What Democratic Socialists Can Learn About Endorsing a Presidential Candidate in 2028

The 2028 White House race likely will be the first in a decade and half without President Donald Trump on the ballot. This open contest puts the nominations of both major parties up for grabs. For the Democrats, one candidate being floated by media outlets, politicians and left organizers as a possible contender is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), an open democratic socialist and DSA member. At this summer’s DSA Summit in Chicago, some members held a gathering with the goal of drafting her to enter the presidential race, which received coverage in the mainstream press. On Nov. 9, a new organization called Ready for AOC was launched to encourage Ocasio-Cortez to run and build out the infrastructure for a possible campaign. 

Ocasio-Cortez has options — she could stay in Congress, challenge an increasingly unpopular Senate Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer, or set her sights on moving to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Should she run for president, it would not be unprecedented. 

First, Sen. Sanders’ two presidential campaigns demonstrated that there is a lane for a democratic socialist to put up a real fight in the Democratic nomination process. Second, DSA has gone through a presidential endorsement process before where the candidate was popular with its base but also had clear and vocal skeptics.

OR Press has graciously allowed In These Times to republish my history of DSA around the organization’s 2020 presidential endorsement process for Bernie Sanders — and the organization’s orientation towards the primary and general elections — from the book Power Concedes Nothing. The chapter features a number of parallels to questions facing DSA today.

These similarities include, but are not limited to, DSA lacking a longstanding endorsement process for president; the democratic socialist presidential candidates having serious detractors in DSA over single issues; and debates over whether an online poll can best determine popular support among the organization’s base.

But there are some critical differences, too, especially for DSA. Ocasio-Cortez, unlike Sanders, is a DSA member, and publicly renewed her membership recently. DSA’s reach is also now wider and stronger in the political arena than ever before. Eight DSA-backed candidates are set to be sworn into Congress next year, and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a fellow DSA member, has become a popular figure and national star. DSA can offer a deeper volunteer operation to Ocasio-Cortez in 2028 than it could for Sanders during either of his runs.

This electoral success has led, since 2020, to tens of thousands of people joining DSA. This year, DSA surpassed the Socialist Party of America as the largest anti-capitalist group in U.S. history, reaching more than 130,000 members.

Hopefully this chapter can help readers both in and outside DSA understand the organization’s endorsement process and the choices facing the broader Left today. 

Democratic Socialists and the U.S. Presidency in the Neoliberal Era

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DSA in 2020: From the thick of it to the sideline

Thousands of Democratic Socialists of America members poured tens of thousands of hours into electoral work in 2020, and their collective efforts were an important factor in Sen. Bernie Sanders’ bid for the presidency. DSA members also contributed — in some cases decisively — to the victories won by progressive and socialist candidates running for local and state office, and several seats in the House of Representatives. During the course of these efforts the organization continued the explosive growth it experienced beginning in 2016, reaching over 87,000 members by the end of 2020.

When it came to the main event, however — the fight to deny Donald Trump and the racist authoritarian bloc behind him a second term in the White House — DSA as an organization officially sat on the sidelines. As the largest and fastest growing socialist organization in the United States, the decision to sit out of one of the most consequential presidential elections in decades had reverberations throughout the left, as well as within its own ranks.

It caused confusion, led to criticism, and provided no clear direction to thousands of potential volunteers. It may also have created tensions with other parts of the left. It meant DSA did not connect itself to any of the formal anti-Trump coalitions or informal alignments that involved the overwhelming bulk of progressive groups and individuals — especially in the labor movement and communities of color. While some of those formations gained influence and credibility among working-class people and communities of color who joined the effort to defeat Trump, DSA squandered the opportunity to do the same. Only some of that damage was mitigated by the decision to take part in the U.S. Senate run-off election in Georgia in January 2021.

The reasons for the decision to not endorse and help elect Biden are not simple. It did not flow from the organization or its leadership being united on a particular view about how U.S.-based socialists relate to electoral politics and mass movements. The reality behind DSA’s decision lies in a wider series of external events confronting a group facing unprecedented membership growth and untested internal processes. 

The decision must also be contextualized within the history of how DSA has handled White House candidacies since 1980, and in the political evolution of the organization’s membership. Especially important are the ways that internal decisions leading up to the organizational endorsement of Sanders during the primary race run set the conditions for a ​“Bernie or Bust” resolution without proper consideration of the possible consequences.

In the fraught period ahead, neither DSA nor the broader left can afford to repeat these kinds of mistakes. Although the decision was a political error, the events that unfolded afterwards offer lessons that will serve DSA and the left. This article is my attempt to tell that story and draw out those lessons.

DSA and presidential elections: 1980-2012

The evolution of DSA’s presidential endorsements since 1980 informed how the group landed at a nonendorsement in the 2020 general presidential election. Regardless of what those who support and critique DSA’s 2020 decision say, both sides exaggerate how much a nonendorsement strayed from DSA’s previous stances. Still, the choice in 2019 to pre-empt any possible endorsement of a Democrat other than Sanders later down the line was unprecedented for DSA and its predecessor organizations.

DSA was birthed in 1982, out of the merging of two socialist organizations — the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM). Leading up to the 1980 presidential election, DSOC led a coalition project dubbed the ​“Democratic Agenda” that brought together labor and other mass organizations. Their goal was to curtail rising neoliberalism and defend a New Deal coalition on its last legs by backing Senator Ted Kennedy in his bid to wrest the Democratic nomination from incumbent President Jimmy Carter. They were unsuccessful, and after President Carter secured the party nomination, he went on to lose to Ronald Reagan. DSOC — much as DSA would do 40 years later — did not endorse a candidate for the general election after Kennedy lost the nomination.

DSA went in nearly the opposite direction in 1984 and endorsed the consensus pick of Walter Mondale — Carter’s former vice president and running mate in 1980 — in the general election after making no endorsement in the primary. Jesse Jackson ran in the primaries that year, and the decision to not endorse the progressive movement candidate was reflective of some demographic traits and political choices of early 1980s DSA. The organization remained heavily white and with a large Jewish membership that prioritized relationships with labor leaders. Jesse Jackson’s sympathies for Palestinians and reported anti-Semitic comments did not help him, but neither did a DSA leadership generally unconnected to Black and other people of color – led social movements.

When Jesse Jackson ran again in 1988 at the tail end of Reagan’s presidency, DSA enthusiastically joined his campaign efforts along with many other progressives, socialists, and communists. He won three times as many delegates as in 1984, and the relative success of his campaign and the Rainbow Coalition gave hope to many that a multiracial national movement could spring from his campaign. However, the lack of a democratic Rainbow organization, Jackson’s own personal agenda, and other factors dampened hopes about a new democratic alliance against racial capitalism. Jackson would go on to lose the Democratic nomination, and Reagan’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, would go on to win the 1988 presidential race.

The fortunes of DSA and the broader left steadily declined from the Reagan era into the Bill Clinton administration. In 1992, Clinton became the first Democratic president since Carter, and rose to power championing a ​“Third Way” politics that blended socially liberal and fiscally conservative policies, reflecting the rightward shift in the country and growing neoliberal hegemony. DSA’s influence, already waning from the mid-1980s, further sank through the 1990s and early 2000s. During this entire period, DSA did not endorse presidential candidates, partly because of the lack of major presidential candidates that challenged neoliberal hegemony in the White House.

In 2000, Ralph Nader’s candidacy for president on the progressive Green Party ticket inspired millions of votes. However, DSA did not endorse him either. The organization lacked unity and many members thought that Al Gore — Bill Clinton’s vice president and Democratic nominee for the presidential race — would obviously prevail. George W. Bush’s victory was a wake-up call to many that conditions could get even worse.

Four years later in 2004, after DSA membership was largely divided between Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich in the Democratic primaries, John Kerry won the nomination and DSA promptly endorsed him in the general election. It was the organization’s first presidential endorsement in 16 years. Although Kerry was hardly progressive, DSA believed that he was the only candidate who could defeat Bush in the general election, and that was top priority. 

Many members went to work to elect Kerry or to unseat Bush. Hardly any members actively supported Ralph Nader’s independent run that year, drawing lessons from 2000, when many believed that Nader split Democratic votes and was partially responsible for Bush’s victory. This experience is important because it mirrors the conditions in 2020 in some important ways, and a much smaller and very different DSA chose a different path than they would 16 years later.

Kerry lost that election, but after making our first endorsement since 1988, DSA would take some critical steps to modernize its electoral structures including getting a political action committee (PAC) so it could spend money on federal races.

After an eight-year Bush presidency that launched endless wars, DSA and other left formations threw their weight behind Barack Obama’s historic campaign. Although Obama was masterful at using social movement rhetoric and building a multiracial electoral coalition, his time in power did not break with neoliberalism and DSA declined to re-endorse him in 2012. DSA did however publicly state that his re-election would be better than the victory of his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney.

The 2016 election and the Sanders era

At the end of Obama’s two-term presidency, DSA still had not endorsed a presidential contender in the primaries since 1988. Bernie Sanders would soon change that. Once the senator from Vermont began sending out feelers to test his viability as a candidate, groups like DSA and the Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) began circulating petitions urging him to run for president. While on the surface, the self-described democratic socialist seemed like an obvious candidate for DSA to rally behind, there were a few other factors that led to our support.

First, even before Sanders’ run, there was a renewed and growing interest in socialism across the country. The devastation brought on by the 2008 financial crisis, growing inequality, the increasing inability of neoliberal policies to meet the material needs of people, and the far distant memory of the Cold War and anti-Soviet propaganda were among many factors that contributed to a growing openness to alternatives to capitalism, especially among younger people. 

In addition, eight years of right-wing attacks and labeling of Obama as a socialist not only had zero detrimental effect on his reelection, but those attacks arguably backfired as his moderate policies defanged the foreign specter of ​“socialism” in the eyes of many, especially with the working-class people of color who supported him and were the target of socialist organizations like DSA. 

Lastly, campaign finance laws had changed significantly since DSA’s first major support of Sanders’ Senate run in 2007. The Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United greatly expanded the ability of nonprofit organizations with a 501(c)(4) designation such as DSA to spend money supporting specific candidates during campaign season. This gave DSA more freedom to independently support a candidate in whatever way and with whatever messaging we chose than if we coordinated with the candidate’s official campaign.

DSA launched a supportive independent expenditure operation called ​“We Need Bernie” that engaged chapters and brought in new members throughout 2015 and 2016. The decision to do that was brought forward by DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC), and won widespread approval at the 2015 national convention. This was partly because of Sanders’ political stances, but also because of his prior relationship with DSA since our support of his 2006 Senate race. 

While Sanders’ 2006 US Senate candidacy brought some press coverage and helped slightly grow the membership, DSA continued to be of only very limited political relevance. For several years, DSA hardly broke 6,000 dues-paying members. After Bernie lost the primary election in 2016, DSA unsurprisingly declined to endorse Clinton by name but embraced the ​“Dump Trump” effort. Few of us imagined he would win, but correctly saw his authoritarian streak and attacks on the voting rights of communities of color, among other threats, as extremely dangerous. His surprise Electoral College victory shocked the progressive world to its core, and his presidency quickly proved to be just as scary and dangerous as his campaign was. This horror sparked thousands of new activists, especially millennials, to join organizations like DSA, PDA, and new formations like Our Revolution and Indivisible in droves. This crowd of new socialists and radicals transformed DSA. After the inauguration and the Women’s March in January 2017, it was clear that progressives were mobilizing at an unprecedented scale.

The next few years would see DSA’s numbers swell into the tens of thousands, but what was more important was how the character of DSA changed with this influx of new members. The influx ranged from experienced leftists coming from other anti-capitalist formations to the newly introduced to socialism who lacked any background in the left movement and its history. This change in the size and character of DSA is crucial to understanding how the ​“Bernie or Bust” resolution came to pass, and how we eventually declined to throw the full weight of the organization into the 2020 general election.

It is important to note that after 2016’s loss, while Sanders and organizations like Our Revolution focused a lot of their work on efforts to reform Democratic Party structures and processes — especially after controversy around the party’s 2016 presidential primaries and superdelegates — DSA remained absent from these struggles. After our 2017 convention, we began shifting away from our legacy of intra-Democratic Party work to begin supporting the formation of a new workers party. This dynamic is critical to understand as it was a harbinger of how DSA could appear much more in lockstep with Bernie than was actually true.

The road to ​‘Bernie or Bust’

The broader history of DSA endorsements laid out up to this point makes it clear that DSA has not consistently endorsed presidential candidates in primary or general elections. Sometimes we did the former and a few more times we did the latter, but most often we endorsed no one at all. People on all sides of the debate surrounding our 2020 nonendorsement of Biden have falsely made it seem like DSA had a long history of either formally endorsing or informally backing the Democratic nominee. This misunderstanding inaccurately colored the debate throughout 2020.

DSA’s ultimate backing of Sanders’ second presidential run started in 2018 when the national organization and its chapters began having discussions about an endorsement. Although the external perception might have been that DSA was fully behind the race before Sanders declared, this was not the case. The hesitation from DSA members to re-endorse Sanders were multifaceted, but all were rooted in the fact that this organization was different from the one that had backed him in 2016.

Some members felt that throwing down in the presidential elections would overextend DSA’s capacity, and that new formations like Our Revolution could handle it on their own, especially since many DSA members would volunteer as individuals anyway. Others felt that Sanders had missed the mark on sex worker rights by voting for the anti-sex-trafficking legislation SESTA-FOSTA and disliked his foreign policy positions. Sanders’ consistently poor showing with African American voters and disconnect from surging Black social movements also caused some supporters in DSA to wonder if he had learned anything from 2016.

We also knew that Sanders could not win without his grassroots base, which DSA was a very important part of, and DSA would have been marginalized if we didn’t endorse his campaign. If we supported Sanders, we had to figure out how to do so while being clear about the differences between his social democratic program and our democratic socialist vision. We did not have unity around how to demarcate that difference while still supporting him.

Organizationally, the new DSA also lacked any consensus on how to select a presidential campaign to get behind. Historically, only the National Political Committee (NPC) would determine a handful of national endorsements. By 2016, DSA had developed an internal culture and process where major endorsements came from local chapters, so that endorsements were more democratic and had local buy-in. After local chapters vetted and nominated candidates, a National Electoral Committee made up of volunteers from around the country would analyze the races further, and eventually the National Political Committee would decide whether to endorse the candidate. Chapters could only nominate candidates running in their jurisdiction, which was determined by assigning zip codes to every chapter. Notably, under this new process, DSA’s Vermont chapter did not submit Bernie Sanders’ 2018 US Senate race for an endorsement and the National Political Committee quietly acquiesced.

However, this process applied only to local and state races, and we still lacked a formal method for endorsing national candidates. For decades, the de facto practice was that the NPC would make presidential endorsements without any clear process that incorporated chapter input. In 2015, the convention resoundingly reaffirmed that body’s decision to back Sanders. However, three years later when we started having discussions about backing Sanders’ 2020 run, DSA had grown and changed. Members were more accustomed to having input in endorsements, and had practice through the local endorsement process outlined above. Leadership understood this, and had to balance these new expectations and culture with a tight timeline. 

DSA’s national convention is where the decision to endorse Sanders was supposed to happen, but that was slated for August 2019, less than a year before the primary elections would take place. If a decision wasn’t made until then, DSA would miss valuable time needed to prepare for its independent expenditure operation. Given how slow things moved in the volunteer-led and short-staffed organization, the desire to endorse before the convention made sense. A compromise was reached that DSA would send a poll to all members asking if we should endorse Sanders. The results of this poll would inform the NPC in their decision-making process.

At a late January 2019 NPC meeting, they voted 10 to 3 to form an exploratory committee to begin the process to endorse Sanders. They told the membership:

“Included in this announcement will be a political rationale for why we are considering Bernie Sanders and no other candidate in the Democratic primaries. This rationale will make clear that we are not rubber-stamping Sanders, but instead that we have high demands on him politically, and that we will push Sanders towards our positions as much as possible.”

A few days later, the poll went out via email and about a quarter of DSA’s then roughly 53,000 members voted. Nearly 75% of the voters supported backing Sanders. The NPC interpreted this as buy-in to back Bernie ahead of the upcoming biennial convention. While the NPC had promised that the upcoming preconvention gatherings would still debate backing Sanders, they voted to endorse before all those gatherings could be completed. The fact that the poll offered no alternative to Sanders alongside the endorsement being made before the debates at the preconvention gatherings could take place left a sour taste in some members’ mouths.

So much of this situation was unprecedented. The scale of our decision-making process and expectations around engagement from DSA membership in 2019 had no parallel in our organization’s history. At the time this was taking place, I was the political director at Our Revolution, and we endorsed Sanders almost immediately after he announced his candidacy. I stayed away from commenting on DSA’s process because of my role at Our Revolution, but privately, I thought the process chosen was a poor one. I have since contended that DSA should have built an endorsement process that incorporated its rules for a special convention as outlined in our constitution. In that scenario, chapters representing a certain percentage of the membership can call for a national gathering to address whatever issue they deem important. It would have been better to encourage chapters to nominate presidential candidates for the NPC to consider. It is hard to imagine such a mass of chapters or members not choosing Bernie, but they would have had the option between him and other candidates inside and outside the Democratic Party.

By the time that DSA’s August 2019 convention rolled around, the NPC had already endorsed Sanders and we had already launched our independent expenditure operation under the banner of ​“DSA for Bernie”. The ​“Bernie or Bust” resolution — formally called the ​“In the Event of a Sanders Loss” resolution — began circulating ahead of the convention. Some DSA members in swing states signed a letter against it. A handful of members, including myself, also spoke on the floor against it. We argued that it would prematurely tie the organization’s hands in the event of complex scenarios such as Sanders getting a vice presidential nod. Supporters of the resolution contended that we should aim high and that planning for these other scenarios meant we were giving up ahead of time. On all sides of the debate, we could not overcome the resounding feelings that the only endorsement a socialist organization could make would be for Bernie Sanders.

The resolution overwhelmingly passed at the convention. This vote outcome formally meant that DSA would only back one Democrat in the primary or general election: Bernie Sanders. Many of the supporters of the proposal would not realize its far-reaching effects until much later. It hurt DSA’s ability to work with other mass organizations during the general election, and paralyzed the organization around the general presidential election as the COVID-19 pandemic, surging mobilizations against police violence, and growing right-wing violence changed the political landscape in unforeseeable ways.

‘DSA for Bernie’ and the general election

Once the NPC made the decision to endorse Sanders back in March 2019, DSA launched an independent expenditure operation in its support of Sanders’ 2020 run under the banner of ​“DSA for Bernie.” The independent expenditure was a distinct legal body that was technically separate from DSA, but obviously connected and coordinated.

In order to carry out this massive independent electoral effort, DSA would have to spend serious resources. The proposal to spend $100,000 on access to voter databases and staffing for ​“DSA for Bernie” proved controversial because we have limited resources as a smaller, nonprofit organization, and our members have strong and opposing opinions about how that money should be spent. One of the selling points was that DSA could keep data on volunteers and voters in order to plug them into our longer-term work after the election. This investment of DSA resources could then help the organization expand its reach both in the short and long term, especially in areas where the Sanders campaign didn’t have a physical presence. In the end, after much deliberation and discussion, ​“DSA for Bernie” got the fiscal support it needed from the organization.

The nature of the presidential primaries made it so that the first few states to vote required nearly all the Sanders campaign’s attention. This provided an opportunity for DSA to be one of the main mobilizers of Bernie supporters in states where the campaign could not dedicate much of its early time, such as California, Texas, and Massachusetts. DSA, maybe more than any other non-union group, led Sanders volunteers on canvasses and phonebanks in those places. In the end, ​“DSA for Bernie” had huge metric success, although we felt that we didn’t do enough to support building power with local organizations in the places we operated. Overall, ​“DSA for Bernie” engaged with 91 out of 199 chapters to knock on 576,000 doors, identified 40,000 Bernie supporters, and gained over 15,000 members during the campaign.

DSA’s investment in internal infrastructure and the independent campaign helped Sanders’ showing in the primaries and helped our organization grow. DSA did not just work alone, but also collaborated with the coalition People Power for Bernie. This alliance was made up of some of the movement nonprofits that backed Sanders in 2016 and new additions such as Sunrise Movement, Our Revolution, and Dream Defenders. The formation stayed together after the primary, although DSA exited once Bernie lost.

In April 2020, Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic primary elections for the second time in four years. This time, however, he was much more ready to enthusiastically endorse his opponent, partially because the stakes were so much higher. Donald Trump was mishandling the COVID-19 pandemic by denying basic science and allowing countless deaths; emboldening and encouraging right-wing violence, and showing no commitment to respecting the democratic will of voters in November should he lose. These and other compounding crises gave massive pressure for groups to rally behind the Democratic nominee despite their hesitations over Joe Biden.

Biden was a deeply flawed candidate for the left to rally around under normal circumstances. He was frozen in time, and was steadfast against the issues that were dearest to Bernie supporters, such as Medicare for All and student debt cancellation. Like his Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, Biden also seemed uninterested in courting the Left’s vote, and was happy to leave that work to Sanders and other prominent progressives.

DSA was very influential, and big, so there was lots of outside pressure to break with our resolution and endorse Biden. I knew that the National Political Committee would not overturn the will of the convention. One important consideration that was missing from all sides of the debate was that Joe Biden did not want a DSA endorsement. Both the DSA members who did not want to endorse him and the comrades who did seemed to avoid the assessment that an endorsement might actually hurt him. Biden was interested in appealing to the center, not the left, and a socialist stamp of approval could have undermined his campaign strategy. The degree to which the debates around an endorsement avoided this led me to believe the debates were much more about public posturing than actual political assessments.

The essential point was that once Bernie dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden, DSA did little — if anything — to mobilize against a Trump presidency. In public statements, DSA was critical of both Biden and Trump while admitting that Trump was worse, but the NPC lacked any mandate or consensus to overturn the resolution. DSA then declined to stay on the People Power for Bernie coalition as it rebranded to the United Against Trump coalition, even as they hired former Sanders 2020 labor coordinator and prominent DSA member Jonah Furman to staff the alliance. In May, the NPC voted down board members of the Socialist Majority Caucus (which I was a part of) in their effort to push chapters in swing states to consider discussions about voting for Biden. Jennifer Bolen, an NPC member, summed up the majority stance when she wrote that the effort ​“violated the spirit” of the ​“Bernie or Bust” resolution and ​“sound[ed] like an endorsement” of Biden. So while the rest of the left and progressives began struggling with the real choice between Trump and Biden, DSA was frozen. DSA even abstained from efforts framed only around defeating Trump because many argued that those efforts were de facto pro-Biden, since he was the only candidate that could beat Trump.

It was one thing for DSA not to endorse Biden. That was predictable and consistent with previous actions. Declining to do anything related to the general presidential election had dire consequences and was the wrong decision.

On April 12, 2020, DSA tweeted ​“We are not endorsing Joe Biden.” It went viral, amassing over 16,000 retweets and 90,000 likes. Our Revolution, on the other hand, also did not endorse Joe Biden but made no such public proclamation about their decision. Providing no information of what the organization would actually do besides not backing Biden left DSA open to criticism from other leftists and from moderate and right-wing critics. DSA’s poor messaging alienated its allies and sowed tensions within the membership, especially less active members who were not plugged into the endorsement process. It was difficult for them to understand exactly what had gone into the decision making, and this gave space for leftists to criticize DSA’s inaction on platforms as prominent as the New York Times. Whether this was done with the hopes of actually influencing DSA to change the decision or not, it allowed its critics to shame DSA and hurt its reputation. DSA eventually did send out guidance on how to approach the 2020 elections, but it was in September and sent privately to chapter leaders. No public clarity was offered as the uprising of the summer swept the country and the threat of political violence increased.

As the political situation grew worse going into the fall, some members felt the lack of a position was unsustainable even if changing DSA’s stance was impossible. To address this, I joined with others in October to publish a letter expressing our concerns with a possible Trump victory. We avoided mentioning Biden. We asked others to sign on and sought to create a vehicle for members to openly express their concerns. We also sought to provide organizing opportunities for members who wanted to do electoral work to plug into as individuals. These opportunities were focused on down-ballot races with the aim of turning out Democratic voters key to defeating Trump. We viewed this not just about messaging but about organizing, and we strove to be different from the previous open letters and articles, which seemed more focused on demonstrating righteousness to others than influencing DSA to change their stance.

Our effort was greeted both with praise and scorn. Those primarily concerned with removing Trump from the White House were more sympathetic. Many of those who had voted enthusiastically for the ​“Bernie or Bust” resolution were less happy. Some members even lied and said we were pushing DSA members to campaign for Biden, which was objectively false. There was a feeling that we were trying to get around the convention resolution and that using our DSA titles implied an endorsement. This argument rang hollow to me, because the resolution just prevented endorsing a Democrat besides Sanders, and did not bar individual DSA members from doing electoral work. Most active DSA members, even those who were against our letter, believed that the resolution closed off any possible presidential endorsement, but the author of the resolution said that it left the door open for the endorsement of a third-party candidate.

People inside and outside of DSA understood that the only choices were Biden or Trump. The Green Party received 75% fewer presidential votes between 2016 and 2020, despite higher turnout, and only two DSA chapters endorsed Howie Hawkins’ race. They were both promptly chastised for doing so outside of a formal national process. Our national formation should have owned that there were two choices and the majority of working people were picking Biden. We should have not shied away from publicly and significantly helping to defeat Trump, even if that meant electing Biden, because those were the only two real choices facing working-class voters.

Although DSA and Sanders’ rise had coincided, this relationship grew more distant and awkward as time went on. While prominent democratic socialist elected officials such as Sanders, Reps. Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jamaal Bowman pushed turnout for Biden, their own organization was absent. A few days before the election, Sanders, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez, and Bowman joined with many other liberal-left mass groups for an online turnout rally in support of Joe Biden. DSA, whose rise paralleled many of their careers and had helped elect many of them, was not at the event. Our absence was glaring and hard to forget.

After November

Thanks to the tireless work of progressive and left organizations, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump without DSA’s help in the November general election. In doing so, he flipped the state of Georgia, which had not been won by a Democrat since Bill Clinton’s win in 1992. The turnout that propelled Biden’s victory there also pushed the two US Senate races into runoff elections, since no single candidate received the majority of votes. With the ​“Bernie or Bust” resolution no longer holding DSA back, the organization mobilized against the GOP incumbent senators. DSA deployed volunteers in the runoff elections and contributed to the successful effort to stop Republicans from gaining those two seats, all without ever making an endorsement. 

This shift demonstrated to me that DSA was willing to be part of the type of coalition politics needed to defeat the far right. DSA matured through our experience of 2020, and we have learned through democratic struggle how to make better political interventions and plan for different scenarios. Even beyond the election, as of August 2021, DSA has continued its foray into mass politics and electoral engagement through logging over a million phone calls to swing-state US senators in support of the labor law reform PRO Act. This kind of coalition work highlights that DSA is ready to be part of broader social movements.

Looking forward

At the August 2021 DSA convention, two years after our fateful gathering where the ​“Bernie or Bust” resolution passed, we faced no hard questions about presidential endorsements. However, over 1,000 delegates in attendance debated electoral strategy more broadly and struggled over the question of how DSA should relate to elected officials we champion who in turn endorse corporate Democrats in other elections. To my pleasant surprise, an amendment to the electoral strategy resolution calling for DSA to discourage our electeds from doing this only got 40% approval and failed.

This demonstrates that DSA members understand that elected officials play a different role than our organization in defeating the far right, and that we need to employ a multitude of tactics on a variety of fronts in order to do that. We need to provide flexibility for officeholders such as Cori Bush — a socialist in a purple state — to work to defeat the far right by working with whomever they deem necessary, and that calculus changes based on time, place, and conditions. Socialists should avoid solutions and blanket decisions that are devoid of an analysis of the particular conditions and scenarios at play. The willingness of delegates at our 2021 convention to move away from pre-emptive rules and resolutions is a healthy sign of a maturing democratic socialist movement.

Since 2019, I have not encountered anyone who voted against the ​“Bernie or Bust” resolution and regretted it. I have, however, encountered plenty of people who did vote for it and later admitted that it was an error. DSA’s involvement in the Georgia runoffs and the results of the 2021 convention are positive signs of a move away from sectarianism and toward a more popular front understanding. 

As a 501©3 nonprofit organization, In These Times does not endorse candidates for political office.