A far-right President was elected in 2024 despite a strong majority of Americans supporting progressive economic and social policies. How can we begin to cohere this progressive majority into a winning political force under the Trump administration?

I will argue here that we are going to have to build an independent political movement from the bottom up, community by community, to provide a viable political home for the progressive majority. An independent political movement should focus on electing thousands to local office during the Trump administration. On that foundation of public credibility, organizational capacity, and experienced local officials and campaigners, the movement can then run credible and often winning elections in their local districts to the state houses and the US House of Representatives. The strategic goal of each local party in this independent progressive political movement should be their district’s US House seat. When the independent left has a caucus in the House, it will begin to have real leverage on national policy.

The Democratic Party is no home for the progressive majority, which cannot capture it due to its upper and upper-middle class leadership and the party’s undemocratic and money-drenched power structure. Social movements on their own are not enough to have much influence on national policy without an independent progressive political alternative that threatens to take progressive votes that the Democrats now take for granted. Nor does any national party or organization have the organization and resources today to organize a credible independent progressive party across the nation.

I say that as a Green Party member. My message here is certainly directed to Greens, but also to progressive activists in general. While a Green ballot line can be used in many states for independent political action, some progressives may want to run under another party label. The task under Trump is to organize, under Green and perhaps multiple party labels, strong local independent progressive political parties across the nation. It cannot be organized from any national center now, but it could become a national movement for local independent political action.

When a critical mass of local independent progressive parties is electing thousands to local office, and on that organized foundation electing their candidates to state houses and the US House, then we will have the organized mass base to come together in a national independent progressive party that can compete for power with the two-party-system of corporate rule.

There is no mystery to how to build a bottom-up independent progressive political movement. The question is whether the progressive left is willing to put the work into organizing their own commmunities.

A Political Parodox

Why did a progressive-leaning public elect a far-right president? I studied the exit polling and other public opinion polling to understand how this happened in a recent article in New Politics.^[1] What I found was that Trump did not expand his white base but that Harris lost enough of the traditional Democratic base to lose the election. In fact, Harris gained 2.7 million more white votes than Biden received in 2020. Trump’s share of the white vote has not increased over his three presidential campaigns: 57 percent in 2016, 58 percent in 2020, and 57 percent in 2024. While Trump gained 2.0 million votes of people of color in 2024 compared to 2020, the margin of difference in the election was the 6.9 million people of color who voted for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for Harris or Trump in 2024. Most of them stayed home and a small portion voted third party.

The top issue by far for voters in 2024 was the economy. Harris lost voters who ranked the economy as their top issue by an 80 percent to 18 percent margin. Harris campaigned on a tone-deaf “politics of joy” when many people were hurting. She campaigned with anti-Trump Republicans and boasted that she had more billionaire contributors than Trump. She did not give economically distressed people, particularly people of color, good reasons to vote for her.

Trump campaigned as the anti-establishment outsider, the change candidate in a change election. Eighty-three percent of voters said they wanted “substantial change” (56 percent) or “complete and total upheaval” (17 percent).^[2] Trump won 3.1 million votes he did not get in 2020, the majority of them from 2.0 million people of color. This disaffected cohort seems to have tuned out Trump’s racist dog-whistling and responded to his message that Biden, Harris, and the Democrats had wrecked the economy, raised their costs of living, and reduced their opportunities for advancement.

When I reviewed polling on where people stand on economic and social issues, it was clear there is a strong progressive majority in America. If Harris had campaigned for progressive populist economic policies that addressed the economic concerns of so many voters, she likely would have won the election with the votes of traditional but economically distressed Democratic voters who sat this election out because they saw no help coming from Harris. The polls show that strong majorities support progressive economic programs such as Medicare for All (60 percent), Green New Deal (65 percent), rent control (68 percent), universal free childcare (73 percent), taxing the rich and big business (79 percent), and raising the minimum wage (86 percent).

Strong majorities also support progressive political and social reforms like ranked choice voting (61 percent), abolishing the Electoral College (63 percent), abortion rights (63 percent), legalized same-sex marriage (71 percent), and respectful treatment of transgender people (74 percent). While Harris tried to out-Trump Trump on immigration by highlighting her support for the Republican-drafted anti-immigrant bill that Trump had told the Republican House to quash for the duration of the campaign so he could hammer away at the immigration issue, the Fox exit poll found that the voters favored offering undocumented immigrants a chance for legal status over deportation by a 56 percent to 40 percent margin.^[3]

While Trump and his MAGA Republicans control of the presidency, both houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court, how can we organize this progressive majority into a winning political majority?

The Democratic Party Dead End

Progressives Democrats are encouraged by the recent victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. The independent progressive political movement should study and learn from Mamdani’s exemplary campaign. But the contradictions between Mamdani’s progressive policy goals and trying to achieve them within the Democratic Party are already apparent. I will discuss that in the concluding section of this article.

Reform the Democratic Party into a progressive party?

Many progressive still argue that the Democrats can win by running on a progressive economic platform. Yes, some will win, as they have been doing in more progressive districts since the New Deal. But that has never been enough to transform the Democratic Party as a whole from a party beholden to corporate interests into one promoting the interests of the working-class majority.

By this time, after 50 years, since the Carter administration, of increasingly neoliberal economic policies from the Democrats, it should be clear that the Democratic Party will never return to its New Deal liberalism of the 1930s to 1970s. The power structure of the Democratic Party is its super-rich donors and its upper-middle class professional cadre of elected officials, campaign and party staff, and associated think tanks and non-profit advocacy groups. This upper and upper-middle class leadership of the Democratic Party is allergic to taxing themselves to fund a new New Deal of progressive economic programs like universal public health care or free public education from childcare through college. The high-income class bias of the Democratic leadership is why Harris did not and could not campaign on an egalitarian redistributive economic platform.

The leaders of the Democratic Party may be the socially liberal wing of the upper and upper-middle classes, but they share a neoliberal fiscal conservatism with the Republicans. Neoliberal deregulation, privatization, public austerity, and top-end tax cuts have been bipartisan pursuits since Democratic votes in the House and Senate gave Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts for social programs the majorities they needed to pass Congress in the 1980s. Instead of fighting the right, the Democrats have compromised with it, from Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” with the Gingrich Republicans to Joe Biden’s pitiful pursuit of bipartisanship with the MAGA Republicans who tried to overthrow his election. Nor is the Democrats’ social liberalism reliable, as we saw with Harris reinforcing and normalizing the nativist racism of the MAGA Republicans by campaigning for their anti-immigrant bill.

The progressive minority of the congressional Democratic Party has given the party a progressive veneer since the corporate New Democrats displaced the old New Deal Democrats as the majority faction. Based in the Congressional Black Caucus in the late 20^th century and the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the 21^st century, the progressives have never come close to controlling the party. They have not won a single major progressive reform that they have proposed over the last 50 years, from a job guarantee and universal public health care to military spending cuts and progressive tax reform to fund social provision, policies they have advanced with ever-diminishing clarity and energy as the years have gone by.

A progressive takeover of the Democratic Party?

Some progressives argue that while the Democratic Party will not reform itself, progressives can take the power in the party from its corporate wing and transform it into a pro-labor social-democratic party. Wave after wave of reform Democrats have tried to do that, from the CIO’s Political Action Committee in the 1940s, to the New Politics and realignment movements of the 1950s to 1970s, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s, and Bernie Sanders’ campaigns in 2016 and 2020. The corporate Democrats are still firmly in control.

The problem for reformers is that the Democratic Party is a memberless party. One cannot join the Democrats as a member with a voice and vote within party structures. One doesn’t join the party by agreeing to its principles, supporting it with membership dues, and participating in a local branch. One becomes a Democrat, no matter what one’s political principles, by registering in the party with the state in order to vote in state-run party primaries in 31 states and D.C., or in the 19 states without party registration by choosing the party’s ballot at a primary polling place, or by simply voting for Democrats in general elections.

Activists can work their way onto county and state committees by petitioning for usually uncontested seats in primary elections or by getting appointed to fill vacancies. But so what? These committees can endorse and petition for candidates, but nominations are determined by primaries, where the well-funded corporate Democrats dominate. These committees can, but rarely do, adopt policy platforms, but the politicians are free to ignore them. I watched the Vermont Rainbow Coalition take over the Vermont State Democratic Committee in 1984 and adopt a progressive state party platform, which the centrist elected Democrats from Governor Madeline Kunin and Senator Patrick Leahy on down just ignored without any consequences.

The party committees that count are the Democratic National Committee, the congressional and senate campaign committees, and their state counterparts. Increasingly since the 1970s, they have centralized the control of the private donations from the corporate rich and the hiring of party operatives. They use those resources to promote corporate centrists and oppose progressives. The centralized party caucuses in Congress and state legislatures discipline and tame progressives that do get elected from progressive-friendly districts with the carrots and sticks of legislative committee assignments and campaign funding from party committees for re-election.

An inside/outside strategy?

A variant of the progressive takeover strategy is the inside/outside strategy where progressives form an “independent” organization – sometimes called a “party within the party” – to support progressives in Democratic primaries and progressive independents against corporate Democrats in general elections. Proponents argue their strategy will heighten the contradictions between progressive and corporate Democrats, leading to a split where the progressives either take over the Democrats or lead a mass break away to form a viable independent progressive party.

I have been hearing this strategy advocated since the late 1960s by the leftwing of the party realignment advocates in the Michael Harrington wing of the Socialist Party, the left wing of the Rainbow Coalition in the 1980s, the Working Families Party since the 1990s, the Progressive Democrats of America since the mid-2000s, and the “dirty break” advocates in Democratic Socialists of America since in the mid-2010s. After 70 years of groups pursuing an inside/outside strategy, there has been no take over or break away by progressives.

The logic of the inside/outside strategy leads back inside the Democratic Party because running campaigns inside the Democratic Party means forswearing outside options in order to have access to Democratic committees, staff positions, campaign funding, primary ballots, and primary debates. Bernie Sanders had to promise to support the winner of the Democratic presidential primaries in 2016, which he expected when he announced in 2015 to be Hillary Clinton, in order to be allowed into the Democratic debates and onto the Democratic primary ballots. Then he had to campaign hard for Clinton in the general election in order to prove his loyalty and keep open his access to the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

Instead of confronting the corporate centrists with inside primary challenges and outside general election challenges, such groups that pursue the inside/outside strategy quickly retreat to making all inside activity supporting Democratic candidates and all outside activity street protests and issue campaigns. But those street protests and issue campaigns are really just lobbying and begging elected Democrats to do something for progressives whose votes these Democrats can take for granted.

Activists and reform organizations have to be either inside or outside the Democratic Party, not both. The Democratic Party power structure forces reformers to choose.^[4]

Defensive lesser-evil voting?

The last resort of progressives advocating Democratic voting is they are the lesser evil. They may be corporate neoliberals, but they are not as bad as the Republican neofascists. The Republicans are indeed worse. But can Democratic neoliberalism beat Republican neofascism? It didn’t win in the 2016 and 2024 presidential elections. Moreover, the growing economic inequality that Democratic neoliberalism breeds has only fertilized the fields of resentment and scapegoating in which Republican neofascism has grown.

The Democrats don’t know how to fight the right. They compromise with it. To defeat the right, we need an independent progressive movement that the progressive majority can rally to. The progressive left should also understand that the popular classes are rejecting the Democratic Party. Post election polls have shown the Democrats’ favorability ratings at all-time lows. Favorability percentages are in the mid-30s and unfavorability is averaging nearly 60 percent.^[5] Other polling shows majority support for an independent pro-worker party.^[6] Progressives shouldn’t waste their time trying to rehabilitate the Democrats, who the then former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips ironically noted in 1990 is “history’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party.”^[7]

Third Parties Work

The first thing to remember about independent political action is that third parties had enormous influence on American politics for a century under the same electoral system we suffer under today. Third parties elected thousands of their members under this single-member-district, winner-take-all system that positions third parties as spoilers and thus tends to generate a two-party system. Despite the spoiler effect, from the 1830s to the 1930s, the electoral successes of independent progressive parties forced their demands into the center of national political debate and they won many of their demands.

The Workingmen’s Party of 1828-1831 of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities and towns was the first workers party in the world, formed when Karl Marx was a 10-year-old boy in Trier, Germany. The Workies, as they were known, elected some members to office in their first elections, but soon fell apart due to factionalism. But the third party movement of the 1830s carried forward their demands for free public education, free homesteads on public land, and the abolition of slavery into the Liberty Party of the 1840s, the Free Soil Party of the 1848-1854, and the abolitionist faction of Radicals in the upstart Republican Party from 1854 to 1877. The Radical Republicans won many of their demands with the Homestead Act of 1862, the Morrill Act of 1862 for land-grant public colleges, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the Radical Reconstruction Acts of 1867-68, and the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution ratified between 1865 and 1870.

The farmer-labor populist Greenback-Labor Party of the 1870s and 1880s and the People’s Party of the 1890s also put their demands at the center of national debate. They elected hundreds to local offices, scores to state legislatures, and 24 members to the US House on their platform aimed at redressing economic inequalities and promoting the welfare of rural agrarian and urban working-class communities. Their demands included regulating monopolies, public ownership of railroad and telegraph utilities, a national currency of publicly-issued Greenbacks to expand economic activity and relieve debt, a progressive income tax, the 8-hour day, Black civil rights, women’s suffrage, and direct election of Senators. In due course, many of these demands were met.

It took the third party movement of the early 20^th century to get many of the populists’ demands over the finish line. The Socialist Party, and many local- and state-based labor, farmer-labor, and progressive parties, elected thousands to local office and many to state houses and the US House. They won many of their demands: the progressive income tax, direct election of Senators, women’s suffrage, public utilities for water, sewage, and sometimes power, food safety laws, child labor laws, minimum wages, job creation through public works, old age pensions, and other reforms.

Unfortunately, independent working-class political action, the first principle of socialist politics since the aftermath of the democratic revolutions on 1848, has been lost on the American left since the Communists’ Popular Front policy of 1936 led most of the left and the unions into the Democratic Party. An independent progressive or socialist movement has yet to re-emerge from the Democratic Party as a mass-based independent movement with a distinct identity and its own mass political party.^[8]

The New Left of the 1960s generated some independent political action, although most of the radicals of the 1960s increasingly retreated to the Democratic Party with the McGovern and Jackson campaigns. The first attempts to build a non-sectarian mass-based independent progressive party tried to build their parties out of presidential campaigns from the top down, including the Peace and Freedom Party of 1968, the People’s Party of 1972 and 1976, the Citizens Party of 1980 and 1984, and the Campaign for a New Tomorrow of 1992 that tried to take the Rainbow Coalition’s politics independent. They all failed.

The lesson here is that a presidential campaign will not organize a viable independent progressive political party. Even with household names who had as much name recognition as their major party competitors, like America’s baby doctor Benjamin Spock in 1972 and consumer advocate Ralph Nader in 2000, these campaigns were marginal to the two major party competition. Progressive third party presidential campaigns are likely to remain marginal until that party has a caucus in the US House that commands public interest and major media coverage. The lesson here is Lincoln’s election in 1860. He was not a third party candidate. The Republican Party he represented had been the second party in Congress behind the Democrats since the 1856 election.

The Labor Party of the 1990s did not try to build itself out of a presidential campaign. It got off to a promising start by focusing on building a base. It had affiliated unions representing 6 million workers. It organized extra-electoral campaigns for a job guarantee and free public higher education to increase its base. But its members lost enthusiasm because most people who joined expected to run independent Labor candidates. Many of the affiliated unions did not really want to run against the Democrats. Most of their leaders viewed the Labor Party as a pressure group on the Democrats, not an alternative to them. The endorsement process for Labor Party candidates was so centralized and onerous that few were endorsed. aMembers who wanted to challenge the Democrats got discouraged and peeled away. The lesson for the Labor Party experience is that we can’t call for an independent party and not run candidates. Without candidates, the party is no different from other NGOs that campaign for various reforms. People who want to run independent progressive candidates will look elsewhere. Many Labor Party members went into the Green Party in the early 2000s.

The Green Party took a different approach in the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of running a presidential candidate and hoping to build the party in the wake of a campaign that would inevitably be marginal and disappointing, the Greens decided at their first national organizing meeting in 1984 to go out and organize locals that would come together in periodic delegated congresses to compare notes on organizing and adopt national policy positions. Greens were soon getting elected to local office beginning in 1986. Their numbers steadily grew over time. Today, the Greens have won nearly 1,600 elections over the years and have more than 160 members in local office today. They won 50 of 92 local races they contested in 2024.^[9] The Greens have elected more third party candidates than any independent progressive party since the Socialist, Farmer-Labor, and Progressive parties of the first third of the 20^th century.

Despite its many organizational problems at the national level, the Green Party has persisted as the largest progressive independent party because it built a grassroots base with enough electoral successes to encourage people to keep going. The ranks of the Greens are also constantly replenished by disaffected activists who find the Democrats to be on the opposite side of issues they care deeply about, from local issues concerning environmental protection, affordable housing, police brutality, and equitable school funding to national positions on health care, climate, immigration, and wars like Iraq and Gaza.

The Greens have shown that independent progressives can win local elections. The task now is to scale that up across the country.

Who Can Fill the Progressive Political Vacuum?

The problem is that no one is organized nationally to fill the political vacuum on the progressive left.

The Green Party can’t do it with a national budget of $166,000 this year and a national structure so fragmented that it is incapable of adopting and implementing a national organizing strategy. The Greens changed from a national membership party to a memberless federation of state parties in 2001. As a memberless party like the Democrats and Republicans, changing its national structure and strategy is a bureaucratic snafu because it is not a one-member, one-vote democracy. It is more like a social movement with informal but unaccounatable centers of power within it. It will take a movement from below of dues-paying mass-membership local and state Green parties to create the democratic culture, accountability, and funding needed to build a democratically accountable national party that can develop and execute a shared national organizing strategy.

The small independent socialist groups talk about the need for a mass left or labor party but are too small and divided to do it themselves. Many in these groups say we cannot even start organizing that party until the social movements are stronger. I have been hearing that excuse from those quarters since we started the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968 when the Black freedom and anti-Vietnam war movements were at their zeniths and the feminist, gay, and environmental movements inspired by those movements were beginning to erupt.

The movement many of these socialists are really waiting for is the labor movement. Progressive trade unionists sometimes get resolutions for a labor party passed in some unions, but they cannot get a major union to back it with funding needed to build it. A progressive party salting the labor movement with activists who promote independent labor political action could bring a labor party into being long before the unions are ever going to initiate it on their own.

In the internet age there have been a number of efforts to build a new party online by collections of individuals representing no organized base, including the Justice Party in the early 2010s hoping to ride the anti-corporate Occupy Wall Street movement, the Peoples Party claiming it was taking the Sanders coalition independent, and now the Justice for All Party, hoping to build upon the small vote of Cornel West’s 2024 presidential campaign, and the rival Justice for All Party Grassroots trying to do it without Cornel West. These are talk shops at best and scams at worst (see the People’s Party^[10]). They have not organized local or state affiliates or run their own candidates. They are a waste of time. Internet communities are no substitute for organizing in local geographic communities that reaches beyond in-group silos.

Build Local Mass-Based Independent Progressive Parties

The existential crises of climate, war, inequality, and democracy are accelerating under the Trump administration. The neoliberal corporate Democrats offer no real solutions and real solutions can’t wait. We can’t wait for a nationally coordinated drive to organize an independent progressive political party. But what progressive activists can do now in any community is organize a local independent progressive party. That is what we should start with immediately under Trump to build a strong grassroots base to defeat Trump’s neofascism and go beyond the Democrats’ neoliberalism.

The Green Party has shown that it can elect many people to local office. The hundreds that the Greens have elected can be multiplied into the thousands. There are about 500,000 local offices in the United States, so there are plenty of opportunities.^[11] Seventy percent of local elections were uncontested in 2024.^[12]

90 percent of school board and 80 percent of municipal council elections are nonpartisan across the US.^[13] The spoiler problem is reduced in nonpartisan races, but often not completely. There is often a hidden partisanship. While partisan labels are not on the ballot, party organizations often support candidates officially or unofficially with resources behind the scenes. The candidates of an independent progressive political party in nonpartisan races should not hide their affiliation. Nonpartisan elections were a reform pushed by middle-class progressive reformers in the early 20^th century who sought to reduce the influence of political parties and elect more qualified technocrats to office instead of party politicians. The reform was aimed at often corrupt major-party urban political machines, but also at the growing Socialist Party. These Progressive reformers were worried that working-class Socialists instead of nonpartisan professional elites would replace political machine bosses.^[14]

Because party labels that give voters cues as to candidates’ political views are absent in nonpartisan elections, those elections have lower turnouts and tend to elect incumbents, celebrities, and well-funded candidates. A progressive party exists to organize and educate voters around its political program. The non-party politics that the early 20^th century progressives, and today’s advocates of nonpartisan primaries, want to keep regular working people atomized and influenced more by top-down paid-for messaging than by the collective discussions of problems and solutions that a progressive party can organize.

Local independent progressive parties should take advantage of reduced spoiler problem in nonpartisan local elections, but not hide their partisanship. We want to move people to support our policy platform, not sneak it by them under the cover of nonpartisanship.

A more important advantage for local independent progressive candidates is that through grassroots door-to-door canvassing they can make themselves known to the voters. Even more than party cues, knowing the candidate is a more important determinant of how a voter votes. Money for advertising also plays a much smaller role in local elections because the districts are usually much smaller than the media markets they are in. Organization, not money, rules in most local elections.

From Local to State and Federal Elections

A local independent progressive party that wins local elections builds a base of voters and a bench of experienced campaigners and office holders that can be the foundation for competitive campaigns for state legislative races and the House of Representatives. Local elected officials can demonstrate they are responsible and effective public servants and that they can win elections. They then become credible candidates for the state house and the US House. Those races are local in the sense that they are in local districts, even if they are usually in larger districts than municipal and county legislative districts. But when the local party has built its base, its bench, and its record in local office, it will be ready to run competitive and increasingly winning elections for state legislative seats and US House seats.

Getting a foothold in local government is much more than a warm-up for running credible candidates in state and federal elections. It is a way to begin implementing a progressive policy platform. Under our federal system, local governments have substantial powers. Local governments have the power to raise revenues more equitably through with more progressive taxation; to spend the revenues on public priorities; to use procurement and regulation to improve many areas of community life, from housing to policing; to create and operate public enterprises in the public interest, from housing to banking to power utilities; and to use eminent domain to take ownership of private properties for public purposes. Local government can promote cooperatives and public enterprises that capture for community purposes the economic surpluses created by the community’s labor.

These local powers are circumscribed by the fiscal and preemptive powers of state and federal government and the economic powers of large private enterprises. The requirement of local balanced budgets prevents sufficient immediate investments in crucial priorities like affordable housing and clean energy at the scale required to meet these needs. Only the federal government can run deficits by borrowing money to fund pressing public needs. But these limitations on local government then become the predicate for running candidates for state and federal office in order to get needed funding and policies to support meeting these local needs.

Most state legislative and US house districts are one-party districts where there is no real competition in elections due to partisan gerrymandering. Over 95 percent of the voters live in state legislative district that are non-competitive defined as where the winner won by more than 5 percent. Nearly 40 percent of state house seats were uncontested in 2024.^[15] Most US House seats are noncompetitive as well. In 2024, only 9 percent of seats were decided by 5 percent or less and only 16 percent were decided by 10 percent or less.^[16]

Many of these seats are so non-competitive that the minority major party in a particular district will not put resources into their candidate, if they even run one at all. These districts give an independent progressive party the opportunity to become at least the second party in the district right away and to push their policy platform into the center of the public debate. To win these elections against the majority major party in such districts will take a base of voters built up in municipal elections and a well-organized campaign.

Strategic Goal: An Independent Progressive Caucus in the US House

Electing a caucus of independent progressives to the House should be the strategic goal for an independent progressive party to gain real influence on national policy. That is when we will begin to have the power to more forcefully oppose Trumpist neofascism and advance real solutions than the corporate neoliberals of the Democratic Party can. An independent progressive caucus in the House is within our reach. That should be our organizing target.

Independent presidential campaigns are not going to have much influence on federal policy until we elect a caucus of independent progressives to the US House. Then we will begin to have leverage in national politics. We will have a platform in the mass media and the Democrats will have to give us something in order to get something on close legislative votes.

Presidential campaigns and campaigns for Governor, US Senate, or other statewide offices have their place. They help the independent political movement in three important ways. First, winning a relatively small percentage, between 1 percent and 5 percent in most states, enables an independent party to acquire or maintain a ballot line, which makes it much easier to qualify for the ballot in down-ballot races in most states. Second, they help clarify internally and promote publicly the policy platform of the independent progressive party. Third, they help recruit new party activists.

But given the scale of presidential and US Senate and other statewide elections in medium-to-large states, the huge sums of money involved, and the weight of the spoiler effect in these higher stakes elections, it means the independent progressive alternative will usually be marginal at the current stage of its development. These races will not have much impact on national policy until we have an independent progressive caucus in the US House, which is within our reach if we develop local mass-membership parties.

We should put 90 percent of our efforts into local party organizing and elections in the next few years. There are no shortcuts around building an organized mass base of local parties. We have to start locally and build out to larger scales from organized local bases.

Dues-Paying Mass-Membership Parties

The mass-membership party was an invention of the popular parties in the latter half of the 1800s. It was how the socialist workers movement organized the masses into democratic parties and raised the money they needed to compete politically with old top-down parties of the wealthy landed and business elites.

The first thing they had to win was voting rights for working people, which they did over time. In Europe, winning the franchise meant winning it for working people. In America, it meant extending it to people of color and women.

It was in Europe that dues-paying mass-membership parties were established by the social-democratic labor movement. They won the franchise and soon significant footholds in government. In America, we have a tradition of memberless parties, whether we are talking about the Democrat and Republicans or their abolitionist, populist, or progressive challengers, with the exception of the Socialist Party of the first third of the 20^th century.

We can build local dues-paying mass-membership parties now. A mass-membership party means organizing new people into the party, not just mobilizing the people already with us. One important feature of electoral politics, if it is serious about winning, it means talking to all kinds of people outside of those already supportive of progressive politics. Our goal should be to build mass local parties that win the support of majorities in our communities. Our goal should be power in local governments, not just speaking truth to the powers that be and don’t care about our truths until we are competing with them for votes.

Membership dues are even more a matter of democracy than funding, although that is obviously necessary. We want members with voting rights who are committed enough to the party’s principles and goals to support it financially. We don’t want free riders who want to right to vote on policy but won’t take on the responsibility of supporting the party financially.

A common objection in America to membership fees is that they are a “poll tax” that discourages poor and working class participation. In my experience, that objection usually comes from comfortable middle- and upper-middle class people, often from those in the non-profit sector where wealthy donors and their foundations provide the funding. In real life, poor and working people’s organizations are dues-paying organizations. 14.3 million union members pay dues that typically are 1 percent to 2.5 percent of gross wages. Regular dues are $30 a year in the 300,000-member NAACP. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) had 25,000 dues-paying members at its peak in 1969.^[17] ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which was in many ways the successor to the NWRO, had 500,000 member families^[18] at its peak in the early 2000s when regular dues were $10 a month, or $120 a year,^[19] which would be approaching $20 a month, or $240 a year, today.

Dues should be progressively scaled to income with provision for token contributions from hardship cases. But free riders should have no decision-making rights in a political party that is serious about contending for power against the two wealthy corporate parties.

ACORN, which considered organizing an independent party in the late 1970s and associated with the Democratic fusion politics of the Working Families Party in the 1990s and early 2000s, shows that a dues-paying mass membership organization of low-income people can be organized. The Democratic Party was intimidated by right-wing video vigilantes who got false exposés about ACORN into the commercial media. The fearful and feckless Democrats became complicit in the right’s destruction of ACORN. A Defund ACORN Act was passed by Congress when it had Democratic majorities in both houses and signed into law by President Obama in October 2009. The smashing of a mass organization

of low-income people was bipartisan. Progressives should not forget this treachery against working people by the Democratic Party.^[20]

A Movement Party

Local independent progressive parties need to be as active in street politics as electoral politics. By street politics, I mean not only street demonstrations but also neighborhood canvassing, public and member education, social gatherings, public hearings, news conferences, community service and mutual aid, and other forms of public action.

We need to be a movement party because people join progressive organizations to take action and to learn about the issues, the system, and strategies for change. We should not be telling people to wait for the next election before we ask them to take action. We should be organizing ongoing issue and education campaigns that new members can get involved in right away.

Issue campaigns are by their nature more participatory than electoral campaigns focused on electing a candidate or slate of candidates. Everybody can help shape the positions and actions of an issue campaign. Electoral campaigns by their nature focused on mobilizing support to execute a campaign plan that has been already agreed to.

Educational activities can be a lecture and discussion, a film and discussion, a reading group with discussions, and other member and public programs. These programs are not only about sharing information about issues and political philosophy. They are also an opportunities to have members take turns making presentations to lead into discussions. These presentations and discussions help train members in public speaking and critical thinking. We need to train lots of spokespeople, organizers and critical thinkers. We need to be smart to take on the powers that be.

News conferences are a much underutilized form of public action by progressive activists. Media including local media are looking for visuals and sound, not only TV and radio broadcasters but also newspapers, which are increasingly centered around online platforms. Simply sending out a statement or press release is much less likely to get coverage than is presenting the statement in a news conference with good visuals and sound.

The party should also cultivate relationships with journalists who cover political and social issues. We should help journalists do their job by giving them interesting information and stories to cover.

We should not be burdening activists with long tedious business meetings. Membership assemblies should decide the basic policy questions. But we should not repel activists with long boring membership meetings. Most people do not have the time for long meetings on minor questions. Leave the administrative decisions to an elected coordinating committee.

Consistent year-round movement politics will build a base of support for effective campaigns in episodic elections.

An Organizing Party

We need to be organizing, not just mobilizing the usual suspects who are already with us for episodic demonstrations or electoral campaigns. We need to have a systematic program of canvassing, of going out and talking to the ordinary people in the neighborhoods of our local communities.

I am not talking about the drive-by GOTV (Get Out The Vote) canvassing to identify supporters and mobilize them to the polls. I am talking about what has been called deep canvassing. It means taking the time to have meaningful empathetic conversations where we listen instead of preach. It is about building relationships between party activists and community members.

In my experience, many people are ready to pour their hearts out if you come to them to hear their issues and concerns instead of just asking for their support for your candidacy or your issue campaign. Many people want to talk simply because no representative of the major parties has ever come to them where they are to ask them about their concerns, but only, if at all, for their vote.

Political science research has found deep canvassing to be a far more effective method of persuasion and winning people over than other political persuasion approaches like television ads and traditional canvassing that gives a short fact-based argument for a candidate or policy position.^[21]

Most deep canvassing campaigns have been limited to one election or referendum and by the end of a 10 to 20 minute conversation seek to persuade people on a candidate or policy. I am talking about ongoing, year-round deep canvassing to reach out in our communities and take the time to establish our presence as a consistent and approachable political party.

A local progressive party that does this canvassing on a consistent basis will be appreciated even by people who have different political perspectives. People appreciate that we are out there consistently and listening to them. This builds relationships over time. And once there is a trusting relationship, you can have fruitful discussions about public policies without coming across as know-it-alls preaching at them.

Not everyone will be happy to talk with an independent progressive at their door or on the phone. The Greens have found that progressive-leaning voters in particular are often hostile at first. This reaction is usually rooted in the perception of the Greens as spoilers for the Democrats at a time when the Republicans have moved far to the right. I have found you can disarm their hostility by saying you share their fear of the Republicans. And then I suggest that we have an answer to the spoiler problem in ranked choice voting. After we talk about how that works, I suggest maybe the Democrats are perpetuating the spoiler problem by not joining the Greens in supporting ranked choice voting.

Another common objection is that the Greens cannot win. Here one can point out that the Greens have won nearly 1,600 elections over the years and have over 160 Greens currently in elected office and that Greens won over half of the local races in which they ran in 2024. When an independent political movement is electing thousands to local office, this objection will become moot over time. Most voters will know Greens and independent progressives are winning elections and holding many offices.

Another common response comes from people who like the Green policy platform but say people aren’t ready for it. Here one can cite polling that shows strong majority support for many of those policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, free public childcare and education through college, and taxing the rich to fund these reforms.

I have witnessed effective canvassing by British and Australian Greens who have elected members to their local, regional, and national legislatures despite competing in a single-member-district winner-take-all electoral system as Americans do. I saw this when I went out to canvass last December with Benali Hamdache, one of the three Greens elected to the three seats of the Highbury ward to the Islington Borough Council in London. Jeremy Corbyn, formerly of Labour Party and now independent, is the MP representing Highbury. But the Green Party, not Labour Party, is winning the local seats underneath the parliament in that district, where the Labour Party local is being out-organized by the Greens. We canvassed in Council Housing (municipally-provided public housing), had conversations with those who wanted to talk, and left a Green Party handout to everyone and at every door where no one answered. I saw people come up to Benali to thank him for work on this or that issue. It was clear the community was familiar with the Green canvassers. Teams of Highbury Greens meet every Saturday to go out and canvass.

I also observed the Australian Greens canvass operations in April in the lead up to their May 3 federal elections. Their campaign storefronts that I visited in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne had busy phone banks and lots of volunteers coming by to pick up signs for posting and street lists for canvassing. The corporate money goes to the centrist Labour Party and the conservative Liberal-National Coalition. The Greens have countered with year-round deep canvassing to build their base. This has led to the election of many Greens to the state houses as well as a record four members elected to the Australian House of Representatives in 2022.^[22]

The Greens have 11 of 76 Senators because that chamber is elected by proportional representation. But the House is elected by single-member-district ranked choice voting, which, despite the elimination of the spoiler effect with ranked voting, still makes it difficult for an upstart party like the Greens to beat both of the two major party candidates. In many constituencies the Greens come in second in the first preference vote and/or the final preferences count.

The Greens lost three of their House seats in 2025 despite maintaining their overall vote of about 12 percent and their 11 Senate seats nationally. What hurt them in 2025 was the anti-Trump vote among center-right voters who switched to Labour because the Liberal-National Coalition’s leader, Peter Dutton, had aligned himself with Donald Trump’s politics of hate and division. However, the Greens now have the sole balance of power in the Senate, which will keep their policy platform before the public. The Greens are optimistic that their longer term prospects for more House and Senate seats are good.^[23]

Organizing in the Labor Movement

Socialists in particular put a priority on organizing in the unions. I agree labor organizing should be a priority but not at the expense of engaging in the issues that people are immediately concerned about and building up movements around. Housing affordability is a huge problem everywhere these days. Immigrants are under assault in our communities. Police brutality is a perennial local issue. Local political organizing is going to find more immediate traction on these kinds of community issues.

But the labor movement is important to engage as well. Unions are the largest and most well-funded progressive organizations in the country. 14.3 million Americans were union members in 2024, far more than any other popular organizations. But that is only a small fraction of the working class. Only 9.9 percent of all workers in 2024 were in unions – 32.2 percent in the public sector and a paltry 5.9% in the private sector.^[24] That is far below the peak of union density between 1945 and 1960 when it was over 30 percent, peaking at 34.2 percent in 1945.^[25]

Despite their shrinking share of the workforce, unions have enormous financial resources. The assets and income of unions are not collected in one place by any government agency. The data is available in unions’ LM2 annual financial filings with the Department of Labor. Researchers have to painstakingly extract the financial data from the LM2 filings into databases in order to get total numbers. Chris Bohner estimated that in 2020 labor unions had $29.0 billion in assets and $18.3 billion in annual income.^[26] Guy Mika estimated in 2021 that union assets were $43.1 billion and annual income was $26.3 billion.^[27]

Leftwing labor activists have lamented that the American labor movement of today, in an era when unions have been on the retreat, is dominated by a business unionism that is narrowly self-interested and defensive, more concerned with servicing their existing members’ contacts and health and pension benefits and husbanding their financial assets than in organizing their own members, new workplaces, and with other progressive social movements. In his study of union finances, Chris Bohner has noted how the number of people employed as union organizers has been going down even though the union revenues and assets have been going up. He suggests business unionism has degraded further into a “finance unionism” that practices finance capitalism.^[28]

The majority of voters are working class. A progressive independent party will need to have a working class base to win elections. Even if community issues are likely to provide earlier fruitful organizing opportunities for a local independent progressive party, labor issues concern most of us. Most of us work and are in unions or could use one. Or we provide the unpaid but essential care work of looking after children, elderly, and disabled family members, which is work that intersects with gender and other community issues.

We need labor unions that are social movement unions that address both workplace and related community issues. Taking on business or finance unions to get the labor movement moving again will require organizing within our unions. Union officers tend to discourage member democracy and education. Existing leaders often don’t want their members engaged and educated because then they might become organized and educated enough to replace the existing leadership in the next union officer elections.

The reform caucuses we have had over the last 50 years have focused on democratizing unions and organizing more militant grievance and contract negotiating, which are good objectives. Teamsters for Democratic Union (TDU), of which I was a member, is the most long-lasting and in many ways successful of these reform movements. But discussion of independent labor political action in TDU and the other union reform causes of recent decades has been largely taboo. Such discussions were seen as divisive because it would question or challenge unions’ support for the Democratic Party, which many members in the reform caucuses agreed with.

Some advocates for a union-based labor party say we should wait until a major union is willing to support the organization of such a party so the effort has the funding and organizers needed to build it. I think unions will support independent politics only when we prove we can win elections. My experience in the Greens is that we can often get union endorsements, mostly in local races where we have established solidarity around joint work on community and labor issues. But these local unions are not looking to start a local labor party. Their political work is focused on electing friendly politicians, usually, but not always, Democrats.

What our local mass parties should do is coordinate work by their members in the unions and in union organizing at unorganized workplaces. That work should focus on four goals: union democracy, labor militancy, social movement unionism, and independent labor political action.

Labor work by party members should continue to push for rank-and-file democracy, more militant grievance and contract actions as the reform caucuses of recent decades have done, and to devoting far more union resources to organizing the unorganized into unions at more workplaces. That labor organizing by party members should also push to replace business unionism with social movement unionism where unions work with other progressive social movements and promote solidarity and mutual support for each others’ demands.

A good example of social movement unionism is the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which practices what they call “Bargaining for the Common Good.” CTU canvasses neighborhoods to build community support for their contract campaigns and support climate, housing, child care, and other social movement demands in the contract demands and by supporting community-based struggles around such demands. That social movement union approach came out of reform caucus in the CTU called the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE).^[29]

Finally, party members in the unions should push in an organized way for discussions of and movement toward independent labor political action. Labor political independence will not happen without an organized push by members of an independent progressive party who are active in their unions.

The Role of Socialists

I have talked about an independent progressive party, not an ideologically and explicitly socialist party because I believe we can quickly build a mass party around popular progressive demands. Few people vote for abstract isms. They vote for policies and even more on their guts as to whether a candidate is for people like them.

A progressive majority already exists for progressive social-democratic or New Deal-type reforms of capitalism like universal public health care and free public education from child care through college. An independent progressive party should organize people around those demands.

The role of socialists in a broader progressive party should be educational. They should explain the limits of social-democratic reforms of capitalism: how it still leaves the corporate owning class with the social and political power to roll back reforms at their first opportunity; how it still leaves in place the capitalist structural dynamic of endless growth that is destroying the environment; how it still leaves in place the institutionalized theft of exploitation where the owning class steals the profits created by working people who do not receive the full fruits of their labor; how it still leaves in place the culture of winner-take-all competition that fuels bigotry and discrimination against minorities by majorities fearful of losing what they have; how competitive profit-seeking breeds imperialist and inter-imperialist wars for resources, markets, and cheap repressed labor; and so forth.

The role of socialists should not be to gain control of the party and impose their program on it. If socialists take that path they will only capture themselves and stunt the growth of a mass party. Socialists should rely on their education and the hard lessons learned from the resistance of capitalists to reasonable reforms to win people over to socialist perspectives. When the progressive majority understands, they will demand socialist solutions to secure universal economic, social, and political rights.

The Danger of Sectarianism

The independent progressive political movement needs to avoid sectarianism. There is a tendency for independent progressives and progressive Democrats to put more energy into attacking each other, the people they are closest to on policy, than they do attacking corporate Democrats and far-right Republicans.

We saw this dynamic in the 2024 presidential race. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released an Instagram screed that attacked the Green Party and its presidential candidate Jill Stein. AOC’s rant was full of ad hominem invective toward Stein and falsehoods about the Greens only running for President and not down ballot campaigns. AOC knew better. She canvassed and phone banked for a Green candidate for the New York city council the year before she first ran for Congress.^[30] Stein’s response focused on policy. She called out AOC for supporting Kamala Harris and the Democrats’ support for genocide in Gaza, suppressing Green Party ballot access, and appropriating without any attribution the Green Party’s signature issue, the Green New Deal – or, I would add here, any attempt to work with the Greens to help move the Green New Deal through Congress. The exchange received substantial commercial mass media coverage.^[31]

On the other hand, the Stein campaign’s messaging was often a sectarian failure to acknowledge the difference between the neoliberal corporate Democrat, Kamala Harris, and the neofascist corporate Republican, Donald Trump. Stein often said “there is no lesser evil in this race.”^[32] Prominent supporters went further. Kshama Sawant, the former socialist member of the Seattle city council, said a goal of the Stein campaign was to mobilize the pro-Palestinian Arab and Muslim vote to defeat Harris in Michigan and thus defeat her for the presidency, saying that would be a historic win.^[33]

Ajamu Baraka, Stein’s vice-presidential running mate in 2016, tweeted out messages that implied Trump was the greater evil: “If voting for the Green Party and Stein/Ware campaign denies a win by the democrat party, it would be great day for the people” and “I see democrats as leading edge of neofascism more so than the Trump forces. So, no not worried about Trump….”^[34] Baraka claimed a Trump victory would strengthen the left: “[With] a victory on the part of the Trump forces in November…. the radical alternative will be strengthened.”^[35]

Nick Cruse, who was on Stein’s media team and spoke at Stein campaign events, took a sectarian swipe at progressive Democrats when he tweeted, “I really hope Jill Stein costs Kamala Harris the election so we can rub it in AOC face for 4 years.”^[36] Three weeks after Trump had taken office, issued 75 reactionary Executive Orders, and unleashed Elon Musk and his DOGE minions to destroy the federal public sector, Jill Stein’s 2024 campaign manager was still promoting the line that Trump was the lesser evil, tweeting that “Electing Harris would have been worse….As godawful as Trump is, it was the better outcome.”^[37]

This messaging does resonate with some Greens who are understandably bitter at the Democrats for many reasons, from supporting the genocide in Gaza to hiring top-shelf lawyers to knock Green Party candidates off of ballots. But messaging that says the goal is to spoil the election for the Democrats and help the reactionary Republicans win is also obliviously offensive to the common sense and sensibilities of the progressive masses. It is unambiguously clear to most progressive-minded Americans that Trump’s racist, plutocratic, authoritarian agenda is worse than the Harris’ centrist agenda. Progressive political messengers who deny those differences strike most grassroots progressives as divorced from reality and not politically serious. It only makes the salience of the spoiler effect stronger and gives credence the claims of some that the Greens are a Republican operation. If the Greens and a wider independent progressive political movement is going to grow, it will expand by winning over progressives who now vote for the Democrats as the lesser evil. Our messaging should try to win them over, not ridicule or shame them for their current position.

I hear many complaints from Greens, independent socialists, and progressive Democrats who are alienated by this sectarian messaging. The way to get beyond it is to counter it with messaging that unites progressives around shared demands. Independent progressives should work and build relationships with progressive Democrats on issue campaigns outside of elections even though we disagree on electoral approaches. Independent progressives should remind progressive Democrats that because independent progressive candidates threaten to take votes from the Democrats if they don’t accede to popular movement demands, they give progressive Democrats leverage inside their own party.

In this spirit, independent progressives should choose their races strategically. There is no point in running against a consistently progressive Democrat when there are so many corporate Democrats to challenge. We should pick our fights strategically. As the independent progressive political movement gains strength, it should leave the door open to welcome progressive Democrats into the independent progressive movement.

The Civic Vacuum

There is a social as well as political vacuum that an independent progressive political movement should also aim to fill. We face a sociological problem — people are more atomized than ever. TV and now smart phones have isolated people. Instead of going to sociable gatherings of civic and social groups after work, most people watch TV and scroll their smart phones.

That leaves people isolated and more vulnerable to top-down centralized messaging from the various corporate media silos instead of becoming better informed and conversive from the give and take of face-to-face discussions in civic and social organizations.

Political parties, trade unions, and civic and social organizations of all sorts, from Elks Clubs and veterans organizations to religious congregations and Parent-Teacher Associations, have been hollowed out over the last 50 years. This sociological development has been well-documented in studies like

Robert D. Putnam’s 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,^[38] and Theda Skocpol’s 2003 book, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life.^[39] These studies have documented the radical decline in grassroots membership organizations and civic participation since the 1970s. An important consequence they discuss is how top-down non-profit professionals have replaced voluntary membership organizations for both policy advocacy and service delivery.

Peter Mair’s 2013 book, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy,^[40] focuses on the parallel decline of mass parties in recent decades. He discusses the hollowing out of mass parties and the consolidation of professional political elites detached from the masses in Europe. But his observations about European parties are also true for American parties, which Daniel Schlozman discusses in his 2024 book, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.^[41]

An independent progressive political movement should organize to fill this civic social vacuum. Most people who seem to be politically apathetic are actually just alienated from the political process. If you do deep canvassing, you will find many nonvoters who follow the news and care about public policy. Many people are hungry to be heard and want to make a positive difference. But they feel powerless to do anything about it. They don’t think the Democrats and Republicans care about them or even know what people like them are going through. Neither the top-down corporate parties nor the professionalized non-profits offer a way for them to feel empowered through discussions and democratic decision-making.

Our local mass parties should become a place where people can socialize as well as talk to each other about social problems and how we should address them. Our parties should be engaging ordinary people through educational and cultural events and mutual aid and community service projects. We should strive to offer educational, cultural, social, and political activities that are more friendly, fun, and interesting than channel surfing and phone scrolling at home alone.

Ranked Choice Voting and Proportional Representation

An independent progressive political movement should prioritize electoral reforms that will support the transformation of the political system from an exclusive two-party duopoly into an inclusive multi-party democracy. There are many political reforms the movement should support, from fair ballot access to public campaign financing. But the reform an independent political movement should prioritize is ranked choice voting (RCV),^[42] including proportional RCV^[43] for legislative bodies to create proportional representation.

Ranked choice voting eliminates the spoiler effect that so hinders third parties. Plurality winner elections create strong incentives to refrain from voting for the third party one really supports and to instead vote for the lesser evil major party in order to prevent the major party you fear most from winning. RCV enables you to vote for your first preference and rank the other candidates in order of preference without helping the candidates you fear most.

The independent progressive political movement should insist on proportional RCV in multi-seat districts for legislative bodies in order to have proportional representation of parties based on their real support among the voters. Within the movement for ranked choice voting, many argue that we should get single-seat RCV first and then go for multi-seat proportional RCV later. But after all the work that would go into getting single-member RCV, it will be very difficult to come back and tell legislators that what we actually really wanted for legislative bodies was proportional RCV.

Australia illustrates the importance of pushing for proportional RCV. The House in Australia is elected by single-seat RCV, while the Senate is elected by proportional RCV in multi-seat districts. The Green Party has been winning 10 percent to 12 percent of the first preference votes in both House and Senate elections over the last decade. In the proportional RCV Senate, the Greens have had 11 or 12 of the 76 Senators. But in the single-seat RCV House, the Greens have won only between 1 and 4 seats in the 150-member House in these elections where they receive 10 to 12 percent of the first preference votes. In a proportional House, they would receive 15 to 18 seats.

Ranked choice voting is a reform we are winning. In 2000, there were only two jurisdictions with RCV. They were legacies of the progressive reform movement of the 1910s to 1940s when two dozen cities had proportional RCV, including Boulder, Sacramento, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Wheeling, and New York City. By 2020, there were two dozen jurisdictions with RCV and by 2024 over 50. Most of them were single-member RCV, but several cities had adopted proportional RCV, including Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon. Washington, D.C., adopted RCV by referendum in the November 2024 election and Boston’s city council voted for it in May 2025.

Republicans and many corporate Democrats like California Governor Gavin Newsom, who vetoed a bill to allow RCV in more local governments, are working hard to pre-empt localities from adopting RCV. They are afraid that progressive candidates will not split the progressive vote between them as under plurality winner elections and win a lot more elections. Seventeen states have passed laws banning RCV. Legislation to ban RCV is pending in 11 other states.^[44] These bans must be fought.

RCV is a popular demand that local independent progressive parties can campaign for immediately and win at the local level in our cities, towns, and counties. RCV is in the news these days because the progressive New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani won his come-from-nowhere victory over the Democratic establishment’s candidate Andrew Cuomo in an RCV election. But the general election will be a plurality wins election.

I have talked to one of the Democrats’ lawyers who worked for the 2019 charter commission that designed the Frankenstein system in New York City: RCV for the primaries but plurality voting for the general election. The Democrats wanted a rational way to determine their primary nominee in a crowded field so the nominee didn’t win with a delegitimizing small plurality like 25 or 35 percent. But they absolutely did not want competition from the Greens in the general election, so they rejected RCV there. Greens testified in the charter commission hearings for RCV in the general election, and better yet, for proportional RCV like New York City had from 1936 to 1947, which resulted in three multi-party city councils of four, five, or six parties.^[45] But the Democrats on the charter commission did not want the Greens mounting challenges for any of the 51 city council seats without the burden of the spoiler effect that RCV elections eliminate. The Democrats assumed the winner of their primary would coast to victory in the general election in a city where Democrats out number Republicans by more than two to one.

It would be ironic if this system now enables an Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams to beat the Democratic primary nominee, Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani, a progressive Democrat, has not called for RCV in general elections in New York City, but independent progressives certainly should.

What about Zohran Mamdani?

Zohran Mamdani’s win in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor on June 24, 2025 is being hailed by advocates of organizing progressive politics inside the Democratic Party. They say it shows that their strategy is a winning strategy.

It is way too early to draw that conclusion from one primary campaign. Mamdani has not won much yet. He has not defeated the two-party system of corporate rule that will try to make Mamdani’s fate like that of India Walton or Brandon Johnson. After winning the Democratic primary for Buffalo mayor in 2021, the progressive Walton was defeated by a combination of wealthy Democratic and Republican forces in the general election. The progressive Johnson won the Chicago mayoralty in 2023, but his reform program and his favorability ratings have been crushed by the opposition of the wealthy Democratic and Republican establishment there.

After India Walton defeated the four-term incumbent Buffalo mayor, Byron Brown, in the 2021 Democratic primary, wealthy Republicans combined with wealthy corporate Democrats to lavishly fund and mobilize a write-in campaign for Brown that focused on viciously smearing Walton. Walton lost the general election decisively by a 58 to 39 percent margin.

The same convergence of ultra-rich Republican and Democratic donors to defeat a progressive Democrat is now happening in New York City. Wall Street billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted the morning after Mamdani’s primary win that “there are hundreds of millions of dollars of capital available to back a competitor to Mamdani that can be put together overnight (believe me, I am in the text strings and the WhatsApp groups) so that a great alternative candidate won’t spend any time raising funds.”^[46] The super-rich donor class has not at this writing agreed on whether to keep backing Cuomo or the equally corrupt and disgraced incumbent mayor Eric Adams, who both have independent ballot lines established, or the prominent lawyer running as a centrist on an independent line, Jim Walden, or a write-in who is “a superb candidate,” as Ackman floated as a possibility. Mamdani could lose the general election like Walton did.

If Mamdani survives the general election, the same corporate forces will resist and undermine his mayoralty. The big capitalists have the private power to wreck New York City’s economy and fiscal stability with a capital strike or capital flight, as they are already threatening.^[47] The corporate Democratic leaders like Kathy Hochul in the governor’s mansion and the leadership of the state legislature have already made it clear that they will block his proposed city tax increases on personal income over $1 million a year and on big businesses that he needs to fund his reforms. He will need state approval for those tax reforms.^[48]

The federal government will also make life hard for a Mayor Mamdani. One only has to recall President Gerald Ford’s refusal to provide federal assistance during the city’s 1975 fiscal crisis, which prompted the famous tabloid headline by the New York Daily News: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”^[49] President Trump has already said as much: “If he does get in, I’m going to be president, and he’s going to have to do the right thing, or they’re not getting any money.”^[50]

Mamdani could find himself in office but not in power. That could mean an outcome like the progressive Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has experienced since being elected in 2023. Johnson’s failure to deliver on his promises, along with some self-inflicted mistakes,^[51] has sent his approval rating plummeting, bottoming out at a dismal 6.6 percent in February 2025.^[52] That is even lower than Rod Blagojevich’s 8 percent approval rating after the Illinois Governor was caught on tape trying to sell the appointment to the US Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama with these self-incriminating words: “I’ve got this thing, and it’s fucking golden. I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing.”^[53]

Johnson was elected to mayor with the support of a coalition similar to that behind Zohran Mamdani, anchored by progressive organizations like United Working Families, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Johnson had been a member and paid organizer in CTU before being elected to the Cook County Board of Commissioners in 2018. Once in the mayor’s office Johnson has been stymied in implementing his program of progressive tax reform to fund his housing and school initiatives and close the city’s huge budget shortfalls. His platform was similar to Mamdani’s, featuring progressive tax increases that required state approval in order to fund his city reform agenda. The state of Illinois refused Johnson’s tax reforms. He has faced resistance from the corporate Democrats on the city council and in state government, a bellicose police force, and the private economic and media power of Chicago’s hostile corporate elite.^[54] Johnson has pushed through a number of progressive reforms but the left in Chicago is now reckoning with the fact that the mayor’s office and the progressive movement do not yet have the power to structurally transform the institutions that generate extreme inequality and public sector austerity in Chicago.^[55]

Mamdani is not destined to be slapped down by the existing power structure as badly as Walton and Johnson were. But it is also clear that he and his movement will face strong resistance, notably from the corporate Democratic establishment. “In fact,” writes New York historian Alexander Zevin, “given the difficulty of finding a suitable alternative to stop him, the Democrats and their donors might be wiser to wait: let Mamdani cross the finish line, then work to block his agenda in office, via the governor and legislature – disillusioning his supporters and discrediting his program in a blow to the entire conceit of municipal socialism.”^[56]

Are Mamdani and his movement are willing to do what it would take to push the corporate Democrats out and take over the party in New York City? It doesn’t seem that they are ready to struggle all-out for a decisive defeat of the corporate Democrats. In the lead up to the primary, the leaders of Mamdani’s campaign, DSA, and the Working Families Party, which could have provided a ballot line if he lost the primary, were not interested in continuing with a third party run against the Democratic Party nominee, presumably Andrew Cuomo. They seemed ready to make peace with corrupt corporate Cuomo and the Democratic establishment if Mamdani lost the primary.^[57]

Some in the Mamdani coalition did advocate a third party run should Mamdani lose the primary, but Mamdani made clear from the beginning of his campaign that he would focus exclusively on the Democratic primary and not run a third party campaign if he lost the primary.^[58] Mamdani showed more loyalty to the Democratic Party than the corporate Democratic candidates who petitioned to qualify and intend to run on independent ballot lines, the Fight and Deliver line for Andrew Cuomo and the EndAntiSemitism and Safe&Affordable lines for Eric Adams.

In office, Mamdani will be pressured to make peace with Governor Hochul, a corrupt^[59] centrist corporate Democrat in the mold of Andrew Cuomo who named her his Lieutenant Governor. She will expect an endorsement for her re-election campaign soon after a Mayor Mamdani takes office. He could endorse her and still likely not get his modest tax-the-rich proposals passed at the state level because Hochul and the majority of Democratic legislators are corporate Democrats whose political careers depend on the donations the corporate rich, who are militantly opposed to paying taxes so the masses can have decent public services.

Mamdani’s campaign has not demonstrated what progressives who advocate for a progressive takeover or break away from the corporate Democrats say will be the outcome of working within the Democratic Party. His campaign and potential mayoralty remain enmeshed in a Democratic Party where the corporate wing still rules. Those constraints, along with the private power of the corporate elites, will make it hard for him to carry out most of his progressive reform program.

Learning from the Mamdani Campaign

There is still much that an independent progressive political movement should learn from Mamdani’s campaign besides recognizing the fatal limitations on progressive politics inside the Democratic Party. In many ways, his campaign took approaches I have advocated here for an independent progressive political movement.

The need for a dues-paying mass-membership political organization is one lesson to learn. Mamdani started out with a core of support from New York City chapter of DSA. The chapter does not publish its membership numbers, but informed sources have put it at between 5,000^[60] and 9,000^[61] members. Standard dues in DSA are $15 a month, or $180 a year. Do the math. DSA had the resources to pay staff to organize their members into the Mamdani canvass, phone banking, sign posting, and other campaign activities. From that DSA core, the Mamdani campaign built out an organization of 50,000 volunteers who knocked on 1.5 million doors.^[62] DSA is recruiting new members out of that volunteer army.

There are no local independent progressive parties in the Green Party or any local independent progressive parties with the size and capacity to be the core of a campaign organizing at the scale that the Mamdani campaign has achieved in New York City. But local independent progressives have, or can soon organize, the capacity to build campaigns of the scale necessary for competitive campaigns in district races for municipal councils, state legislatures, and, with some time and experience, US House districts.

Mamdani has described his approach to voter outreach as “listening, not lecturing.”^[63] That is the same deep canvassing approach I have urged here that independent progressive parties undertake. Deep canvassing is not only about listening to voters’ concerns, but also using those empathetic conversations to persuade voters to support or at least consider what we are advocating. Mamdani’s canvass and campaign messaging appears to have done that persuasion and moved voters to replace crime with housing as the top issue in the polls.^[64]

Clear, concrete messaging is another lesson the independent progressive political movement should take away from the Mamdani campaign. Mamdani focused on a clear theme of affordability and highlighted a few concrete demands to realize it: free buses, free childcare, rent freeze. Voters grasp and can believe concrete demands far more than more abstract slogans like accessible mass transit, childcare as a public good, or affordable housing. This is consistent with my argument here that independent progressives should raise popular progressive demands, not abstract concepts of a plan or worse, an ism. Mamdani did not hide his identification as a democratic socialist, but he didn’t campaign on it either. He didn’t ask people to vote for democratic socialism. He asked them to vote for fast and free buses, universal free childcare, and a rent freeze on rent-regulated apartments.

Another lesson we should draw was not presented by the Mamdani campaign itself. But we should derive that lesson from the balance of power between the campaign and the corporate Democrats, and the private political-economic power structure behind the corporate Democrats. An independent political movement should not seek the governing responsibility of executive power until it has majority support in the legislative branch along with an extra-parliamentary social movement that can counter the private power of the corporate elites. We can uphold our principles as legislators. But if we take executive power without enough legislative support and a strong social movement, an independent progressive mayor, governor, or president will be trapped into administering the system they started out to change. They will be in office, but not in power.

Our immediate task is to find a political approach that can organize the progressive majority that already exists into an effective force that can defeat Trumpian neofascism and the Democratic neoliberalism that has fostered the inequalities and insecurities that enabled neofascism to grow in reaction. I am arguing that we all need to start in our own communities now and build independent political action there first. That should be the foundation for building up to winning seats in the state houses and the US House.

The existential crises of climate, war, inequality, and democracy are upon us. “We must make haste – slowly,” as the Chilean socialist president Salvatore Allende in the early 1970s urged his movement as he tried to consolidate its grassroots democratic base into a power that could defeat the looming fascist military reaction.^[65] The Chilean revolution did not consolidate its popular power in time. The lesson is that we must move quickly but we can’t take shortcuts around organizing a real grassroots base. Organizing that base into local independent progressive political parties is the first step that we can all take now.

NOTES

1. Howie Hawkins, “A Political Paradox: A Progressive-Leaning Public Elects a Far-Right President,” New Politics, Winter 2025, https://newpol.org/issue_post/a-political-paradox/. ↑
2. Fox News, “2024 Fox News Voter Analysis,” https://www.foxnews.com/elections/2024/general-results/voter-analysis. ↑
3. CNN, “Election 2024: Exit polls,” https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0. ↑
4. Howie Hawkins, “An ‘Inside/Outside’ Strategy or Independent Politics,” New Politics, Summer 1989; Howie Hawkins,“Safe States, Inside-Outside, and Other Liberal Illusions,” CounterPunch, May 10, 2016, https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/05/10/safe-states-inside-outside-and-other-liberal-illusions. ↑
5. Democratic Party Favorability, Real Clear Polling, Accessed June 15, 2025, https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/democratic-party. ↑
6. Jarod Abbott and Les Leopold, “Rust Belt Voters Are Sick of Both Parties, Jacobin, June 20, 2025, https://jacobin.com/2025/06/rust-belt-voters-independent-party. ↑
7. Kevin P. Phillips, “A Capital Offense; Reagan’s America,” NewYork Times, June 17, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/06/17/magazine/a-capital-offense-reagan-s-america.html. ↑
8. Eric Chester, Socialists and the Ballot Box: An Historical Analysis (Praeger, 1985), ↑
9. Green Party of the United States, Elections Database, https://www.gpelections.org. ↑
10. Prem Thakker, “Cornel West Announces Presidential Bid … as a People’s Party Candidate, The New Republic, June 5, 2023, https://newrepublic.com/post/173244/cornel-west-announces-presidential-bid-peoples-party-candidate; Rafi Schwarz, “What is The People’s Party that launched Cornel West’s presidential campaign?”, The Week, June 19, 2023, https://theweek.com/2024-presidential-election/1024333/what-is-the-peoples-party-that-launched-cornel-wests; Jacob Crosse and Joseph Kishore, “The ‘Rage Against the War Machine’ rally: A reactionary political freak show,” World Socialist Web Site, February 20, 2023, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/20/lfjm-f20.html. ↑
11. PoliEngine, “How many politicians are there in the USA?,” 2024, https://poliengine.com/blog/how-many-politicians-are-there-in-the-us. ↑
12. Ballotpedia, “Analysis of uncontested elections, 2024,” https://ballotpedia.org/Analysis_of_uncontested_elections,_2024. ↑
13. Kunal Goel, “There are over 70,000 “nonpartisan” open seats in 2025,” BallotReady, March 18, 2025, https://organizations.ballotready.org/research/nonpartisan-races. ↑
14. Arthur Lipow, Political Parties and Democracy (Pluto Press, 1996). ↑
15. Carl Klarner, “Competitiveness in State Legislative Elections: 1972-2014,” Ballotpedia, May 6, 2015, https://ballotpedia.org/Competitiveness_in_State_Legislative_Elections:_1972-2014; Ballotpedia, “Annual State Legislative Competitiveness Report: Vol. 14, 2024,” November 24, 2025, https://ballotpedia.org/Annual_State_Legislative_Competitiveness_Report:_Vol._14,_2024. ↑
16. Ballotpedia, “Election results, 2024: Congressional elections decided by 10 percentage points or fewer,” January 25, 2025, https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_Congressional_elections_decided_by_10_percentage_points_or_fewer. ↑
17. Kazuyo Tsuchiya, “National Welfare Rights Organization (1966-1975),” Black Past, January 23, 2007, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/national-welfare-rights-organization-1966-1975/. ↑
18. John Atlas, Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, America’s Most Controversial Antipoverty Community Organizing Group (Vanderbilt University Press, 2010). ↑
19. “ACORN,” Candid, March 1, 2005, Philanthropy News Digest, https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/features/nonprofit-spotlight/acorn. ↑
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21. Brian Resnick, “How to talk someone out of bigotry,” Vox, January 29, 2020, https://www.vox.com/2020/1/29/21065620/broockman-kalla-deep-canvassing; Jennifer Medina, “A New Strategy to Persuade Voters: Listen Carefully. And Don’t Hurry,” New York Times, October 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/us/politics/minneapolis-deep-canvassing.html; Deep Canvass Institute, https://deepcanvass.org. ↑
22. Max Chandler-Mather and Liam Flenady, “The Success of the Australian Greens in Queensland Shows the Power of Organization,” Jacobin, November 11, 2020, https://jacobin.com/2020/11/australian-greens-queensland-organizing; Liam Flenady, “The Brisbane Greens Are Building a Mass Party With Unashamedly Left-Wing Politics,” Jacobin, October 9, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/10/brisbane-australian-greens-organizing-left-wing-strategy-parliament. ↑
23. David Shoebridge, “From Gaza to the gasfields: Why the Greens won’t back down,” Green Agenda, May 9, 2025, https://greenagenda.org.au/2025/05/from-gaza-to-the-gasfields/. ↑
24. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Union Members Summary,” January 28, 2025, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm. ↑
25. Paul D. Romero and Julie M. Whittaker, “A Brief Examination of Union Membership Data,” Congressional Research Service, June 16, 2023, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47596. ↑
26. Chris Bohner, “Now Is the Time for Unions to Go on the Offensive,” Jacobin, June 5, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/06/organized-labor-union-membership-finances-fortress-unionism-spending. ↑
27. Guy Mika, “Key facts, figures, and trends among U.S. labor unions,” Candid, September 13, 2021, https://blog.candid.org/post/key-facts-figures-and-trends-among-u-s-labor-unions/#1. ↑
28. Chris Bohner, “The Labor Movement’s ‘Business Unionism’ Has Transformed Into ‘Finance Unionism,” Jacobin, February 5, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/02/finance-unionism-union-density-decline-american-labor-movement-mass-organizing. ↑
29. Jackson Potter, “The Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators Changed American Teachers Unionism,” Jacobin, June 7, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/06/core-caucus-of-rank-and-file-educators-chicago-teachers-unionism, ↑
30. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, June 4, 2017, https://x.com/AOC/status/926916204433936384. ↑
31. Howie Hawkins, “AOC Boosts Jill Stein by Attacking Her,” Solidarity, September 9, 2024, https://solidarity-us.org/aoc-boosts-jill-stein-by-attacking-her/. ↑
32. Andrea Shalal, “Jill Stein sees ‘no lesser evil’ between Harris, Trump,” Reuters, October 7, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/jill-stein-sees-no-lesser-evil-between-harris-trump-interview-2024-10-07/. ↑
33. Kshama Sawant, “Defeat Kamala Harris! No Votes for Candidates Supporting Genocide,” Workers Strike Back, October 7, 2024, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9JaZVtm2Bc. ↑
34. Ajamu Baraka, October 10, 2024, https://x.com/ajamubaraka/status/1844445812232974808. ↑
35. Ajamu Baraka, “Race, Rights and Repression: The Moral and Political Dilemma of the Capitalist Dictatorship, Black Agenda Report, September 4, 2024, https://www.blackagendareport.com/race-rights-and-repression-moral-and-political-dilemma-capitalist-dictatorship. ↑
36. Nick Cruse, September 12, 2024, https://x.com/SocialistMMA/status/1834377674619261264. ↑
37. Jason Call, February 11, 2025, https://x.com/CallForCongress/status/1889238467047243954. ↑
38. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2000). ↑
39. Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 2003). ↑
40. Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (Verso, 2013). ↑
41. Daniel Scholzman, The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics (Princeton University Press, 2024). ↑
42. Fair Vote, “Ranked Choice Voting,” https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/ranked-choice-voting/. ↑
43. Fair Vote, “Proportional Ranked Choice Voting,” https://fairvote.org/our-reforms/proportional-ranked-choice-voting/. ↑
44. Ballotpedia, “Thirteen states have now banned ranked-choice voting as municipalities decide on whether to adopt it,” March 25, 2025, https://news.ballotpedia.org/2025/03/25/thirteen-states-have-now-banned-ranked-choice-voting-as-municipalities-decide-on-whether-to-adopt-it/. ↑
45. Jesse Docter and Theodore Landsman, “Proportional Representation in New York City: New York City’s Experiment with Proportional Representation and Multi-Party Democracy,” Fair Vote, https://www.fairvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Proportional-Representation-in-NYC.pdf. ↑
46. Bill Ackman, June 25, 2025, https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1938094628034506984. ↑
47. Kevin T. Dugan, Gregory Zuckerman, and Brian Schwartz, “Wall Street Panics Over Prospect of a Socialist Running New York City,” Wall Street Journal, June 25, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/us-news/wall-street-panics-over-prospect-of-a-socialist-running-new-york-city-da7db7e4; Rebecca Picciotto and Peter Grant, “NYC Developers Gripped by Hysteria After Mamdani’s Sudden Rise,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/nyc-real-estate-zohran-mamdani-4797e4c9. ↑
48. Hannah Fierick, “Gov. Hochul rips Zohran Mamdani’s proposed tax on rich,” New York Post, June 18, 2025, https://nypost.com/2025/06/18/us-news/gov-hochul-rips-zohran-mamdanis-tax-on-rich-admits-costs-are-pushing-nyers-to-palm-beach/; Matthew Haag and Benjamin Oreskes, “Free Buses and Billions in New Taxes. Can Mamdani Achieve His Plans?,” New York Times, June 28, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/28/nyregion/mamdani-policies-economy-housing-buses-childcare.html. ↑
49. Ryan Purcell interviews Benjamin Holtzman, “Ford to New York: Drop Dead,” SoundscapeNYC, May 2, 2025, https://open.spotify.com/episode/6xCaGuFkD4tCMjWD7T0dPl. ↑
50. Julia Ornedo, “Trump Warns Dem NYC Mayoral Candidate: Behave or Face Consequences,” Daily Beast, June 29, 2025, https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-warns-dem-nyc-mayoral-candidate-behave-or-face-consequences/. ↑
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52. Katherine Fung, “Is This the Least Popular Politician in America?,” Newsweek, February 25, 2025, https://www.newsweek.com/chicago-mayor-brandon-johnson-approval-rating-2036026. ↑
53. Salon Staff, “I’ve got this thing and it’s f—ing golden,” Salon, December 9, 2008, https://www.salon.com/2008/12/09/blagojevich_complaint_2/. ↑
54. Kevin A. Young, “Brandon Johnson Won in Chicago. Now His Movement Will Have to Beat Capital Strikes,” Jacobin, April 12, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/04/brandon-johnson-mayor-chicago-capital-strikes-movements; Alan Ehrenhalt, “Why Is It So Hard to Run Chicago?,” Governing, June 11, 2024, https://www.governing.com/politics/why-is-it-so-hard-to-run-chicago. ↑
55. Simon Schwartzman, “Trying Times for the Chicago Left: Mayor Brandon Johnson’s First Year,” Against the Current, January/February 2025, https://againstthecurrent.org/atc234/mayor-brandon-johnsons-first-year/; Asha Ransby-Sporn, “Two Years After Electing a Mayor, Chicago’s Left Keeps Contesting for Power,” In These Times, May 15, 2025, https://inthesetimes.com/article/mayor-johnson-two-year-left-power. ↑
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57. Peter Sterne, “Many expect Zohran Mamdani to take the WFP line if he loses to Cuomo. That’s far from a sure thing,” City & State, June 24, 2025, https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2025/06/many-expect-zohran-mamdani-take-wfp-line-if-he-loses-cuomo-s-far-sure-thing/406270/. ↑
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63. Zohran Mamdani, “Interview: ‘From lecturing to listening’: Mamdani explains how he drew votes from Trump supporters in NYC race,” MSNBC The Briefing with Jen Psaki, June 25, 2025, https://www.msnbc.com/the-briefing-with-jen-psaki/watch/-from-lecturing-to-listening-mamdani-explains-how-he-drew-votes-from-trump-supporters-in-nyc-race-242277957507. ↑
64. Susan Kang, “Mamdani Is Showing Dems Don’t Have to Chase Voter Opinion — They Can Shape It,” Truthout, June 21, 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/mamdani-is-showing-dems-dont-have-to-chase-voter-opinion-they-can-shape-it/. ↑
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