Electoralism and the Electoral System

Promises, K.R Chamberlain, The Masses November 1916

Eric L

As the dust settles on the 2024 elections in the United States, the prognosis is grim. The reactionary and politically repressive Republican Party has gained total control over every branch of government. Meanwhile, the mouthpieces of the Democratic Party have failed to offer any reasonable reflection about the failure of their right-wing messaging in the lead up to November. Harris fully endorsed Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden’s campaign of genocide in Palestine, highlighted support from the Cheney family, essentially adopted Trump’s 2016 immigration platform, and abandoned any elements of the economic populism that Harris pretended to embrace in her 2019 run. 

In response to their defeat, establishment Democratic politicians and pundits have dug in their heels. Op-eds and interviews now embrace throwing the most vulnerable populations under the bus—calling for abandonment of trans people, embracing tough-on-crime policies, and, absurdly and in defiance of all polling data, even claiming Democratic politicians did not embrace Israel or crack down on Palestinian activism enough.

Few socialists would dispute that mainstream American politics is in its darkest place since the surge of interest in socialism after 2016. And this was clear before a vote was cast—the election pitted an administration actively engaged in genocide against the anti-democratic, cruel and vindictive ideology of Trump (who, it should be noted, is an equally enthusiastic proponent of Israel’s crimes). 

A bill pending in Congress would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to unilaterally strip a nonprofit organization of its status based on their deeming the group a “terrorist supporting organization.” While the thought of Trump’s administration possessing these powers is chilling, the bill predates the election and has two Democratic co-sponsors—both AIPAC favorites. The reason House Democrats largely turned against the bill was that it would grant these powers to Trump, not Harris.

Now, more than ever, it is clear that the Democratic Party is an inhospitable environment for socialist politics. Its hostility to left-wing politics is not, as some pundits like to pretend, a function of electoral calculus, but a product of its class-backing and the resultant structure of the party. It is vital that socialists build DSA  into a politically independent mass party in opposition to the Democratic Party, rather than liquidating into groups and coalitions with diametrically opposed interests. 

The Fight for Political Independence

How to best pursue this political independence has long been a topic of debate among DSA’s “partyist” flank. While necessary in the long run, an independent DSA ballot line is secondary to the issues  of operational discipline and parliamentary strategy— a point made excellently by Parker McQueeney in the Weekly Worker. The Democratic Party organization, and the Democratic Party ballot-line, are only tangentially related. The former is essentially an opaque fundraising shell represented by a rotating cast of familiar faces in Party leadership. There are few procedures for discipline outside of the soft-power of funding, career prospects, and institutional ties. 

This is a dynamic with which DSA ought to be all too familiar. When a DSA-aligned slate won leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party in an upset, the old guard simply withdrew the money, quit en masse, and formed parallel organizations to influence the Democratic Party ballot-line. In Buffalo, DSA-backed India Walton won the Democratic nomination in the 2021 mayoral election, only to be defeated by incumbent Byron Brown’s well-funded and institutionally connected write-in campaign in the general. 

The Democratic Party’s day-to-day operations are invisible to the average worker, yet it retains its status through legal fiction. Universal suffrage is reduced to the infrequent, atomized choice of ticking a box next to the ‘R’ or the ‘D’—and for the more engaged voter, to enjoy the wider variety of tightly controlled party primaries, 

These choices are often made in large districts that require enormous financial backing and institutional support to win in the absence of mass politics. Undergirding this is a campaign finance law tailored to individuals over parties, strict ballot access requirements for third parties in most states, and limited means to effect change to the electoral system beyond the legislature. 

Our legal-constitutional order forms the structure within which the capitalist politician thrives, making use of access to money and undemocratically obtained institutional connections. Meanwhile, the legal machinations surrounding the form of the political party serve to actively stifle its potential as a vehicle for mass politics. 

Socialists in the United States must recognize these facts when determining our electoral strategy. We derive our principles not simply from “doing the right thing,” or as a rote response to the conditions that we face. Our principles serve as a road map for developing tactics which can transform conditions to meet our goals. These challenges do carry a silver lining: they are answered by the substance and form of a mass party, especially in the realm of electoral politics.

Despite its legal status as a 501(c)(4) with no ballot line of its own, DSA is a political party in all but name, but not in the bourgeois sense. It is a membership organization with powers to discipline, affiliate and disaffiliate, and endorse its members. To compare with an example in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party determines its nominees for office from the top-down. Generally speaking, incumbents are automatically re-selected, although under the Keir Starmer regime exceptions have been made to de-select members of the labour left. 

If Labour Party membership is unhappy with leadership, well that’s too bad! A leadership challenge requires support from a large portion of the Members of Parliament, themselves largely selected by leadership. It is a system built specifically for the purpose of keeping the left from ever gaining power. Why then would a socialist ever be a member of the Labour Party? They might as well join the Democratic Party. 

Most DSA chapters will need to prioritize building up end-to-end campaigns, however, to put themselves on the map as a real political option. This is necessary to build on, unify, and propel the organizing that members do in other areas—like labor, abolition, or tenant organizing. There is a crowded graveyard of socialist third-parties in this last century which can attest to this point, and which rode a spiral of ballot access campaigns into single-issue irrelevance. An adoption of a “clean break” policy (abandoning the Democratic Party ballot-line) would indicate that we clearly see ourselves as a party with a distinct program to bring to the working class with the means to organize an independent presence on the ballot. 

It would also mean DSA would have to be willing to discipline members who continued to run on the Democratic Party line, even those who are committed to our program. Could we truly convince an effective DSA elected who has voted and agitated in line with our platform that she must either run third-party, and likely lose her seat, or else lose DSA endorsement? Such a tactic—adopted prematurely and under the uneven political and electoral conditions that various chapters currently face—would risk not only alienating the members who worked to get these people elected, but limit the ability of DSA members to serve as tribunes in the halls of power. Advocates of a premature break often seem to place primacy on the ballot line as the determining factor in our internal politics. 

Similarly, the “dirty stay” (the belief that DSA cannot currently achieve an independent existence outside the Democratic Party), while tactically correct on the ballot-line question, shares a similarly narrow view of the political terrain. Its arguments lose sight of the fact that DSA is inherently distinct from the Democratic Party, and that members tend to join us for this reason. This signifies a broader desire for political independence as a motivating force in the working class.

Many comrades who support working within the institutional Democratic Party point to “victories” that demonstrate its purported benefits. David Duhalde of Socialist Majority Caucus has recently written an article which is replete with misconceptions about DSA’s relationship with the organizational Democratic Party in its attempt to chart the “successes” of this strategy 

First noting that DSA neither endorsed a vote for nor against Kamala Harris, Duhalde sidesteps the fact that his caucus implicitly supported urging members to tactically vote for Harris. He then points to the “success” of the Uncommitted Movement in urging Joe Biden to step aside, and in convincing Harris to select Tim Walz as her Vice-President. DSA embarasses itself by trying to claim such “victories.” 

While the unpopularity of the genocide in Gaza may have played some role, the primary consideration in Biden’s dropping-out was his visible mental decline and the subsequent loss of faith of Democratic Party insiders. This was spurred by a loss of public support, and more importantly by donors withholding money from the campaign.

Meanwhile, figures on the left flank of the Democratic Party—such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—inexplicably eroded their credibility by calling on Biden to remain in the race. Harris, once nominated, took pains not to break with Biden on Gaza in any meaningful way. 

“Uncommitted,” a campaign worthy of active support under difficult circumstances, was an unmitigated failure in the objective of influencing the policy of Democratic Party leadership. It failed to garner even the token gesture of a speech at the Democratic National Convention. It failed to get Harris to shift her policy of support for Israel by an inch. Yet many of its prominent representatives still supported a vote for Harris, in spite of having won zero concessions. 

Had the entire organization, rather than only a faction, supported the No Votes for Genocide campaign as a continuation of the mass pressure tactic that National Uncommitted abandoned, it may have had more of an impact. This was not the case. The Democratic Party made a bet that the Uncommitted Movement was an empty threat. Although Harris bled Muslim and Arab support, her campaign was not entirely wrong in this appraisal. Many of Uncommitted’s organizers, particularly the national section that kicked off the first state campaign “Listen 2 Michigan,” lined up behind Harris. 

The choice of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as Harris’s running mate, was sometimes framed as flowing from a fear of backlash to Shapiro’s hardline pro-Israel views. But this was of course never acknowledged by Harris, who seemed to be more focused on campaigning form, personal impressions, and governing records than showing progressive face. In those respects, Walz soared above the “showboating” Shapiro, who also had a number of looming scandals. And Walz did well to toe the line. Rather than running moderate cover for Harris’s views, Walz took a more pro-Israel stance during the election than he ever had previously.

A desire to celebrate these phantom “successes” flows from a strategy which views DSA as a junior partner in a broad left-liberal coalition. The Democratic Party establishment sees no such partnership, and holds the left in complete disregard. Harris, who refused to allow a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention, spent weeks campaigning with neoconservative icon Liz Cheney and proudly trumpeted the support of her war criminal father. 

It is difficult to remember the last election in which the left was so thoroughly rejected by the Democratic Party establishment. There is no partnership, and insisting on its existence against all evidence only makes DSA look weak.

It becomes imperative that DSA adopt the electoral strategy of “party surrogate in form, clean break in content.” As long as our electoral system is structured to fight rather than facilitate mass party organizing, we need to recognize that the “dirty break” is not about breaking socialists from the Democrats. It means winning the working class away from the Democratic Party’s institutional grip to organize independently through DSA. 

Positions like the “dirty stay” and the “clean break” reflect partial answers to the problems that emerge from the sheer difficulty of this task. DSA shouldn’t beg for scraps from Democratic Party institutions, nor should it abstain from contesting their primaries where state laws throw up insurmountable barriers to the formation of an independent ballot line. What is needed is to build on our own autonomous, democratically-organized campaigns. 

We can accomplish this by taking the fight from the primaries to the general elections, developing systematic outreach amongst the rank-and-file of working class institutions, and putting forward a clear political program that poses the question of power in clear connection with the day-to-day struggles of the working class. 

We need to organize independent socialist blocs within local and state legislatures that can agitate around our program, working within the political mandate of their chapters and the national organization. Even when running on the Democratic ballot line, rooting our electoral work in DSA as a democratic political project while simultaneously fighting for electoral reforms is what will make class-political independence possible.

Electoral Reform and the Battle for Democracy

This brings us to one of the most strategically difficult yet overlooked results of election night: the widespread failure of electoral reform. The first-past-the-post system used in the vast majority of elections constrains the political imagination. Allowing a candidate to win with mere plurality support all but ensures the continuance of a two-party system. 

A series of referenda on the ballots this November addressed the question of adopting ranked-choice-voting, or RCV. Ranked-choice-voting is not the most representative form of allocating representatives—it is beaten out on that count by  proportional representation. However, with the federal prohibition on proportional representation and many similar state laws, advocates of a more democratic system have turned to RCV as the most immediately viable solution.  

While ranked-choice-voting was adopted in Washington, D.C., it was rejected handily in every state it was on the ballot. This includes Nevada, a state where the measure had passed previously  but required a second ratification to be adopted. Meanwhile, in Alaska, one of two states that already uses RCV, an effort to repeal the system failed by just 0.2% after an extended recount. These votes have gone under the radar, but ought to be understood as a major blow to the effort to build political independence from the Democratic Party, limiting necessary avenues for  tactical flexibility.

These movements have suffered not just from outright opposition on behalf of the  Republican Party. The Democratic Party has pursued a typically opportunistic and incoherent response, vacillating between support, opposition, and neutrality based on the short-term calculus of  relative harm or benefit to their candidates. These campaigns have also often been somewhat disjointed, and disassociated from any national narrative of democratization. 

Advocates of more immediately achievable electoral reforms such as FairVote similarly suffer from the narrowness of their mission. Being staff-driven NGOs, they are often far-removed from any broader political movement. While FairVote does theoretically support proportional ranked-choice voting, the bulk of their activism is oriented toward advocating ranked-choice voting in single-member constituencies. While far preferable to first-past-the-post, this still falls short of an electoral system that enables workers to harness our freedom of association for political action. If anything, it ties electoral reform to the continuation of the two-party system.

The adoption of party-list proportional representation, while a distant prospect, would enable the organization of a DSA slate. These candidates would be selected democratically by our membership and could be removed at the next election, rather than an individual endorsee who relies on a personal brand for election, insulating them  from any loss of faith by the organization. This individualist approach to political action is a product of our single-winner electoral system, which RCV does not change. This is in addition to the campaign finance laws that divorce membership organizations from accountable representation.

DSA is uniquely suited to the fight for democracy. DSA, unlike the Democratic Party or liberal NGOs, recognizes the undemocratic nature of the United States’ electoral system and constitutional order. Similarly, it also recognizes the necessity of party organizations like itself to build the democracy we need. 

The cause of adopting a truly democratic-republican form of government is not a question readily put before voters in the media or through electoral forums. When electoral reforms are on the ballot, we have the opportunity to bring this political vision into focus. DSA ought to be at the vanguard of fighting for reforms that democratize the system, while tying it to a comprehensive program for revolutionary democracy and socialism. It should put substantial effort into messaging, ballot initiatives, and legislation through its elected officials towards this purpose.

Conclusion

In the short term, DSA should take a two-pronged approach: (a) running candidates where chapters can focus on building end-to-end democratic campaigns and putting forward DSA’s program, which means openness to running in the Democratic primary; and (b) working toward an electoral system that will eventually allow DSA full independence—including, when the time is right, running candidates on its own ballot line. This means DSA should also support efforts towards ranked-choice-voting as an immediate reform, both within DSA publications and as a policy endorsed by our elected officials. 

However, we must engage these campaigns on the condition that we can openly express an alternative path forward to the working class. We can utilize these efforts to highlight the necessity of wielding a mass party in the battle for democracy, the fundamentally undemocratic nature of our political system, and the necessity of extending these reforms to the establishment of multi-member constituencies and party-list proportional representation. DSA-endorsed candidates for federal office also must be asked to support the repeal of the federal law barring proportional representation. 

These reforms alone do not amount to a democratic republic. This would require a fusion of powers under the command of the legislature, an end to federalism, and sweeping changes to the executive branch— effectively an overthrow of the Constitution. But they enable the political organizing necessary to form the class political consciousness that understands this revolutionization of the state as its primary task.

There are no shortcuts that will establish DSA as a national political force  outside of patient work using all available means. That large part of the workers, trade-unionists, and even socialists engage primarily with politics through the lens of elections is inarguable. DSA’s status as an electoral force is hard-won and should not be tossed away through adventurist campaigns of questionable utility. Electoral reforms must be pursued both for the sake of democracy as an end-in-itself, and as means to further the party project by expanding avenues for political independence.

On the DSA Left, though the details may differ, there is a consensus on the necessity of building a socialist party. I argue that socialists in the United States already have in DSA a party in the most important sense, at least its embryonic form. DSA has the ability to remove its members, the ability to condition support on adoption of our program, and to maintain its own structures of discipline outside of—and hostile to—the Democratic Party platform. This, not the manner in which our candidates appear on the ballot, is the key to building DSA as a third force in American politics. 

DSA must be unafraid to utilize all the weapons at its disposal—engaging in open struggle to build democratic structures across society—and ensure that our tribunes in the halls of power share our commitment to building a new world.