Hundreds of Democratic Socialists of America members hold elected office across municipal, state, and federal legislatures throughout the country. As that number has steadily increased over each election cycle, DSA chapters whose endorsed candidates have won their elections have been launching “Socialists in Office” (SIO) Committees as a way to coordinate with those elected officials. Even as more SIO Committees pop up in chapters across the country, there has not been much debate about the primary purpose of SIO Committees and whether or not they are well structured for organizing for socialism alongside our SIOs locally and nationally.
Without a clear focus for what our SIOs should be prioritizing once in office, our electoral strategy is going to ultimately fail to produce the results necessary to win socialism. As DSA has become more adept at winning elections, our ability to elect socialists has outpaced our plan for what to do with them — and now we’re adrift. Our expectations for how our SIOs use their office are often unclear and far fewer members continue organizing alongside them after Election Day.
Ideally, the committees that we build to organize alongside our SIOs should act as a way to cohere knowledge and power within our party and its membership such that it allows us to build permanent structures regardless of who we send into office. In a way, our SIOs should act as vessels for our movement and be interchangeable with anyone else they’re organizing alongside. Rather than relying on charismatic individuals and their personal connections, we must produce DSA members that can go from auto worker or public school teacher to city council member or state representative and then back to their job when they need a break or into higher office when the movement we’re building around them makes that possible.
When we elect socialists to office and create SIO Committees to coordinate with them, we need to be clear about the criteria for their success. When we started an SIO Committee in Metro Detroit DSA, there was no way to figure out what all the different SIO Committees across the country were doing and or shared criteria that we could use to evaluate the success of different models. As an experiment towards this in Metro Detroit DSA, we’ve been organizing alongside Bread & Roses member and State Representative Dylan Wegela over the last nine months. We believe there are three criteria through which we should evaluate our success:
- Are we making more lifelong socialist organizers?
- Are we building socialist organization?
- Is our SIO leading as a spokesperson for our independent party?
Organizer in Office
At our 2025 Detroit chapter convention, myself and another Bread & Roses member authored an amendment that would create an experimental “Geographic Working Group” within our SIO Committee as a space for rank-and-file DSA members residing within State Representative Dylan Wegela’s, Westland City Council President Mike McDermott’s, and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s overlapping districts, to regularly meet with and organize alongside them. Although Groundwork members in chapter leadership strongly opposed the amendment, arguing that it was undemocratic for the convention to specify one of the authors as chair of the group for a one-year term, and that creating a subcommittee within the SIO Committee was similar to COINTELPRO tactics, the convention passed it by a margin of 51-34 votes.
Since Dylan was endorsed by the chapter in 2023 while in office, he has been requesting help to launch bottom-up organizing projects in his district with support from Metro Detroit DSA members. Calling back to his experience of leading Arizona public school teachers in a statewide strike in 2018, this approach is meant to organize a subset of his constituents for continuous action between campaign cycles. The idea was to put them in touch with socialist organizers and strategy, building toward a long-lasting base for socialist politics and worker self-organization in his district. Because of his limited staff capacity, this vision needed help from DSA members.
Dylan’s predominantly working class district, located about 30 minutes west of Detroit, is distant from the main concentration of where chapter members live. In 2022, just five members lived in his district. Thanks to nationwide DSA membership bumps in response to both Trump’s re-election and Zohran’s primary win — and intentional recruitment by both Dylan and this group — there are now almost 50 members in his district in 2026!
Making Lifelong Socialist Organizers
We believed that if we did the work to create a regular, local, in-person meeting space within Dylan’s district and conducted careful outreach and onboarding, that many of the new members in the district would be more likely to show up and organize with a group located closer to them. Almost everyone we talked to expressed some amount of demoralization over Trump’s reelection and a desire to build more local connections with socialists. Many felt compelled to finally get active because of Zohran’s primary victory. Throughout our meetings, we’ve also learned from participants that:
- They have been more likely to participate in DSA through this group since it’s very close to them and they get to meet their socialist neighbors. The smaller group setting has been an easier way to interact with each other and start to build community and social connections.
- When they joined DSA, they were overwhelmed with how much was going on. This group felt like an easier point of engagement with the organization.
- The group has felt like a welcoming space for DSA members to bring their friends and significant others.
Group meetings held every two weeks average around 15 to 20 people from a pool of around 40 different attendees over eight months that includes DSA members, non-DSA members brought along by members, and constituents that Dylan recruits through door-knocking, social media, or coffee hours. Only six of those members had participated in DSA before joining this group and four people have joined DSA through participation in it. Dylan and Mike join every meeting.
The group’s meetings run for two hours and start with someone reiterating our political purpose: our SIOs need a mass movement behind them and this group can help develop local socialist organizers and potential future socialist candidates to make that happen. Each attendee introduces themselves and shares why they’re a socialist or what brought them to the meeting. Introductions are followed by a 30-minute political discussion based on a reading (distributed in advance) on topics like basic socialist theory, organizational democracy, electoral organizing strategy, or current events. These political discussions are based on easy-to-read, short Jacobin articles and have acted as a way to onboard new members and non-members alike who are new to socialism and organizing. They’ve also allowed us to talk about the broader goals of socialist organizing and our theory of change beyond just supporting our SIOs.
Building Socialist Organization
Group members have shared responsibilities for running the meetings, with some members facilitating our political discussion by preparing discussion questions beforehand and others taking turns to take notes and chair. Roles switch each meeting so that all members get experience in each one. Distributing and rotating the work in this way teaches through experience that includes making group democratic decisions. We spend a portion of our meetings working on organizing plans, as a means to develop group members who have never organized into experienced leaders by leading projects. We have:
- Collected signatures at events in the district for three statewide ballot initiatives endorsed by Metro Detroit DSA. Notably, none of the nonprofits leading the ballot initiatives had established a presence in this area. Signature collection at events has been used as a conversation opener to talk to people about socialism and DSA, give them one of our DSA palm cards, and try to recruit.
- Begun power mapping Dylan’s district so we can learn about local political dynamics, including research on a warehouse purchased by ICE that they intend to convert into a detention center.
- Run a public donation drive alongside our SIOs in response to the government shutdown and SNAP benefit suspension to funnel donations to local food pantries.
- Started to organize tenants at a 300-unit apartment complex in Dylan’s district. This was initiated by Dylan, with a town hall attended by 50 tenants, after he learned that many of them were living in poor conditions and did outreach to the whole building by mailing them surveys about it, paid for with office funds. Unfortunately, work on this has stalled due to the lack of a dedicated and experienced housing organizer to lead it.
- Launched Dylan’s 2026 re-election campaign with an event that was attended by more than 200 people, most of whom were not DSA members.
- Organized a No Kings rally alongside the same UAW local that our chapter supported on the picket line during the auto workers’ strike in 2023.
In the case of the tenant organizing, this opportunity was only possible because Dylan was in office. Through his constituent services program, his office fielded multiple calls from constituents calling attention to issues in their building. In this same situation, a liberal or progressive elected official may have attempted to negotiate with building management and the landlord on their own on behalf of the tenants. As an “organizer in office” Dylan instead viewed this as an opportunity to bring these tenants together and lead them in organizing themselves to fight on their own behalf. By facilitating this type of self-activity, we can start to understand the real value of our efforts to elect socialists to office as they bring workers and tenants, with whom we would have not been in contact otherwise, into the class struggle.
SIO as Spokesperson for Our Independent Party
A quick glance through Dylan’s social media produces a number of videos of him calling himself a democratic socialist and urging people to join DSA — typically insisting that even if there were 10 more of him in the state legislature, the demands of the socialist movement cannot be won unless working class folks themselves take up the fight for their own liberation.
Immediately after taking office in 2023, Dylan came under pressure from Democratic Party leadership, including the governor, as the single hold-out vote for a tax policy bill that included $1.5 billion in corporate handouts. Democrats had just taken full control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984, and were going so far as to call Dylan’s constituent donors, political mentors, and city council members in his district to try to whip his vote. Dylan publicly held firm against them even as Democratic leadership threatened to take the cancellation of public school debt for one of the cities in his district off the table. The funding to erase the school debt was successfully passed later that year anyway.
In 2025, Dylan was one of only a few State Representatives that voted against general and school aid budgets that stole funding from public schools to fund roads. Through his office, he issued a public statement detailing why, and in doing so exposed the undemocratic and non-transparent process that Republican and Democratic party leaders use to make backroom deals that cut out rank and file legislators and the public. He republished it in Metro Detroit DSA’s online publication, the Detroit Socialist, that the chapter used to further publicize his stance.
Running Up the Score
We plan to continue expanding this group as a training ground to create more socialist organizers in an area where our chapter has not previously had an established presence. We’ve already been successful in creating a space for active — rather than DSA’s traditionally passive — recruitment through the organizing we’re doing. For workers to take over and transform society, we need to be everywhere we can to produce more organizers and force the hand of capital in legislatures and workplaces. Socialist organizers developed through this group can confidently go out into their neighborhoods, unions, and workplaces and lead other workers.
