders campaign, it the best path is to continue to struggle against the capitalist Democratic Party establishment through building a party-surrogate, entirely separate from the institutions of the Democratic Party, utilizing Democratic primaries to cleave the bourgeois/managerial elite of the Democratic Party from its working-class base. Understanding that the Democratic ballot line lies primarily on the contested terrain of the state, rather than internal to the party itself, was the key to this strategy. The crucial difference from previous “realignment” based orientations is the absolute focus on building up this party-surrogate, separate from and hostile to the Democratic Party itself. This means building an entirely separate electoral infrastructure — data, communications, field, etc. — financed by this membership organization.

It also means — unless strategic in a local context — not engaging in the formal structures of the Democratic Party, such as trying to reform local parties, the DCCC, the DNC, and so on. It also means building a distinct brand as democratic socialists, wherein voters align more with DSA than with the institutional Democratic Party.

Running as an independent is possible, but only rarely viable. Independents essentially cannot win in partisan contests in the United States. The primary exception here is in conservative areas, where a working-class, populist message independent of the toxic Democratic brand can win or be competitive, as with Dan Osborn in Nebraska. While these campaigns are useful and incredibly important as class struggle campaigns for class alignment, they will not constitute direct party building as DSA, and therefore should generally not be endorsed by the organization because, in order to win, they will almost certainly need to take stances at odds with our commitment to social justice, like socialist feminism and migrant rights. It is also paramount not to view non-partisan races as being somehow “independent races” in the same way that running as an independent in a partisan race is.

The long-term end of this strategy is unclear: it will depend on how the Democratic Party responds to the growing socialist base. The end result will be either: a base big enough to split from the Democratic Party, form a new ballot line dominated by the structures of our party, making endorsement tantamount to victory in the primaries of the new ballot line, and marginalize the Democratic Party entirely; a base big enough to marginalize the Democratic establishment, making our endorsement tantamount to victory in Democratic primaries and permanently hijacking their ballot line; or the marginalization of the Republican Party into a two-party system between socialists and liberals.

Chapter Strategy: Discipline, Prioritization, and Capacity

While both cadre and class struggle candidates, unlike candidates who do not meet these criteria, can build capacity, endorsements should be based on a realistic assessment of capacity and the potential for endorsed candidates to increase that capacity. If the amount of capacity needed by candidates who fit the cadre candidate or class struggle candidate criteria exceeds the reasonable capacity of the chapter, these candidates should be prioritized by their ability to win and build DSA as a party-like organization. DSA has very little money; our most precious and almost only resource is people: our members’ time. Candidates who are lower-priority and beyond a chapter’s capacity should not be endorsed, and members should vote no.

• Specifically, chapters should estimate how many doors can be knocked, how many doors are necessary to win each race (based on the estimated number of votes needed to win the election), and work backward from this overall number, only endorsing candidates who can fit within this number or are very likely to win or mobilize large numbers of people without the needed doors (examples of such campaigns include very prominent campaigns like Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns or Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor, or a campaign that directly challenges the Democratic establishment in a prominent way like Chi Osse, but almost never downballot races).

  • Campaigns like Bernie Sanders’s and Zohran Mamdani’s can move masses and popularize DSA and socialist politics through public messaging. For DSA, when engaging with these campaigns, capacity is a renewable resource. What the organization puts in can come back to it — even many times over — through new members and increased engagement.
  • But for the vast majority of DSA campaigns, capacity is inelastic. There is a hard limit. What the chapter puts in is precious, and must actively go toward winning. And while most campaigns claim to build capacity, the vast majority — even extremely worthwhile campaigns — will not.

• Chapters should prioritize cadre candidates and previously-endorsed incumbents. Incumbent protection is extremely important for DSA; being able to protect members who make lonely or unpopular votes is crucial to the organization’s power. Without the ability to credibly protect incumbents, the organization has little-to-no leverage to hold endorsed candidates accountable in office.

  • Incumbents are also the exception to the no-paper-endorsements policy broadly shared by DSA caucuses. Incumbents who have worked with the chapter should be reendorsed even without a credible challenger.

Winning is crucial, and the ability to win should be prioritized with rare exceptions (candidates who can polarize workers toward socialism at a mass scale). We have built our power by being able to successfully project the idea to elected officials that: “If we come for you, you’re probably gonna lose.” This means elected officials move left, promising candidates want our endorsement, coalition partners respect us and follow our lead, we can push more and more radical positions, and workers join our organization.

Losing matters. The more we lose, the less we are able to threaten elected officials, flex power, push legislation, attract new members, and advance more radical demands. To put it simply: when DSA loses and marginalizes itself, everyone else has the freedom to move right. When we say: “We demand rent control. We demand safety for migrants and for trans people,” we can credibly say, “and if you don’t do this, you will lose your job.” And when we lose — especially by a lot — and when we fracture coalitions that are more powerful together than apart, we can’t credibly say that, and we can’t credibly act as a force for working-class power.

Every chapter in DSA has the capacity to elect a socialist cadre by 2030. This means:

• Planning ahead on a timeline of at least two years.
• Identifying a winnable district with a base of left-leaning working class voters and DSA members, either an open seat or a weak incumbent, and with a win number low enough that the chapter can plausibly directly contact enough voters to win.
• Identifying a cadre candidate who is accountable to the chapter, disciplined, and a compelling public figure.
• Winning the “invisible primary.” This means securing the support of as many labor unions, progressive organizations, and organic community leaders as possible, well in advance of announcing for the election, boxing out non-DSA progressives.
• Fundraising: In most DSA chapters, if a majority of members donate a reasonable amount to the candidate on the launch date, this will be enough to make them financially competitive and help box out challengers by presenting a strong launch and a clear base of support. This is particularly useful in places with public matching funds, where a mass of small-dollar donations from DSA members can prove financially overwhelming.
• Knocking as many doors as possible through DSA-led canvasses, developing DSA members as leaders, and talking to and winning over a majority of voters in the district.
• Establishing in advance an SIO structure, allowing the chapter to have a democratic relationship with the elected.

This strategy and approach have worked across the country, including in small towns and red states. Every chapter has a winnable district. The key is patience. Many chapters begin their electoral programs by engaging in unstrategic races, either beyond the chapter's capacity, in the wrong district, tailing a liberal candidate, or backing a sectarian protest candidate. All of this is unnecessary and avoidable. This is why we advocate for hiring more electoral organizers, who have an invaluable strategic perspective that can help chapters build a strong electoral program.

Coalitions and the Left-Labor Bloc

Coalition work poses a strategic challenge for socialists. On the one hand, DSA must develop a clear, independent socialist identity rooted in its membership structure, program, and cadre. On the other hand, class alignment requires building a majoritarian left-labor bloc, distinct from and in conflict with the capitalist-managerial bloc. These two imperatives can seem in tension, but they do not have to be. In fact, broad coalition organizations anchored by unions can be a useful way to synthesize that contradiction, and are necessary to building DSA if approached strategically.

These coalitions often draw together unions, tenant groups, progressive organizations, and community formations around a shared electoral project that speaks to the interests of the working class. While they tend to lack a coherent socialist program, they frequently have material resources, institutional ties to labor, and a broader political reach than DSA alone. Socialists should not withdraw from such formations or approach them skeptically as competitors. They fulfill a different role from DSA as DSA. Instead, we should approach them as spaces where a broader class-based political project can take shape, while maintaining the organizational independence that allows DSA to build itself as a party-like formation.

Within these coalitions, DSA should act as the socialist pole: the organized force pushing for our cadre candidates where possible, insisting on clear lines of conflict with capital, and advocating for a coherent class-based electoral strategy. Because DSA’s power is rooted primarily in people rather than money, our contribution is in field capacity, discipline, and clarity of political purpose. This means DSA should only endorse candidates who meet the rigorous criteria laid out above.

Coalition partners, by contrast, may bring money, institutional legitimacy, and the power of organized labor. When coordinated well, this division of labor allows coalition spaces to assemble broad class-aligned slates, while DSA focuses its organizational endorsement and direct campaign work on socialist candidates who build the party-surrogate.

This strategic division serves two purposes at once: it allows broader coalitions to advance candidates who help cohere a working class majority, even when those candidates are not themselves building socialist organization, and it enables DSA to preserve the rigor of our endorsement criteria, reserving its own organizational capacity for cadre and class-struggle campaigns that build the organization as a party for itself while still influencing the broader alignment of forces within the left-labor bloc.

DSA members who participate in unions, progressive organizations, left electoral coalitions, or other groups should advocate within those spaces for both DSA cadre candidates to be endorsed and for class-struggle candidates in general, regardless of whether DSA as an organization endorses in those particular races. It is good for DSA, and the socialist project broadly, for viable progressive labor candidates to run and cleave the electorate along class lines, even when these candidates are not and should not be DSA candidates themselves. Advocating for this strengthens the socialist pole, advances a class-wide political strategy, and contributes to the broader project of class alignment by helping the labor and progressive movements adopt a shared orientation rooted in class conflict.

DSA’s independence remains essential, but independence does not mean isolation. Our limited resources mean we must prioritize rigorously within our own electoral work, yet the broader left-labor bloc must be expanded, politically clarified, and strengthened. Coalition work, when approached deliberately and without dissolving our organizational identity, is one of the key ways to accomplish this. Socialists must never tail these groups or sublimate our politics within them, but the existence of a class-based left-labor coalition is a necessary prerequisite for building DSA itself as a mass party. We must first have a politically self-conscious working class before we can win as a party for ourselves.

Opposing Fascism at the Ballot Box

Even as DSA works to develop class alignment and build an independent party surrogate, we also do not have the luxury to ignore the struggle between the fascist Republican Party, and the wider anti-fascist bloc, composed primarily of different constituent parts of the Democratic Party’s base. Fascism is not only a threat to many members of the working class, including immigrants, people of color, and queer people, but also an existential threat to the socialist movement itself. We therefore must be vehement in our opposition to fascism. Such opposition can manifest in a variety of struggles, including through labor organizing and in the streets, but a core form of resistance in this moment is through the ballot box.

While most elections that DSA organizes around occur where the general election is effectively uncontested, and primaries are fought between DSA and more mainstream Democrats, this does not mean that such elections do not have a key role in opposing fascism. There is a great unevenness among Democratic elected officials in their willingness to fight against Trump, with democratic socialists being among the most strident in our opposition. Many Democratic elected officials, especially in urban areas with a strong DSA presence, have capitulated to Trump, rolling out the red carpet for ICE and putting migrants, trans people, and the working class as a whole at great risk. Replacing subservient Democrats, like Eric Adams or Muriel Bowser, is in itself antifascist work. Because of this, by defeating collaborationist Democrats, and replacing them with our own candidates, we strengthen the anti-fascist movement.

Another key aspect of the struggle against fascism is strengthening democratic socialism itself. Fascism feeds off the distrust and cynicism that permeates our society, which is in part generated by the failures of Democrats to effectively deal with the problems that working people face. Giving people something to believe in and that can rebuild social cohesion is of paramount importance. Electing democratic socialists to office will go a long way towards such an effort.

DSA and democratic socialism represent an important and compelling alternative to fascism itself. The groups that swung most toward Trump in 2024 – young people, Latino voters, Muslim and Arab voters, voters in places like New York City and Los Angeles – are also groups that have and can be won by democratic socialists. While these voters have rejected Kamala Harris and the establishment Democratic Party at the ballot box, they can be won away from fascism by a compelling socialist program. Even local-level electoral work in overwhelmingly blue cities can play an important part in the anti-fascist project by providing a real alternative for alienated working class voters.

Socialists also need to experiment creatively with electoral work in red areas and areas where we can directly confront MAGA Republicans at the ballot box. We need to build a model for this sort of work, though we do not claim to currently have the answers. It is a fact that socialism is not popular in these areas, and attempts to run socialism as a left-populist alternative to liberalism in red areas have failed. It is not true currently that there is some sort of sleeping giant of socialism in West Virginia or similar. However, recognizing that, we do need to be able to have a non-liquidationist anti-fascist electoral strategy in conservative areas, one which doesn’t sell out our values or break with our program in order to win. There have been pockets of success, such as socialist wins in very pro-Trump Bay County, Michigan, that we must study and seek to replicate.

However, we also need to recognize that many candidates will not live up to our democratic socialist vision, but that it is nevertheless critical that they win over far worse and far more dangerous candidates. Even where DSA should absolutely not make an endorsement, it is still important for socialists to vote tactically against fascists at the ballot box. It is crucial to recognize the reality that liberal government is better for socialist politics and the working class writ large than fascist government. Socialist politics must be rooted in correct analysis, and the idea that liberalism and fascism are the same is incorrect. We firmly reject any socialist politics that obfuscate this naked truth, even as we believe our resources should go into building an independent socialist political pole.