Independence, Co-Governance, and Building Socialist Power: Why DSA-LA Should Not Endorse Nithya Raman
By the Groundwork Local of DSA-LA
DSA-LA will soon vote on the potential endorsement of Councilmember Nithya Raman for Mayor. The Groundwork caucus will vote No on endorsing Raman, based on our Class Alignment Electoral Strategy. We do not view this disagreement as existential. We hold deep respect for our comrades who support the endorsement. We strongly prefer Nithya Raman’s election over Karen Bass, and will support the will of the chapter and will campaign for her should the chapter vote to endorse. However, after deliberation and analysis, we believe DSA-LA should not endorse Nithya Raman.
Raman and DSA: How We Got Here
DSA-LA first endorsed Nithya Raman in 2020, joining a broad coalition of progressive organizations in one of the first interventions of the modern-day Los Angeles electoral left. This context is important: DSA’s relationship with Raman was born out of a specific time and place. At that time, DSA-LA engaged in an approach common for young and developing chapters, jumping into a progressive electoral campaign to develop organizing skills and competence, build up chapter structures, and gain confidence in electoral interventions.
This campaign victory transformed both the chapter and the Los Angeles electoral left. It was, however, a campaign in which DSA was very much a junior partner. Before her initial run, Raman had never organized within DSA, joining only in the lead-up to her campaign. She did not present herself as a democratic socialist; DSA members largely entered the campaign as canvassing footsoldiers within a much broader progressive coalition. For Raman, co-governing was not something she ever signed up for. The idea that Raman would govern as part of a collective DSA political project that sought rupture with capitalism was not part of the relationship either side established in 2020. DSA-LA itself had not yet developed a coherent model of co-governance or a clear expectation that endorsed electeds would collectively develop strategy with the chapter. Her thinking at the time was simple: DSA was part of the progressive left, and should endorse and canvass for her, a progressive Democrat, to help move the city in a more progressive direction, as dozens of other groups were doing. In her own words, she did not join DSA out of ideological alignment.
Since Raman’s initial win, DSA-LA and DSA nationwide have developed into a party-like organization: one that seeks to run our own candidates, with our own program, and govern collectively. This development occurred because democratic socialists built political muscle and developed capacity through involvement in campaigns like Raman’s. Simultaneously, Raman became more politically sophisticated and discerning, developing into a devoted advocate of a technocratic liberal urbanist ideology, all the while finding new allies, DSA-aligned or otherwise. These developments brought the chapter into inevitable conflict with the now-mayoral hopeful.
Raman’s relationship with DSA-LA in office has often been fraught. Notably, the chapter censured her for accepting an endorsement from Democrats for Israel in late 2023, an endorsement which her campaign asked canvassers to tout. The chapter rebuked her again in 2024 for voting for the appointment of Jim McDonnell, a former sheriff who facilitated thousands of Obama-era ICE deportations, as police chief. She has been engaged intermittently with the chapter’s Socialists in Office Committee, rarely, if ever, changing her votes or positions in response to advice from the Committee and the chapter. Groundwork criticized her repeatedly for her political positions and dismissive stance toward the chapter.
Raman has never publicly called herself a democratic socialist; she tends to dissemble on the subject when asked. This is not, at least primarily, because she is afraid of democratic socialism as a label or a political ideology based on electoral calculus, but rather because she does not believe in socialism as an ideology, method of analysis, or political movement. She views politics as a contest between ideas rather than a contest between organized blocs representing class fractions with discrete and competing interests. Her public stances strongly emphasize her independence as a singular political figure. In her conception, politically involved organizations are almost always corrupting; they are interest groups who function to make it harder for experts to craft good public policy, arguing for the needs of their members at the expense of the public good. To ignore them is a virtue, the sign of a strong individual refusing to bow to political pressure and compromise effective governance. Because of this, she prides herself on her ability to operate as an independent political actor rather than as someone who believes that organized political relationships should shape her decisions.
Raman is “not ideological,” but a “wonk.” She uses “ideological” as a negative, to which her problem-solving market liberalism is a salve; not an ideology itself, but objective truth. Her politics and public messaging fit the Louis Brandeis-Elizabeth Warren managerial-progressive tradition, not the socialist tradition, and her electoral appeal resonates with this base. Her disdain for “politicking” causes friction not only with DSA, but also with colleagues and organizations across the political spectrum. This limits her effectiveness in building coalitions and passing legislation.
After years of conflict, including the Democrats for Israel censure and the battle over Jim McDonnell, Raman and the chapter reached a détente through 2025 and into 2026. She remained intermittently engaged with Socialists in Office, even as the underlying disagreements about political accountability and co-governance remained unresolved. Her surprise February entrance into the mayoral race blew up this fragile arrangement.
Contra DSA’s model of targeting seats and recruiting candidates, she got in the race at the last possible minute, without consulting the chapter. Importantly, she did not consult or even give a heads-up to any Council colleagues, rupturing relationships with DSA’s other Socialists in Office; or consult with anyone in the labor movement or the broader progressive campaign ecosystem. While she took advantage of a political opening that others were too cautious to seize, she also upended years of chapter strategic planning. In our socialist partybuilding conception of politics, the decision to contest the city’s most powerful office is a question of collective strategy. Compare this to Zohran Mamdani’s run for office, which, while not without controversy in NYC-DSA, was announced after in depth consultation with chapter leaders and rank and file, on the promise that he would not run if the chapter did not endorse.
Her entrance into the race, on a platform of technocratic, self-professed non-ideological, governance—“a city that works”—put DSA-LA in a bind. Our endorsement process was complete; we already had a slate, a message, a platform, and a campaign apparatus in full swing. In April, after petitions by both Raman and the more ideologically left-wing, but less viable candidate, Rae Huang, to reopen the chapter’s primary endorsement process, the chapter had a generative and productive debate, ultimately voting against reopening the process. Raman was recommended by the DSA-LA voter guide and ultimately won the vast majority of DSA-LA’s social base and constituency, qualifying for the general election over far-right Spencer Pratt with 29% of the vote.
Raman has applied for DSA-LA’s endorsement in the general election, a contest in which she is an underdog but has an opening due to unpopular status quo Mayor Karen Bass. This race is top-of-mind for Angelenos; significantly more LA voters voted in this race than any other in the primary, including the Governor race. It has received outsized attention as a test for the electoral left and an inflection point for politics in the city.
The Case for Endorsement
Our comrades in the chapter, particularly those from the Socialist Majority Caucus, have made a compelling case for endorsement, one we take extremely seriously.
The case for endorsing, in our view, is that the Raman campaign and the political moment could conceivably fit what we call the class struggle model of electoral campaigns. In our words:
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.DSA’s political strength was built on endorsing candidates like Bernie Sanders who were not accountable to the organization, and on polarizing people around class and democratic socialism as an ideology, bringing socialism from a fairly marginal position to a mass movement. Intervening in these sorts of elections and building class alignment and a constituency for socialism is a necessary precondition for building DSA as a party.
Raman has mobilized the social base of DSA; indeed, her primary results almost serve as a proxy for “DSA support.” To the press and to the public, Raman is already a DSA candidate, even the flag-bearer for the chapter. In a real sense, her campaign can be seen as a test of DSA’s strength as a movement, even without formal organizational endorsement and canvassing. Whether we like it or not, or whether Raman does, this is the terrain upon which we find ourselves.
Capital has also lined up around Bass. Airbnb and the police union, key enemies of the working class and socialist movement, view a Raman defeat as essential.
The case for endorsement, from our perspective, is thus: this campaign is now being waged as a struggle between the left and the center, even a referendum on DSA. If we abstain from that struggle, we cede our own agency and an election is fought over socialism without our participation. If we endorse, we can try and shape the narrative, polarize the electorate around socialism and class struggle, place DSA-LA as the major opposition force in the city, recruit new members, develop new organizers at scale, and shape the campaign from inside the coalition. These arguments have a great deal of merit.
Based on the contours of the campaign, however, Raman’s politics and relationship with DSA, and the chapter’s long-term strategy, these arguments are still outweighed by the case against. Our electoral strategy sets a specific bar for these campaigns: they should “politicize workers along class lines,” cohere a left-labor bloc, and be capable of moving working class people into political action at a large scale. Even when the candidate is not cadre, we expect them to publicly identify as a democratic socialist, respect the chapter’s democratically decided red lines, and be capable of being organized through DSA in office. Raman does not meet these standards. The costs of wedding our organization and our political independence to her campaign and potential mayoralty are too steep.
The right stance for DSA here is critical support and freedom of movement.
Is Nithya Raman Running a Class Struggle Campaign?
The crux of the matter: does endorsing Raman build working class political power and independence? Does it build socialism as an independent political force, and DSA as a party? The objective conditions exist for a class struggle election: capital is lining up against Raman, the electorate is primed to be polarized around class as an issue. But the conditions for a class struggle campaign do not make a class struggle campaign, at least one that DSA can support.
A class struggle campaign does not need to put socialism itself at the center of every message, but it does need to organize politics around class. Raman’s campaign has not done that. She emphasizes competence, policy expertise and independence from organized political pressure rather than naming workers as one side of the conflict and capital as the other. The primary electorate reflected this orientation: her voting base was whiter, more affluent, and more highly educated compared to that of DSA-LA’s endorsed candidates.
That constituency matters, but it is already relatively available to progressive politics. The political breakthrough of Sanders-style class struggle was its ability to change the cleavage itself. Rather than putting progressive experts against conservative populists, working people across race and geography were asked to understand themselves as sharing material interests against the billionaire class. This is why Bernie won supermajorities of working-class Latino voters in Los Angeles and why socialist candidates across the country have repeatedly reached voters outside the traditional progressive base.
Raman’s campaign strategy and messaging can change. The conditions exist to step into the breach and run a strong class struggle campaign, but it requires significant movement from the candidate. While much of the capitalist class has lined up against Raman, objective conflict between capital and a progressive candidate does not automatically become class struggle that can be harnessed by socialist organization. Capital can choose its enemy without the opposing candidate organizing workers into class consciousness. Bernie's “billionaire-class” rhetoric told voters who they were, who ruled them, and what organized force could defeat that rule. Class politics requires not merely an enemy, but a political subject.
There is great potential in the mayoral race, an opening for class politics. And there is an actually existing campaign and candidate which have thus far chosen not to take it.
The potential of the Raman campaign to expand the base and popularize democratic socialist politics asks us to bend some of our standards for endorsement. But even for a class struggle campaign in which the chapter is one part of a broader coalition, we still ask that candidates publicly identify as democratic socialists, that they not cross our democratically-decided red lines, that they agree to advance our program, and that they work with the organization as a partner. On all counts, Raman falls short.
While she has shown some admirable movement during the endorsement process, in particular on Palestine, she remains explicitly willing to violate our red lines. This is a candidate we have censured once and have had to rebuke publicly several times for acting against some of our closest held, non-negotiable positions. These red lines are not an exercise in purity politics for its own sake, or choosing idealism over pragmatism. The chapter upholds these standards because our endorsement and labor are valuable, and earning them requires upholding at least a few central, democratically agreed upon principles. If DSA-LA candidates flagrantly and repeatedly violate these principles and still obtain our endorsement, our leverage and power drastically weaken.
DSA’s ability to set and enforce a small number of democratically agreed upon, non-negotiable conditions is itself a source of organizational power. As our capacity has grown, so has our ability to make demands of candidates and elected officials, and to organize them into a coherent political bloc. It should be treasured. What we ask of candidates doesn't just determine whom we endorse; it helps determine what kind of candidates we can produce. There are moments to compromise on these standards to advance our politics in the long-run, but they are few and far between. This is a sacrifice we should only make when the opportunity exists to move people in the millions. We do not think this campaign at this moment meets the standard.
Governing and the Democratic Road to Socialism
While many socialists disagree, we resolutely believe socialists should run for executive office to win, and work through the contradictions of governing. This means a responsibility for administering the capitalist state and its often hostile bureaucracy. It means risking unpopularity and damage to our political project in the eyes of workers. But it is necessary, if we have the popular support to win power, to take it. The contradictions of governance are faced by all successful socialists at some point. It is far better to take them on when we are able than to delay in the hope that we will gather our forces at some future time when conditions are more favorable.
DSA-LA should take power, we should govern Los Angeles. But is electing Nithya Raman actually DSA governing, as electing Zohran Mamdani was?
In their article, our comrades from Socialist Majority Caucus lay out their view of the democratic road to socialism, in which socialists win elections and use the power of the state to enact transformative reforms that open up the space for working class self-organization. We strongly agree. Raman doesn’t fit into this strategy, however.
Our theory of change is based on the working class winning and governing on its own behalf. The organized popular classes are the protagonist. Socialist electoral power can not simply be the government acting on behalf of workers; it must be the workers organizing to exert political power. The democratic road to socialism thus requires socialists coming to power and governing as a party and a class. This is far different from electing a progressive who does not govern as a conduit for the working class and its organizations and institutions. The difference lies in an elected’s willingness to engage in cogovernance alongside the chapter, to see DSA as their party, political home, and the organization through which they participate in a broader working class political project.
That distinction is extremely important for Raman because her conception of political leadership is particularly individualistic: gather information, decide what policy works, do the right thing, deliver results. Her current campaign landing page promises: “I will not make political decisions. Only the best decisions for Angelenos.”
That's practically the opposite of a relational theory of the state. There are no politically neutral “best decisions” standing outside the balance of organized social forces. In Nicos Poulantzas’s terms, the state itself is a condensation of those class relations.
Raman will not wield power as a conduit for the working class and our democratic organizations: in the best case scenario, DSA would be a junior partner in a non-socialist administration. She will likely bring about positive reforms, even some that increase worker power and organization. But how can she enact a theory of change she does not believe in and may not even be aware of? A strategy of non-reformist reform cannot be enacted accidentally. It requires a governing project that understands those reforms as part of a broader shift of power toward organized working people, and an elected official who agrees to govern with the organizations pursuing that strategy. We cannot simply project our theory of change onto policies she may enact for different reasons.
This is not governing on the democratic road to socialism, but hoping that a benevolent progressive elected official gives us space to operate. This can be useful, and our chapter’s voter guide consistently recommends candidates who fit into that space. But recommendation is not endorsement for a reason: because our endorsement comes with our canvassers and our resources, and those should only be available to candidates willing to engage in co-governance. Her surprise announcement, and her six years in office, demonstrates that she will not.
Electing Raman, in itself, is not actually winning or wielding power. What use is having your logo on the mayor’s website if she won’t return your calls?
Raman’s actual relationship with the chapter and movement make the question of her winning with our endorsement, as our standard bearer and avatar in the eyes of the working class of Los Angeles, far thornier than the one faced by NYC-DSA. A Mayor Raman would be celebrated and elevated as a victory for DSA, but it also gives us the responsibility of governing in the eyes of the masses. It presents a situation where we have all of the responsibility of governing but none of the power. Her decisions will be our decisions, at least publicly, and the legitimacy of our project will be tethered inexorably to the legitimacy of her administration. A failure of her administration would be devastating to the organization. This means that the success of the administration would, by necessity, be the chapter’s highest priority. Maintaining her popularity will be necessarily and rationally prioritized over implementing our own program or building our own independent political power.
This has been the case in New York City, with successes and failures. But there, the Mayor has a strong working relationship with the chapter. Zohran Mamdani is of us and from us, and we can trust, within reason, that his ends are our ends. Even then, we will disagree and need to make that public – but our political project will always be inextricably tied to his success. In New York, the possibilities of governing are worth the risk. In Los Angeles, with Raman as the candidate, that outcome is clearly in doubt. A Raman administration risks becoming an anvil around our organization’s neck.
Other chapters have faced similar situations. Candidates like Katie Wilson in Seattle, Brandon Johnson in Chicago, Helen Gym in Philadelphia, and beyond have run similar campaigns: a class struggle campaign with a left-labor coalition that mobilized DSA’s social base but was not accountable to DSA. In all cases, the chapter did not endorse. These candidates and administrations when they win are still seen as representatives of the left, and even by some of DSA. There is no getting beyond that – their popularity still affects the success of the chapter and the left project more broadly. But their distance gives them something important we need to preserve when acting as a junior partner or socialist pole within a broad left-labor coalition: freedom of movement.
We propose instead a position of critical support for Raman. She should be elected Mayor, and DSA-LA should advocate for this with an honest assessment and strong recommendation in our voter guide. But we should make clear she is not our candidate. She does not represent us or answer to us, her policies are not our policies. We should take great care to emphasize this difference in the eyes of the public, and, should she be elected, to criticize her publicly whenever we disagree. This will allow us to maintain political independence as socialists, and it may be a better solution for Raman. Being criticized by DSA may even give her political cover and freedom of movement to pursue her own political project, independent of the left as a movement and DSA as an organization with positions she often disagrees with. This is fine: most major American cities have technocratic liberal administrations, and Raman understands her city’s problems and cares more about competent governance than nearly all. A stance of critical support may even legitimize her in the minds of voters she needs who see DSA as an enemy. Indeed, it directly matches the way she talks about DSA in the press.Raman is a smart politician who truly cares about people, but her political project is not the left’s project. She doesn’t govern on behalf of DSA, or the organized tenant or labor movements. She has not run on that platform and does not seek to do so. The relationship between DSA and Raman is the result of specific mutually beneficial historical and political conditions in 2020. But fundamentally, these conditions have changed. This arrangement no longer suits the chapter or the candidate: DSA wants to function as a political party, run our own candidates on our own platform who are responsible to the organization; Raman wants to operate independently to put her liberal policy expertise to the city’s myriad problems. She does not want to be a Socialist in Office accountable to DSA-LA.
If political relationships shape candidates, the conditions by which support is offered matter enormously. Our strategy for organizing Raman during the campaign and in office relies on the idea that politicians are calculating realpolitik actors who respond to incentives; if we provide their base and ground game, politicians must respond to our needs because we deliver their election. By this logic, we should endorse in order to enter the tent and shape Raman’s agenda, using our involvement in the campaign as leverage to organize her towards governing as a socialist. Raman, in some ways to her credit, cannot easily be organized this way: she is, for better or worse, a true believer in liberal market urbanism, who is highly resistant to external political pressure. She doesn’t see politics as socialists do, and as Zohran Mamdani uses to his benefit as mayor— as a competition between class fractions, each with their own incentives that can be strategized around to construct majorities around particular goals. She will not operate as a coalitional or transactional politician as mayor: she has a singular vision, separate from ours. Raman should be elected. Her election will make Los Angeles a better city to live in, and potentially open up more space for socialists to organize and contest for power. Where we agree, we should work together as allies. But she cannot be the standard-bearer for our political project, because she does not support it.
The Left-Labor Coalition and DSA’s Role
DSA-LA is part of a broader movement: a left-labor coalition with a mass base extending far beyond DSA’s formal membership. This coalition and base is energized by Raman’s candidacy. This coalition as a whole can and should do things that DSA should not formally do as an organization. We discuss this thoroughly in Groundwork’s Class Alignment Electoral strategy. Unions, tenant organizations, progressive groups, community organizations, and the coalition tables bringing them together fulfill a different role from DSA as DSA. They can bring together a broad working-class constituency around candidates and demands without sharing a specifically socialist program. DSA should participate fully in these formations, but participate as the socialist pole: pushing the coalition toward clearer conflict with capital, advancing our program, developing our own cadre, endorsing our own candidates, and maintaining the political independence necessary to build a party.
A useful, if imperfect, analogue for Nithya Raman is Brad Lander. If Zohran Mamdani had not run for Mayor, Lander would have likely become the standard-bearer of the New York progressive left: a long-time DSA member, rooted in the broader progressive movement. A candidate capable of winning meaningful reforms and swaying liberal voters, especially highly educated ones, away from the establishment. But an endorsement under those conditions would not produce a relationship with Lander that comes close to mirroring NYC-DSA’s relationship with Mamdani, a candidate developed through the organization. Raman’s history with DSA-LA as an SIO is clearly deeper and messier than Lander’s with NYC, but she now occupies something much closer to that political space in Los Angeles. She is a valuable progressive coalition politician with her own base, her own politics, and her own project. Lander, similarly, as the leading progressive contender for mayor would not have made him a candidate DSA should endorse in that situation, nor did it when he ran for Congress this year with Mamdani’s support. Supporting this kind of campaign formally is the role of the broader progressive and left-labor coalition.
DSA-LA’s position in this coalition offers a synthesis for campaigns such as this one. Groups like the Working Families Party, LA Forward, Ground Game, and progressive labor unions play a different role within the left-labor coalition than DSA-LA. This coalition should support Raman and use the campaign to advance progressive politics and hopefully class polarization. DSA, as the socialist pole of this coalition and a proto-party in our own right, must focus on electing cadre candidates running democratic socialist campaigns, like Marissa Roy and Estuardo Mazariegos. We need progressive insurgents like Raman, or Abdul El-Sayed (who, it should be noted, is running a far more populist campaign, centered around universal demands like Medicare for All) in Michigan, to run, build a base, and win. It opens up space for socialist politics and moves people at scale. It’s a necessary precondition for building DSA as a mass party. However, it also harms DSA as DSA to be formally involved -- it dilutes our own politics and approach. If DSA endorses all progressive anti-establishment candidates, we lose the ability to begin to operate as an actual party, which requires running our own candidates who are accountable to our membership and share our goals. Abandoning this entirely liquidates DSA into the broader progressive movement, and our ability to act like a party is crucial to winning socialism.
To do this without abdicating leadership in the eyes of the coalition and the working class of the city is a difficult synthesis, but we believe achieving it is essential. DSA-LA should remain an independent socialist pole, advocating for our own program and candidates and our own distinct identity, rather than merging into the broader progressive coalition and Raman campaign. DSA members in unions should advocate for their unions to endorse Raman, and DSA members should be very public with our preference for Raman over Bass, while maintaining our organizational independence.
The Top of the Ticket
One argument for endorsing Raman is that she can lead the top of the ticket, winning over voters to our slate who are focused on the mayoral race and are less motivated by races for City Attorney or City Council. This is an important consideration. A top of the ticket candidate can give our slate an identity, bind them together around one governing program, and break through in the eyes of voters with long ballots. However, our view is that this is not likely to happen with Nithya Raman.
First, Raman’s independence makes it difficult for her to run as part of a slate: her platform is very different from the DSA slate platform our primary candidates ran on. Because she doesn’t represent DSA and our program, it is hard for us to run on that program with her as the lead.Second, in part because of her technocratic-progressive message and its limited appeal, she ran behind our DSA-LA Shake Up City Hall Slate. In the June primary, every single candidate DSA-LA endorsed ran ahead of Raman in their shared geography. While Raman was able to activate much of DSA’s core base and geographies, she did not win over the more working class populist voters the rest of the slate were able to capture. Beyond some more affluent and educated voters, mostly on the Westside, she was unable to make inroads beyond the core progressive/leftist constituency. In other words, Raman won few voters who did not otherwise follow DSA-LA’s voter guide across the board, while DSA-LA’s other candidates won many more voters who did not vote for Raman. Raman’s voter base was whiter, more college-educated, and more likely to be a homeowner than every single DSA-LA endorsed candidate. Faizah Malik, for example, ran 21 points ahead of Raman in the least white quartile of precincts, while she ran nearly even with Raman in the whitest quartile. The same pattern recurs across the city.
The problem is not that college-educated, white homeowners should be excluded from a socialist coalition, or that having a more professional class base than DSA-LA’s other candidates is somehow bad or suspect. It’s that they cannot constitute the key social base for a majoritarian class-based coalition. A class-alignment strategy depends on organizing the much larger multiracial working class, including voters who do not already identify with progressive politics. The primary gives little evidence that Raman has a distinctive ability to reach those voters beyond DSA’s own candidates.
The voters we need to turn out and persuade for our cadre candidates may be hindered by Raman at the top of the ticket. These are voters we know are winnable to a class struggle message, but Raman’s technocratic message does not resonate with them. DSA-LA has a positive electoral pull with a wide swath of the city’s working class that Raman does not.This means that we could conceivably be decisive in powering a Raman victory. But this is not the situation we are facing: the case for the endorsement is one where we tail Raman, not one where she is coming to the chapter, adopting our program, and asking us to lend our credibility to powering her victory.
We should have confidence in what we’ve built. DSA and our class-struggle message have credibility with workers beyond the brand of an individual candidate. The election results show we should ask for more from our endorsees. Raman has constituencies that DSA needs; DSA also has constituencies that Raman needs. The political relationship is not one in which an isolated socialist organization must attach itself to an existing mass movement that threatens to leave us behind.
Conclusion
Much of this debate has been governed by a very real fear; the fear that something is happening and that DSA will miss it. Socialism is growing. We are winning up and down the ballot all over the country. The Democratic establishment is historically weak. Capital is beginning to polarize against Raman. Thousands of people could be brought into political activity through this race. We should be nervous about standing aside from a moment like that.
That fear makes sense. It keeps us from becoming satisfied with our own internal structures and mistaking organizational neatness for political power. There is a real opportunity cost to declining endorsement, one we take very seriously, just as there is a real opportunity cost to every political decision.
We should recognize that fear, but we cannot let it make our decisions. If every single political opening is treated as too important to maintain the organizational standards DSA-LA has spent a decade constructing, those standards will disappear precisely in the races where they matter most. Over the past decade, we have become much more powerful because candidates increasingly have to take DSA seriously as an organization with its own program, membership, base and capacity, rather than treating us as one more endorsing organization on the progressive checklist.
The line between meeting a political moment and tailing it is extremely thin. There are moments when socialists have to enter political ruptures behind candidates who are not our own, because the opportunity to polarize millions of workers around class and build our durable socialist organization outweighs the contradictions. Bernie was such a moment. AOC in 2028 could be another. The serious case for Raman is that this could become another one.
But our electoral strategy requires judging campaigns as they are, not as we wish them to be. The class confrontation underlying the mayoral race has not translated into the actual campaign Raman is running. Six years of a relationship have produced access without organizational leverage. And because the office at stake is the mayoralty, endorsement would bind our political fortunes to an administration we cannot construct and have limited ability to influence.
Socialists must both recognize political openings and maintain the organizational independence that allows us to seize them. We always must balance between the twin errors of sectarianism and opportunism. The difficult work of democratically deciding strategy is determining when entering a broader movement builds an independent working-class pole—and when it merely makes that pole one component of somebody else's coalition. In this case, we don't believe the potential benefits clear that bar. We urge comrades to vote no on Nithya Raman.
