The Wave Is Coming

With the coming election on Tuesday, the question isn’t whether the Democrats will have a good night but how triumphant their victory will be. They head into Election Day about nine points ahead on the generic ballot, a lead that has held steady for a month, and Trump's approval is stuck in the high 30s. Prediction markets give the Democrats better than nine-in-ten odds of taking the House and around 70 percent in the Senate; early voting is on pace to surpass 2022, and Pew finds that Democratic voters are now the more engaged side, both more motivated to vote and more likely to say it really matters which party wins, reversing the pattern from 2022.

We have been here before. The president's party almost always takes a beating at the midterms, and the Democrats rode a wave in 2018 that did nothing to stop Trump from coming back in 2024. A majority built on disgust with Trump and anger at grocery prices tells us very little about whether working people are moving left, and nothing at all about whether they are organizing as an independent political force.

I'll be glad to see the Republicans lose badly. But we should be honest about what that does and doesn't mean. Underneath the news cycle, there is a two-party system that passes majorities back and forth while the working class has no party of its own. Each new majority runs into a constitutional order built to stall it; the voters get disappointed, and the pendulum swings back. For socialists, the size of this year’s Democratic wave matters less than what we manage to build in the two years before the pendulum swings back toward the Republicans.

Two decisions are coming at DSA, the largest socialist organization in the US, fast: what to do about the Speaker vote in January, and whether, and how, to endorse anyone for president in 2028. I'll get to both, but first it's worth looking at the conditions we're voting under this year and what a Democratic Congress can actually get done. On both decisions, my answer comes down to one thing. DSA has to decide what it wants from its representatives before they act, tell them and everyone else, and put their response on the record.

The Machinery Behind the Vote

For all the attention on the polls, the more revealing story this year has been the fight over the rules themselves. On April 29, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, which sharply narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Within weeks, Alabama asked the Court to let it return to a congressional map that the courts had already ruled as racially discriminatory, and the Court agreed. Six unelected judges effectively redrew Black political representation across the South. Judicial review over elected bodies is one of the main ways capital keeps its hold on the American state, and here it worked exactly as intended.

The Democratic response was to gerrymander right back. California's new map is expected to elect 48 Democrats and four Republicans. I'm less interested in calling the Democrats hypocrites than in what this says about a system where whoever controls a statehouse gets to decide the shape of that state's House delegation. Even some liberal legal scholars are reaching for our answer. Back in February, before the ruling, Harvard Law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos told Votebeat that, as his colleague Guy-Uriel Charles argues, proportional representation may be the only way forward for minority voting rights if Callais gutted the VRA. Socialists have been demanding proportional representation for a long time.

The Senate is worse. To take a majority, the Democrats have to flip four Republican seats, which means winning in places like Ohio, Maine, and even Texas, all for a chamber that gives Wyoming the same weight as California.

And Trump hasn't exactly been hiding what he wants. At a party convention in September, he told supporters to "cheat like hell," and the Justice Department is planning to deploy 1,000 federal election monitors, close to double the number it sent out in 2024. So far, the worst of it has been held off by the federal courts and state control over elections; the Supreme Court upheld an order blocking the administration from using the Postal Service against mail voting, though less than two weeks later the same Court, in a 6–3 emergency order, let the administration resume using a revamped Homeland Security citizenship database to check state voter rolls.

The institutions protecting the vote from the executive, then, are the separation of powers and federalism.This is where the left could easily get trapped. The Democrats are campaigning on the idea that "democracy is on the ballot," and by democracy they mean the courts and the Constitution. As Nick D. argued in To Steal an Election, socialists need to defend the right to vote while opposing the system that makes a presidential dictatorship possible to begin with. We should defend the vote, the count and mail ballots without conditions, and we should do it under our own banner: proportional representation in the House, the abolition of the Senate and of judicial review over elected bodies, and a single national code of voting rights administered by elected and recallable officials rather than by state legislatures or the president. If we sign on to the Democrats' version instead, we end up defending the Constitution the framers wrote in 1787 and calling it democracy.

What a Democratic Congress Can Deliver

Nobody should expect much from the next two years. A Democratic House means hearings and subpoenas, maybe another impeachment, and a lot of fighting with the White House over spending bills. Trump keeps his veto no matter what, and the filibuster stays unless a Democratic Senate scraps it.

The closest comparison is 2009 and 2010. Obama came in on a wave, ran straight into the Senate, and never prepared his base to fight for what the majority had voted for. The Democrats were wiped out at the next midterm. Voters didn't blame the filibuster; they blamed the politicians who had promised change, along with everyone who had vouched for them.

If socialists spend 2027 and 2028 attached to a Democratic majority's record, we will share the blame for its failures without ever having had real power. Steven R. laid out a different approach in the article Tribunes in the Halls of Congress: use our seats to force floor votes on DSA's own demands, speak past the chamber to the working class outside it, and make the Democrats choose publicly between their voters and their donors. A Democratic majority would actually make that easier. Whether our members in Congress are willing to do it is another matter.

DSA's Best Year Yet

DSA just had the best primary season in its history. Melat Kiros unseated fifteen-term incumbent Diana DeGette in Denver, Donavan McKinney beat Shri Thanedar in Detroit, and Chris Rabb won an open seat in Philadelphia. Here in New York, Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila-Chevalier won their primaries, Avila-Chevalier beating a sitting incumbent. NYC-DSA had around 12,000 members when Zohran Mamdani won last November, and by this summer it was approaching 16,000.

Up close, the numbers look less impressive. A Brookings study of 282 DSA-endorsed candidates found that those running for Congress and statewide office won fewer than half their primaries, mostly in places that were already safely Democratic, and that some of the progressive candidates who won their primaries have been quietly scrubbing their more left-wing social media posts.

That last finding worries me more than the win rate. In July, DSA released a platform calling for a new constitution, and Republicans jumped on it right away. Progressive candidates were quick to explain where they part ways with it, and the AP noted that even DSA-backed candidates don't all sign on to the full agenda. So in the same summer DSA adopted the central demand of the Marxist program, much of the left wing of the primary field, including some of our own endorsees, kept it at arm's length.

The clearest example came in August, when DSA confirmed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had only just rejoined the national organization after letting her dues lapse in 2019. It only came to light after she described herself as a member of the New York City chapter but not the national organization, which prompted DSA to check its records. I don't see this as a scandal about AOC personally. What it shows is that for seven years the national organization had so little to do with its best-known elected official that nobody noticed she had stopped paying dues.

None of this is new. When I wrote about Mamdani's campaign last year, I predicted that DSA would do the heavy lifting to get him elected and then find itself as one voice among many around him, with less and less pull once he had a city to run. Jessica Tisch is still running the NYPD. Congress works the same way. Our representatives run on the Democratic ballot line, raise money from their own donor networks, and rely on the Democratic leadership for committee assignments and protection from primary challenges. DSA endorses them and knocks doors for them, but it has no say over what they do once they're in office.

That isn't what the thinkers behind the party-surrogate model had in mind. As Seth Ackerman sketched it in his 2016 Jacobin essay "A Blueprint for a New Party," the idea was a membership organization that behaves like a party in everything but the ballot line, with a binding program and a rule that "all candidates would be required to adhere to the national platform." Ackerman's essay even describes the alternative he was trying to escape: a "party-less" politics in which the politician recruits a base, writes her own message, and answers to no one, with progressive groups acting as a middleman between voters and ambitious office-seekers. That is closer to what DSA has become than to what he proposed. DSA kept the ballot line and the endorsements and dropped the discipline and adherence to a program. Implemented that way, the model can only produce what we have now: representatives who carry our name and answer to someone else.

The Speaker Vote

In Tribunes in the Halls of Congress, Steven R. suggested that a DSA bloc could hold up the Speaker election to win a set of popular demands, the way antislavery representatives did in the 1850s and the Freedom Caucus did to Kevin McCarthy in 2023. Now that we have a good sense of who is headed to Washington, it's worth being honest about how likely that is.

The numbers could work. The Speaker has to win a majority of the members voting for a named candidate, so if the Democratic majority is narrow, a handful of members voting for someone else would be enough to deny Hakeem Jeffries the gavel on the first ballot. The McCarthy holdouts had about twenty votes and dragged the fight out over fifteen ballots.

What's missing is the will. The Freedom Caucus had an organization behind it and a base that rewarded confrontation. Our members have neither, and as I said above, their careers run through the Democratic leadership, not through DSA. Following the leadership costs them nothing, while breaking ranks on DSA's behalf could cost them a great deal.

Anyone who remembers "Force the Vote" has seen how this goes. In December 2020, an online campaign demanded that the Squad withhold their votes from Nancy Pelosi until she allowed a floor vote on Medicare for All. Ocasio-Cortez refused, and the campaign fell apart in a round of recriminations. There was some truth on both sides. The critics were right that it was a stunt, since no organization had decided on the demand or had any way of enforcing it. But the episode also made clear that nobody could hold those members to anything, because there was no party for them to answer to.

That means the Speaker vote will test DSA more than it tests our members in Congress. There are two things the organization can do before the swearing-in that don't need their cooperation at all. The first is to adopt and publish Speaker-vote demands through DSA's own democratic bodies, picking demands the Democratic leadership can't easily grant but working people can easily understand: a guaranteed floor vote on a voting rights bill that answers Callais, say, and a floor vote on proportional representation for the House. The second is to publish afterward how each DSA-endorsed member voted and why, and to argue about that record openly in our press.

My guess is that most of our members will ignore the demands and vote for Jeffries on the first ballot. I still think the exercise is worth doing. Putting the vote on the record is how our membership learns that endorsing someone without any discipline attached does not give us a fraction in Congress. It also builds the case for making acceptance of the platform, and of the organization's direction, a condition of future endorsements. DSA might look weak for a moment if its representatives ignore its demands, but continuing to call them "our" representatives while having no claim on them leaves us much weaker in the long run.

Waiting on AOC

Meanwhile, the national organization has been consumed by one question: will AOC run for president, and what do we do if she does?

The process itself is mostly settled. In July, the DSA’s National Political Committee adopted an amendment from MUG and Springs of Revolution that removed a nonbinding all-member poll on the endorsement. In September, it voted 15 to 12 against a proposal for a special endorsement conference, which keeps the decision in the NPC's hands. An endorsement could come early next year, and City & State reports that the NPC is all but certain to vote for a super PAC backing Ocasio-Cortez if she runs. She hasn't decided yet; she could run for the Senate instead, and she's expected to make up her mind once she sees how the midterms go.

If you think about it for a minute, the situation is pretty absurd. The biggest strategic decision facing the largest socialist organization in the country depends on one person's career plans, and she'll make that call on her own schedule with her own advisers. I don't blame her for that; it's what the party-surrogate model produces. A party with its own program and disciplined candidates settles on a strategy first and then picks someone to carry it out, while an organization working inside the Democratic primary has to wait for individual politicians to make their moves and then respond.

Both sides of the internal debate also treat this as a question about AOC herself. Those who want to endorse her on day one are asking whether she's the best vehicle we have, and those who reject her outright are asking whether she's pure enough. Hardly anyone is asking what DSA's program is, or what a presidential campaign is supposed to do for it.

The super PAC route makes things worse. A super PAC makes independent expenditures and is legally barred from coordinating with the campaign it supports, so an endorsement delivered that way writes the separation between organization and candidate into law, when overcoming that separation is the whole point.

Writing about Mamdani earlier, I made the case that running the executive is a different job from sitting in a legislature. A mayor or a president has to manage the state as it already exists, and that means constant deals with the people who already hold power inside it. If that was true of the mayoralty, it is far more true of the presidency, the most anti-democratic office in the Constitution and something close to an elected monarchy. Suppose she won. She would be a socialist minority running that office against a hostile Senate and Supreme Court, with no organized party behind her.

Avoiding that trap is the whole point of what Marxists call the strategy of patience. The idea goes back to Karl Kautsky and the German Social Democrats before 1914, and Mike Macnair makes the case for an updated version of it in his 2008 book Revolutionary Strategy. A workers' party stays in opposition until it has won a majority. In the meantime, it fights for every partial gain it can and makes limited agreements with other parties where they help, but it refuses to join or prop up a government it doesn't control. Until then, in Macnair's words, our job is "to fight to build an alternative opposition," not an alternative government.

The record of socialists who took on governing responsibility before they had the strength to carry out their program is not encouraging. Alexandre Millerand joined a French cabinet in 1899 alongside the general who had crushed the Paris Commune. Ramsay MacDonald led two minority Labour governments and ended up splitting his own party in 1931 to push through spending cuts. Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidency in 1970 with just over a third of the vote and was overthrown three years later. François Mitterrand came to power in 1981 promising nationalizations and a break with capitalism, then, after three devaluations of the franc in less than two years, made the 1983 turn to austerity that set the pattern for European social democracy for decades afterward. Italy's Rifondazione Comunista joined Romano Prodi's government in 2006, voted to keep funding the war in Afghanistan, and two years later lost every seat it held in parliament. And Syriza, elected in 2015 to tear up the bailout memorandum, signed a new one within months.

My MUG comrade Noah Emke made a version of this argument earlier in Cosmonaut in July. In his view, a President AOC would carry out the establishment's policies under our colors, and DSA, as it exists now, is an endorsement machine with only an "ON" button that would end up defending her as she moved right.

Eugene Debs offers a different model. He ran for president five times, four of them as the nominee of the Socialist Party, on its program, and nobody expected him to administer the state. The votes were modest: about 400,000 in 1904 and again in 1908, then just over 900,000 in 1912, six percent of the national total, and nearly 914,000 in 1920, when he campaigned from a federal prison cell after being convicted for a speech against the war. The organization behind him is the real story. Between 1904 and 1908, the Socialist vote barely moved, but the party’s dues-paying membership doubled, from about 21,000 to about 42,000. By 1912 it averaged around 118,000 members and had more than a thousand of them in elected office, including 56 mayors.

That record has a second half, and we should be honest about it. The party peaked in 1912 and never reached that strength again. Wartime repression jailed Debs and many other leaders, and in 1919 a split over how to respond to the Russian Revolution cut membership from more than 100,000 to about 35,000 within the year. In 1920, Debs won more votes than ever while the party around him was falling apart, which tells you how little a vote count says about an organization’s real strength. His campaigns couldn’t save the party from repression and schism, and no candidate could have. What they show is what a presidential run is for when the organization, and not the candidate, is the point: the Socialist Party used Debs to recruit, educate and build, and it rose and fell with the health of the organization, not with his vote totals. Jenna G. had something similar in mind in Let DSA Decide! when she called for a cadre candidate who would run on the DSA platform. The ballot line a candidate appears on matters, but so does what the campaign is for and who the candidate answers to.

Deciding Before Anyone Declares

My own preference is that DSA run its own propaganda campaign in the Debs tradition, on its own program. Realistically, given where the NPC and the membership stand, that position will probably lose, so we need to know what we're fighting for when it does.

DSA should stop waiting on AOC's decision and make its own first. There is a window between November 3 and whenever Ocasio-Cortez announces, and the NPC could use it to adopt a standing policy that applies to any candidate. It would have three parts: 1) the program DSA will campaign on in 2028, regardless of who carries it or whether anyone does; 2) a set of conditions any presidential candidate has to accept to get our endorsement, whoever they are; and 3) a fallback plan, so that if no candidate accepts those conditions, DSA runs its own campaign for the program, and puts forward a candidate of its own only if no socialist is in the race.

A policy like this lets DSA settle the question on its own timetable. Whether she runs, and whether she takes the deal or not, the organization will already know what it's going to do. It also changes the terms of the internal debate. The Marxist current is going to lose any fight that comes down to a popular figure, but we have a real chance in a fight over principles.

What does the fallback actually look like if she says no? Not a DSA candidate running against her in the primary. Turning a refusal into a rivalry with one of our own members would split the organization and give the day-one camp every reason to say we cared more about winning a fight with her than about beating the right. If she refuses, DSA withholds its endorsement and runs its own campaign for the program alongside her race: our own literature, our own events, our own speakers on every stage we can get, and a plain public account of what we asked for and why she turned it down. Plenty of our members will knock doors for her anyway, and they should be free to. The point is that when they do, the organization they belong to will have said something of its own. A tribune candidate of our own makes sense only if she doesn't run at all, which is where Eric Blanc's Plan B comes in (discussed below).

Everything depends on what the conditions say, and our 2024 conditional endorsement should be a warning. Those conditions centered on her positions on Israel and Palestine. When she didn't meet them, the national organization withdrew its endorsement, the New York City chapter kept its own, and nothing about the relationship changed. Positions are easy to fudge and awkward to police. The relationship between a candidate and the organization is much harder to get around, so that's what the conditions should cover.

Any candidate we endorse should agree to four things. They run openly on the DSA platform, the new-constitution demand included, instead of on a personal manifesto. The campaign's volunteer lists and data stay with DSA, not with the campaign or the Democratic Party. They accept public criticism from our press during the campaign without treating it as betrayal. And they commit ahead of time to how they'll handle a contested convention, which includes saying no to a cabinet post or the vice-presidential slot from a non-socialist nominee.

Conditions only work if the organization holds to them. In 2024, the national endorsement was withdrawn while the New York City chapter kept its own, which turned the whole episode into an argument about chapter autonomy instead of a statement to the public. Nothing stops that from happening again, and talk of a split has already surfaced over the endorsement process. So the standing policy has to bind chapters too: no chapter should be able to give a presidential candidate what the national organization has withheld. That will be a hard fight with our largest chapter. It's better to have it now, in the open, than to discover in the middle of a presidential campaign that our conditions mean nothing.

The Democratic establishment can't accept terms like these, and we should set them knowing that. Each condition asks a candidate to put her accountability to our organization ahead of her standing in the Democratic Party. Whatever she answers, our members learn where she stands, and if she refuses, the refusal makes our case for us.

The most common objection comes from the comrades pushing for an early endorsement. In To Build Power for Socialism, DSA Should Endorse AOC on Day One, Amelia D. of Socialist Majority Caucus and Philip B. of Groundwork point out that DSA grew from about 6,000 members to 120,000 in the decade after Bernie's first run, and they want an all-member poll the moment AOC announces so DSA can establish itself as a senior partner in her campaign. They also make a point I don't think the rest of us have answered: members-at-large, who don't belong to any chapter, have no way into chapter-based deliberation. Whatever process we design has to fix that.

Underneath the procedural fight, though, their case is a trade. Even if DSA can't steer her, the argument goes, the members, money, and visibility her campaign would bring us are worth far more than whatever leverage we give up. I think the premise is right. A presidential run by AOC would draw people in on a scale DSA has never handled, probably more than Bernie did, and an organization of several hundred thousand would be a different kind of force. If the choice really were between that and a small, disciplined DSA standing off to the side, I'd understand why most members would take the growth. I don't think that's the choice, for four reasons.

First, the growth doesn't depend on dropping the conditions. People will join DSA because her campaign exists and because DSA is visibly part of the fight around it, not because of the fine print of our endorsement. If she accepts our terms, we get the same influx and a real relationship besides. If she refuses, DSA still campaigns for its own program on the biggest stage the left has had in decades, and can recruit from everyone her run sets in motion. Amelia and Philip warn that if DSA holds back, other, less principled organizations will fill the void. That's a fair worry, and it's exactly why one condition is that the campaign's volunteer lists and data stay with DSA. They also want DSA to popularize a set of democratically decided demands for the would-be president. I'm for that, but nothing in their plan would make her answer to these demands. What conditions actually put at risk is narrower: looking hostile to a popular figure if she says no. That cost is real, and I'd rather pay it openly now than pay something worse later.

Second, members recruited around a candidate don't necessarily stay. DSA's own figures, analyzed by Andy Sernatinger in Tempest, show the organization more than doubling in 2020, with spikes during Bernie's primary run, then members in good standing peaking at about 78,700 in April 2021 and sliding to about 50,700 by October 2024. Because DSA counts someone as in good standing for a year after their last payment, the steepest drops arrived roughly a year after the biggest waves of sign-ups, which is what you'd expect if many people who joined in the excitement of 2020 simply never renewed. Sernatinger also ties the losses to the fight over Jamaal Bowman's record on Israel, and some members certainly left the organization over it. But the numbers alone can't separate that from the end of the Trump years and the broader ebb of the left after 2020. What they do show is that a membership built on one electoral moment can drain away once the moment passes. Since 2024, DSA has grown again to a reported 120,000 members (a broader count than members in good standing), and much of that growth came with Mamdani's campaign, which NYC-DSA ran itself with one of its own cadre as the candidate. That's the kind of growth we should want, because it came through a campaign the organization ran.

Third, the risks are lopsided. They are smallest if she loses the primary and largest if she wins. A President AOC with DSA's name attached and no way for DSA to shape what she does is the outcome where we stand to lose the most, the way the Democrats' 2008 wave turned into the 2010 rout. Members who joined during the excitement of a winning campaign can leave just as fast if the first administration they were recruited into lets them down.

Fourth, size alone doesn't build a party. The decade of growth the day-one camp points to also produced an organization that went seven years without noticing its most famous member had stopped paying dues. Every new member will learn what DSA is from the way we handle her campaign. If the conditions come first, they join a party with a program. If they don't, they join a support operation for one politician, and we spend the next decade trying to turn it into something else.

There is also the argument from the stakes. Whoever the Republicans run in 2028 will be running to finish what Trump started, and AOC may be the Democrat best placed to stop them. Why weaken her with conditions? But by the day-one camp's own account, a DSA endorsement isn't what decides her chances. If it’s true AOC will run and draw crowds with or without us, our conditions can’t cost her the election. They only decide what DSA gets out of her campaign, and whether the organization that comes out the other side is stronger or merely bigger. If she does win, a DSA that keeps its own voice is the one in a position to push her when the pressure from the other direction starts.

Geese Magazine has made the sharpest version of this argument. In AOC 2028: The Next Stage of the Democratic Revolution?, Nik M. argues that treating the endorsement as leverage is a fantasy since AOC doesn’t rely on our support, and that DSA's real leverage is the organization it builds through her campaign. I appreciate the candor, because it concedes my starting point: under the current model, the endorsement gives DSA no hold over her. But the piece's own evidence cuts against its conclusion. Nik M. notes that AOC came out against all military aid to Israel at the NYC-DSA forum in March. That happened in the middle of an endorsement vote in a chapter that expects its endorsees to oppose all aid to Israel. The one time we watched her move, there was a standard on the table.

The deepest version of the case comes from Founding Editor of Geese J. Ryder in Enter Daedalus. Ryder takes Lenin's point that the masses learn from their own political experience and not from propaganda alone, and turns it on the DSA left. Our criticisms of AOC may be correct, he concedes, but to millions of people she is still the most radical figure in American politics, and they won't believe our warnings until they've watched her govern. So the left should help put her in the White House, let her limits become visible to everyone, and build an independent party out of the disillusionment that follows. Nik M. makes a similar case using Lenin's advice to British communists to back the Labour Party.

I take this seriously, because the premise is right: people learn from experience far more than from our articles. But what they learn depends on whether an organized alternative was there all along, saying in advance what would happen and why. Lenin understood this. The line Ryder quotes comes from the chapter on Britain in Left-Wing Communism, and the same chapter spells out the terms. Lenin's proposal to back Labour came from a single, separate Communist Party, which would offer Labour an electoral agreement only if the communists kept "complete freedom of agitation, propaganda and political activity." Without that condition, he wrote, a bloc would be treachery. And if Labour's leaders turned the offer down, their refusal would itself show workers where those leaders stood. That is a lot closer to a standing policy with conditions than to an endorsement on day one. The record of the alternative isn't encouraging either. When Syriza capitulated in 2015, the left that broke away to pick up the pieces, Popular Unity, won just under 3 percent in the snap election that followed and missed the threshold for entering parliament Four years after that, the right was back in power. Disappointment on its own doesn't hand anyone a following. Ryder even calls his approach a deeper strategic patience, but it turns the idea upside down. The strategy of patience means building the party before taking responsibility for the state. His version means helping take the presidency first and building the party out of the wreckage.

Eric Blanc's If AOC Doesn't Run for President, Run a Union Worker in Jacobin may be the most useful piece in this debate, partly because it agrees with more of my argument than it lets on. Blanc wants DSA to go all in if AOC runs. But his Plan B, if she doesn't, is a worker candidate running on two demands, Medicare for All and an end to aid to Israel, and he is explicit about where that campaign's leverage comes from: its delegates would back another candidate only if that candidate adopted both planks, the way radical parties in Denmark or Sweden set their terms before supporting a government from outside. He even points to the Milwaukee sewer socialists, who backed Debs's propaganda campaigns because they built the party. That is a standing policy with conditions, with a tribune campaign as the fallback. The one candidate Blanc exempts from it is AOC, and his own reasoning doesn't support the exemption. He grants that she could lose, or win and be unable to pass much of her program, which he calls demoralizing, and he says outright that an AOC run carries more risk than his Plan B. He's also right that backing a candidate from outside your organization doesn't violate political independence, as long as you keep your own profile and organization. Conditions are how DSA keeps its own profile inside a campaign the size of hers. If they're good enough for Ro Khanna, whom Blanc would hold to his two planks, they're good enough for our own member.

A second objection is aimed at the Speaker vote: that publicly pressuring our own members only hands ammunition to the right and makes the people we elected less willing to work with us. My answer is that members who would walk away from DSA because it asked them to vote for its demands were never really working with us. It's better to find that out in January than in the middle of a presidential campaign.

There are things DSA members can do right now. We can bring resolutions to our chapters calling on the NPC to adopt a standing policy like this before any candidate declares, and make the case to comrades in other caucuses who care more about accountability than about any particular nominee. We should also tie the two tests together. Before DSA debates endorsing one of its own members for president, it should find out whether its members in Congress will act as a fraction on something as minor as a Speaker vote.

Building an Accountable Party

The midterms will come and go. The Democrats will probably take the House and maybe the Senate; the Constitution will frustrate them, and eventually the pendulum will swing back. None of that is in our hands, and nobody can say for sure how it will go.

What we do have agency over is what kind of organization DSA becomes in the meantime. A movement that can't hold its own representatives accountable isn't in a strong position to demand a republic where every official is elected, accountable, and subject to recall. How we run our own organization is a preview of the democracy we're fighting for, and if we want a working class that rules through its own institutions, we need to start by building institutions our elected members actually answer to.

The Speaker vote in January and the 2028 endorsement are the first real national tests of that principle, and we may well lose both. Even so, a fight we lose in the open, with the votes on the record, leaves us better prepared than another year spent arguing about someone else's career. Whatever happens in November and after, the work in front of us is building a movement around a program its own members have argued over and voted on. As Jenna G. put it, we become a party by acting like one.