Contradictions of the Party Surrogate Model

The Democratic Socialists of America has long struggled with how it should relate to the Democratic Party ballot line. The organization has had success using the “Party Surrogate” strategy, where socialists run insurgent campaigns while using the Democratic Party ballot line. The most recent example of this strategy in action is Zohran’s upset victory in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary. However, in many respects it is a step back from a break with the Democrats and it is already evident that this approach presents some significant challenges. For many in the organization, the debate is settled, but we believe this strategy cannot work forever. Taken to its logical conclusion, the strategy contains a contradiction that will inevitably lead to a break. We believe DSA should continue to use the party surrogate model tactically, but also must prepare for the break now before it is forced upon us.

The Ongoing Ballot-line Debate

With the passage of Principles of Party Building at the 2025 DSA convention, the organization has committed itself to adopting the “Party Surrogate” strategy as our main ballot line orientation. This strategy, first outlined by Seth Ackerman in “A Blueprint for a New Party,” entails DSA continuing to run candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line, but as an absent partner, using the ballot line as a “utility,” but otherwise acting entirely independently from the Democrats.

This commitment is a step back from the dirty break, which for several years before was the stated strategy of many caucuses within DSA. However, it is also an acknowledgement of the truth that the Party Surrogate has been DSA’s actual strategy for several years now, over realignment and the clean or dirty break strategies.

Realignment is a strategy where DSA attempts to take over or “realign” the Democratic Party towards DSA’s politics, and was the default strategy for DSA until the mid 2010s. However, this strategy has had limited success in creating a independent socialist power. This is because control over the Democratic Party is not determined by control over the ballot line or the party committee, but by control over the donors and the civil institutions surrounding the Democrats. 

In Las Vegas and Illinois, DSA has attempted realignment by taking over the party apparatus, successfully gaining control over the party committees, only for the party insiders to withdraw all party funds, loading the committees with debts, and removing all useful data or assets. Those insiders then went on to create a new party committee in the image of the old Democratic Party.

As such, the realignment strategy has largely lost favor within DSA, or those that do still support it don’t tend to advertise that fact.

The clean break strategy, on the other hand, is one where DSA would immediately break with the Democrats and start running candidates on a Democratic Socialists ballot line. Its detractors argue that this strategy places too much emphasis on the ballot line itself, which in and of itself does not guarantee political independence, and comes at the cost of having to immediately deal with the United States’ byzantine ballot access laws, which vary widely state to state and put socialists at a huge disadvantage. 

The dirty break strategy is a combination of the party surrogate and the clean break, wherein DSA will continue to run candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line tactically, but in localities with more advantageous ballot access laws DSA, would experiment with independent or Democratic Socialist ballot lines, pushing for more independence over time. This approach had some popularity within DSA in the early 2020s.

However, in a more recent entry in the debate, Michael Kinnucan argues that building a traditional member-based political party in the US is not just difficult, it is illegal. He goes on to argue that, due to election laws in the US, traditional member based organizations cannot exist in any functional way: they are barred from selecting their candidates for themselves, they cannot control who is allowed to vote in their primaries (in most states), and they can’t discipline their elected officials (e.g. by removing them from the party rolls/government). 

Without control over which candidates run under the party name, and the ability to discipline elected officials, building a party based around a strong shared program is nigh impossible. Instead you are left with more NGO style organizations that act like coalitions of individual elected officials or ones that struggle to maintain a ballot line, like the Green Party or the Working Families Party.  This argument is at the core of the push to enshrine the party surrogate as DSA’s official orientation. If real third parties are illegal, then we must work within the existing party ballot lines, conversation over.

But the conversation is not over! Just as the convention closes this debate, current events have exposed cracks within the party surrogate strategy, cracks that given enough time, will lead to a break. This is because the party surrogate cannot continue indefinitely — as it expands it will eventually either shift in quality to become akin to the realignment strategy or to the dirty break strategy.

In the former case, if DSA were to continue to win races on the Democratic Party ballot line, absent a response from the democrats, we could take over the Democratic Party. As we have seen, the Democrats and their donors will respond to prevent that, leaving us with an inevitable break. In order to prepare for it we must consider how this break might occur and how we will use it.

The Growing Break

The Democrats will go to great lengths to keep socialists out of control of the party and off their ballot line. In the 2020 presidential race we saw unprecedented maneuvering by the Democratic Party to have all establishment candidates fall in line behind Biden to prevent an insurgent Bernie Sanders campaign from securing the Democratic Party nomination.

In 2021, when DSA members successfully contested for and won control over the Nevada Democratic Party, party insiders emptied the party coffers and closed up shop, preferring to start a new party committee rather than see it fall into the hands of socialists. That same year India Walton, running for mayor of Buffalo, won the Democratic primary handily 51-45 against incumbent Byron Brown, only for the Democratic Party to support Brown’s write-in campaign, defeating Walton in the general election.

In February of this year DSA cadre candidate Jesse Brown was expelled from the Democratic caucus within the Indianapolis city council for calling out three of his colleagues for their support of public school funds going to charter schools. More recently we have seen Democratic Party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries refuse to endorse Zohran Mamdani for the New York City mayoral race despite Mamdani winning the Democratic primary. Similar to Nevada, large Democratic donors in the NYC race have decided to back Cuomo’s independent run, choosing to abandon the official party apparatus rather than allow a socialist to use it.

Signaling further ruptures, Omar Fateh won the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsement for the Minneapolis mayoral race at their convention with strong support from the delegates in attendance, only for that endorsement to be rescinded by a committee of party insiders. The party committee alleged “irregularities” despite the election method employed being completely allowed within the party bylaws. 

As DSA continues to grow and gain power, we can expect the Democrats’ attempts to keep socialists off the ballot to become more brazen. They will use every avenue available to them in the law and the courts to hold up DSA candidates’ access to the ballot.

Future Attacks

The Supreme Court case California Democratic Party v. Jones, 2000 held that political parties have a right to determine who can run on their nomination and that restrictions by states on this ability violate their first amendment right to assembly. Using this precedent the Democratic Party could sue to remove DSA candidates from their ballot line, tying up their campaigns in the courts until the election has passed.

Furthermore, they may use their control in the states to hold up the primary certification process. In 2024 several states held Donald Trump off of the ballot citing the January 6 insurrection on the grounds of the 14th Amendment, Section 3 which states:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

While this approach has only so far been used against the far-right, a possible future scenario where support for Palestine or immigrants is classified as giving aid or comfort to enemies of the United States could see socialist candidates denied ballot access.

The ruling class may even amend election laws to keep socialists out. They could modify the rules to allow closed primaries or selection of candidates outside of the primary system. Some of these changes could in fact be to our advantage, allowing us to have more control over a socialist ballot line.

To ignore the pattern of retaliatory tactics already employed by the democrats against, not only socialists, but even progressive liberals, presents a tactical oversight. Instead, we must prepare to use any repressive actions the ruling class takes and turn it against them. When they change the laws to keep us off of the Democrats’ ballot lines, we must use that as an opportunity to control our own ballot line, when they change the laws to be in their favor we must find creative ways around them, and when they conspire to use courts or backroom maneuvering to keep us off of the ballots, we must expose them for the anti-worker, anti-democratic hypocrites that they are!

Preparing for a break

The persistent and escalating attacks by the ruling class are a sign that we must remain dynamic in our approach to the ballot line, we cannot rest on a particular strategy and expect it to continue working all the way to the revolution. We must be ready to fight back against, and to make use of, the repressive measures the Democrats and the ruling class will use to prevent socialists from participating in elections. The best way to be prepared for the eventuality where a break is forced upon us, is to begin experimenting with different ballot orientations now.

Just as the party surrogate was an innovation meant to break through an electoral system that is skewed to keep third parties off the ballot and allowing DSA to have ballot access while still remaining independent, so too may future ballot orientations be found that allow us to move closer to independence – we must continue to experiment and innovate in order to find them.

We can do this through exploratory committees, set up in many chapters around the country to exploit the varying laws between states to try out different strategies. For example, while parties may not be able to control who votes in their primaries in most states, in Colorado and Maine, this is allowed. Other states may have different campaign finance laws or have different primary structures that may be amenable to running on independent or Democratic Socialist ballot lines.

My own state of Washington uses non-partisan top-two primaries for most elections. In Washington we could try running candidates on a “prefers Dem Socialists” ballot line with relative ease. We might find that running on a Democratic Socialist ballot line provides more benefits than we expect. After all, when prominent socialist politicians have referred to themselves as Democratic Socialists in the past, DSA has grown as a result. With the Bernie Bump, AOC, and now Zohran, DSA has benefitted when people start seeing Democratic Socialism associated with popular policies and politicians. We won’t know if a Democratic Socialist ballot line will have the same effect until we try it!

The party surrogate need not be in contradiction with a dirty break, in fact the dirty break allows for using the party surrogate model where an independent ballot line is not tactically feasible, but keeps open the possibility of running independently where it can be to our advantage. We can use the party surrogate strategy to continue to build power while forcing a conflict with the Democrats. Adopting this dynamic approach allows us to implement the dirty break to experiment with new ballot line orientations and new legal structures in jurisdictions where we have greater flexibility, on our way to an independent party.

This experimentation will be vital in our preparations for a break with the Democrats, one that must happen eventually, whether we initiate it or the Democrats do. The dirty break strategy is the one that will allow us to experiment so that we are not caught off guard when that time comes.

The dirty break has been and continues to be the position of Reform and Revolution, and if you agree and are interested in starting an exploratory committee in your chapter to investigate running independent party campaigns, get in contact with us, we’d love to work with you!