Groundwork’s Class Alignment Electoral Strategy

Why Elections?

How socialists engage with electoral work is a question as old as socialism, but as DSA has grown and engaged in electoral work, the organization has established a broad consensus on the utility of engaging in electoral work itself. Beyond that, there has developed clear supermajorities at convention for some ideas that were formerly controversial: running on the Democratic ballot line for at least the near future, building toward a partylike structure¹, generally avoiding “paper endorsements”², and a relentless focus on door-to-door field campaigns. Since these debates have generally been put to bed, DSA and its tendencies have struggled to articulate a more comprehensive theory of electoral politics.

Groundwork would like to put forward our electoral strategy: the Class Alignment strategy of electoral socialism, a holistic approach rooted in a Marxist analysis and the practical application of the lessons learned over the last eight years of electoral organizing in DSA. We owe a great deal to comrades from across the organization who have formulated some of these ideas, in particular the concept of class struggle elections, first explicated by the Bread & Roses Caucus, and the electoral programs and strategies spearheaded by the Socialist Majority Caucus and others.

First, our strategy rests on the basic analysis that the fundamental obstacle of modern society is the capitalist class that dominates political and economic life at every level in this country and globally. This class has ordered society according to its own narrow interests, creating wealth inequality at unprecedented levels, destroying the basic ecological premise of life on earth, and fueling imperial war and genocide abroad and fascistic attacks on our people at home. This system of class relations has withstood centuries of organizing by the socialist movement.

As such, we view the primary goal of the socialist movement as the defeat of the capitalist class and the seizure of power by the working class to reorient society for the benefit of all. In order to win this conflict, our class needs to build the only weapon we can: organization. For us, this organization must be a mass democratic party of the working class. This is where DSA comes in. Our primary role in this moment is to build a party of, for, and by the working class: a fighting force capable of the world-historic transition from capitalism to democratic socialism.

Why do we engage in electoral work? This is a question that has not been settled in DSA — we have agreed in the short-term that it is because electoral work has grown the organization and popularized socialism. But where are we heading with it? As more DSA members are elected to office, we need a coherent theory of what it is they have been elected to do. Do we elect candidates just to raise the red flag of socialism and propagandize? Are they elected instead to improve material conditions for the working class and demonstrate democratic socialist capacity for governance? Our approach rejects both strategies and synthesizes these ideas into a comprehensive framework for winning socialism that fundamentally abolishes the class system, with practical applications for chapters and their work.

The central problem for the socialist movement today is the lack of working-class organization. Our approach to electoral work should be to use it primarily as a tool to build this organization. The primary goal for electoral work is Class Alignment: building a workers’ movement large and organized enough to take power. This means politicizing the working class as a class for itself and winning a majority of workers to our cause. These are prerequisites to socialism. This requires the creation of a left-labor electoral bloc cohered around class.

But the working class also needs a vehicle: the mass party. This must be a democratic membership organization for workers. Membership decides democratically on a program, elects a representative leadership to direct work, selects candidates for elected office, functions with organizational unity, and — crucially — seeks to take and wield power. Workers’ power lies in our numbers, but without organization, these numbers can’t be brought to bear.

In the electoral arena, class alignment can be promoted through agitation-heavy campaigns that cleave workers from capital and move them to act politically as workers, developing a self-conscious working-class political identity. We can also use the contested terrain of the state to win transformative reforms, not for the sake of improving conditions of the working class as an end, but to open up space for working-class organization at the base. Socialists in office can win reforms that allow workers and tenants to organize, shift the balance of power away from capital, and expose the nature of class struggle by fomenting conflict between capital and labor. Socialists can also win majorities and govern at the local level. Electoral work must exist in concert with other socialist organizing work in the service of class alignment, rebuilding working class political consciousness at a mass scale, and building DSA as a political party that can act as the vehicle of working-class political activity.

We do not advocate for reforms merely to raise living standards for workers, but to increase working-class organization and inculcate class struggle. Reforms should disempower capital and build working class self-activity. Rather than retreat from demands that can be won, we must advance those that expand working-class organization. Nationalizing sectors of the economy, winning labor rights, and guaranteeing housing rights do not ameliorate class struggle; they foment it. Tenant protections that enable rent strikes, public control of utilities that limit capital’s power, expansions of labor rights like the PRO Act that allow unions to organize on a mass scale, and decommodification efforts like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All are examples of transformative reforms that open space for working-class power and create the basis for future struggle. These are not technocratic tweaks. They are class antagonisms legislated. These are the terrain on which socialism becomes possible.

To win these reforms, we need to engage with electoral politics and grapple with the contradictions of building power — namely, that we must win elections and engage with workers on the mass scale only available via electoral politics and simultaneously sustain political independence via partybuilding. These reforms are winnable, but not currently by socialists alone. Yet they are necessary prerequisites for socialists to act alone. Therefore, we must engage in legislative fights even where socialists are not a majority. Winning reforms that open space for working-class organization and change the balance of power between labor and capital, at the local, state, and national levels — even through working with non-socialists — will build class independence rather than stymie it.

Some tendencies in DSA want to “vote in” socialism, electing a majority and then legislating in reforms that socialize the means of production. Others have a purely agitational view. For many in DSA, electoral work exists only as a project from election cycle to election cycle, without a long-term strategy for turning this work into a concrete roadmap for socialism.

Building class alignment through electoral organizing involves two tasks that are both necessary but also often opposing, working in a dialectical relationship: politicizing workers at a mass scale, and building a disciplined party that can then fight for and win the redistribution of power to our class. Our approach synthesizes these two tasks into two distinct types of electoral campaigns: Class struggle elections and cadre elections.

¹ A democratic membership organization with a platform that selects and runs its own candidates. This was first explored in DSA’s specific context by Seth Ackerman and then further by Jared Abbot & Dustin Gaustella.

² Endorsements that function only as recommendations of which candidate is better, rather than engaging in a concerted campaign to elect the endorsee socialists.

Class Struggle & Cadre Elections

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.

Practical Chapter Strategy

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.

Ballot Line: Understanding the Terrain

‍ ‍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.

Conjuncture & Conclusion

Every socialist organization must confront the issue of political time. Electoral politics does not move at a steady or predictable pace. Most of the time, the terrain is stubbornly resistant to major shifts, and winning anything at all requires patient organizing in the districts where a socialist can plausibly win. But there are also moments when the political order becomes unsettled, when voter loyalties loosen, and when millions look for an alternative that speaks to their sense that something in public life has gone fundamentally wrong. These moments do not arrive on a schedule, and they do not last long. Yet they have outsized consequences for the socialist movement because they allow us to reach working-class people on a scale no amount of methodical base-building can achieve on its own.

A serious electoral strategy has to navigate both kinds of political time. The routine work of developing cadre, winning downballot offices, and consolidating a disciplined organization is what gives socialists the credibility and capacity needed to act in the first place. But the patient, district-by-district approach rests on an implicit understanding that, at some point, there must be a break in the ordinary political cycle. Class alignment cannot be built by canvassing our way through socialist-leaning districts forever. It requires moments when large blocs of working class voters shift their allegiance at once, and when socialists are able to define a public conflict with the political establishment that resonates far beyond our own membership and traditional voting base.

The difficulty comes in knowing how to read the moment. If we assume every exciting race is a realignment moment, we spread ourselves thin, chase symbolic contests, and drift into electoral adventurism. If we assume no moment ever rises to that level and stay forever confined to cautious calculations about knock rates and district demographics, we consign ourselves to a slow march through institutions that were never designed for us to win. The danger runs in both directions: overestimating the moment can leave the organization demoralized and isolated, while underestimating it can cause us to miss the kind of opening that created DSA’s last major period of growth.

Bernie Sanders’s campaigns remain the clearest illustration. On paper, they were long shots, but they expressed a crisis in the political order that millions of people recognized instantly. They changed the political horizon of an entire generation, not through the strength of DSA’s canvassing alone, but because they altered the terrain itself. Even in defeat, they produced a strategic victory for the socialist movement, pulling large numbers of working-class people into political action and creating the conditions under which DSA could grow into an organization of meaningful size.

Downballot insurgencies rarely produce such transformations. If a race does not have real visibility, if the media does not treat it as a contest over the future direction of politics, and if the class lines are not clear enough to register with ordinary voters, then the basic calculus of patient, capacity-aware organizing should guide the organization’s decision. We cannot afford to treat every race as a referendum on the political establishment, nor can we simply hope that symbolic losses will build momentum. Sometimes losses consolidate the socialist movement; sometimes they merely confirm the limits of our reach. The difference lies in the political scale of the race and the degree to which it speaks to deeper structural contradictions.

A mature strategy, therefore, requires an ability to distinguish between normal political time and political time in motion. In normal times, the organization builds its bench, strengthens its internal democratic structures, selects cadre candidates carefully, and focuses on winnable contests that allow it to demonstrate socialist governance and secure reforms that expand the field of working-class organizing. This is the foundation upon which everything else rests.

But when the political environment shifts, when the fault lines of class conflict become visible to a wider public, and when a contest opens that draws a clear line between the socialist movement and a deeply unpopular political establishment, the organization has to be willing to move beyond our ordinary habits. We have to be prepared to act at a scale disproportionate to our usual resources and accept the risk that comes with attempting to lead in a moment of political fluidity. These are the rare opportunities when socialists can win new constituencies, reshape public narratives, and build the kind of majoritarian force that ordinary electoral cycles cannot produce.

The central challenge for DSA is not choosing one of these orientations over the other; it is learning how to interpret the conjuncture, how to judge when the terrain is shifting, and how to avoid mistaking either caution or boldness for a universal rule. The organization must always be building patiently enough that it can seize the next opening, and always be alert enough to recognize an opening when it comes. When is the Democratic Party leadership unpopular enough to take big swings, and when are we in a time of retrenchment?

Put differently, the strategic question for DSA is never simply whether a race is winnable. The question is what kind of political time we are living through, what kind of political time a given contest expresses, and whether the moment demands patient construction or decisive intervention. A socialist movement that understands the difference will be capable of building power in ordinary periods while also rising to meet the extraordinary ones.

This current period — the second Trump term, with a discredited Democratic establishment and masses in the streets looking for political leadership — could be a time for broadening our horizons in a smart and strategic way. DSA should be bolder in the campaigns we run in the next few years, drawing a contradiction between ourselves and the establishment in visible races. The calculus here is: Does running this race, and taking this gamble, actively politicize workers at scale? Bold races, like running for Mayor of New York or challenging House Democratic leadership, must be a bigger part of our strategy going forward.

Political Moment: Assessing the Terrain

Conclusion

DSA has proven that electoral politics can grow our ranks, popularize socialism, and win material victories that shift power away from capital. We have also proven that without a coherent theory guiding this work, electoral gains become difficult to coordinate, difficult to defend, and difficult to integrate into a broader project of working-class organization. We are no longer a small group experimenting at the margins of municipal races. We are a national organization with elected officials, real political responsibilities, and a base of working-class people who now expect socialists to act with purpose.

The Class Alignment electoral strategy is our approach. It begins from the recognition that the central crisis of our movement is the disorganization of the working class. Electoral work is a key tool to building that organization. Class struggle campaigns reveal the basic antagonism between labor and capital to millions, drawing workers into political life with a new sense that their interests are collective and in conflict with the existing order. Cadre campaigns consolidate that politicization into durable organization, build the party-surrogate we need, and allow socialists to govern and enact transformative reforms that open space for organic working-class self-activity.

Together, these campaign types form the two prongs of the socialist electoral project. The specific goals of each type are often in conflict, focusing on party building and running our own versus mass politicization. One speaks to the masses at moments of heightened contradiction; the other constructs the disciplined structures that allow us to act as a vehicle for working-class power. Neither is sufficient alone.

Our approach to the ballot line, to coalition work, and to political time itself flows from this strategic orientation. We operate on the Democratic ballot line not out of loyalty, but because it remains the only mass arena available for contesting power at scale. We engage in coalition work not by dissolving into broader progressive fronts, but by asserting a distinct socialist pole within a necessary left-labor bloc. And we calibrate our electoral interventions according to the political moment, understanding that most periods require patient construction, while some rare openings demand bold leadership and carry the possibility of shifting the terrain for years to come.

What this strategy ultimately demands is discipline, clarity, and a shared horizon. Discipline to avoid chasing symbolic contests or overextending our limited capacity. Clarity to distinguish between campaigns that build working-class power and those that merely express progressive sentiment. And a shared horizon that views every electoral decision not as an isolated choice but as a step toward a democratic, membership-based mass party capable of contesting for state power on behalf of the working class, and ultimately using that state power to open the space for further organic working class self-activity and organization needed for workers to finally seize power as a class.

We should be sober about the challenges ahead. The capitalist class remains organized, well-financed, and deeply embedded in the state. The Democratic Party remains structurally hostile to our project. The working class remains divided by race, geography, industry, and ideology. But we should also be clear-eyed about what is possible. In less than a decade, socialists in the United States turned socialism from a marginal set of groupules into a national force, elected dozens of candidates, recruited tens of thousands of members, and reopened the question of whether the working class could once again act as a class.

The next few years will determine whether we can turn that opening into real political power. The path forward is a slow, disciplined construction of a party-like organization rooted in the working class, combined with the readiness to intervene decisively when the political order fractures and the masses seek new leadership. It is the patient selection of cadre who can govern, combined with the boldness to seize the moments when class conflict becomes visible to the entire country.

This is the class alignment strategy. It is the project of binding millions of workers into a coherent political force, constructing the organizational vehicle capable of representing them, and using electoral politics as a tool to abolish the class system altogether.

If we take this project seriously, and if we act with strategic discipline and political ambition, DSA can become the kind of organization this moment demands. We can build a working class ready to govern. We can build a party capable of confronting the capitalist class and winning.