On August 4th, Kshama Sawant lost in the primary elections for Washington's 9th Congressional District, placing third behind incumbent Democrat Adam Smith and Republican Doug Basler. The chance to pit an independent socialist candidate against a decades-long stalwart of US imperialism in Congress was lost, and notably, DSA did not play a part in this race. It's worth examining why DSA did not endorse Sawant this time around, even when it has in the past.

In his op-ed on the Agitator, David Duhalde presents a defense for this. But we can start with his own words: “Let’s be clear: incumbent Congressman Adam Smith should be defeated. And if Sawant wants to do it, more power to her. Smith is a classic corporate “New” Democrat who, as Sawant explains, backs the worst of U.S. foreign policy.” Sawant’s campaign platform highlighted demands such as Free Healthcare for All, End All Military Aid to Israel, and National Rent Control - all key aspects of DSA’s own national platform. In terms of combatting the reactionary forces in power through popularizing the socialist politics DSA professes to be building, endorsing Kshama Sawant’s campaign against Adam Smith should have been an obvious decision. So why did it cause so much controversy within the Seattle DSA chapter, and why did its annual local convention decide not to side with an independent socialist calling to End the Palestinian Genocide?

If you ask an SDSA member who voted against reopening the endorsement consideration period for Sawant, they may explain in genuine good faith that this was due to DSA’s working relationship with Sawant. After all, a chapter endorsement means a democratic mandate to commit material support and mobilize members towards her campaign. And Sawant has unfortunately earned her reputation among left groups for being difficult to work with. She indeed has not engaged with DSA as a member beyond criticizing from the sidelines and seeking endorsements when running a campaign. Her campaign made it a priority to publicly attack independent critical (but material!) support from former members of her organization. These are deeply destructive, sectarian behaviors that disorganize the left, undermine the fight for working-class unity, and in all likelihood harmed Sawant’s own campaign. They should be ruthlessly criticized as such.

But DSA’s response was no less destructive - at best, to not endorse Sawant on this basis amounted to fighting sectarianism with sectarianism. Concretely, it used organizational bad blood to justify not fighting to unseat one of the Democratic Party’s most consistent champions of war and Zionism with an independent socialist. This is unacceptable! Struggling against sectarian impulses will be necessary if we want a successful movement for demands like those in Sawant’s campaign (which, again, are very similar to DSA’s). DSA and the Left should have challenged Sawant’s sectarianism and fought to unite workers against both bourgeois parties by critically endorsing Sawant. This wouldn’t have precluded us from raising necessary criticisms and holding Sawant accountable. Accountability is possible with someone like Sawant precisely because she’s an independent socialist completely dependent on the political buy-in and support of the working class.

Duhalde’s arguments against endorsing Sawant echo many of the concerns raised within SDSA: she has been a hostile actor more interested in tearing DSA down or asserting control over it than contributing to it. But his article is as much a defense of running candidates within the Democratic Party as it is a polemic against endorsing Sawant. He points to the rise of electoral victories for progressive Democrats brandishing the banner of socialism to argue that Sawant’s principled rejection of bourgeois parties is not the way forward for socialism. AOC and Zohran Mamdani in particular are brought up as the new faces of American socialism.

What then does Duhalde think about endorsing AOC for her 2026 re-election campaign, or her potential 2028 presidential campaign? AOC has a long history of tension with DSA around her repeated apologetics for the Palestinian genocide, to the point that the DSA NPC retracted conditional endorsement of her 2024 re-election campaign. Duhalde summarizes his argument against endorsing Sawant as such: she “has not reciprocated DSA’s solidarity nor acted as a productive leader in our organization since becoming a member.” Can the same not be said about AOC? Similarly, Duhalde has nothing to say about the various controversies around Zohran Mamdani since he assumed office as mayor of NYC, including but not limited to: re-appointing known Zionist Jessica Tisch as NYPD commissioner, endorsing Kathy Hochul, and betraying a campaign promise to end the 24-hour work day. With Mamdani, doesn’t DSA deserve better?

Bringing up AOC’s and Mamdani’s conflicts with DSA is not a sophist whataboutism; they are burning questions that DSA is grappling with right now. They are conveniently left out of Duhalde’s op-ed because they expose the double standard used to justify non-endorsement of Sawant. The crux of the issue is not whether a candidate or elected official plays nice with DSA. Nor is it about whether someone is too dogmatic or “socialist identitarian” to be in a socialist “big tent”. It is about what political lines must be drawn by a socialist organization, even one that is proudly multi-tendency. And in this regard, whether you consider yourself a Marxist or an anarchist, whether you take political inspiration from Lenin, Luxemburg, Bakunin or Mao, whether you affix any kind of label to your socialist beliefs at all, any half-serious socialist ought to agree with Sawant on this basic point. A socialist organization that fights for the working class must oppose the Democratic Party. Fundamentally, Duhalde disagrees but cannot politically respond to Sawant’s criticisms, and this is why he exhorts the values of the “big tent” to argue that it should not back mean old Kshama against Adam Smith.

There are those among the DSA Left, such as Marxist Unity Group, who recognize that betrayals by Democrats like Zohran Mamdani are a problem, and are trying to introduce measures to hold such electeds accountable. There’s a positive instinct here, but it’s rendered impotent by illusions that electeds can be held more accountable to DSA than they are to the Democratic Party, the oldest bourgeois political machine in the US. DSA’s retraction of conditional support for AOC in 2024 demonstrates this. Conditional support is an important tool for accountability in the workers movement! We should retract or withhold support for political representatives unless they actually fight in our interests. But for this to work, that elected official must actually stay rooted in the workers movement as opposed to growing connections with the ruling class to get ahead. And we can’t be fooled by empty promises.

Unlike Sawant, AOC is so integrated into the Democratic Party as one of its established stars that she does not need DSA’s support to win re-election - she is a bourgeois politician in a bourgeois party. Some may point to her recent pledge to oppose all US military aid to Israel as evidence that she has acceded to the movement’s demands. But her stance is that Israel is already able to fund its Iron Dome, ergo US imperialism need not spend any more taxpayer money on its proxy in the Middle East. When the situation changes, and it is no longer convenient to hold this faux anti-war stance, who will AOC answer to? The DSA membership that calls for Palestinian liberation or her political party, the Democrats, which is committed to Zionism, US imperialism, and the suppression of the international working class?

Such attempts to hold elected Democrats accountable to the DSA arise out of the dirty-break strategy. This seeks unity between those who recognize the need for the workers' movement to decisively break from all bourgeois parties and those who insist on keeping the DSA chained to the Democratic Party. In theory, the DSA is agnostic on when to make this break, allowing for flexibility on tactical questions such as running on the Democratic Party ballot line. In practice, this is consolidating towards the DSA serving as an electoral machine for progressive Democrats while steering clear of independent socialist campaigns. Many DSA members are rightfully outraged about California DSA’s absurd recommendation of billionaire Tom Steyer for governor over a “protest vote” for Ramsey Robinson. On the same day Seattle DSA voted to kill the Sawant endorsement process, it also voted to endorse Democrat Jaelynn Scott.

Meanwhile, DSA nationally is celebrating a wave of electoral victories on the Democratic Party ballot line. We should have a perspective towards building and demonstrating the popularity of socialism! But attaching the name of socialism to Democrats is completely counterproductive to this goal. SMC insists that the Democratic Party ballot line must be used to build a workers party, but recent history painfully proves that, instead, Democrats use "socialism" to drag workers back to the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders became the most popular politician in the country by branding himself a socialist, decrying the billionaires, rallying millions around healthcare and housing as human rights, and calling for a political revolution. He then sold this movement out to the Democrats twice, supposedly to combat Trump. That immediately failed the first time around, and the second time workers faced a disastrous Biden presidency that turned the working class back into the jaws of Trump. Through all of this, socialism - the idea that the working class must unite and fight for its own interests against the ruling class - gets liquidated into the left-right, liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican polarization that pits the working class against itself.

This is not socialist identitarianism; there is a material price to running on the Democratic Party ballot line. That price is home care workers continuing to have their bodies destroyed by 24-hour shifts under a “socialist” mayor who promised to end that hyper-exploitation. That price is this “socialist” mayor unleashing housing privatization on the black and brown working class of New York. That price is “prominent socialist electeds” siphoning a quarter million dollars of working-class donations into the Democratic Party machinery and covering for establishment Democrats who are rightfully hated by the working class - directly undermining the fight for a socialist majority.

The question of breaking from the Democrats will not leave the DSA alone any time soon. It will only become more heated as the 2028 elections and a potential AOC candidacy approach. It’s very much possible that, should DSA decide not to endorse AOC, significant layers would leave - layers that have been integral to DSA’s electoral successes in past years. But this possibility cannot sway DSA from doing what is necessary. Clean breakers don’t advocate our stance out of political puritanism or seeking to wreck and attack the DSA. We genuinely want DSA to be an organization that advances the class struggle - to fight the boss in the workplace, to defend trans lives, to end the Palestinian genocide, to struggle for black liberation and the liberation of all the workers and oppressed under capitalism.

We know there are many who share our desire for DSA to be a mass organization the working class deserves and needs. We call on you to join us in strengthening DSA by breaking its ties with the Democrats. This work can come in many forms, whether it be campaigning for independent socialists like Brittany Kubicek, or fighting to defend Cuba from US imperialism. More than ever, in this period of right-wing reaction, socialists cannot be roping workers into one of the major parties of US imperialism. We must build a truly independent party free of all the Democrats’ and the ruling class’s crimes, one that workers would be proud to call their own, one that workers will join in the struggle against capitalism for a socialist future.