MEMBERS ARE MEMBERS: 1 Member, 1 Vote For National Leadership
By Daniel C. | DSA-LA
“The system (1M1V) brought in before 2015 had disastrous consequences for Labour and the country when Jeremy Corbyn was elected thanks to mass recruitment of new members and registered supporters.”
“Giving MPs more power in Labour Leadership Elections will ‘De-Corbynize the Party, Insiders Say”
For nearly a year, four words have been at the center of the lead up to DSA’s 2025 National Convention: “One Member, One Vote.” This phrase unites three resolutions, and this article focuses on the one most directly inspired by structural changes recently seen in the fight for member democracy in unions like UAW, and other left wing political parties: 1 Member, 1 Vote For National Leadership.
1 Member, 1 Vote For National Leadership will establish direct election for our national leadership by the entire membership. This means every DSA member in the country will vote on who makes up our highest level leadership body, the NPC (National Political Committee). This changes the current indirect election system, where national convention delegates are the only people allowed to vote for NPC.
Groundwork members have written elsewhere about our other two 1M1V resolutions, which give members power over decision making. But even if these pass, the NPC will still be tasked with the immense power and responsibility of making decisions on a regular basis. It is crucial that members are able to trust that the NPC’s composition represents the will of the members accurately.
1M1V for National Leadership is designed to ensure all members have access to clear information when choosing leaders, and an equal say in choosing who leaders are. As a result we would have a leadership body that more accurately represents members as a whole, and leaders that are more accountable to that membership as a result. Our current system hinders this in some key ways:
First, chapters elect delegates before NPC candidates are even announced, meaning members do not know who is running for NPC when electing the delegates who will elect them.
Second, around 70% of delegates are elected on caucus slates, meaning a large portion of the NPC’s makeup is effectively decided before candidates are even declared. This means candidates must heavily weigh caucus politics when campaigning, which leads to communicating in ways that are more aimed at caucuses than the overall membership.
Third, formal requirements for clear information on candidates are surprisingly limited. All candidates need to do is fill out a very general questionnaire that is emailed to members, and attend a single candidate forum. Any other information, including things as crucial to voters as how NPC members will vote on major resolutions, is strictly voluntary, and hard for delegates to find even when volunteered.
Fourth, members vote for the NPC in the middle of convention, meaning candidates can easily hide how they will vote on a whole days’ worth of convention resolutions.
Finally, members of small chapters can be completely disenfranchised. While members of large chapters will likely get at least some of their preferred delegates elected, a chapter with one delegate who wins 31-29 means 29 members have nop say on the NPC composition. In chapters with uncontested elections, the number of members not represented at convention or in NPC votes is even higher.
When combined with the sheer number of candidates to choose from, this lack of accessible and clear information, dominance of pre-decided caucus slates, and odd timeline makes it easy for things like caucus connections, personal charisma, and aesthetics to outweigh political substance in leadership elections.
Instead, imagine a system where leadership candidates both can and must appeal to the full membership. This means candidates will have to communicate their visions in terms that are legible to everyone who carries our card, rather than being incentivized to appeal to slices of insiders first.
Whatever your internal orientation is within DSA, this should be good news. Far more members will be exposed to your ideas, which means many more chances to win them over. You will spend far less time worrying about how to phrase things in order to appeal to the formalized factions who can dominate convention votes, and much more communicating with rank and file members on your own terms, in the most concrete and accurate way possible.
A directly elected leadership body that is more accountable to the political makeup of members, and one that has a greater mandate from members to carry their will out is an unambiguous victory for our organization’s ability to intervene decisively in national politics.
One Member One Vote for National Leadership will supplement the town-hall democracy of local DSA meetings with a national counterpart by pulling the murky world of DSA subfactions and top level political decisionmaking out of Discord and Signal chats and Twitter into everyone’s hands equally, where the members can make sense of it on their own terms. I’ve met enough so-called “paper members” to be excited for this experiment in democracy. I trust them to make their decisions, and I trust all members who seek leadership, to be able to lay out our visions to them, win or lose.
I don’t believe direct elections are a silver bullet for our organization’s problems, and to be clear, mass-membership elections require institutions to make sure those elections are meaningful, representative, and fair. DSA members deserve to hear from the differing orientations they will be given the chance to choose between, and they deserve a chance to ask the NPC candidates questions to clarify their perspectives.
That is why, in collaboration with comrades from within Groundwork and outside it, I wrote an amendment (CB02-A01) to address some good faith critiques of 1M1V. The adjustments made in the amendment aimed to resolve two main criticisms of the 1M1V system: That it will reduce the amount of deliberation by members before votes, and that it will reduce the quality of campaigning for those votes down to whichever candidates know the most members.
Our goal is the opposite: to increase the amount of information members have access to, to heighten deliberation among members before votes (as the majority of the NPC electorate under the current system is already committed to one slate or another before taking their seats at convention), and redistribute power from the few well-connected caucus insiders at the top, to the many at the bottom.
So we took critiques seriously, considered what was lacking, and wrote up: Deliberative Democracy for One Member One Vote. We responded to these concerns by including provisions for a national in-person deliberative process for NPC candidate questionnaires, a pure STV election system, membership-wide NPC debate, and equal access to official campaign platforms for all candidates. We also bolstered universal information standards by requiring specific information members currently do not receive from candidates, like a statement on how they will vote on major resolutions, which now must be given to all members.
When writing the amendment, we assumed that the vast majority of delegates and caucuses believe that the average dues paying DSA member:
A. Identifies with democratic socialism as a project
B. Is intelligent enough to consider and discuss substantive political information when it is made available to them and make decisions accordingly
C. Is worthy of having a direct say in the makeup of our national-level leadership.
I and other 1M1V resolution authors are heartened to hear from the many delegates that this amendment has already moved from skepticism to support. But for those who continue to attack the idea that DSA members should choose DSA’s leaders directly, I find it necessary to call the question.
Should everyone who carries our membership card and who pays their dues have the right to decide who our national leadership is?
I maintain that I am not one whit better than anyone who gives our organization their hard-earned dollars and who takes the risk of having their name on a list of organized democratic socialists during a period of brutal state repression. I’m not one whit better than my mom, who wore a keffiyah and praised Mitterand at a Kentucky high school in the 1980s. I’m not one whit better than my former colleague at SEIU, who’s a dues paying DSA member as well as a convinced Maoist Third Worldist that doesn’t show up to meetings because he thinks we’re too liberal. I’m not one whit better than my friend Jack, a dues paying electrician that can’t make meetings on the weekend and took me to see No Other Land, and I’m not one whit better than a friend of mine from Western Kentucky University’s YDSA who went on to lead the Starbucks Workers United organizing committee at the Chicago roastery and doesn’t go to DSA meetings because they feel excluded by academic language and political posturing. Though these talented organizers, rank and file union members, fellow builders of a better world and cherished dues-paying comrades of mine may be given the snide label of "paper members,” I hold that they deserve to have a say in their party’s leadership and in doing so aid in building a truly democratic mass party.
Fundamentally, the fight over 1M1V boils down to a single question: will DSA’s leadership be responsible to the thousands (and, hopefully soon, millions) convinced that our organization is the vehicle for providing redistribution at home and peace abroad, or will it continue to be an arena for the caucus insiders to play inside baseball?
The current electoral system - where so many members are significantly underrepresented, where caucuses and local cliques can control the flow of information to and voting methods for delegates, and where the vast majority of our membership is structurally unable to participate in the selection of our highest level leadership - is simply not capable of turning national DSA into a democratically run, mass socialist party by and for the working class.
Our membership is a subset of a subset of a subset of the whole mass of people we will need to bring on board to win working-class power and socialism; the layer of members currently empowered by our unequal national structure is an even smaller number than that. We need inclusive, democratic institutions responsible to the majority of those that give us their dues and carry our card.
The debate over 1M1V should be as direct as it is in unions. Instead, it is rife with euphemisms and scare words. Since few detractors are willing to say “I believe that dues paying members are politically naive and easily manipulated”, or worse, “I believe that the views and politics of the vast majority of DSA members are so undeveloped and inferior that they should not be allowed to choose their own party's leaders” we see increasingly abstract criticisms that attempt to portray our current, frequently dysfunctional system as the height of democracy, and argue that the ultimate authority in DSA comes not from our membership, but from the delegates we elect to represent us at convention.
The most transparently bad-faith of these arguments claim that 1M1V would turn DSA into a liberal business union or nonprofit. On the contrary, “One Member, One Vote!” has been the near-unanimous cry of the radical left in working-class institutions around the world, from the UK Labour Party’s Corbynite era to the UAW effort that elected Shawn Fain. In 2020, DSA members rightly critiqued the Working Families Party on similar grounds. They pointed out how the WFP's lack of a 1M1V process for national endorsements allowed party insiders to nominate Elizabeth Warren, despite the mass membership's preference for Bernie Sanders. Inclusive institutions that grant membership as a whole a direct say in nationwide political orientation are the polar opposite model from the top-down structures of authority in hollowed out business unions and NGOs.
What's even more concerning is how hollow these arguments are. Some 1M1V critics, noting the weakness of the above arguments as well as I have, are now pivoting to an appeal to the delegates, saying, "you're asking them to vote away their own power." This approach completely disregards the delegates' own intelligence and principles, opting instead for a simple appeal to self interest. I have faith in DSA members and the delegates we elect to represent us, and it is frustrating to see opponents of 1M1V think so little of us all.
All of these arguments against 1M1V are the result of failures in vision and ambition. Membership-wide elections can broaden buy-in, build political consensus, and create more engaged and militant members. Members, even those that don’t go to all the meetings, deserve to be understood as fellow comrades, not passive receptacles for whipping instructions. Our vision for a members-first mass organization places faith in the delegates to co-govern alongside our membership, to mentor, poll, organize, and listen to them, to serve as more than just jealous guardians of the right to decide our highest-level leadership.
I want someone to be able to join DSA, go to a 101, and be told not just that we are a democratic organization accountable to the members, but we are a democratic organization accountable to them. “DSA belongs to you as much as it belongs to me”, as Zohran Mamdani emphatically stated. I want every member to understand the truth of this statement and how deeply DSA believes in them. From Louisville to Los Angeles we should be able to tell new members that they have a direct say in our highest leadership, not that they can (depending on the activity requirements, voting method, and caucus breakdown of their chapter) vote for people who can vote for people who run the organization.
If you or your comrades are in DSA because you want to build DSA into a Democratic Socialist Party, armed with a mandate from its members and strategic unity, then 1M1V is nothing to fear. Simply go to your members and ask for their vote; indeed, our amendment makes sure that the national Growth and Development Committee will help you do just that!
If you’re skeptical about 1M1V, but believe in the egalitarian principle that all members should have the same say in our leadership, then please bring an amendment to the floor; we really want this to pass!
If you’re one of the many on the fence about 1M1V, I encourage you to listen to the voices not just of prominent Socialist intellectuals, but of the less active members in your own life. Would they feel more included and valued, would DSA’s internal feuds and infighting be demystified, if the candidates for NPC were made to appeal to them directly? To answer their questions? To argue their positions openly in front of them?
I want my mom, and your mom, and your buddy who headlines a hardcore band, and the guy you heard complaining about his boss at the bar who you recruited, and the union sister who you had to talk to for weeks to join DSA, and all the people who are our fellow Democratic Socialists but who might not devote their every waking moment to it to know who Ashik and Alex and Megan are. I want them to come to their own conclusions about who best represents their perspectives on how DSA should move forward. I want this because they pay their dues too, I want this because I’m not a better comrade than they are because I’ve knocked a certain number of doors, led a certain number of campaigns, and had a certain amount of arguments about the party surrogate strategy on signal. DSA should not have an active and passive citizenship distinction, time is money, and some people have less of it than others. We cannot become an organization leading the masses until the masses in our organization lead.
Members are Members, All Power to ‘Em
Questions about 1 Member, 1 Vote? Join our upcoming 1M1V Panel to learn more!
