On Saturday, November 14th, Chicago DSA will be asked to debate and decide whether our chapter should endorse Mayor Brandon Johnson for his reelection campaign or, if we decline to endorse, whether the chapter will recommend a vote for him. Endorsing or recommending Johnson risks chaining our organization to a sinking ship at the very moment of our party’s nationwide ascendency.

During the 2023 mayoral election, Chicago DSA did not endorse Brandon Johnson in his campaign for mayor. The media tied us together anyway, thinking it would hurt him. While his term has been a mixed bag, we have found common cause and visibly worked together on priorities such as the Protecting Renters Ordinance and the Corporate Head Tax. Our endorsed city councilors have been among his staunchest allies in council. While polling shows Johnson deeply underwater, it is tempting to believe we could save him. We all want Chicago to have our “Zohran Moment”, breaking through and becoming the dominant political force in the city. 

Brandon Johnson Is Not Our Zohran

Unfortunately, for several reasons, Brandon Johnson cannot deliver such a moment nor the power that comes with it. He is not a socialist and refuses to identify as such. He is not interested in joining DSA, let alone co-governing with us. We are building a strong socialist party to transform society, not another progressive organization which endorses the lesser of two evils in every race.

Right now we can credibly present ourselves as outside insurgents against an established political class, sharing our plan to radically change our political and social systems to a public ready and willing to punish the capitalist parties. Johnson’s likelihood of spurring a highly enthusiastic campaign for his reelection is low. His path to victory lies largely in presenting himself as the only tolerable candidate where his main opponents want to hire 1,000 more cops to terrorize our streets or to roll back portions of the landmark SAFE-T Act. The fact that his opponents are terrible ghouls does not make Johnson a powerful candidate for DSA. He currently sits at an abysmal 22% approval rating in Chicago and has been widely criticized for his failure to deliver on large parts of his agenda. The frank reality is he is not likely to win reelection, nor are we likely able to save him. 

It is imperative that we have the patience to wait for the right window and the right candidate. To achieve Chicago’s Zohran moment, we need to do more than endorse a winning mayor. We need an exciting candidate who can win not just broad support but popularity across the working class of Chicago. We need our status as an outside insurgent to remain intact until we are ready to run that campaign. By endorsing Johnson now, we risk forfeiting it on a doomed campaign for a candidate who is neither a member of our party or even an open socialist. 

Advocates of endorsing Johnson might make the argument that it would be a class-struggle election, that we can polarize the working class due to his strong labor connections and progressive politics. The key goal of a class-struggle election is building lasting working class organization and solidarity. Four years ago, this did not happen. United Working Families served as a firm tent pole for aligning organized labor around the campaign. That organization has only gotten weaker, with two of its main labor backers, the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU, now actively feuding with each other. Endorsing Johnson would not build working class independence in a socialist party, but would result in Chicago DSA becoming just another member in the mayor’s fractured political coalition and tie us to the unpopular administration even while DSA itself is more popular than ever. Our essential tasks are to build our class base and independent power for our party. To do that through a mayoral run, we would need to follow the model of NYC and Metro DC in running an open socialist willing to help drive the energy of their campaign into the party. 

A Recommendation Is A Distinction Without A Difference

Similarly, we must vote against any proposal to “recommend” Brandon Johnson in place of endorsing him. The distinction between a recommendation and an endorsement is a purely internal distinction that is generally only understood by DSA members involved in debating the issue. It is almost completely indistinguishable to the broader public. When California DSA issued a recommendation in favor of billionaire Tom Steyer for governor, social media accounts and journalists reported that DSA had endorsed the candidate. Because of this lack of clear distinction, a recommendation amounts to an endorsement in the public eye. It would commit us to nothing to support the campaign or to increase its viability while visibly tying us to it. We should reject “recommendations” generally as little more than a means to circumvent our high threshold for endorsement.

What Is To Be Done?

Thankfully, declining to endorse does not preclude us from visibly stepping into the municipal elections. First, we have already committed to delivering two new socialists to city council this cycle, Kalen Luciano and Raheem Uqdah. Both candidates have made it to the February ballot thanks to our hard work, and these candidates pose real threats to two of the corporate alders who have obstructed the mayor’s agenda.

Second, this school board cycle has served as a proof of concept for a means of intervention in races with no socialist contender: an issue-based DSA Voter Guide. Voter guides are a commonly used tool for working class people navigating ballots with dozens of candidates over many races and little media coverage. There is an appetite among DSA members and the public for these guides, but in Chicago there are few good ones. The most popular on the broader Chicago left is “Girl, I Guess.” The author is not a socialist and often issues recommendations that are difficult to explain beyond merely being the personal preferences of the author. DSA’s Marxist approach positions us to analyze the elections more objectively and better inform voters about where candidates stand on key issues while putting a spotlight on those candidates who have earned our endorsement. This approach has already seen some success with our recent School Board voting guide and could be further developed and iterated on to stake out and elevate our analysis and party without forcing us to endorse candidates who sometimes align with us but do not help build the mass, socialist party.  

Brandon Johnson is the leftmost candidate in this race and clearly better than his opponents. I encourage everyone reading this article to vote for him in the February election. That does not mean we should compromise our principles of party building to endorse or recommend him. We have very little to gain in doing so and quite a lot to lose. We should continue to collaborate with his office when our legislative and organizing agendas align. We should continue to build the ties with West Side organizing which brought us to New Mount Pilgrim Church for the Fireside Chat. Declining to endorse the mayor does not and should not mean burning bridges with him or his allies.

The facism of the Trump administration and the Democratic party’s limp response has put a lot of pressure on leftist organizations to endorse and support anyone willing to provide even token resistance. We cannot cave to that pressure. We must remember that we are building something bigger than a progressive NGO. Building a socialist party capable of transforming society requires us to stick to our principles and to be wary of opportunism. We will have our chance to run a socialist mayor, perhaps as soon as 2031. When we have the opportunity to put forward a committed socialist and proud DSA member for mayor, we will be glad for our patience.

The post Brandon Johnson is not Our Zohran appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Why I think endorsing Brandon Johnson for re-election is an opportunity we should not pass up

When I got to New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church for the “Fireside Chat” with Mayor Johnson, I had a funny realization. I shared with Rev. Dr. Marshall Elijah Hatch, Sr. that my grandma lives about 40 blocks north of him, on the same street as his Church. That street they share, Kildare Avenue, is one she’s lived on for 58 years. There, both in and beyond their local parish of St. Viator’s, was where her and my late grandpa did their community organizing. They trained as organizers with a man quite familiar to Rev. Dr. Hitch, under Ed Chambers, the long-time Executive Director of the Industrial Areas Foundation after Saul Alinsky died. Their toughest campaign was defeating the Crosstown Expressway, a proposed route that, had it been built, would have torn through both their communities and beyond. The struggle to defeat the Crosstown Expressway reminded me of what the stakes are for our movement, and how we should approach coalitions and endorsements to achieve our medium term goals. 

To defeat Mayor Daley’s preferred megaproject, the anti-Crosstown coalition had to win successive gubernatorial elections as well as municipal seats. While stopping a highway takes a lot of time and organizing, most of the goals which we seek to achieve — whether they be in the Workers Deserve More! program or from our own local platform — will take multiple terms and legislative wins at multiple levels of government. For this reason, we should look at the possible endorsement of Mayor Johnson as an opportunity to deepen our relationships with communities that are less represented in our general membership and to broaden our influence across the city. 

Mayor Johnson’s remarks at New Mount Pilgrim talked  about the need to have more “old-fashioned” organizing. We need to be back in Garfield Park. He needs to hold more “fireside chats” with organizers and constituents to make connections. We need to rebuild a multiracial, working-class coalition to tax the rich and deliver for the public good. I think we should endorse Brandon Johnson’s re-election campaign whether he wins or loses. We should use the endorsement as an opportunity to cultivate relationships and expand our membership to more of Chicago.

Our Short and Medium-Term Goals

The primary political tasks of Chicago DSA and its members are1. to fight the bosses, 2. make more socialists, 3. be socialists everywhere, and 4. build a class party. To these ends, we have prioritized the work of our chapter towards contesting for state power, supporting labor organizing, and building the party. Our labor organizing work has developed significantly by expanding on a national partnership with United Electric to create the Chicago branch of the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee (CHIWOC). Chicago continues to lead on DSA’s national priority to organize Amazon, in partnership with the Teamsters. Our members have deepened ties with other unions through strike solidarity work, and new initiatives authored by the National Labor Commission will provide fertile opportunities in the coming years. Our ability to fight the boss grows by the day; now, our task lies in both contesting for state power and building the party. An endorsement of Brandon Johnson would increase our opportunities and resources to advance both of these priorities.

Looking at our local platform, we would need to achieve several legislative victories at multiple levels of government. Some policies would only require individual ordinances at the city council level, which could feasibly be achieved in the short term. Expanding Treatment not Trauma and establishing Fair Elections in Chicago are already active campaigns within our chapter and among our coalition partners. While existing opposition to these changes means they may not be accomplished in the remainder of Brandon Johnson’s current term, it would not be difficult to imagine winning these policies in the near future if he is re-elected. Some of our other platform planks reside squarely within the purview of the city government but would be quite difficult to win even within the next few election cycles. Ending aldermanic prerogative, for instance, has long been a white whale of progressive organizations. Many parts of our platform cannot be enacted by the City Council alone. 

The distributed leadership and responsibilities born from the creation of the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) means that some of our transportation aims will require winning elections and pressuring politicians at different levels and in different municipalities. For example, changing the property tax regime to target land valuation would require winning at the County level. In another example, the State’s Attorney’s office is the proximate impediment right now to prosecuting DHS agents. We’ll have to elect a progressive prosecutor if we have any hope of getting it done. To achieve many of our medium term goals, we will need to go to Springfield so we can tax the rich. Even something like achieving universal health care coverage, which is in both our local and national platform, will require exerting pressure on representatives and senators to ensure the passage of federal legislation. On all of these fronts, and more, we will need to massively expand our reach as an organization. Whether this is accomplished by pressuring sitting politicians or electing new ones, we will need to make more socialists across our city.

What it Will Take to Win These Goals

To truly contest for state power in the city of Chicago, in Cook County, and in Illinois, we will need to build our party. Brandon, as Mayor, can obviously wield some state power, and influence other office holders through the informal parts of his role. Even combined with our endorsed alders, this is still not enough to pass legislation by ourselves. If Chicago DSA remains an insular and geographically confined but highly mobilized cadre, we will not be able to to achieve our aims. Building a mass party for the working class requires us to do a few things. To quote one of our previous passed resolutions from earlier this year, “party-building” is: 

“…outward facing actions and activities that grow Chicago DSA’s membership and supporter-base; expand our reach into working class communities, especially predominantly BIPOC neighborhoods where we currently lack high member density; educate members and the wider public on socialist and Marxist politics; and that develop our party’s ability to participate effectively and constructively in labor, electoral, social movement, and other struggles.”

While party-building also includes cultivating joy and combating loneliness through socials, it should be evident that party-building is equally about constructing and strengthening the core of our organization so that we might better fight the boss and contest for state power. 

In order to contest for state power at the various levels of government and over the many cycles needed to accomplish our platform, we will need to dramatically expand our reach into more working class communities. We will need to build high member density beyond the North Side Blue and Red Line branches. We will need to meet people where they’re at, which means drawing in people unfamiliar with socialist and Marxist politics and educating them so that they can effectively organize in their neighborhoods and their workplaces. To do all of this, we will need to work with a large and diverse set of coalition partners and create long-lasting relationships with institutional and organic leaders. I believe that an effective way to begin this expansion into previously unreached communities is by endorsing Mayor Johnson. 

Towards a Multiracial Working Class Movement

In the “Fireside Chat,” Mayor Johnson talked about building a relationship with Chicago DSA. He talked about having more meetings between him and community stakeholders as well as between us and residents on the west side. It’s no secret that our organization does not demographically look like our city – especially its working class; we can only address this fact with explanations and promises to do better for so long. To create a socialist movement here, we need to organize in, and from within, Black neighborhoods. Endorsing Brandon Johnson’s re-election campaign should be seen as an opportunity to take our party-building to the next step. We should take that first step. 

For one, we should ask Brandon Johnson to introduce us to his allies. Our organization already organizes alongside community-based organizations on ordinances like the PRO. While it’s good to unite around these shared struggles, we could do more to develop our relationships during times when city council legislation is not being considered. Introductions to institutional and organic leaders would also open the door for more tabling opportunities and recruitment. It is not enough to just be in coalition with other organizations, siloed by our distinct membership. We need to grow in numbers to exert greater influence and to shape the direction of movements for social justice. 

While we could expand into the South and West side without endorsing Mayor Johnson, it would be more difficult to do so. Unlike 2023, Mayor Johnson is the only viable candidate running on the left for Mayor. The vast majority of left and progressive organizations in our city will be getting behind Johnson, and a choice to not endorse would be conspicuous. While I, and likely you (the reader), do not believe that our organization is anti-Black, contrary to the claims of erstwhile endorsed candidates and others, that doesn’t mean unacquainted Black Chicagoans will arrive at the same conclusion as us. If we choose to not endorse Brandon Johnson, it will be something that every member has to explain in conversations with potential new members, especially those in the Black community.  I think it would be difficult to explicate the ‘capacity issues’ and the unique implications of our endorsement process to someone who just wants to know which side we’re on.  In order to organize in the varied neighborhoods of our city, we need to have the trust of the diverse residents of those neighborhoods.

Some may caution against endorsing Mayor Johnson because of his less than stellar chances of getting re-elected. It’s true that he faces a difficult path ahead. Our endorsement may not make the difference in February, or in April. I believe it is wrong, though, to condition our endorsement on the prospect of winning an election, and should look more broadly to how endorsements can help us build a movement. If it turns out that Brandon only wants to get another check-mark graphic to add to his campaign website and some extra unpaid labor, then I would be against endorsing him. I, however, do not believe this is the case. Maybe he doesn’t yet have loyalty to our group, but I think his career shows a commitment to the same vision which guides our members: that the working class should be the author of its own destiny, in this city and across the world. 

Conclusion

Chicago’s problems have existed since before Lori or Rahm. The scourge of neoliberalism began decades prior, and periodic red scares have arisen over the past century. It would be foolhardy to think (and doubtful many in this organization do) that problems decades in the making will take one or two election cycles to fix. It took my grandparents multiple election cycles to beat an expressway. Surely, then, the struggle for a better world will be a lifelong struggle. 

In some ways it is terrifying to think that we must commit ourselves to this fight for the rest of our lives. In other ways I think it can be quite freeing. Our defeats will be temporary because our victories will eventually come. Hope is a passion for the possible. By this same logic, a failure to endorse here is just a momentary setback in the long conflict. However I urge you to see endorsing Brandon Johnson as a chance to take our organizing goals to another level, and to bring our organization to places it has scarcely yet known. Win or lose, an endorsement for Brandon Johnson means a commitment to building the party we need so that we can fight the boss, wrest state power from our class enemies, and get the world that workers deserve. 

The post Endorsing in an Election; Committing to a Coalition appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Wednesday, November 11, 2026

Join DSA Ventura County’s Labor Working Group on zoom to discuss recent labor struggles in our communities, from Starbucks Workers United’s indefinite strike, to the new contract our County employees won by threatening to strike, to the movement for an arms embargo by Labor for Palestine, and the calls for a general strike by May Day 2028. Please, bring other ideas, campaigns, and your own workplace experiences. An agenda will be posted on slack soon. You will receive the zoom link shortly after completing RSVP.

Sunday – November 22 at 2 PM PDT

Join the DSA Ventura County book club for discussions about selected readings. If you love history, the written word, or the world around you, then you belong here!

This will be a friendly, inclusive event open to all, regardless of prior experiences or familiarity with the topic.

A post-election victory call showcased newly elected DSA endorsees from all over the country. They agreed on one thing: The work is just getting started. 

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The post Metro DC DSA Condemns Councilmember Christina Henderson’s Attempted Power Grab and Disregard for DC Home Rule appeared first on Metro DC DSA.