As the U.S. stares down yet another Donald Trump presidency, DSA and the left must look for ways to offer an alternative not only to Trumpism but to a failed and humiliated Democratic Party. Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College with fewer votes than he received in 2020, while the Democrats hemorrhaged over 10 million votes. Voters were clearly looking for an alternative to the Democratic Party, and the Republicans afforded them one. To beat the right, DSA and the left must build and grow an alternative to both Republicans and Democrats.
Alongside other important tactics, we must beat the Republicans and the Democrats in elections and put democratic socialists in office across the country. Since 2017, some DSA chapters, and in particular NYC-DSA, have built impressive electoral infrastructure that rivals the Democrats’. This includes communications, fundraising, voter outreach infrastructure, and more. DSA’s National Electoral Commission has spent 2024 building important national infrastructure, too — an electoral academy, mentorship program, national fundraising infrastructure, grants for local chapters, and phone banking and communications programs. These are great strides forward that will help nationally endorsed campaigns win in 2025, across the country. DSA’s national and local electoral skills and capacity are tangible and ready to be scaled up.
While we build and use our infrastructure, we also need to grow a separate, party-like identity that distinguishes DSA and our politics as an alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties. All the logistical and tactical capabilities we’ve built will not help us win socialism if we do not help voters sympathize with our ideological project and win them to our side. The 2024 electoral cycle highlighted some key areas in which we can stand to experiment and to grow: experimenting with third-party ballot lines, building a base beyond Democratic Triple Prime voters, and running aggressive and propagandistic general election campaigns.
Ballot Lines
Most DSA chapters cannot run electoral campaigns outside of the Democratic primary on third-party general election ballot lines and expect to win. While ideologically appealing, it has simply not been logistically practical. Decades of leftist electoral history inform this perspective, not to mention the hard-won experience we’ve gained before and since NYC-DSA’s electoral breakthrough in 2020, when five candidates running as open democratic socialists on the Democratic ballot line were elected to the New York State Assembly and Senate.
The current corporate party duopoly has too much of a hold on infrastructure, brand identity, and legal methods for removing challengers from the ballot for democratic socialists to break through without significant uphill effort. For the near future, NYC-DSA and chapters across the country will have to run DSA candidates on the Democratic Party line in the general election, contesting for the Democratic nomination in the party primaries.
Electoral results in 2024, however, suggest a growing toxicity to the Democratic Party brand that may accelerate the process of fully separating from the Dems. Even within deep blue NYC, where most voters are registered Democrats who automatically “vote blue” come the general election, initial 2024 electoral results show Trump gaining vote share across the city. The one NYC-DSA-endorsed candidate facing a competitive 2024 general election, Marcela Mitaynes, outperformed Harris thanks to split-ticket voters. In NYC, as in most of New York, the Democratic primary is significantly more competitive than the general election, albeit with lower turnout. DSA campaigns must run in the Democratic primary, as we would face an unnecessarily difficult battle in the general election on a third-party line — voters might mistake us as opposing their interests (being conservative or fringe), and likely wouldn’t know of our candidate at all, even with extensive canvassing and a great communications strategy.
This plight is not exclusive to DSA: There have been no notable electoral victories in New York City won exclusively on a third party ballot line since 2003, when Tish James won on the Working Families Party (WFP) line following the assassination of the Democratic incumbent and the gifting of the Dem ballot-line to his scandal-beset brother. This was a unique set of events.
Still, NYC-DSA has experimented with third-party ballot lines in the past. In 2017, NYC-DSA supported Jabari Brisport’s third-party run for New York City Council on the Green Party line, creating our own Socialist ballot line as well. Running on multiple ballot lines like this — something called “fusion voting” — is available in New York but unfortunately not in most states. Brisport secured 29% of the vote that cycle, impressive for a purely third-party candidate and a clear sign that the area was open to Brisport, to DSA, and to our politics. Brisport’s quickly assembled third-party City Council run, though unsuccessful, built the foundation for his resounding 58% win in the 2020 Democratic primary for the 25th State Senate District, followed by a resounding win in the general election.
Fusion voting is permitted in some form in only Connecticut, Mississippi, New York, Oregon, and Vermont. It does open up opportunities for socialists in states where it is available, notably New York. Fusion voting allows a candidate to appear on multiple ballot lines, and for the votes from those different ballot lines to all count toward the candidate’s total. In New York, this tactic has been most widely used and championed by the Working Families Party and by the Conservative Party, a right-wing alternative with a major influence in the rare “purple,” Republican-leaning parts of New York City. Since Brisport’s Green Party campaign, DSA has seemed allergic to any experimentation with ballot lines. A recent piece by DSA’s NYC-based SMC Caucus goes out of its way to criticize even light discussion of a third-party ballot line as unrealistic and as opposed to future DSA electoral success. It’s a mode of thinking stuck in the Bernie moment of 2020 and not reflective of our current political climate. It’s also a straw man: No major tendencies in DSA advocate for running DSA campaigns exclusively on third-party general election ballot lines.
Running a socialist ballot line via fusion voting, where available, would be a way of safely raising visibility for DSA as a political identity separate from the Democrats, while avoiding a contested general election. Signature counts for establishing independent ballot lines in New York City are also relatively modest: 1,500 for State Assembly races; 3,000 for State Senate; 2,700 for City Council. These are achievable numbers. Fusion voting offers a way for NYC-DSA to proselytize about DSA and about our politics. A separate ballot line, with DSA’s name next to our candidate’s name, would offer voters a clear opportunity to see us as separate from the Democrats and to identify with our socialist project.
Triple Prime Voters
Because of the circumstances described above, DSA campaigns are forced to contest for electoral power within the Democratic Party primary. But this can put significant constraints on how we run our campaigns. Running in the primary of a party we often do not agree with, on both policy and strategy, often raises sharp contradictions and creates new challenges. Some electoral organizers call it the “Triple Prime voter problem.” Because most registered Democrats don’t turn out to vote reliably in primaries, Democratic primary campaigns of all ideological persuasions chiefly appeal to a small group. These folks are called “triple prime” voters — they have voted in all three of the last Democratic primaries. Campaigns, DSA’s included, will often prioritize reaching and convincing these voters, instead of irregular or new voters.
This is an understandable strategy when your primary goal is winning an election. However, it leaves out the many disillusioned people who have not voted in the past three primaries and may be sympathetic to (or even enthusiastic about) DSA’s candidates and politics, the type of people we need to reach to build a separate base and, eventually, a socialist workers party.
As demonstrated by their strong primary voting record, these Triple Prime voters are committed active Democratic voters and they tend to be older and middle class. With their votes in the primary they are deciding which direction they want the party to go. Since DSA’s politics contrast sharply with the Democratic Party’s, democratic socialist campaigns may forgo widely sharing their more radical policy agenda or socialist identity in the interest of winning the election with the Triple Prime voters’ support. This has, understandably, created pressure to de-emphasize DSA’s identity and the presence of socialism within campaigns, reflected in campaigns taking DSA’s logo and any phrasings of “socialism” off of print mailers, digital ads, and websites, and in canvassing scripts that focus on “policy-first” communications and de-emphasize ideology and anything that could contrast too sharply with the Democratic Party. For years, it has also been common for NYC-DSA electoral campaigns to embrace or foreground “progressivism” over socialism — even when there are many “progressive” competitors in a given race — as that’s seen as more appealing to the Triple Prime voter.
I understand why campaigns make these decisions and as a veteran of many electoral campaigns, I am sympathetic to the rapid-pace, intense nature of electoral work. But now, as we enter 2025, with two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns and many local democratic socialist wins behind us, and committed, outspoken and beloved socialists in office winning reelection year after year, I see a clear path for grounding DSA-endorsed campaigns in (easy-to-understand, accessible) language around socialism, and being clear about our ties to the organization. DSA, the country, and voters have moved beyond the politics and moments of 2016 and 2020. Let’s seize the emerging political moment of 2025.
What if we reprioritized our goals to not only win elections but to also build a base? To become a more powerful force in electoral politics, and to build an identity separate from the Dems, DSA must extend our appeal and our campaigning beyond Democratic Triple Prime partisans. One way of doing that is running broad, high-profile, explicitly socialist electoral campaigns, like the NYC-DSA endorsed Zohran Mamdani campaign for New York City Mayor. Another is running highly visible general election campaigns — even as the Democratic nominee in a blue district and even unopposed.
General Elections
Currently, when DSA campaigns win the Democratic primary and move to the general election, they largely go silent and stop campaigning. Primary campaigns are high-energy and exhausting affairs. Members are often ready for a break, and in blue districts, a win is all but guaranteed. A highly organized and strategic general election campaign often seems not worth the effort. We should, though, explore what we can gain by running visible socialist general election campaigns, and what we lose when general election voters’ sole experience with us is as Democrats.
In most general elections, voter turnout is typically higher than in party primaries, and this general election voter base is broader and more diverse. These are the kinds of voters, less committed as a base of a specific party, who are more likely to be open to a new workers socialist party, separate from the Democrats and the Republicans. They’re dissatisfied with the status quo. Or they just registered to vote for the first time. Or they work really, really long days and didn’t know there was a primary in June.
When campaigning in the general election as Democrats, rather than as democratic socialists, we offer nothing to the broader masses of general election voters. We become invisible, absorbed into the Democratic Party, just another box for people to bubble in and move on from. And by not running a campaign as socialists, we depoliticize the act of voting for that broader audience.
We’re experimenting with more robust general election campaigns in New York State, and (spoiler) it’s working. For example, in the Hudson Valley, DSA-endorsed State Assembly incumbent Sarahana Shrestha recently defeated her general election Republican opponent with 64% of the vote. While national trends resulted in a relatively closer result than might have been expected in such a Dem-leaning district, this was never going to be a truly competitive election. Rather than sit this one out, though, Shrestha mounted a general election campaign nearly as robust as that in the hotly contested Democratic primary months earlier, holding rallies, canvassing, running digital ads, and more. The goal of this campaign was not just to ensure a general election victory but to ensure that awareness of Shrestha and her platform saturated the district and laid the foundations for growth for years to come.
As part of this general election campaign, Shrestha used digital ads emphasizing the Working Families Party ballot line as an alternative ballot choice, alongside the typical Democratic line. Imagine the messaging possibilities if a DSA ballot line were also ready and usable.
To truly challenge the right, we will need to build a defined party-like identity and structure separate from the Democrats, who will be tainted by their failures of the working class for years to come. The dynamics of building an electoral alternative to the Dems will likely change in 2025 in ways we can’t predict and no one can control. There is no way to truly prepare except to build our solid foundations, to grow, to experiment, and to seize the political moment when it presents itself.
