The Democratic Party is deeply
flawed and repellent to left challenges—but it still offers the easiest path
for socialists to win elections and build power now.
There are currently 7,383
state legislators in the United States. Nine of them are affiliated with the
Vermont Progressive Party. One of them is an independent from Alaska who
caucuses with the Democrats.
This is the grand sum of the
left presence in American state legislatures outside the Democratic Party.
There has been a single instance of federal-level victory in my lifetime—Bernie
Sanders’s election as an independent to the U.S. House, then Senate, in
Vermont. No one else has even come close. And Sanders, after thirty years as an
Independent, elected to seek the presidency through the Democratic primary.
In my state of Pennsylvania,
many talented candidates have attempted to make a go of it running for office
through the Green Party. Fifty-one of them have run for state office since 2000.
Their vote totals ranged from 1.39% up to 19.26%—very impressive for a Green
but still lower than what even the more worthless Democratic challengers
regularly pull in a primary. For comparison, less than a quarter of Democratic
primary challengers for these state legislative offices in Pennsylvania failed
to achieve 20% of the vote in 2014.
On the other side of the
ledger, we have the recent record of left challenges within the Democratic
Party. We can look at the bottom, where the California state party has seen a
Sanders sweep in delegate elections. We can look in the middle, where Working
Families Party (WFP)-backed challengers swept a slate of incumbents out of
office in Rhode
Island legislative elections in September. Or we can look at the top, where
22 statewide elections were won by Sanders, an open democratic socialist,
including hotly contested primaries in New Hampshire, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Having proven that we can win
statewide elections both at the bottom and top of the ticket, as open
democratic socialists, the Left should be salivating at the opportunities
presented by the 2018 primaries, barely a year away. But this would involve
strategically participating in Democratic primaries, which, despite the Sanders
experience, remains a bridge too far for some.
The experience of the
candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America in the 2016 cycle
reflects this. I worked on the campaign of Debbie Medina, who, despite facing a
major scandal in the middle of her campaign, won 40.56% of the vote in an
election where 6,000 votes were needed to win. Had she run as a third-party
candidate in the general, victory would have required convincing roughly 40,000
people to vote against a Democrat in deep-blue Brooklyn—a herculean task.
Compare this to Ian Schlakman
who ran for Baltimore City Council on the Green Party line. He ran a solid
campaign, with support in the community, but still ended up with just 13%
of the vote. Three thousand votes would have won the primary handily, whereas
the general was won with over 9,000.
These are stark numbers, and
point to a reality for anyone in a Democratic area: Primary campaigns provide
real opportunities for leftists to compete and win. Campaigns off the party
line, in all but the rarest cases, do not.
Primary challenges
Longtime labor writer and Labor
Notes co-founder Kim Moody’s recent
piece in Jacobin, “From Realignment to Reinforcement,” argues against
engaging in Democratic primaries, centering largely around an extensive
taxonomy of the monied forces that control the Democratic Party. One cannot
argue with Moody’s contention that those currently in control of the party are
rich, powerful and odious. They are also, as Moody points out, firmly
determined to repel left challenges within the party. These same interests
poured millions into the Hillary Clinton campaign, and pour millions more into
incumbency protection every cycle. These arguments are being amplified in the
wake of Keith Ellison’s defeat in his run for DNC chair.
Fair enough. And yet Moody
fails to make a strong case for why third party activity holds any more
promise, or to actually gauge the short-term prospects for left victory in
Democratic primaries. Much of the piece skirts this central consideration
altogether.
“In general,” writes Moody,
“because they are already well-known, incumbents at all levels are able to gain
important endorsements, union backing, and support from party activists;
attract what media attention there is; and raise several times what most
challengers can muster.” Moody fails to mention that these challenges also
apply to a third party run, where they are even more pronounced. Unions, media
attention, money and endorsements may be in short supply for left primary
challengers but it can be even harder to find them as a third partier.
This basic fallacy sits at the
core of American third party advocacy. Endless ink is spilled on the strength
and resilience of the Democratic establishment. But why would that tremendously
strong establishment be any more vulnerable to a third party challenge?
The track record laid out
above is simple, it’s stark and there’s no way around it. The Democratic Party
establishment is vulnerable—to primary challenges. The recent record of third
party competition in partisan races in the United States is one of unmitigated
failure at nearly every level. Thanks to the Sanders campaign, the case for
left challenges within the Democratic Party has never been stronger.
Bizarrely, Moody points to the
Sanders campaign as a case arguing against engaging with the Democratic Party.
“Of the 3,170 Democratic state legislators,” writes Moody, “Sanders won the
endorsement of 91, less than 3 percent.” True—and yet he received over 43% of
the total primary vote. It would seem that the institutional Democratic Party
has relatively little clout among its own base.
The idea that the Sanders
campaign proved that we need to abandon the Democratic primary is among the
most confusing on the Left. We all just participated in the most interesting
(and certainly the biggest) socialist electoral project ever to take place in
the United States. But that project took place within the Democratic Party, and
a vocal segment of the American Left seems to believe that we should never do it
again.
We need to take this strategic
gap between Democratic and third-party challenges very seriously. Thousands of
local left-to-progressive formations are springing up or growing, from DSA to
Indivisible to the Working Families Party. Many of them will, in 2018, have the
ability to draft and run candidates for office. They will have two choices:
one, run a candidate in the Democratic primary, with a far lower win number
than the general, no spoiler issue, no third-party stigma, and a chance to
win—joining the long list of leftists elected as Democrats. Two, go the
independent route and hope that where hundreds upon hundreds of left
third-party challengers have failed, they will succeed.
These local campaigns are
useful as pathways for left formations to build coalitions and recruit allies.
The first question of any potential ally regarding a local election run is one
of viability. A socialist running in a Democratic primary can point to Bernie
Sanders’ result in their district, or to any number of recent progressive
challengers. Should a candidate outside the primary point to Jill Stein’s 1%?
Nader’s 3%? The Labor Party?
Outside of extraordinary
cases, a good left third-party candidate gets 15-20% of the vote in a partisan
race without a Democrat whereas they attain 3-5% in a race with one. A
Democratic primary challenger can sleepwalk to 20%. Local activists need to
understand this, and take a hard look at what can and cannot be done outside
the primary.
These numbers are nowhere to
be found in Moody’s piece. “It’s time for socialists to build an
alternative,” Moody argues instead. “The base is there in cities of all sizes.
It is there among thousands of Sanderistas with no place to go. It is there in
militant unions and among union insurgents fighting to change their unions—many
of whom supported Sanders—as well as among activists from Black Lives Matter,
Fight for 15, immigrants’ rights groups, and workers centers. It is there among
the millions of working-class African Americans and Latinos who have seen both
major parties let their neighborhoods deteriorate. And it is even to be found
among those ‘left behind’ white workers who voted for Trump.”
But as Adolph Reed argued
thirty years ago, “no popular base currently exists within the black community
for wide-scale political organization independent of the Democratic party.”
Since then, nothing has happened to prove him wrong. Conjecturing “millions of
working-class African-Americans and Latinos” (and worker centers) as some sort
of nascent base for a third-party is based on nothing more than a wish, and one
cannot build a winning electoral campaign around a wish.
This is, ultimately, the
weakest aspect with Moody’s piece and others like it. It returns to the Left’s
vision of itself as starting completely from scratch, hoping to go from zero to
hero, to ignite a “mass base” of millions that is currently completely
inchoate. We don’t have to follow this script. We have the benchmark of the
Sanders campaign. We have hard numbers, a solid gauge of our strength. It is
much more plausible to build an electoral force from that than from nothing.
A time to win
The 2018 election cycle is an
enormous opportunity. The millions who have marched against President Trump are
looking to those elections as the next great opportunity to stop him. Those on
the Left, by taking a lead role in pushing our candidates, can seize and direct
this energy. Choosing this moment to adopt electoral strategies that have
virtually no prospect of winning elections in 2018 would squander the opportunity
at hand.
At this point in discussion
around the Democratic primary, advocates of a new party generally assert that,
while isolated successes may be possible, the party itself, to use Moody’s
word, is “impregnable.” In this vision, the party establishment is a membrane.
It may allow isolated victories (such as that of Sanders backers in California)
but will simply flood the arena with overwhelming resources should there be any
real possibility of realignment. Given this, goes the argument, let’s not waste
time putting resources into a party that will never be ours. Let’s build our
own formation, so at least we have a banner for the long, long march ahead. In
this formulation, participation in the primaries simply delays this long march.
Let’s assume that they are
right and that wholesale realignment is indeed impossible—an assertion that may
well be true. This is irrelevant to the immediate tactical question, given that
an independent force can be built and nurtured while continuing to engage in
Democratic primaries.
Seth Ackerman’s Jacobin
piece “The Party We Need” rightly calls for a new mass party on the Left in
which “decisions about how individual candidates appear on the ballot would be
made on a case-by-case basis and on pragmatic grounds.” This model is the best
of both worlds.
A strategy of using Democratic
primaries to win power does not preclude other organizing outside the
Democratic Party in non-partisan races at more local levels. Kshama Sawant's
success in Seattle as a Socialist Alternative-backed city council member is
instructive for running in these types of races.
But organizing for socialist
politics and a left agenda should not be mutually exclusive from building power
through winning Democratic primaries now. We can form our new mass party
without a guiding principle that this party must always have its own ballot
line—a strategy that has already served to build third parties like the WFP
that by and large make their bones in the Democratic primary.
We don’t have to put all our
eggs in the realignment basket. We can adopt a strategy that takes advantage of
the low barrier to entry of the Democratic primary, and use those victories to
build our own forces—forces that, once strong enough, could plausibly break
from the party. Let’s choose that strategy, and start electing socialists.
