The Failures of the 2022 Campaign Season Are NYC-DSA’s Own Fault
It's time we own up to what's going wrong. Part 1 of a 4-part series.
Intro
NYC-DSA is the largest chapter of the largest socialist organization in the United States. Many thousands strong, we have the proven potential to completely upend the political status quo in western Brooklyn and Queens. We have several specialized working groups dedicated to tackling a variety of problems faced by New Yorkers, and work with several DSA-endorsed elected officials to organize around those issues. The resources at our disposal are far vaster than any New York-based left-wing movement in the last fifty years could lay claim to. And yet, other than the election of Kristen Gonzalez to the State Senate, we in NYC-DSA have failed to accomplish any of our tangible goals within the last twelve months.
We failed to force the passage of the Build Public Renewables Act, the scaled-down and rudimentary demand of the Ecosocialist Working Group. We have similarly failed to get a majority of state legislators on board with Good Cause Eviction, an equally modest and diluted platform pushed by the Housing Working Group leadership. The New Deal for CUNY campaign that sought to eliminate tuition saw its CUNY funding demands whittled down to nothing. And, most importantly of all, every NYC-DSA insurgent candidate, save one, has been defeated in this summer’s primary elections. Each of these efforts cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of volunteer labor. Is it possible to spend such resources more effectively? This essay will argue in the affirmative. But some introspection and changes will be necessary.
There are many prominent voices in the organization who argue that our current strategy is sound. They argue that many messy losses this year were due to volunteers not being committed enough, or our enemies being too well-funded to overcome. That hitting a brick wall is sometimes inevitable. That Gonzales’ victory is by itself sufficient proof that NYC-DSA remains in good health.
This view is belied by the facts and exists to create false hope, resulting in long-term negative consequences.
Our organization is adrift and in extreme danger. If next year resolves the same way, apathy will overtake the chapter, leaving us with fewer and fewer volunteers. The membership and leadership will self-select for those who prefer to stay the course. We will hear, over and over, that NYC-DSA has always functioned in this manner and that there is no practical alternative to a strategy that brings only stagnation. The vicious cycle will continue until all that remains is a small coterie of obsessives with no one to trick into doing the dirty work. DSA will become a sect, the default endpoint for in-grown political projects.
In truth, we are already further down this path than most members believe, and closer to its ultimate outcome than we are to the electoral successes of 2020. But it is not too late to open our eyes to the situation and consciously decide to course-correct. The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging there is one. The second step is mapping it out.
Yes, There is a Problem
One clear indicator of organizational downturn has been NYC-DSA’s diminishing ability to motivate and mobilize volunteers. In a parallel to the Democratic Party’s precipitous decline in 2022 primary election voter turnout, it is getting more and more difficult to convince people to show up for our events and actions. The mobilizer programs employed by various campaigns to reverse this trend recall Democrat strategies of maximizing cold contact, in our case for potential volunteers rather than donors. Mass-distributed texts and emails from random DSAers increase in frequency and desperation, mainly convincing inactive “paper” members that they should ignore or delete our messages. In short, attempts to reverse this decline have only exposed and exacerbated it.
Reduced turnout has been but the most obvious surface-level manifestation of a deeper motivational crisis. With the unifying platform of the Bernie campaigns a faded memory, it has become increasingly unclear even to members what DSA is supposed to stand for. The campaigns of 2022, legislative and electoral alike, offered little to clarify this. We lack a holistic and digestible agenda, or any agenda beyond accomplishing narrow campaign objectives. DSA has become an end unto itself, and the causes we advance are considered socialist merely because they emanate from DSA. The logic of the mobilizer programs- that members will activate like robots when randomly pestered by their peers- flows naturally from these vacuous and self-righteous premises. Why should this logic motivate people in a volunteer organization?
Lacking a political center, a policy platform, or even medium-term goals, NYC-DSA in 2022 was a vehicle for campaigns that did not inspire the bulk of our membership. Organizing models beyond the campaign-form were systematically pushed aside and ignored by working group leadership. Electoral campaigns were designed and/or thwarted by arrangement from organized internal cliques, without concern for whether candidates were socially embedded in winnable districts. Ties with grassroots organizations outside of legislative pressure campaign-focused NGOs have been severed by a combination of unconcealable, ignorant contempt and political illiteracy. Make no mistake: despite not yet visibly collapsing, NYC-DSA has been hollowed out.
Suffering defeat after crushing defeat this year has hopefully cured us of the ridiculous notion that DSA exists in a vacuum and has an automatic moral claim on volunteers’ support regardless of what we decide to do. A closer look at the campaigns themselves will reveal how volunteers opting to completely ignore us, might have made a more ethical decision than wasting valuable time stringing us along. That said, there are a number of macro factors playing just as prominent a role in the decline of our organization. For a detailed description of larger-scale issues impeding the growth of DSA across the country, and what, if anything, we can do to resolve them at the local level, see Appendix A: Problems National and International.
In order to understand the corrosive effects of our campaign-based organizing model, we must first evaluate and reckon with the below-the-surface stagnation of the Ecosocialist Working Group (EcoSoc).
The Green New Deal Disappears: EcoSoc and the Campaign-Form
In July of 2021, EcoSoc still appeared, at a glance, to have something resembling an independent volunteer base and activities outside of pushing increasingly moderate legislation. Their demonstrations against a new fracked-gas-fueled “peaker” plant in Astoria had just won the vocal support of Senator Chuck Schumer, making the plant's eventual cancellation in October all but inevitable. Relatively direct actions like these would soon wind down, however. In truth, EcoSoc efforts in support of protests in Astoria and North Brooklyn (the latter over a proposed gas pipeline) were but the dying embers of a recruitment scheme for a legislative pressure campaign that had already run its course. To properly grasp the disastrous impact of this working group on NYC-DSA’s electoral mission, we must first analyze the failed 2020-21 push for Public Power.
With two bills, the NY Utility Democracy Act (NYUDA) and the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA), EcoSoc had sought to begin the arduous task of decarbonizing New York by taking direct government ownership of the state's power grid. These bills would, respectively, accomplish the twin Green New Deal goals of expanding the public sector and green energy production by expropriating Con Ed and creating a state fund for public renewable electricity generation. With DSA’s usual modus operandi of door-to-door canvassing not succeeding in capturing the volunteer base they wanted, EcoSoc opted instead for media-friendly demonstrations to win publicity and recruits for their cause. At the height of the 2021 state legislative session, these recruits would then ask constituents in targeted districts to contact their legislators and demand the bills’ passage. Despite the embarrassment of New York State not passing a climate bill in two years, and thus the increasing likelihood that the government would fail to meet decarbonization targets set in 2019, both bills stalled out in their State Senate committee at the behest of chairman Kevin Parker.
Here arise the two most obvious problems with legislative pressure campaigns. On the one hand, targeted politicians face no immediate threat to their careers from a large, mobilized group of people politely asking them to do something- leverage can only come from the implication that it will translate into votes against them come Election Day. Failure is baked into the process and believed to be inevitable (at least for the first few tries) even by proponents of the campaign-form. On the other hand, these very failures compel activists to narrow their objectives and moderate the legislation being advocated for in next year's session (which will largely be helmed by the same group of politicians). And so, for their 2022 campaign, the Ecosocialsts would push the “expropriate Con Ed” demand to the side and opt to focus solely on BPRA.
It was only natural, then, that EcoSoc leadership should decide to mount a semi-hostile takeover of our election cycle. In order to make the BPRA-focus seem like an aggressive final push rather than the retreat it was, they decided to mount primary election challenges against officials who had previously stood in the way of Public Power. EcoSoc would recruit more extensively for a softer demand, create enough leverage to see the demand through, and directly remove their legislative opponents by cannibalizing another sector of NYC-DSA. They rushed into Electoral Working Group (EWG) endorsement meetings to ensure all campaigns targeted legislators holding up BPRA with candidates of their own choosing. The “insurgents” EcoSoc handpicked (or failed to stonewall effectively) would thus brand 2022 a “climate election.”
Results were anticlimactic. EWG, the only working group capable of mounting successful high-profile campaigns, lost harder than ever before, taking only one out of five contested seats. With EcoSoc embedded in the electoral canvassing operation, volunteers were asked not to mention BPRA during the point of the legislative session when it had a chance of passing. This was an attempt to avoid “no” votes from the elected officials facing primary challenges over it, privileging “insider” operatives over “outsider” activists and undermining both, in a complete perversion of the “inside-outside” strategy. It did not change the ultimate outcome in the slightest. Despite passing the State Senate this time, BPRA was blocked from the Assembly by Speaker Carl Heastie, an extremely safe high-ranking official who, flush with corporate cash, has no reason to ever change his mind.
Emphasis on the campaign-form narrowed EcoSoc’s vision until they could no longer agitate for the Green New Deal, and then dragged the rest of the organization down with them. The working group once instrumentalized local environmental issues to advance meager policy goals, but now is incapable of even that. Campaigning on “climate change issues” became synonymous with passing BPRA, a bill that cannot be considered the dawn of a Green New Deal without the company of its more ambitious sibling NYUDA. Tangible work has been forgotten in the name of an ever-diminishing legislative fancy. There is no traction for the suggestion that Ecosocialists ought to be concerned with local affairs first and foremost, tasking their volunteers with integration into on-the-ground environmental struggles (such as the difficult situations incurred by climate resiliency projects on public land).
Beyond their tendency to suffocate a political organization’s non-lobbying functions, legislative campaigns are fundamentally less worthwhile than electoral campaigns. Running a candidate expends a comparable amount of resources on a more direct threat to a politician's livelihood, and that, as mentioned before, is the only true source of legislative leverage. Elections are easier to win and better at showing that activists mean business than the various indirect methods of lobbying for particular reform bills.
Therefore, to better appreciate NYC-DSA’s comprehensive self-inflicted defeat this year, it behooves us to investigate EWG’s broken momentum. We will find that the losses were locked-in from the start due to the meddling of various internal cliques and our refusal or inability to learn from what happened in 2021.
Candidate Selection and Electoral Work
Late last year, still reeling from losing four out of six City Council races in June, but confident in the democratic consensus built by a rigorous political debate, EWG made a series of endorsements that were even worse than last time. Before going into detail about the process that led us there, it bears mentioning how diverse the many lessons taught by the previous cycle were, and how comprehensively the deliberations for a new slate rejected each one. Important factors like making sure a candidate is properly distinguishable from the competition, each branch handling their own geographic territory so that none are underserved or overburdened, picking people who were already well-known in their districts; all these were dismissed as trivial. Likewise, the advantages conferred by running female candidates (the response to having three male candidates lose to women in 2021 was to only endorse one woman in 2022, who wound up our sole victor). Similarly ignored were the benefits of having simultaneous races in overlapping districts, endorsing in larger races to increase our notoriety and spread our platform, or even having a platform…
Well, technically, there was a platform, as provided by EcoSoc. This was to be a “climate election,” centered on BPRA, with bread-and-butter issues like housing less emphasized. That obviously did not pan out. Even when climate change is properly framed as a local issue rather than used as a crutch for totally defanged legislation, it is a looming rather than immediate threat to the majority of New York voters. We cannot expect to turn out tens of thousands of people by prioritizing climate over, say, rising rents. But prior to any assessment of how poor EWG's campaign messaging was, we must first consider the debates surrounding endorsements and how they led to the worst possible outcome.
One method to understand the intensely misguided candidate discussion last year is scrutinizing the frequent use by all factions of a meaningless (in DSA) buzzword, “cadre.” In normal parlance, the term suggests a cohesive partisan group staffed by skilled and loyal political operatives. A DSA member will use that connotation, shorn of substance, to advocate for their personal friends. Debates concerning district composition and viability, while heated, took a backseat to arguing over who was and was not “cadre.” Implicit in all this was the expectation that proper DSA candidates would have a large internal clique backing them up (rather than dragging them down), and that the main focus of the candidate’s political organizing work would be DSA rather than outside organizations. The notion that a “cadre” candidate with true-blue bona fides might lose if not suited to the chosen district, was not to be taken seriously.
Hence the State Assembly campaign of Illapa Sairitupac, which was built on false premises and doomed from the start. Sairitupac himself was a universally beloved volunteer, a veteran of many campaigns across the city, particularly with EcoSoc. He was known to DSA members in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan as friendly and reliable, with that internal name recognition sufficient for them to believe he had some public visibility outside the organization. In sum, as a prominent and charismatic leader in EcoSoc, the face of their fieldwork back when they did fieldwork, he was the perfect figurehead for a takeover of NYC-DSA's electoral cycle. His legitimacy as a candidate derived from his “cadre” appeal inside DSA rather than a relationship with the relevant electorate.
And from the standpoint of internal organizing, things had lined up alarmingly well. Housing Working Group (HWG) wanted to take down State Senate Housing Committee chair Brian Kavanagh (whose district covered portions of Manhattan and Brooklyn) for his obstruction towards their own modest legislative goal, the Good Cause Eviction bill. Lower Manhattan (LowMan) EWG were desperate for a race to call their own after years of campaigning in other parts of the city. None thought to impugn LowMan’s judgment, despite their previous cycle's attempt at a candidate, Chris Marte, literally rejecting their endorsement after soliciting and receiving it (and going on to win in a landslide). Brooklyn EWG, which decided its endorsements collectively as a borough, would be harder to swing, but the combined might of the previously listed factions would surely be enough to convince everyone of the necessity of running this race. No, the real problem was that another left-winger had already decided to primary Kavanagh, and applied for our endorsement.
Alana Sivin had gotten there first, and asked for the organization’s help in good faith. She could not be seen as some Democratic Party functionary or careerist liberal hoping to win our support without doing the work. Sivin was a close friend of DSA-endorsed City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, and one of the people who first convinced her to run for office in the first place. That by itself made Sivin a contributor to the historical development of NYC-DSA, as the Queens EWG would likely not exist without Cabán’s 2019 campaign for District Attorney. Queens wasn't voting on this race though. EcoSoc and LowMan had decided to only trust Sairitupac, refused to rescind that decision, and accordingly launched a campaign in the Brooklyn EWG to smear Sivin as a moderate.
EcoSoc and LowMan’s joint goal was to make the Kavanagh primary into a three-way race, and they succeeded. Unprovable claims were made, such as that Illapa had close connections with the Chinatown Working Group and could easily get the Chinese-American grassroots to vote for him. Emotional arguments and opposition research were deployed against Sivin. But the decisive factor for a majority of Brooklyn EWG members was that Sairitupac was "cadre" and Sivin was not: he was their friend, she an outsider. Sairitupac supporters claimed a "cadre" candidate could be parachuted into a vast district without any non-DSA support to take on both a popular incumbent and a spoiler candidate with similar politics, and win. A majority believed them. The majority voted to lose.
So, that was the story of how Illapa Sairitupac came to run for State Senate. Astute readers might have noted that the race he eventually lost was for State Assembly. The chaos in the months following the Brooklyn EWG endorsement meeting made the above tragedy of unforced errors look reasonable by comparison. But before digging any deeper into the mishaps that occurred on the campaign trail, we should analyze the other candidates EWG approved and rejected, to see that they again demonstrate how meaningless and contingent the “cadre candidate” concept is.
Samy Nemir Olivares, another candidate chosen by Brooklyn EWG, was and through the end of this year remains a powerless elected functionary for the state Democratic Party. Olivares’ claim to fame was serving as District Leader for a State Assembly district neighboring one EWG had already targeted two years ago. North Brooklyn branch (NBK) had long wanted to take on Erik Dilan, whose father Marty fell to NYC-DSA’s first successful candidate, Julia Salazar. 2020's attempt to unseat him with Salazar’s former chief of staff Boris Santos fell through when Santos quit before his name could get on the ballot. NBK was hungry for a rematch, and were confident enough to not consider Olivares’ insider position a potential detriment to morale. Seeing the overwhelming NBK support for them, the enthusiasts for running “cadre candidates” in other races also came together around Olivares. They were the one gap in an otherwise BPRA-centric slate.
EcoSoc and aligned cliques had a reason to strategically capitulate on this matter (for the least inspiring candidate): they needed to head off candidates they liked even less. NBK was too large and too hungry to be denied this time, but they saw peripheral branches like South Brooklyn (SBK) and Bronx/Upper Manhattan (BUM) as auxiliary volunteers for the EcoSoc slate rather than sites of independent campaign development. The candidates seeking endorsement in those branches were, like Sivin, pushed away by slander and organized derision. One particularly revealing example of this was the rejection of Abdullah Younus, a man with far more “cadre” credentials than Olivares could lay claim to.
There were legitimate issues with Younus as a candidate. His intended State Assembly district in Bay Ridge was a hypothetical outcome of redistricting, one that did not manifest in the final maps. Moreover, he was a DSA insider who had served on national leadership, and as an activist was identified more with that position than any activities on the ground. EcoSoc-aligned cliques, fond as they were of the “cadre” concept, decided to make the opposite argument: that Younus' day job for the New York Immigration Coalition made him an “NGO liberal” sellout with little interest in DSA. This outrageous inversion of what makes a candidate strong or weak was pushed in a unified fashion by members of the national Bread and Roses caucus, after Younus represented the rival Socialist Majority faction on the National Political Committee. So, being “cadre” in the literal sense will earn you enemies that deny your loyalty, because factional hostility is the only reason the word “cadre” will be used in an argument in the first place.
Like SBK, BUM EWG was another victim of NYC-DSA’s desire to clamp down on branch autonomy in elections. They had in 2021 spurned the ultimately successful City Council campaign of self-declared abolitionist Kristin Richardson Jordan, opting to focus on a less feasible one in the North Bronx. This was regarded by some of the branch membership as a missed opportunity, to the extent that a large majority jumped at the chance to back Jordan ally Ali Diini in a 2022 State Senate race. And then the Citywide Leadership Committee (CLC) vetoed the endorsement, causing Jordan to immediately abandon DSA in disgust. BUM EWG was told to volunteer for Sairitupac instead.
What could have justified such an obviously harmful executive overreach by chapter leadership? One common excuse was rooted in an insular NYC-DSA-centric mindset. Outside politicians and groups with comparable power and similar values are viewed as hostile invaders, and the pro-Diini majority in BUM were considered the dupes of guilt-mongering entryist demagogues. More importantly, Diini was rejected as a result of EWG's flawed view of mobilization capacity- narrowing the number of races under the belief that more people will turn out for candidates outside their branch if their branch is directionless. The 2022 results, like 2021’s, demonstrate clearly that this logic is unsound.
By unilaterally unendorsing Diini and crippling BUM EWG morale, CLC did not improve turnout for Sairitupac (not that it would have mattered, since he wound up 13.9% behind Lee in the final tally). They may have prevented another loss, as Diini quickly dropped out of the race without the support of DSA and likely did not have the infrastructure to mount a successful campaign. But Diini’s own viability was not the real issue so much as BUM’s diplomatic overture to Jordan- a strategy that CLC neither approved of nor understood. The only way for branches to function properly, for each to find their respective niche in the local political ecosystem, is for CLC to allow full autonomy in strategic decision-making. Without branch deference on matters like these, there is no real democracy. The volunteers discouraged from local activities tend to tune out rather than eagerly redirecting themselves to what CLC wants.
Keeping this in mind, we can recognize how a campaign with minimal DSA involvement, far outside the territory of the branches, for a candidate who lost in a huge landslide, might have been the only unsuccessful one to actually broaden our coalition. As Inez Barron’s intended successor, Keron Alleyne did not ask for much more than administrative and fundraising assistance for his limited State Assembly endorsement. Inez’s husband and organization leader, City Councilmember Charles Barron, categorically refused the potential help of white canvassers entering East New York by subway. Endorsing Alleyne was the exact kind of low-cost diplomacy CLC rejected in BUM, and through the connections made on the campaign back-end we can start to intermingle with another openly socialist group, the Barrons' Operation P.O.W.E.R. (even if it's unlikely that any of us other than Charles can win an election in East New York anytime soon). With a City Council that has more avowed non-DSA socialists than DSA members, all pushing back against the reactionary Mayor in a rather haphazard fashion, commonsense maneuvers like our Alleyne endorsement should be approved more often than not.
But, as mentioned before, EWG’s most recent strategy has been to double down on old mistakes rather than learning anything. The most important race NYC-DSA has ever run was lost in this fashion before it even commenced. As both the chief obstacle to BPRA and one of the highest-ranking members of the State Senate, Kevin Parker had been in our sights for some time. Despite his longevity and connections to the Brooklyn Democratic Party machine, the Senator’s corporate ties and history of messy public outbursts made him appear vulnerable to a progressive challenge. But much of the district was far outside any of the branches’ traditional territory, east of Prospect Park and south of Crown Heights: a less-gentrifying area with a significant Black population. It would require a candidate who was well-established in the area, perhaps having run for office a few times before, one who could draw in local allies beyond DSA to avoid the campaign becoming embarrassingly white. EWG’s sectarian mindset desired the opposite: a “cadre” member who would center NYC-DSA and its goals, with a robust race-blind field operation taking care of the rest. So the tremendous challenge was pushed onto David Alexis, a loyal DSA activist and perennial candidate who truly deserved better treatment than this.
Alexis had quit at the last minute after almost being pressured into a lower-stakes City Council competition in late 2020. His candidacy has been a frankly inexplicable fixation of the Bread and Roses caucus for years, to the extent that they had demanded he be the only race endorsed by Brooklyn for the 2021 cycle. His boosters in that forum neglected to tell EWG membership that their plans involved him moving his family into a new district in order to run there, and it only came to light when personal circumstances forced him to back out. But the people obsessed with running Alexis and the EcoSoc leaders fixated on challenging Parker saw their goals align, and the feasibility of actually winning was a secondary consideration. So Alexis was gassed up for a race he had little chance of succeeding in, and our candidate deliberation process was solidified as less effective than simply choosing at random. Indeed, the only victory in the slate of new candidates was Kristen Gonzalez, a random DSA member who had the advantage of contesting a district close to neighborhoods where we have won elections before, running for an open seat against unpopular competition.
Beyond the struggles with recruitment, New York State’s chaotic redistricting process has played havoc with campaigning this year. Some branches were caught flat-footed: SBK repeatedly flirted with the idea of endorsing Congressional candidate Brittany Ramos-DeBarros before ultimately opting to do nothing, changing their position as her intended district’s shape became more and less favorable. The races EWG did choose became radically different when the final maps were approved. In the David Alexis race, Kevin Parker shed Park Slope, the most vulnerable part of his district. We lost the chance to compete in a high-turnout area where white canvassers wouldn’t be seen as alien and an endorsement by the local City Councilmember, Shahana Hanif, would have had far greater effect. This no doubt played a significant role in Alexis’ defeat. But emphasizing smaller contests in a redistricting year will always result in issues like these. That once-in-a-decade conundrum is not by itself an indictment of electoral localism. The real weakness of a down-ballot strategy is neglecting to understand the big picture.
It cannot be clearer after the results of 2021 and 2022 that local elections, by themselves, will not spark sufficient public interest to accomplish our goals. Without larger, headline-grabbing races like Bernie, most voters cannot connect our movement to something tangible they understand. The proponents of a local-only strategy, who point out that our attempts at larger elections have always failed, are unable to recognize that these contests spurred recruitment and caught the public’s sustained attention in a way DSA acting by itself has never done. More importantly, if NYC-DSA is to be treated as a political powerhouse in its own right (which it usually is even by non-members), we are going to be scrutinized for not getting involved in mayoral and gubernatorial contests the same way we’d be held responsible for losing. In the eyes of the public NYC-DSA shares the blame for the continued success of Eric Adams and Kathy Hochul, regardless of whether or not we tried to stop them.
All this is to say that the root of our refusal to even consider endorsing Jumaane Williams’ doomed attempt at the governorship was insular middle-class chauvinism and racism, and it embodied all the flaws in EWG’s organizational culture. Arguing this is not suggesting that Williams is sufficiently aligned with our political beliefs, or that his hesitancy to endorse our candidates in certain neighborhoods was something to be overlooked. But in 2018, our organization endorsed wealthy white actress Cynthia Nixon for Governor, with Williams as her running mate against then-Lieutenant Governor Hochul. Our reluctance to repeat the endorsement against Hochul four years later, with the Governorship on the line, is revealing and embarrassing. That some NYC-DSA members, when asked about this, respond that Nixon, unlike Williams, is somehow “cadre,” even more so. EWG is fixated on running outsiders with no one else to turn to, and it only seems to value candidates of color when they are thought firmly under the sway of DSA.
The Williams campaign was undone by its inability to set a robust left-wing agenda or use tactics that the press could not ignore. His victory would have remained unlikely even if NYC-DSA had helped him into the spotlight by consolidating the left. But our organization could have benefitted from having a set of graspable statewide priorities and a prominent candidate to connect our small candidates to. EWG’s last two electoral cycles have taught us a valuable lesson about abdicating our responsibility to run in high-profile elections. Those who said that small races were too important for us to waste capacity on large races were proven shortsighted. On the contrary, we can’t afford to not make our mark on the large races, because the small races will otherwise suffer.
And suffer they did, directionless and ill-thought-out. Olivares’ establishment progressivism proved so uninspiring that the campaign, after collecting enough nominal supporters to win, literally failed to convince enough of them to show up at the polls. Alexis was not well-known enough east of Flatbush to unseat an extremely powerful incumbent, even with help from an army of (overwhelmingly white) canvassers. And in Manhattan, when the formidable Yuh-Line Niou moved to clear the field against Kavanagh, Sairitupac’s campaign pivoted to the vacant Assembly seat she left behind. (Niou then pivoted again to an unsuccessful bid for the NY-10 Congressional seat, leaving Kavanagh unopposed.) After successfully alienating the remaining Sivin supporters, LowMan turned its futile animus toward another minor candidate, ex-DSA gadfly and lifelong neighborhood resident Jasmin Sanchez (who upon entering the race was promptly endorsed by Jordan and no one else). In the end, Niou’s centrist 2020 challenger Grace Lee walked away with the nomination by virtue of being Asian in Chinatown.
Questions abound. Why couldn’t we run a candidate who better suited the district? How did we fail to distinguish ourselves from Lee, a wealthy astroturf politician objectively less popular than her immediate predecessor? Why run anyone in Lower Manhattan, the central core of America’s world-devouring financial empire, if the strategy is going to be no more sophisticated than “campaign really hard?” None of these can be answered with the logic employed to justify endorsing Sairitupac- the logic of stalwartism. Stalwarts think DSA is an end in itself, anything DSA does is inherently righteous, and, therefore, that any alternative course of action to the most DSA-centric one is a threat.
Our organization must never again succumb to stalwartism, because a stalwart DSA member has no moral compass. Like the average New York voter, they do not particularly care what our organization stands for outside of a few short-term campaign soundbites. They pick candidates that are either DSA activists or politicians’ friends, and support them parachuting into whatever district the leadership wants. These candidates’ independence from the grassroots is a point of pride for them, because if DSA has “cadre” that can run anywhere, they themselves could be next. Stalwarts make DSA an apolitical, power-hungry clique, breathing life into the gentrifier stereotypes promulgated against us by the establishment.
In this light the Sairitupac campaign serves as a microcosm of NYC-DSA’s organizational decline. While Grace Lee racked up every major union endorsement, bright-eyed YDSA college students donned “New York is a Union Town” t-shirts to canvass Manhattanites about BPRA and Good Cause, issues unrelated to most unions. It is not merely our organization’s messaging but our entire belief system that has become narrow, confused and unintelligible. Could any candidate actually express in detail what a socialist New York would look like? Could any volunteer, for that matter?
Ideological incoherence spawns co-optation the way a stagnant pool attracts mosquitoes. In the absence of a comprehensive platform, the Sairitupac campaign drew in a number of libertarians obsessed with zoning deregulation and increased construction. (For more comprehensive detail concerning the infiltration by pro-developer forces, see Appendix B: The Yimby Menace). Obviously, the housing platform that won us the 2020 elections is no more, reduced as it was to a single focus on milquetoast Good Cause legislation. But as we now turn to the Housing Working Group’s failure to push that meager bill past the finish line, it bears on us to recognize that the issues extend further than what leadership were overtly advocating for. The highest levels of our citywide organization are implicated in both the destruction of HWG’s tenant organizing and a far greater crime against public housing residents. HWG’s support for the NYCHA Preservation Trust has now transformed NYC-DSA into a genuine threat to the working class.
This is Part 1 of a 4-part series. Part 2 can be found here.