When State Representative Lesly Muñoz attended a Salem DSA meeting in October 2025, her district was under an ICE attack. Agents had kidnapped a father in the parking lot of El Torito Market. Days later, ICE abducted 31 immigrant workers in nearby Woodburn.
Chapter leaders spent the better part of an hour brainstorming a rapid response with Lesly. By the end, we had a plan: activate community members by distributing Know Your Rights resources to residents and Latino businesses, with Lesly leveraging her position as state representative to amplify our Abolish ICE demands. That same evening, Lesly joined DSA.
Together, we went on to build a campaign for the state legislature that mobilized constituents, named the enemy, and let the red banner fly. As a result, Lesly won re-election to House District 22 by 18 percentage points, a jaw-dropping shift from her razor-thin victory just two years before.
Our unapologetic socialist campaign flipped right-wing precincts and turned once-competitive neighborhoods into strongholds for our politics. We ran on a vision to Tax the Rich, Freeze the Rent, and Abolish ICE. Defying the conventional wisdom of Democratic consultants, we dared our base of renters and Latino workers to demand more from their government. Here’s how we did it.
The Past Is Prelude
Lesly Muñoz’s district is special. House District 22 is the heart of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, including Northeast Salem, as well as the towns of Woodburn, Gervais, and Brooks, and large tracts of rural farmland. It is the only majority-minority district in the state, anchored by a vibrant Latino community.
In 2024, Democrats eked out a 161-vote victory in HD22 that grabbed headlines statewide. Lesly was credited with clinching a supermajority for the Democrats in the House. This was despite a Red Wave in which Latino voters swung hard to the right; the Trump-Muñoz combination voter became a notable phenomenon in the district.
Lesly was excited to join the Oregon House of Representatives. A self-described “Social Justice Warrior,” she looked forward to Democrats wielding their supermajority to enact transformative legislation for Oregon’s working class. The Democratic establishment had other plans.
As her first term in the legislature dragged on without any of the promised reforms, Lesly’s excitement became outrage. A staffer for the Oregon Education Association, she specifically was disillusioned with the legislature’s assault on public education. Oregon is already at the bottom of national rankings for funding public schools. The legislature’s $11.3 billion allotment over two years was wholly inadequate. Students and educators were left at the mercy of right-wing superintendents and their austerity programs. On top of that, Governor Tina Kotek launched a public salvo against Multnomah County’s Universal Pre-K program, a policy won by a coalition spearheaded by Portland DSA in 2020.
By the end of 2025, Lesly was looking for someone, anyone, who was fighting back against the right. That’s where DSA came in.
Revealing the Rose
Once Lesly was in, she was all in. She was quick to join Salem DSA on our campaigns, including an appearance on the picket line with striking Starbucks workers. By January 2026, Lesly had applied for and earned Salem DSA’s endorsement.
As excited as we were, chapter members were also nervous. We were in uncharted territory: tasked with re-winning a swing seat previously captured by less than a percentage point — as open socialists. We had a lot to prove, with no shortage of consultants and interest groups eager to see us fail. But you wouldn’t know it based on Lesly’s messaging.
On January 19, DSA members from across the state descended on the State Capitol. It was MLK Day, and our goal was to honor the Reverend’s legacy by standing with immigrant workers against ICE terror. Lesly was among the marquee speakers. This was a key opportunity to raise the red banner, loud and proud. And that she did. To a crowd of over 500, Lesly encouraged attendees to join DSA, the organization that was now her political home.
This confident streak continued into the summer months. Lesly filled her campaign team with cadre DSA members like Tammy Carpenter and several of us from the Bread & Roses caucus in Salem and Portland. Our campaign kickoff featured Tax the Rich, Freeze the Rent, and Abolish ICE as central themes.
In May, Lesly seized another opportunity to make her identity known. She had been invited to speak at Salem’s 2026 May Day rally by Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste, a local immigrant justice advocacy nonprofit. But there was a catch: Event organizers wanted her to “shout out” Congressperson Andrea Salinas, who was also in attendance. This was the same Andrea Salinas endorsed by Democratic Majority for Israel and who has taken nearly $270,000 from the Israel lobby. Salinas had also voted for an infamous Republican House resolution to condemn “the horrors of socialism.” So Lesly walked onto the stage, declared that she was a proud democratic socialist, and refused to utter Salinas’s name.
Is Socialism a Turnoff?
FuturePAC Housebuilders is the incumbent protection racket for Democrats in the Oregon House. Through a consortium of labor unions and candidate committees, FuturePAC builds war chests for Democratic representatives. Once primary season drew to a close, they turned their attention to HD22, eager to control Lesly’s campaign from the sidelines.
The central pain point between Salem DSA and FuturePAC was Lesly’s socialist identity. According to FuturePAC’s very smart consultants (many of whom had worked on Congresswoman Haley Stevens’s campaign for U.S. Senate), branding our campaign materials with democratic socialism would be a turnoff for the independent and non-affiliated voters who broke for Trump in 2024. Our thesis was the opposite: running Lesly as a socialist would present her as the anti-establishment choice in a decidedly anti-incumbent year.
Our chapter’s vision won out in the end, in no small part thanks to Lesly’s resolve. Weathering threats from stakeholder organizations to divest from the campaign, Lesly insisted that DSA would remain on our door-knocking literature and Voter Pamphlet Statement (mailed by the Secretary of State to all voting households). Our final batches of flyers proclaimed Lesly a democratic socialist and Salem DSA’s endorsement remained on the Voter Pamphlet Statement..
Data Center Disaster!
On July 13, the California-based data center construction company Verrus announced it was coming to Salem.
DSA sprang into action. We called an emergency meeting and then publicized our plan: pack the Salem City Council session. Our opening salvo included a petition, a letter-writing campaign, and coordinated speeches from DSA members at the council meeting. We’d seen success rallying against deporter Avelo Airlines and winning a State of Emergency declaration over ICE. City Council pressure campaigns were our bread-and-butter.
Even so, we could not anticipate the level of mass rage sparked by the Verrus data center. Nearly an hour before start time, a crowd had already formed outside the council chambers. Within 30 minutes of doors opening, attendees were turned away because even the overflow rooms were at max capacity.
Five hours of public testimony later, what remained was an angry mass unsure what to do with their anger aside from yelling at their city councilors. Then, as the clock struck midnight, Salem Mayor Julie Hoy called on the final speaker of the night, Lesly Magdalena Muñoz.
A week earlier, Lesly had promoted Salem DSA’s rally and petition in a video statement sporting a bright-red DSA shirt. Now, just days into recovering from a surgery, she castigated the majority-liberal council for undermining democracy and reiterated her intent to champion a statewide moratorium on data centers. It was an explosive finish to a night of palpable working-class energy. Within weeks, the city council adopted a local moratorium on all data center development.
September Surprise
In the months following our data center rallies, we capitalized on Lesly’s support for a moratorium to move traditionally Republican-leaning voters into our camp. Our Republican opponent quickly followed by adopting a nominally oppositional stance as well.
We knew we had to distinguish ourselves from our opponent even further and undermine her centrist branding. The FuturePAC milieu expressed distaste for going negative. We largely agreed on keeping Lesly’s affirmative vision for the district the focal point, but we also knew that class-struggle elected officials name the enemy at every opportunity. And there was a clear class enemy in House District 22.
By the late summer, Salem and Woodburn had repeatedly been pillaged by ICE raids. Many people were unaware of our opponent’s pro-ICE voting record on the Woodburn School Board and her far-right staffing choices. And so, defying the conventional wisdom of the consultants, DSA member Geovanny Tolentino released a video blasting Republican Noemi Legaspi for her vote, as school board chair, against condemning ICE violence. The video also depicted Legaspi’s campaign manager, a Turning Point USA staffer who publicly stated her love for Trump and ICE.
The clip, which garnered 1.6 million views across platforms, completely upended the dynamics of the race. This was no longer a race between two Mexican-American women who loved their community. It was now a showdown between socialism and barbarism. And Latino voters knew which side they were on. Through Election Day, online discourse in HD22 was consumed by Spanish references to Noemi “MAGAspi” and MAGA Latinos. Legaspi’s reputation never recovered.
Home Stretch
In the final days of the campaign, Lesly faced renewed pressure to abandon the socialist underpinnings of her candidacy. Political staff at the Service Employees union (SEIU) and AFSCME, the public employees union, were outraged that Salem DSA continued running GOTV phonebanks independent from the Democratic Party of Oregon official events.
Their concern? Turning out voters outside the consultants’ exclusive universe of partisan Democratic voters could hand the gubernatorial election to Republican Christine Drazan. They wanted us to cease our turnout efforts, which would effectively suppress the Latino vote. They made the consequences clear: we could comply or organized labor would not “play ball” on Lesly’s bills during the next legislative session. We went on to conduct our largest phone banks of the election cycle.
In the end, Salem DSA knocked 10,000 doors and made nearly 35,000 calls for Lesly’s campaign. While other Democrats in our district ran towards gated retirement communities, we went to some of Oregon’s most working-class neighborhoods. We encountered at the doors indigenous Mexican languages, young tenants, and socialist voters unaffiliated with either party. This strategy confounded Democratic consultants and labor staffers alike, all of whom urgently begged us to change course. But on election night, our resolve was rewarded.
On November 3, our double-digit lead grew as other Democrats’ shrank. We flipped rural Latino towns like Gervais and Labish Village and transformed competitive neighborhoods in Salem and Woodburn into double-digit victories for Lesly. At 58.7% to Legaspi’s 41.1%, we outperformed Democrats like Governor Tina Kotek, Representative Andrea Salinas, and even U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley, one of the most popular politicians in the state. This wasn’t just a “really good night” — it was a political realignment.
Towards a Dirty Break
Swing seats, purple districts, are not a socialist’s weakness — they are where our politics shine brightest. Our campaign named the enemy, centered popular working-class demands, and organized our neighbors to win concessions.
The working people of House District 22 rewarded us. Mexican flea markets and restaurants welcomed DSA through their doors. Tenants who had voted Republican or never voted before committed their ballots to Lesly Muñoz. Our coalition triumphed over Republican PACs, the Chamber of Commerce, and the police unions.
The conventional wisdom of the Democratic Party is a lie. Bourgeois politics teaches us to suppress working-class anger, not to encourage it. Political independence for the working class can only be won if we take risks. There are no shortcuts, and that is why we fight as open socialists.
