Socialists Are Winning Using Old-Fashioned Democratic Means
It feels good to be a socialist right now. Last year, Zohran Mamdani’s upset victory in the 2025 New York City mayoral election shook the political world at home and abroad. This June, New York City Democratic Socialists of America (NYC-DSA) won a near sweep in nine out of the ten New York City congressional and state legislative primaries that we ran in, along with an upset win in Buffalo and the unseating of a twenty-eight-year incumbent in Syracuse. Outside of New York State, we have seen victories in Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and most recently in Denver, where Melat Kiros defeated an incumbent who had held that seat longer than Kiros has been alive.
The political media has spent a lot of time trying and failing to explain DSA’s success, trying to place us as a left-wing Tea Party or arguing that we are riding the wave of anger among the Democratic base following the humiliating defeat of the party establishment to Donald Trump and the GOP for a second time in the presidential election of 2024. Others focus on the vertical videos and social media virality that did have a role in helping propel Zohran to Gracie Mansion and that have been aped ever since by candidates to our right, with little success.
Most of these arguments downplay one thing that you cannot explain the democratic socialist wave without: that we prioritize member democracy, where dues-paying members get a voice and a vote as to which campaigns we will endorse, electoral or otherwise. This is a model for the vision of democratic socialism we wish to build in the United States more broadly: namely, that those who labor have a right to control what they labor for.
I signed up for my first Zohran canvassing shift in January 2025, thinking that I would do a shift or two, complete my civic duty, and then go back to my usual routine. Within a few months, I became a regular canvasser, then a field lead for the Alexa Avilés city council campaign, knocking doors simultaneously for Avilés and Mamdani. When the primary ended, by then a member of DSA, I ran for and was elected to be a delegate to our national convention in Chicago, and a few months later to be the South Brooklyn branch representative to the Citywide Electoral Working Group.
I spent the winter, spring, and early summer of 2026 knocking doors for our socialist slate. In short order, I went from feeling apathy and depression after the 2024 election to becoming an active member and organizer internally to DSA and externally to the wider voting public of NYC.
It was not, contra the media’s new go-to line, due to one man’s incredible charisma. I like Zohran, but I don’t put too much stock in the personalities of individual politicians. The reason I became such an active member and organizer in DSA is that the Zohran campaign made me feel that by working in concert with a hundred thousand others, I had the ability to reclaim some small amount of control in shaping a world where political outcomes often seem predetermined by the powerful, with no role for the public to influence them.
Take It to the People
It is not easy to knock on a stranger’s door. It can be demoralizing. When people do open their doors, as often as not they close them just as quickly. On rare occasions, people will get downright rude or hostile. You knock in the rain, on days when any sane person would rather be indoors, and in the heat, when any sane person would rather be at the beach. Despite all the frustrations that come with it, there are few better ways to test and develop your politics than by bringing them to voters directly and making the case for the candidates running on a socialist platform.
We live in an intensely atomized society, and at no point have we been more alone than today, when the old bonds of community have largely eroded after decades of neoliberalism. In their place, we spend our free time in the online hyperfilter called the “For You Page,” which creates the illusion of community based in passive consumption of reels and posts. This is a major stumbling block to our socialist project. It removes us from physical community and creates the illusion that we can either scroll past politics or do our part solely through posting that has no follow-through and is not part of any organized strategy. Politics becomes a consumer choice, and in politics as consumerism, we allow ourselves to cultivate precise, specific, “correct lines” in our head about most issues.
It is when you are actually knocking doors that the politics that sound so convincing in your head and in your online echo chamber are actually tested. More often than not, they are improved as a result.
When I got involved in earnest with the Zohran campaign, I quickly realized that I was embarking on a grand tour of New York City; unlike the tourist, however, who experiences the city as a series of landmarks and attractions, my expeditions to the many neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens led me to the doors of the working people who each have a hand in making New York function, and who were still stuck in uncertain conditions, squeezed by the hoarding of the immense wealth they create and maintain through their labor.
Still, despite the pressures created by an increasing cost of living without a commensurate increase in wages, it is not a given that somebody who is experiencing the same material squeeze as you are will accept as common sense your solution to the problem, and it is almost a guarantee that if one begins to describe the problem and the answer in the jargon-heavy way that is so common to the online left, you will fail to make much of an impression in the precious few minutes you have with a voter who you or the campaign may never reach again. In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote, regarding this style of argumentation, “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”
You learn quickly therefore to do far more listening than talking, and when you talk, to talk simply. It sounds like common sense, but it is a practice that cuts against instinct. Politics is about persuasion, and persuasion is often interpreted as you pushing the correct answer (or “line”) on the voter. What is more important is to let the voter convince themselves: to let them tell you what is important to them and to only then tie that into the platform and make the connection clear.
When this is connected to a project of expanding the electorate instead of only trying to persuade frequent voters, at its best, the result is a feeling of equality and common cause between the canvasser and the voter: you knocked on my door, nobody ever knocked on my door before, and you brought to my attention a vision of politics which I hadn’t before been exposed to. I and others have even on occasion recruited people to DSA in this way, after winning a voter over to our candidates.
It is not easy to knock on a stranger’s door. It can be demoralizing. When people do open their doors, as often as not they close them just as quickly. On rare occasions, people will get downright rude or hostile. You knock in the rain, on days when any sane person would rather be indoors, and in the heat, when any sane person would rather be at the beach. Despite all the frustrations that come with it, there are few better ways to test and develop your politics than by bringing them to voters directly and making the case for the candidates running on a socialist platform.
We live in an intensely atomized society, and at no point have we been more alone than today, when the old bonds of community have largely eroded after decades of neoliberalism. In their place, we spend our free time in the online hyperfilter called the “For You Page,” which creates the illusion of community based in passive consumption of reels and posts. This is a major stumbling block to our socialist project. It removes us from physical community and creates the illusion that we can either scroll past politics or do our part solely through posting that has no follow-through and is not part of any organized strategy. Politics becomes a consumer choice, and in politics as consumerism, we allow ourselves to cultivate precise, specific, “correct lines” in our head about most issues.
It is when you are actually knocking doors that the politics that sound so convincing in your head and in your online echo chamber are actually tested. More often than not, they are improved as a result.
When I got involved in earnest with the Zohran campaign, I quickly realized that I was embarking on a grand tour of New York City; unlike the tourist, however, who experiences the city as a series of landmarks and attractions, my expeditions to the many neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens led me to the doors of the working people who each have a hand in making New York function, and who were still stuck in uncertain conditions, squeezed by the hoarding of the immense wealth they create and maintain through their labor.
Still, despite the pressures created by an increasing cost of living without a commensurate increase in wages, it is not a given that somebody who is experiencing the same material squeeze as you are will accept as common sense your solution to the problem, and it is almost a guarantee that if one begins to describe the problem and the answer in the jargon-heavy way that is so common to the online left, you will fail to make much of an impression in the precious few minutes you have with a voter who you or the campaign may never reach again. In “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote, regarding this style of argumentation, “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.”
You learn quickly therefore to do far more listening than talking, and when you talk, to talk simply. It sounds like common sense, but it is a practice that cuts against instinct. Politics is about persuasion, and persuasion is often interpreted as you pushing the correct answer (or “line”) on the voter. What is more important is to let the voter convince themselves: to let them tell you what is important to them and to only then tie that into the platform and make the connection clear.
When this is connected to a project of expanding the electorate instead of only trying to persuade frequent voters, at its best, the result is a feeling of equality and common cause between the canvasser and the voter: you knocked on my door, nobody ever knocked on my door before, and you brought to my attention a vision of politics which I hadn’t before been exposed to. I and others have even on occasion recruited people to DSA in this way, after winning a voter over to our candidates.
We Can Make a Different Path Forward
It is also something of a feedback loop, where the more one listens to peoples’ concerns at their door, the more a volunteer gets a sense of which parts of the platform are most relevant to different kinds of people and can bring that back to the campaign to better inform future canvassing and other forms of voter outreach. In that sense, it is an opportunity for democratic feedback from the public even before a candidate is elected.
While DSA did not invent canvassing, we are the organization that uses it most regularly and effectively to continue building power. A program of regular contact with voters through repeated canvassing, year after year, forces you to constantly be on the watch for how the political climate is shifting for the average person, and thus puts DSA, for whom a strong door-knocking operation is a core part of all their campaigns, in a better position to try and strategize ways to shape the constantly shifting common sense of politics to the benefit of the movement.
This is not a purely urban phenomenon, as evidenced by some of our victories in districts that include suburban and exurban areas, as well as smaller, more conservative cities. It is something that I believe can be scaled and adjusted to any district if the underlying conditions for a socialist candidacy are right.
Some on the Left who are outside of DSA criticize our prioritization of electoral politics, arguing that this is a strategy that lends itself to a moderation unsuited to the drastic need for change as we face down a degrading capitalism, buffeted by the climate crisis and buttressed by far-right political movements at home and abroad. On the contrary, it is a necessary and a profoundly radical experience to go to people who are not intimately familiar with left political theory, and to get the chance to speak with them about how the many-faced crisis of capitalism strains their own lives. It is also surprising and reassuring to realize, in the course of these conversations, how many people are already able to connect the dots — even if they do not put them in theoretical terms — between the United States’ violent foreign policy abroad and the abandonment of its working class at home.
In doing so, we can sidestep the conventional wisdom that the political and media establishment have spoon-fed us for the better part of the past forty years. We are also at the personal level able to understand that we are not alone in our anxieties and fears over the direction the world is moving in; that many others, in fact a majority, feel the way we do, and that through collective action we can make a different path forward for ourselves.
That same political and media establishment, here localized in New York City, has spent every moment since June 2025 attacking the mayor and his supporters and voters as out-of-touch transplants who could never dream, first of winning a majority, then of running a city sure to reject them. Unlike our opponents, we made our case directly to the people and won them over door by door with a volunteer army. Along the way, we convinced thousands of those voters to join our movement for democratic socialism. Now they are in turn empowered further to take control of their own lives through collective action, whether they are out knocking doors themselves, organizing their workplaces or their buildings, and finding other ways to strengthen community through activism.
Both the Democratic establishment and the GOP continue to fear this kind of democratic engagement. But DSA will continue to put democratic dialogue with the working class at the core of its political strategy. We do so because we believe in democracy. That belief has worked out pretty well for us thus far.
This article was originally published by Jacobin; please consider supporting the original publication, and read the original version at the link above.
It is also something of a feedback loop, where the more one listens to peoples’ concerns at their door, the more a volunteer gets a sense of which parts of the platform are most relevant to different kinds of people and can bring that back to the campaign to better inform future canvassing and other forms of voter outreach. In that sense, it is an opportunity for democratic feedback from the public even before a candidate is elected.
While DSA did not invent canvassing, we are the organization that uses it most regularly and effectively to continue building power. A program of regular contact with voters through repeated canvassing, year after year, forces you to constantly be on the watch for how the political climate is shifting for the average person, and thus puts DSA, for whom a strong door-knocking operation is a core part of all their campaigns, in a better position to try and strategize ways to shape the constantly shifting common sense of politics to the benefit of the movement.
This is not a purely urban phenomenon, as evidenced by some of our victories in districts that include suburban and exurban areas, as well as smaller, more conservative cities. It is something that I believe can be scaled and adjusted to any district if the underlying conditions for a socialist candidacy are right.
Some on the Left who are outside of DSA criticize our prioritization of electoral politics, arguing that this is a strategy that lends itself to a moderation unsuited to the drastic need for change as we face down a degrading capitalism, buffeted by the climate crisis and buttressed by far-right political movements at home and abroad. On the contrary, it is a necessary and a profoundly radical experience to go to people who are not intimately familiar with left political theory, and to get the chance to speak with them about how the many-faced crisis of capitalism strains their own lives. It is also surprising and reassuring to realize, in the course of these conversations, how many people are already able to connect the dots — even if they do not put them in theoretical terms — between the United States’ violent foreign policy abroad and the abandonment of its working class at home.
In doing so, we can sidestep the conventional wisdom that the political and media establishment have spoon-fed us for the better part of the past forty years. We are also at the personal level able to understand that we are not alone in our anxieties and fears over the direction the world is moving in; that many others, in fact a majority, feel the way we do, and that through collective action we can make a different path forward for ourselves.
That same political and media establishment, here localized in New York City, has spent every moment since June 2025 attacking the mayor and his supporters and voters as out-of-touch transplants who could never dream, first of winning a majority, then of running a city sure to reject them. Unlike our opponents, we made our case directly to the people and won them over door by door with a volunteer army. Along the way, we convinced thousands of those voters to join our movement for democratic socialism. Now they are in turn empowered further to take control of their own lives through collective action, whether they are out knocking doors themselves, organizing their workplaces or their buildings, and finding other ways to strengthen community through activism.
Both the Democratic establishment and the GOP continue to fear this kind of democratic engagement. But DSA will continue to put democratic dialogue with the working class at the core of its political strategy. We do so because we believe in democracy. That belief has worked out pretty well for us thus far.
Waging War on the Left Within the Democratic Party Won’t Work
Pundits close to the Democratic establishment have a new term to fling at the left-wing insurgents they want to disappear: “factionalism.”
Matthew Yglesias now constantly attacks socialists and their leading figures on the basis that they believe in “factionalism and anty-partyism,” or have “a whole factional project,” “factional talking point[s],” a “passion for factionalism.” At first, he took up this line over the Graham Platner candidacy, but now Yglesias uses it to refer to any attempt by the Left to replace establishment-friendly incumbents by beating them in primary races.
Center for American Progress President and CEO Neera Tanden agreed. Platner should have been solely attacking his Republican opponent, “not attacking Dems in factional fights,” she tweeted. Socialists had to be stopped from “giving away the Michigan Senate seat for factional reasons the way they tried (and likely succeeded in) giving away the Maine seat,” warned former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum.
Even the cryptocurrency industry has gotten in on the act, with crypto investment firm executive and former Securities and Exchange Commission official Justin Slaughter adding his voice to the chorus warning that the Platner scandal was the doing of “a coherent and focused faction” more interested in remaking the Democratic Party than beating Donald Trump.
This line is a bit rich. In a phenomenon known as “mirror politics” or “accusation in a mirror,” the centrist figures pushing this talking point are accusing their leftist political opponents of the very thing they want to do — the very thing their side has already repeatedly done, in fact.
As one example, recall that to stop Bernie Sanders from winning the nomination in 2020, they coalesced around a candidate, Joe Biden, who they had openly acknowledged was cognitively unfit and whom they had little faith in. As we found out last year, Biden was so out of it, when they filmed him interacting with ordinary voters for that year’s Democratic convention, those who saw the footage were alarmed and convinced he couldn’t serve, and it required “creative” editing to salvage.
In other words, the factionalism-driven election disaster that party centrists are now accusing the Left of trying to engineer is exactly what they already did, risking handing the White House to Trump a second time because they were so desperate to stop Sanders. As Biden’s own adviser acknowledged, that this didn’t happen was only thanks to pure dumb luck, after a global pandemic meant Biden didn’t have to campaign or be regularly seen in public. Self-defeating “factionalism” is alive and well in the Democratic Party — but it’s coming from the establishment side.
But there’s a more important point to be made here, as well as a cautionary tale for those willing to learn from it. It happens to be related to the likely place that gave Yglesias, Tanden, and the like the idea to start spamming this word, “factionalism”: the United Kingdom.
Five years ago, the UK’s Labour Party got exactly the party leader that establishment centrists dream of getting here: a dull centrist lawyer who more or less looked like what AI would spit out if you asked it to show you a British prime minister. Keir Starmer complained endlessly about “factionalism.” And just like Tanden and Yglesias, Starmer used this gripe against “factionalism” — by which he meant the party’s swing to the left occasioned by a democratic process won by a flood of energized, young members into the party — to launch an actual factional war against his party’s left.
Once leader, Starmer spent years systematically purging that left from the Labour Party, a campaign that often involved heroic levels of shameless hypocrisy. He suspended then booted his socialist predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, from the party, a man he had once pretended to be an ally to and called a “friend.” He demoted several socialist MPs and continued suspending left-wing members any time they dissented. He banned left-wing intraparty groups and expelled their members, disproportionately targeting those of Jewish descent (while saying he was focused on “tackling antisemitism”). He made a series of arcane procedural tweaks to weaken the party’s left wing, cracked down on local branches controlled by the Left, and tried to get rid of the democratic process that let grassroots party members elect the leader (which is how the Left had taken power in the party in the first place).
The idea was that Labour had to reject its left wing to look more serious and electable, and that, once it won, with its radicals and lefty firebrands out of the picture, it could govern from the “sensible center,” ushering in a new golden age of liberal governance.
Five years on, how did this idea work out? Well, Starmer and Labour did win the election in 2024 — although polling showed voters were largely driven by hatred of the disastrous Conservative government, and Labour had won one of the more unusual landslides in politics, where its actual vote share had only gone up 1.6 points from its defeat under Corbyn to win barely more than a third of the vote.
That would turn out to be the high point of the Starmer experiment. Having muzzled any internal dissent from his left flank, Starmer embarked on a series of lethally unpopular neoliberal governing choices that would send his and his government’s approval ratings into free fall.
His decision, for instance, to make cuts to winter heating subsidies for pensioners, while simultaneously having taken a record amount of lavish gifts from a superrich donor, saw his personal popularity plummet to its lowest ever level after only two months (though he no doubt would’ve been pleased that he had become more popular among Conservative voters in that time).
The hits kept coming. Labour was decimated in the following year’s local elections in a major victory for the hard-right Reform Party. Starmer then lurched even further right in response, disgusting even more Labour voters and sending his favorability rating to a new nadir of -46 percent. Satisfaction ratings hit the lowest point for any prime minister in nearly fifty years, and Labour achieved the worst first-year polling drop of any governing party ever. Then Labour got another drubbing in this past May’s local and regional elections, which were viewed as a referendum on his leadership.
By the time Starmer resigned last month, he was widely considered a failure, the most unpopular British prime minister in polling history and a deeply hated one, who not only left his once-dominant party in a state of collapse and vulnerable to its first serious left-wing challenger in forty years, but may well end up having paved the way for the country’s takeover by the far right.
Starmer achieved this parade of humiliations by doing exactly what the likes of Yglesias and Tanden dream a future Democratic candidate will do: he governed with no real convictions; stuck close to big donors and neoliberal operatives who ended up creating scandals for him; was pro-business and sharply anti-immigration; went above and beyond to defend Israel’s genocide in Gaza; and, of course, he went to war with his party’s left. And as a result, he may have destroyed his party and certainly turned himself into one of history’s embarrassments.
There’s no reason to think this would go any different here. In fact, we’ve already gotten a taste of it. Two of the loudest figures attacking progressive “factionalism” right now both had a direct hand in the political conditions that brought Trump to power a second time: Tanden, who served as Biden’s adviser during his rightward pivot; and Yglesias, by being one of the most-read pundits in his administration, during which time he was serving Biden advice that people were wrong about their affordability struggles and the president should keep ignoring them.
Meanwhile, to deliver the White House to Trump a second time with her uninspiring centrist campaign, Kamala Harris actively sought out the expertise of Starmer’s inept advisers, who told her to focus on winning back voters drifting right, partly by presenting as an immigration hawk. Even though Starmer and his party’s approval was at that very point collapsing, she listened to them.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Just look at — and I can’t believe I’m writing this — New York governor Kathy Hochul, a conservative Democrat who, rather than going to war with the socialist mayor of her state’s biggest city, has governed in a loose coalition with him, even adopting some watered-down versions of his flagship policies as her own. That’s been a mutually beneficial arrangement for both of them, as Hochul moves to address New Yorkers’ affordability concerns in advance of her reelection.
As socialists continue to win elections around the country, you will hear more and more from the panicked voices who claim that democracy is some kind of nefarious plot against them. Driven by petty grudges and ideological resentment, those voices will only get more frenzied the more these wins stack up. Don’t take them seriously.
