The Old Model: Assisting the Campaign
Historically, many progressive organizations have approached electoral work in a campaign-centered way. In this model, when a candidate espousing progressive positions ran for office, the organization supported their campaign by channeling donations and volunteers to it and by giving its public seal of approval to the campaign through endorsement. The goal was simply to elect as many people as possible who were sympathetic to the left. The link between candidate and organization here is quite weak: the organization may endorse an indefinite number of politicians, and the candidate, in turn, is likely to seek dozens of such endorsements.
In this model, candidate accountability is a very serious problem. After a successful race, the candidate possesses not only elected office and the power of incumbency, but all of the resources (staff, skills, experience, a donor list) required to run a successful campaign and stay in office; the organization, meanwhile, has little leverage over the candidate and little to show for the work of its volunteers.
Organizations that operate this way often settle for access to the candidate rather than accountability over him or her; the candidate may take meetings with the organization’s leadership, or attend its events. But over time, there is an inverse relationship between the imperatives of access and accountability: the organization will find itself lowering its standards merely to maintain access to those in power, in the vain hope of wielding influence over the officeholder, while perpetuating the concentration of power with the leaders of the organization who can enjoy that access.
The New Model: Building the Organization
The old model serves a purpose, but its limits are real. DSA chapters all over the country in 2017, together with other left and progressive electoral organizations, began assembling a new model: a model centered not on helping campaigns but on building a sustainable socialist political organization. Instead of loaning out our volunteer capacity to political candidates, we have begun to build electoral capacity within DSA—capacity responsible directly to the organization and democratically controlled by its members. What does this entail?
First and foremost, chapters that endorse candidates would build an independent field/canvassing operation trained and run directly by DSA, not the candidate.
Canvassing is the single most important factor in down-ballot races; equipping the chapter to control its own canvassing team immediately increases its capacity for electoral and non-electoral projects alike. Second, DSA should collect and maintain its own data. The enormously valuable data generated by field operations, which campaigns and party machines usually hoard, should stay with the DSA volunteers who generate it, for use in future campaigns—electoral and otherwise, allowing us to map neighborhoods and communities, in the same way we would do a workplace for a union drive. Third, DSA should have independent messaging. Locals should retain their own voice and canvass on their own issues with their materials and scripts, not merely borrow the messaging of the campaign. Fourth, DSA should have its own research capacity. Locals should be able to evaluate electoral opportunities and policy issues, and should not be forced to rely on the expertise of others on issues of candidate viability.
In other words, DSA chapters should strive to develop the full range of capacities required to run a down-ballot campaign from start to finish. It goes without saying that this goal is aspirational: Few if any DSA chapters currently have the skills, experience and capacity to fully embody it. But we believe it’s a long-term goal worth pursuing, for several reasons.
First, it will allow us to operate strategically and independently as an electoral force. Rather than simply reacting to the candidates available, a DSA chapter operating on this model would even be able to recruit and run its own candidates for office. Eventually, rather than passively evaluating candidate platforms, our chapters will be able to run candidates on the issues they consider important, in coordination with non-electoral work they are doing. And they will have increased leverage over the candidates they do run because they will have significantly more power to put them into—and hence to take them out of—office.
Second, it will allow us to break out of the election cycle and transform electoral work into organizing work that will help us grow our chapters, identify and train more leaders, and build up our collective capacity to achieve all of our chapters’ goals. The skills and knowledge required for electoral work, after all, are enormously useful in other kinds of campaigning: an organization that canvasses for a candidate one month can use the skills and data it collects to canvass for tenants’ rights the next month, if in canvassing for a candidate it has built its own campaign apparatus rather than loaning out volunteers to the candidate. All of us hope that DSA will be an organization that fights on many fronts in many ways, not only winning elections but organizing tenants and workers and pressuring the state for reform; we can best accomplish this by doing electoral work in a way that contributes to our organizational capacity rather than distracting from it.
Third, it will build working-class power independent of the Democratic Party and its local fiefdoms. Discussion of independence from the Democrats tends to revolve around the question of the ballot line, but it shouldn’t: most party power rests not in ballot access as such but in the network of consultants, politicos, lawyers, and party functionaries who control the means of electioneering in each state. Like most in DSA, we see the ballot line question as a tactical one to be addressed by local chapters in accordance with local circumstances—but we consider it essential that DSA escape the welter of Democratic patronage networks that have controlled and limited politics in the US for too long. To operate independently of this network we need to build our own electoral capacity, democratically controlled by DSA. Ultimately, it is not the name of the party under which a candidate runs that governs their decisions while in office, but the material conditions that inform the composition and capacity of the groups that form their coalition.
