Forget about 2024, start organizing for 2028

The 2024 Presidential election looks like it will be a reprise of 2020, in spite of Joe Biden’s promise to be a one-term president and Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles. If it turns out that Trump runs on the GOP ticket from prison, or Biden is replaced with a younger version of himself, it won’t much change either party’s strategies. None of the challengers on either side represents the working class and they’re all just awful. Due to many factors, including the pandemic, there isn’t an obvious left-of-center candidate, but that’s fine. The worst thing that the American working class can do right now is get emotionally or financially invested in the 2024 presidential election. It is much more important that workers continue organizing and striking to increase their material power. As long as workers continue making progress in their working and living conditions, it doesn’t matter if we ever have a president who perfectly represents our values, because results are always more important than representation. But if workers want to give the presidency another shot someday, there are lessons to be learned from the last election, and the solutions will help us in many areas of our lives.

The next left-of-center candidate probably won’t have anywhere near the experience and gravitas of Bernie Sanders, which is part of why electoral politics seems so hopeless right now. In fact, the next left-of-center candidate, even a relative nobody, could do much better than Sanders by paying attention to securing the material requisites to run a race and the material gains of organizing and voting, in other words, seizing the means of enfranchisement. In 2020, Bernie Sanders had name recognition, a stellar resume, momentum from 2016, non-profit organizations, goodwill among energetic and passionate people, battalions of small-dollar donors, and with all that the best his campaign could do was one resounding victory in Nevada and clinching his home state of Vermont. The rest of the gains were simply not good enough to challenge the powers that be. One reason Nevada did so well was because caucus voters were already organized by their unions, and in many cases, workers voted together. The voters knew each other and had organized together for reasons other than electoral politics. As I explain below, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign was, for the most part, organized from the top down instead of ground up, so the campaign couldn’t fight for its legitimacy or nimbly respond to changes.

There were a lot of frustrations about the 2020 primaries — an overcrowded field, vitriolic debates, bad faith attacks from the media against anyone challenging the status quo, the technological failures at the Iowa caucus, and of course the pandemic shutting down canvassing and live events and delaying many state primaries. For anyone who followed the primaries closely, one of the most frustrating aspects of the 2020 primaries was how it all seemed to be over before it started, in spite of the election lasting almost two years. A lot of post-election analysis in leftwing and liberal media has focused on ideology and the platform, the other Democratic candidates’ maneuverings, and DNC “rigging.” The DNC is a private company that is not obligated to honor election results and, legally, can pick a Democratic candidate in a “smoke-filled room.” But they do go to a lot of trouble to hold these elections that bring out millions of participants. These elections are very real, and the results do matter. But what rigging is, where it happens, and by whom is much more complicated than the notorious and sweeping “phone call from the big boss.” Rigging also doesn’t explain why there were voters in early states, who had voted for Sanders in 2016, and yet didn’t even know he was running again in 2020! There’s rigging and there’s letting yourself be rigged. Let’s look at the early states in more detail.

The Caucuses

A caucus is a group of voters all supporting the same candidate; a caucus is also a precinct, as in a geographically assembled collection of caucuses for different candidates; a caucus is also the act of voting in a caucus, or the event in general. All definitions are used all the time, but it doesn’t get terribly confusing in context. Neither are the caucus rules: voters enter the premises and sit near their fellow caucus members, then they choose their top choice candidate for the first vote. Qualification is set by a simple algebra equation. (A caucus needs 15% of ballots to qualify, delegates are awarded based on how many units of 15% they get.) The caucuses that qualify can receive votes in the second vote. Caucuses that do not qualify cannot receive votes, and so those people can either leave/abstain, or join one of the qualifying caucuses and change their selection for the second vote. The second vote is counted and then delegates are awarded to the top candidates according to the algebra equation. The only thing I’m still unclear about is whether two losing caucuses can join together to qualify before the first vote is official, effectively letting people change their first vote. My gut says no, but a lot of Precinct Captains like me were unclear on that rule and we witnessed some real borderline cases that we thought were illegal and then were later told by the campaign organizers that it’s very common (though that still doesn’t mean it’s legal).

Caucuses by their nature are exclusive and ableist, ambiguous and undemocratic, but as long as they exist, workers must engage with them on a deep level, learn their secrets, and master the technique. Understanding how to succeed in a caucus is beneficial for primary state organizing, as well as any other type of organizing. The mistakes I witnessed could have been fixed by training and promoting locals instead of traveling volunteers, training everyone much earlier, and carrying out in-person dress rehearsals to establish muscle memory for the process. Like any type of election, the two keys to success are voter turnout and maintaining a chain of custody of the ballots. The Sanders campaign came up short in both areas because they left a lot of important organizing until the very last minute or not at all, and they were assigning the most important caucus roles to out of state volunteers the night before and day of the Iowa caucus. Nevada does not allow out of state volunteers to be Precinct Captains, let alone be present inside the caucus, which could be a key to Sanders’ success in Nevada.

The problems in Iowa and Nevada were indicative of a top-down and automated approach to organizing, rather than real grassroots:

- In Iowa, organizers made the caucus training video available to volunteers only in the last week before the caucuses. It contained factual errors or ambiguities about the policy of losing caucuses being able to join qualifying caucuses between the first and second votes. At least half of the training video was about canvassing the voters as they streamed into the school or convention center, which means that the creators of the video had probably never been to a caucus themselves. There was also very little information about procedures and rules for the second count. They made it sound like a neutral party was calmly collecting and counting the ballots, when in fact that’s all done in-caucus for the first vote. The video hosts seemed to run out of steam by that point in the explanation. The focus was overwhelmingly on how great our ideology is, not on technical issues like maintaining the chain of custody of ballots and fair counting.

- Davenport, Iowa organizers did not put enough effort into recruiting locals for the key roles in the caucuses and there was no in-person training. Instead, they favored last-minute out of state volunteers and inexperienced DSA members bused in from Chicago to be Precinct Captains, Deputies, Ambassadors, and other roles. The DSA members received a different training, a pamphlet that they read on the bus on the way to Iowa, and some of the information about key rules was different from the campaign’s training video. In spite of the Sanders campaign having the most volunteers in Iowa of any campaign leading up to the caucus, the caucuses themselves were understaffed, while many of the long-term organizers remained at their offices simply to order carry out and watch the results come in. Because our caucuses were less cohesive, we couldn’t maintain a chain of custody of the ballots.

- In Nevada, based on what the Precinct Captains told me over the phone on the Precinct Captain Help Hotline, the training was as inadequate as it was in Iowa. Our PCs were not prepared for how brazen, belligerent, and confrontational PCs from other caucuses could be, and they did not have enough support staff to protect them or the ballots. Organizers failed to distribute paraphernalia, decorations, and tee shirts in time, so our caucuses were not as recognizable to voters as other, more lavish caucuses. The Sanders command center on the day of the caucus was housed in a room that was too small for all the different functions and departments, not to mention having 30 people talking on the phone all at once. Quite often, I was not able to help the PCs with their problems because neither of us could hear each other over the din. Operators were given incorrect information about important policies, like losing caucuses joining qualifying caucuses, which spread panic among the PCs who were calling for help.

- In both states, organizers neglected the most vulnerable voters who were most likely to be disenfranchised by their work schedule, family duties, disability, or lack of transportation. It appeared that the organizers had focused on wealthier neighborhoods first, even though those voters are more likely to be free to caucus on a Monday night or a Saturday morning and have the free time to watch debates, read the news, and keep informed. In Davenport, Iowa, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Denver, Colorado, the poorest neighborhoods were the last to be canvassed.

Proposed solutions:

1. Study the state caucus official rules and relay them verbatim to a training manual and video that can be accessed on the campaign website as soon as the site goes live, even if that’s a year before the caucus. Train early and often, hosting in-person dress rehearsals for caucus procedures to establish muscle memory and solidarity.

2. Become acquainted with organizers from other campaigns. Assess their numbers and their potential for joining together on the second vote.

3. Focus on poor neighborhoods from the beginning and establish which voters need help getting to the caucuses or polls. Organize mutual aid groups to help people get substitutes at work or a babysitter.

4. Pay attention to seemingly small but crucial details, like venues for headquarters, noise levels for operators, distributing paraphernalia ahead of time, telephone trees for last-minute information and designating a long list of alternates in case of illness or emergency.

If you’ve only ever voted in a primary state, nothing can prepare you for how much you will need to physically protect your caucus ballots (and your people) until the final tally is made official. The only way to do this is for the Precinct Captain, Ambassadors, Deputies, Observers, and other volunteers, and their alternates, to know each other personally, and know by sight most of the constituents in their caucus. Instead of four helpers for a caucus of seventy Bernie Sanders voters, the ratio of helpers should be closer to one helper for every five voters. You should aim for as many local voters as possible to be trained and feel empowered and deputized to step in to help at any point.

Picture a giant convention center full of thousands of people with “rooms” separated only by accordion walls. After the Precinct Chair (who might be from any caucus) draws out the opening performative procedures as long as possible until people are yawning and rearing to go home, the first vote, consolidation, and second vote all take place in a matter of minutes. A caucus at a convention center is anything if not porous. Anyone can walk past a caucus on their way to another one, there is no restriction of movement. Anyone can walk in, heckle a Precinct Captain during their speech, and vanish a minute later. Most people would reasonably assume that a neutral body would collect and tally all the ballots, but no! They’re tallied by their own people in each caucus. Scouts hover around each caucus to see if they’ll qualify and notify other caucuses to join together. This is key: the first vote is very fluid and only the second count is done by the Precinct Chair. The reason I keep coming back to understanding the rules and protecting the ballots is that I was trained wrong, and so when I saw the disqualified caucuses joining together, I followed my training and called the PC Help Hotline in Des Moines to report the violation, only to be put on hold and then told “they do be joining together like that.”

I missed a critical several minutes in the process because they said, “call us when something goes wrong,” only to be told there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. I only know what scouts told me was happening, so for all I know, I may have been told to panic about nothing. Even worse was the second vote counting process. The Precinct Chair counted all the ballots and put them in a single pile. Someone said the numbers were off by a couple ballots, so she recounted and got yet another number. She decided to separate the caucus stacks and let each caucus recount their own ballots. But then the number was again different by a few ballots. The stacks had to be re-separated and recounted again. Combine the stacks, separate the stacks. Combine the stacks, separate the stacks. I’m sure it’s fine.

Sanders organizers in the training video and at the Davenport headquarters kept emphasizing ideology and the superior platform, but by the time you’re at the caucus itself, the missionary work is over. There was a little last-minute recruiting going on but not based on platform points — no, at that stage it’s tribal, it’s: “Don’t I know you from church?” and “Why, I haven’t seen you since the last PTA meeting!” There was no plan for protecting the material gains of the voting process. After seven months in Iowa, they had no game plan for maintaining the chain of custody of ballots, hadn’t trained a single voter in the caucus where I was Precinct Captain, and only sent one volunteer (me) from the actual campaign. (I went to Iowa thinking I’d be in a support position.) Before the first vote in my caucus, Sanders supporters made up the largest caucus in the caucus, in other words the largest contingent out of roughly 250 people. But after the second vote, Sanders came in third. Yes, third! This was because the Sanders organizers did not contact organizers from other campaigns to negotiate joining together to stay in the lead. They could have found common ground with Biden, Yang, Williamson, Steyer, Gabbard and other voters, but the edgelord martyr “everyone hates us” attitude prevented organizers from reaching across the aisle. Sanders picked up a couple votes in the second round, but Buttigieg and Warren picked up many dozens. By leaving chips on the table, the Sanders campaign made it easier for technical glitches and Pete Buttigieg “shocking the world” to muddy the waters about the results. The Iowa victory didn’t have to be so vague and contested.

Some of the Sanders organizers felt most comfortable dealing with people exactly like them, so they mainly dealt with other men in their 20s and 30s. The organizers didn’t try to deputize whole households. All adults and teenagers in a household should be trained to volunteer at the caucuses, not just the 20-year-old guy who expressed interest in volunteering but was shy and too busy with school. (It turned out his whole family came out to vote for Bernie and they all could have been trained!) The local voter I replaced as Precinct Captain because he wasn’t given time to train became a Deputy on caucus night, but since he came with everyone else, instead of an hour early, we didn’t have time to make a game plan or review the rules. It turns out his wife was also an avid Sanders supporter, but the campaign never contacted her. I made her an Ambassador and she turned out to be one of the most instrumental volunteers that whole night, and she later exclaimed that she’d had the most fun in her life. Imagine how many more dynamos there are like her, who get ignored by automated, impersonal, or exclusionary campaign strategies.

In Davenport, Iowa, it was painfully obvious that all the other caucuses for other candidates were much more cohesive and organized. They clearly had better training and knew the laws, the captains and other roles were filled by experienced locals, and out-of-towners were mere Observers. No doubt, they crunched the numbers beforehand to plan which losing caucuses would join which qualifying caucuses between the first and second votes in order to neutralize the Sanders caucus. Everyone else came prepared for battle and the Sanders campaign prepared us for church.

Overreliance on discourse

Speaking of preaching, the two keys to election victory are voter turnout and chain of custody of ballots. There is a time and a place to talk to voters about the platform, just not when you’re supposed to be counting ballots. In the months leading up to the caucus or primary, much more time needs to be allotted to canvassing, training, and organizing poorer neighborhoods than rich neighborhoods. More times than I could count, I canvassed people in Iowa, Nevada, and Colorado, who hadn’t heard from any campaign until after early voting had ended. If they were free on caucus or primary day, or they could get off work, we convinced them to vote. We didn’t convince them to vote for Sanders, we convinced them to go vote because of Sanders. Unfortunately, so many of them had been scheduled to work during the caucus or primary and we didn’t reach them in time to vote early, so they couldn’t vote at all. What a waste of your volunteers’ free labor! The campaign neglected the most vulnerable voters who make up Sanders’ true ride-or-die base.

Fixing this broken country is not easy. It requires reknitting the fabric of society and battling crushing inertia. A just-in-time approach to organizing with lots of social media hype but little material organizing on the ground will not deliver results. Sanders strategists and organizers relied too heavily on Leftist™ online debate culture to shape their own social media rhetoric and rally speeches, as well as their training and recruiting strategies. It also created a sloppy image. High up campaign staff, strategists, and surrogates got into bratty and vulgar spats with journalists and celebrities online, feeding into the impetuous “Bernie Bro” stereotype. The Bern App failed to channel volunteers’ energy into productive organizing, and it favored first-time volunteers. The born-again confessional “Bernie Stories” turned out to gatekeep more than they inspired. There were way too many rallies since the media products generated are mostly identical, and it wore down Sanders’ stamina, triggering his heart attack. The campaign was geared toward creating fun experiences for a very specific demographic of young, very online, able-bodied, photogenic, political newbie people who will share selfies and soundbites on social media. Those people can be very influential in their milieu, but less than a fifth of Americans are on social media. Even fewer people get their political opinions from 20-somethings. The Sanders campaign did not try to reach older voters where they are — on TV, not their phones.

There were several rhetorical and strategic blunders that could have been avoided:

- The Sanders campaign relied too heavily on Bernie’s debate performances to translate to voter turnout. The 2019 and 2020 primary debates were especially dyspeptic; many voters I canvassed told me they were too antagonistic and unpleasant to bother watching. In 2019, when people were eager to start volunteering, usually all you could find were debate watch parties, which are only fun for certain kinds of people (nerds with lots of free time). Debate watching parties don’t increase voter turnout because everyone present is already a strong supporter and they don’t protect people’s right to vote, only their right to be entertained. Out of context soundbites from debates can be shared on social media but they have limited use as talking points for canvassing, phonebanking, or texting. The Sanders campaign made the fatal liberal error, known as The West Wing Syndrome, of believing that Bernie’s superior debate performances and logical answers have anything to do with material gains and power structures, as if people act or vote against the greater good merely because they are ill-informed. The Sanders campaign trusted the mainstream media to cover the debates fairly, or at all, and failed to react when it became clear that the media could in fact ignore Sanders for as long as it wanted (when they weren’t downright hostile to him). Bernie doing well at debates was certainly good for campaign finances, since it was a chance to fundraise, but those funds didn’t translate into votes, rights, or power because they were used on entertainment for the converted (rock concerts) and the eye-wateringly high salaries for the concert planners.

- The Bern App was great in theory, but it turned out to be tedious, impersonal, and counter-intuitive. On the side that said “Volunteer” were just instructions for creating one’s own confessional “Bernie Story.” If you were trying to volunteer you had to click on the other side for “Events,” where everything was dumped in a pile and difficult to navigate. It had everything from massive rallies, to debate watch parties in bars or homes, to texting voters. The result was that for all of 2019, while campaign staff and surrogates kept telling Sanders supporters to “get off Twitter” and go volunteer, all there was to do was polititainment, or recording your Bernie Story and trying to go viral, or sitting on your couch and texting voters for money. None of that should be considered “grassroots organizing,” or even “organizing.” Once the primaries started in 2020, there were in-person canvassing shifts, but the information was not presented in a navigable way and shifts were listed only a few weeks before each state’s primary. It was impossible to find basic information like each state’s headquarters. Many entries were mislabeled.

- As if the confessional “Bernie Stories” weren’t problematic enough for being so impertinent and baptismal, organizers leaned on that concept as a training tool. We were supposed to tell our Bernie Story at volunteer orientation, recounting our lives’ lowest points to groups of total strangers, and then let that confession inform how we canvass voters, as if we’re former drug addicts going door-to-door selling magazine subscriptions. The concept was so ingrained in volunteers as the only way to grasp the platform and people’s commitment to it, that volunteers greeted each other by asking “What’s your Bernie Story?” which, in my opinion, is rather rude. The idea that Bernie supporters all have recent and pre-approved radicalizing stories that we should feel comfortable sharing with strangers whenever they ask ended up erasing the contributions of a lot of committed leftists from different backgrounds and ages. Everything was backwards. The message when you canvass is supposed to be “How can we help you?” not “I just told you this bad thing that happened to me, why aren’t you helping me?”

- The rhetorical strategy for reaching older voters was to encourage young people to “talk to their conservative uncles at Thanksgiving,” in reference to the Saturday Night Live “Drunk Uncle” bit. If I had a dime for every time Sanders campaign staff and surrogates said or tweeted some version of that, why, I could launch my own presidential campaign! It would have been fairly easy to produce TV commercials for primetime cable news warning older voters that Social Security is under attack and drug prices are too damn high. Why didn’t they make more hay of the FDR comparison until long after the pandemic started? Young voters often get discouraged by the weight of the world and the apparent insignificance of their one vote, so they are easier to dissuade than older voters. Like with the “Bernie Stories,” the philosophy was all backwards: if you tell young people to convince their conservative elders to vote leftist, you run the risk of losing both votes, because the youth got discouraged when their elders, on whom they might depend for material needs, ridiculed their idealism. On the other hand, if you target older voters with TV ads speaking directly to their needs, then the youth will be pleasantly surprised when they find out they have common ground, and the youth will be much more likely to make it to the polls.

- A unifying trait of Democratic primary voters was the desire to beat President Trump. Sanders strategists placed too much emphasis on individual and sometimes overly optimistic platform points, and they failed to capitalize on anti-Trump hatred by selling Bernie as the unity candidate. Just as strategists and organizers were unwilling to code switch to reach older voters, they weren’t flexible enough to have different rhetorical strategies for the primaries and the general election, when there are different audiences.

Like the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, the Culture War is unwinnable. The Sanders campaign was trying to change people’s identities and get their votes. But the campaign’s job is to get the votes, period, and otherwise leave people and their souls alone. Rather than seizing the means of enfranchisement by physically connecting and protecting people and ballots, the Sanders campaign was an evangelizing reverie, blessing souls who are already screwed over in this life.

The covid pandemic makes it harder to run an energetic progressive campaign, but you don’t really need all that hoopla. For most voters, a rock concert on a weeknight in a city an hour away for a candidate you already support isn’t practical and doesn’t do anything to protect the right to vote. (It’s also a superspreader event.) A better use of time and funds would be to launch generic, non-denominational Stacey Abrams-style registration drives in 2024, 2026, and 2028. Not only will you increase voter turnout you will also be able to amass your own statistics about every district. I’ve texted for a local candidate before, in 2018, and the purchased voter list seemed to be padded with click farming bots. Many of the replies to text messages were identical to each other, irrelevant to the local election, and personally insulting to the volunteer, even though the candidate was the Democratic nominee and front runner in a solid blue county, in other words, not controversial. It seems like it would be so much more effective to seed your own spreadsheets with data you collected, then you’re sure to reach a real person when you call or text.

Year-round organizing

Climate change is in full swing — don’t forget the ongoing covid pandemic is climate change, too — and we must secure our bodily protection. Experts on public health and disaster preparedness say that the same kind of skills and networks that are needed to organize town fairs and festivals are used in preparing for disasters. They mean that towns that organize regular festivals can organize a more effective response to a disaster, like a hurricane or wildfire, than towns that don’t. It also means that the more organized towns require less help from federal agencies, especially early on. Applying that to electoral politics, organizing should be seen as fostering local long-term mutual aid and community solidarity, and requiring as little national level organizing as possible. The more grassroots the campaign is, the better it can respond to the pandemic or other disasters that might interrupt the voting process.

The way to win is to treat the election like any logistical problem in a country that doesn’t invest in social or physical infrastructure, lets corruption run rampant, and strangles its people in red tape. (Imagine you’re building a road through a mountain pass in an unstable third world country…) All of the above proposed solutions for caucuses and canvassing take a lot of work and would be extremely time-consuming for any single campaign to undertake, especially if the candidate has a small war chest. That’s why you, the public, are going to organize your workspace and your living space before an election is even on the horizon. You’re going to organize your spaces for any contingency, be it wildfire, hurricane, disease, recession, eviction, mass shooting, mass hunger, mass layoffs, electoral politics, library closure, or alien attack. Rest assured it sounds more daunting than it is. You’ll make a phone tree of everyone in your cul-de-sac or apartment floor, share info on making “go bags,” create stashes of PPE and other supplies, print copies of designated rendezvous points and local basements and sturdy structures, directions for evacuations, pet sitting info. You can take a CPR class together at the YMCA or invite the fire department to a block party info session. Get creative but keep it simple for everyone to understand. Be sure to print info in every language found in your area.

Next, you’re going to use those phone trees and networks to organize fun activities, like outdoor movie screenings, festivals, sporting tournaments, chess or cooking competitions, swap meets, gardening expos, and science & engineering fairs and workshops. It doesn’t matter how small an area you’re serving, what matters is that you get started. And you’re not going to talk about politics, you’re just going to be. If there is an emergency in the community, like a flood, then help people out, and don’t talk about politics, just be helpful. Then when an election comes along, you’re still not going to talk about politics, because you’ll be too busy with registration drives and checking work schedules, babysitting needs, and bus routes, and doing everything necessary to ensure people’s access to the caucus or polls. You’re doing politics, not talking about it. You’re already going to know a lot of that information because when you organized your workspace and living space you made a census without realizing it. You know who is in your spaces, who has small children, who is disabled, elderly, who has mechanical skills, medical skills, who has vehicles, who speaks what languages, and also who wants to be left alone. You’re organizing your spaces so that people don’t slip through the cracks, that’s all, you don’t need to save their souls.

The current style of Democratic organizing lets so many voters slip through the cracks. Canvassing neighborhoods during the day while people are at work, texting voters on pre-packaged phone number lists that are out of date and very likely padded with fake numbers, making cold calls and phonebanking at the last minute from obsolete registration lists — all these activities burn up man hours and burn out volunteers while delivering marginal gains. The above proposed solutions for caucuses, primaries, canvassing, and advertising would benefit any national or local organization or campaign. It’s what Our Revolution should have been doing since 2016. The Berniecrat wave of 2018 still followed a top-down automated approach because candidates would nominate themselves and get an endorsement from Our Revolution (and/or DSA, Working Families Party, Green Party, etc.), and then the voters would “stan” them by voting, donating, volunteering, and defending them on social media — as individual, atomized voters. It should be clear by now that the “Blue Wave” model has limited potential.

This is why you, my dear comrades, are going to jump the gun. All that advice I just gave about national organizations will be moot when you start organizing yourselves locally. We may never know why, in Iowa, the Sanders 2020 campaign cut ties with experienced local delegates and organizers from 2016, in favor of recruiting much younger people from out of town who “read theory.” Or why the most important moment, the caucus itself, was left to night-before planning and the least experienced or connected volunteers. Or why long-term organizers hid out at the office. Or why the campaign made so few TV commercials, in spite of raising a quarter of a billion dollars. We do know that if locals were better organized for all-purpose year-round action then it could have been the locals telling the Sanders campaign what to do, and not the other way around.

Bernie’s most indelible legacy has been in the labor movement, not electoral politics. The country hasn’t seen this much labor activity in almost a century! The labor movement is where we have momentum and urgency. Climate activism, pandemic preparedness, and democratic representation can only come from out of the labor movement, not elections, demonstrations, or the cyber-glamour-space. Of course, this labor activity can’t all be credited to Sanders alone, the managerial class has responded to the pandemic and climate change with barbaric policies and gross callousness, in some cases returning to 19th century practices, like employing children in slaughterhouses. It was inevitable that Americans would wake up to the fact that we are all workers, and that is the only political identity relevant to our quality of life. A lot of excellent analysis in recent years has elaborated on the fact that leftist organizations like DSA spend too much time debating amongst themselves about what their ideal platform and tenets would be, if they were in charge of the world, and that they don’t spend enough time taking charge of even their own precincts and parishes. There is this eternal push-pull between wanting to expand the ranks of socialists while also needing to establish the exact balance of ideological purity and laxity. That is the curse of running an organization based on superficial identities. The fact that two people are from Phoenix, AZ, where touching the sidewalk in summer can land you in the hospital burn unit, is wholly more relevant to their identities and material conditions than what books they read recreationally or how they vote. If you were creating a list of empty foreclosed homes in your neighborhood to help local homeless people squat with neighborhood approval and protection, how the heck would Lenin even come up? The man’s been dead 100 years! He’d burst into flames just hearing about the heat in Phoenix!

The issue with leftist organizations talking about expanding their ranks is that they never say how many people they need in order to start changing things. It’s always “we need more socialists, that’s why we’re always losing.” But there’s never a number goal. How many will it take? Surely they have a number in mind. The truth is, DSA or Our Revolution could have gazillions of members and still not make an impact on electoral politics because their members don’t ever have to see each other outside club meetings. Having to run into people at work or in the neighborhood is a categorical imperative to organizing. Say you’re organizing for a caucus, and you want to liaise with organizers from other campaigns so you can join together on the second vote, remember that strategy? How are you going to negotiate in a few breathless minutes on the night of the caucus, when you’re from out of state and not even voting? How are you going to do that, even if you’ve been organizing in town for a few weeks or months? If you’re leaving once the election is over, you have nothing to offer other caucuses. If you’re a local, however, you have collateral: “Your people join us on the second vote, and next month we’ll support you when you complain to the town council about the dilapidated culverts.”

It’s hard to spend very long in leftist spheres without coming back to ecclesiastical comparisons. For one thing, the emphasis is often on reaching new people, neophytes, because older leftists have too much baggage. Youthful rage, embarrassment, and resentment are seen as more powerful and useful than experience and skills. Saying that we need to expand the ranks of socialists before we can be effective reinforces the meek and sectarian notions that “no one likes us,” “the establishment hates us,” “it’s normal, even expected for socialists to lose,” “in fact, losing is the only way to prove we are the good guys.” Despite all the tough talk about bucking the corrupt system, these leftist organizations ultimately place a lot of faith in voting systems, not even acknowledging that voting itself would become more difficult after four years of Trump. The emphasis is much more on proselytizing and protesting than simply ensuring that your people are Election Judges. You think rigging is only done by household-name famous politicos regally moving pawns, and not by your neighbor acting of their own free will? Bless your heart. Seeing individual nurses destroy hundreds of vaccine doses in the name of anti-vax conspiracy theories should shine some light on how people operate when they are emboldened to act, and they have access to the goods.

Bernie Sanders is an avowed socialist and he’s been in the Senate since before a lot of you were born, representing a conservative rural state, and he’s still out there helping us and trying to save the world. I guarantee you, he didn’t win his first race for Mayor of Burlington, or any of his House or Senate runs, by telling his constituents that everyone hates them. We didn’t even hear that rhetoric in his 2016 presidential run, which was much more fact-based. Voters, even conservative ones, are pretty friendly and open to new ideas. (Anecdotally, the only doors slammed in my face were by Elizabeth Warren voters.) Out in the real world, people are pretty receptive to left-of-center, “old school Democrat” social safety-net liberalism. In fact, they’re so open to it that they see it in candidates who don’t even promise those policies! That’s how much they want to see that change. Speaking from experience there are scads of voters out there who would hold their nose and vote for a “socialist” if they believed that the candidate had a legitimate plan to win, not just a righteous wish list for stirring up emotions. Always remember that a reluctant, nose-pinching vote counts just as much as an ardent one.

This is why locals need to organize themselves. When you speak to people in person, you know you are both affected by a hurricane or belching natural gas mines or a corrupt politician. And the fact that you’re talking to each other establishes the fact that Things Are Bad Enough Already. When you come to someone’s door and ask for their vote, they won’t have to ask if your candidate has a plan to *actually* win, because they’ll know you from the post-flood food drive and they’ll know that you’re capable of carrying out a plan. You might not even need to rattle off a blizzard of talking points because they’ll be interested enough to do their own research because they know you’re a serious person. And maybe they have a candidate they already like, but they like you, so they’ll agree that if their candidate doesn’t qualify they’ll join you on the second vote. The 2020 primaries would have gone very differently if Our Revolution had been doing this kind of grassroots organizing since 2016, instead of holding potluck dinners and over-the-phone pep rallies with only the keenest members. Then again, perhaps it’s just not possible for a national organization to initiate real grassroots organizing.

Electoral politics is an off shoot of the labor movement. It’s about sending one of your people to grease the wheels for you, to make your job of organizing yourselves a bit easier. There’s a very limited amount a single person can do to change the world, even if they’re in a position of authority. A friendly politician can’t initiate that much action, but they can choose to not get in the way of your progress. That is the First Do No Harm of politics. It’s a lot easier to get your person in that position of authority if your workspace and living space are already organized for other continencies, both bad, like fires, and good, like festivals (but not Fyre Fest). If we don’t organize ourselves before elections, and only wait until a candidate appears out of the woodwork begging for donations and fearmongering about the latest bogeyman, then every election will be a Fyre Fest: the promise of Dionysian reverie and marginal material gains that vanish into thin air as soon as the party is over.

The biggest worldwide pandemic in a century should have been a slam dunk for the universal healthcare candidate. By the time the country was shutting down, most states still hadn’t voted, so there was still time to edge out Biden for the nomination. A grassroots campaign that had been organized on the ground for years prior could have turned tragedy into a revolutionary moment. But when canvassing in most states lasts only a couple weeks before the primary, and then it gets shut down completely by the pandemic before it even starts, that means that in a lot of post-Super Tuesday states, there was never an on-the-ground presence. Maybe a few stops on the rally tour, volunteers texting for donations, and some debate watch parties, but no in-person organizing. Meanwhile, bodies were being stored in refrigerator trucks acting as surplus morgues and the President was advising people to inject bleach into their veins. Times were bleak. Can you really blame Democratic primary voters for just wanting to get rid of Trump before he makes the pandemic any worse? How could people have known that President Biden would “stop thinking about it” once there was a vaccine?