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How Structured Organizing Can Help Win Elections

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By: Henry de Groot

Henry De Groot breaks down how election campaigns can learn from organizing methods refined in the labor movement

Grassroots Campaigns Need More Than Mobilizing

Campaigns to unionize a workplace and campaigns to win public office may both involve voting, but often they feel like two worlds apart. And there’s a real basis for that – union campaigns are almost always in a ‘universe’ of a few thousand at most, if not hundreds or fewer. Meanwhile, election campaigns may need to span an entire country; even more modest races (for example, for state assembly) still involve multiple tens of thousands of potential voters. And if both can involve large budgets and fierce opposition campaigns, there’s no comparison in public election campaigns to the brutal intimidation tactics of captive audience meetings and closed-door interrogations that take place in union drives.

Campaigns for public office are tough, but the fight for control of the workplace is even tougher. And perhaps that’s why it has served as a crucible – a pressure chamber that has forced the development and codification of some of the strongest and most precise strategies and tactics for building power and beating one’s opponent. The typical difference can perhaps be summarized as a difference between organizing and mobilizing, two separate moees, to utilize the terms understood in the labor movement. 

Most election campaigns are built to mobilize: campaigns tap existing networks for donations, identify supporters, persuade the movable middle, and turn people out on Election Day. That model can work, especially when campaigns have money, endorsements, institutional allies, and a mature voter file operation.

Union campaigns, if run well, focus on organizing: building long-term power by investing in the development of deep relationships. These investments build and maintain the durable trust needed to face down aggressive union-busting tactics and win. This high-cost, long-term investment makes sense in the union context, especially since the fight doesn’t end after an election victory but is often only the beginning. In many cases, securing a first contract requires taking strike action.

But grassroots campaigns for public office rarely have those advantages. They’re often running against deeper pockets and establishment machines, backed by the big money interests that want to protect the status quo. And, if they’re worth supporting, grassroots campaigns are also trying to do something harder than winning a single election: they’re trying to build durable power that continues beyond Election Day.

It is in this context that grassroots campaigns – those that see the need to organize – can benefit by drawing on the union methods of organizing, or what is known in the labor movement as structured organizing.

The Basis Of Structured Organizing

Structured organizing is a disciplined approach to building mass participation and leadership capacity. It combines a theory of power with concrete benchmarks and tactics, which are replicable across multiple campaigns. 

The simplest and most powerful idea in structured organizing is also the most overlooked: people are already organized.

In a workplace, workers are already sorted into shifts, departments, buildings, job titles – and a workplace also has internal communities based on language, ethnicity, nationality, gender, as well as those based on social circles. These networks have norms, leaders, communication channels, and trust relationships.

Traditional campaigns often behave as if none of that exists. They build a campaign universe from scratch—email lists, volunteer signups, events—and then ask people to enter that universe. The people who do are often already politically comfortable, already connected to movement spaces, or already inclined toward volunteerism.

But since trust is the fundamental variable for the strength of an organized community, this misses a huge opportunity to tap into existing trust and to unite it with the campaign’s ends.

Instead of expecting people to join your structure, in a structured organizing approach you build a campaign structure that parallels and taps into the structures that already exist. It’s like scaffolding built around real life. And because it’s built around what’s already there, it can go deeper, faster, and with more legitimacy than a campaign trying to manufacture community in real time.

This is one reason structured organizing is so powerful for grassroots campaigns: it lets the campaign leadership access trust it didn’t create but can respectfully earn the right to participate in.

The Key Concepts of Structured Organizing

Understanding that a community is already organized, we can then deploy a set of tactics in order to build a structure which taps into the existing networks. The following practices work towards that and reinforce each other, and the strength of the approach comes from the way these parts fit together.

1) Mapping Existing Networks, Identities, & Affinities

The first step to tapping into the existing ways in which a community is organized is to ‘map’ that community. And mapping a workplace or an election landscape is not so different. 

First, the campaign team begins by noting all the various segments of the population. In an election campaign, this can be: geographies, ethnic demographics, issue-based networks, and the various existing communities like unions and environmental groups active in the area.

Then the campaign considers each group both qualitatively and quantitatively. What key role might each group play in the campaign? What unique strengths might they have? And how large are the populations of each group relative to the overall campaign universe?

Finally, a campaign can note what existing relationships it may have with each group and identify gatekeepers and influencers, who can help provide access and inroads into the community.

The same process can be run on the campaign’s own supporters. Supporter surveys, which collect this kind of data about those who sign up for the campaign, can help to reveal how much progress the campaign is making in tapping into the networks and communities that it has mapped. In addition, the campaign can collect information about its own unique network: those willing to help volunteer, be it on canvassing, fundraising, phonebanking, or volunteering on a video or social media team.

2) Organic Leaders

Every network has people who function as hubs. Often they don’t have official titles, and they may not be the most politically involved or ideologically motivated. But they are the people others already trust—people who can convene, interpret, and legitimize.

Organic leaders are the key access point of the campaign in engaging its target communities. By prioritizing the identification and engagement of existing organic leaders, the campaign secures its engagement with each community.

And the campaign need not rely only on existing known community leaders. The campaign can also help develop members of its target communities into leaders of that community in relation to the campaign’s efforts. Even if someone is not already a recognized community leader, just being part of a community gives them a level of trust and insight that can serve as a huge advantage relative to someone from outside that community. When demographic and affinity data is tracked at the same time as the campaign tracks levels of engagement (see below), this creates an easy matrix through which the campaign can identify and develop highly engaged members of each community.

The strategy is simple: the best people to organize a community are those from that community.

3) Representative Leadership Committees

Candidate platforms typically highlight where a candidate stands on key issues. And traditional campaigns spend time interfacing with the communities they see as key to building a winning coalition, making sure those communities feel heard and included in the campaign.

An organizing approach goes deeper: instead of simply listening to these communities, an organizing approach facilitates members of each community to help shape the engagement of that community. 

Something as simple as hosting a committee meeting can turn supporters into organizers. In these meetings, a campaign organizer hosts the space and invites the participants (i.e., community members) to help the campaign develop its messaging as it relates to their community needs. And they work to consider how they can engage their peers. As ‘locals,’ these participants often have far greater insights and relationships in the target community than does the facilitator. 

These committees can help draft sign-on letters, take on lists of the fellow community members for phonebanking, or plan an affinity-based fundraiser. Not only does this help to get work done, but it also makes these supporters feel ownership of the campaign. Hosting these committees weekly or bi-weekly is a great way to develop a collective organizing team that takes responsibility for leading the campaign’s efforts in a key community. 

When supporters feel ownership over the campaign they are willing to give far more of their time and effort. And similarly, when folks organize in their own community, they are likely to be far more effective than if they take up general volunteer tasks.

This system assumes that the campaign is comfortable campaigning in a genuinely democratic way and willing to make long term investments. Building committees may not be the fastest way to produce results in the short term and requires navigating potential differences both within a committee and between that committee and the campaign/ its candidate. But the long-term benefits outlined above make this strategy worthwhile.

4) Building Distributed Organizing

Most grassroots campaigns fail not because they lack supporters, but because they do not adequately engage their various layers of supporters and relate these layers to each other. Everything funnels through a few staffers or a handful of super-volunteers. It is simply not possible to grow a campaign into a mass movement in this way.

The only possible way to build a mass campaign which does real organizing at scale involves the core team’s focus on developing a middle layer of volunteer leaders. And this is not the same as simply having the core team train volunteers to engage directly with the public. Rather, what is necessary is to train volunteers as organizers – those who can manage and lead other volunteers.

To facilitate this process, campaigns need to build an ideology of organizing into their self-conception, and ideally into their self-presentation as well. Then, the campaign should invite supporters to take responsibility and should provide some initial training. A simple training focused on encouraging supporters to share their personal stories is often a sufficient starting point, with additional coaching and support provided after volunteer-organizers get underway.

Then, volunteers are assigned lists, usually for phonebanking. Two basic tactics can be used for list work.

First, volunteers can be given lists to make “assessment calls.” These are first-contact calls with supporters, where a volunteer-organizer conducts a brief story-sharing exercise to drive further engagement and assess the interest of that person to get further involved. The volunteer-organizer should track data and take notes for subsequent follow up. One very helpful tool at this stage is a simple supporter survey (the same one sent out by email). Volunteer-organizers often talk too much, listen too little, and don’t collect the desired information. By its nature, a supporter survey guides a volunteer-organizer an opportunity to listen and collect data. 

Second, volunteers may be given a more permanent list, which they are responsible for organizing over the long term. In this system, volunteers engage and re-engage their list, focusing on long-term engagement over short-term turnout. Often, this list is composed of those who have already had an assessment call and have already indicated their interest in volunteering on the campaign.

This is a great time to cut and distribute lists based on target communities. Phonebanking a general list of potential supporters can feel painful and endless. But give a nurse a list of 100 healthcare workers, or an educator a list of 100 fellow teachers, and they will amaze you with their enthusiasm, creativity, and perseverance. Establishing among volunteers an understanding of the impact of their efforts is profoundly important to a campaign. And when volunteer power is the main resource of a campaign, the difference is life or death.

It is also possible to combine these two methods, so that a volunteer is given a list that includes both unassessed and assessed supporters, with the volunteer responsible for managing the entire list for the long term. This system is usually applied to lists cut geographically, because by definition the campaign will generally not know where else to assign unassessed persons if they don’t have data on their union, demographic, or issue priorities. In this case, the volunteer understands that they are responsible for taking charge of a given neighborhood or town. 

5) Structure Tests: Strength Comes From Use

In structured organizing, the aspiration is to build a campaign that maps onto the existing structures of our organizing landscape. But what matters is not whether the campaign’s ‘scaffolding’ looks or appears to model and provide access to these networks, but whether it actually does. 

It is only by using our campaign structure that we can test whether we have built the true ability to activate our targeted communities or not. And furthermore, the depth of trust that we need to build is not built one-off, but iteratively through struggle and use. ‘Structure tests’ refer to the ways through which we can test out our campaign structure as we go, measuring whether we have built the strength necessary to escalate our work, and revealing gaps which we need to address.

In a structure test, you deliberately ask the structure to do something real and measurable so you can see whether it holds.

Probably the first and most useful use of a structure test for a campaign is to test the volunteer layer. A campaign which wants to grow and create a distributed organizing system may be inclined to rapidly assign titles and responsibilities to volunteers – but these are much easier to give out than to take back. Unfortunately, many volunteers who appear motivated or talk up their willingness to build the campaign end up falling short of delivering on their commitments.

A campaign is best served if the work is given out before titles, running a structure test in miniature on each volunteer to see whether enthusiasm actually translates to work ethic and results. If a volunteer wants to take a lead in a neighborhood, give them five or ten numbers in their area, and see how far they get. This also serves as a great opportunity to provide follow up coaching and training, which is often more useful after someone has actually dipped their toes in the work. 

This can be replicated at a higher level. Instead of putting some volunteer in charge of overseeing other volunteer-organizers right away, give everyone their own area of work. The most capable and motivated organizers will make themselves apparent and can be relied upon to help lead their peers.

The same can be true of volunteers with special skills. Someone interested in video production may have grand ideas about what can be produced. But the sooner the campaign can assign them a concrete piece of work, even if small, the sooner the campaign can separate serious volunteers from the unserious.

6) The Organizer’s Bullseye: Prioritize Leadership Development

The final framework to note on structured organizing is perhaps the most basic and fundamental: the organizer’s bullseye. 

Many campaigns treat organizing as “more volunteers,” but the real catalyst for growing a campaign is securing more leaders.

The organizer’s bullseye is a well-established framework for categorizing supporters into their levels of involvement in the campaign, with the core team at the center and the passive sympathizers at the edges.

The bullseye framework reminds us that every supporter can become a leader and challenges us to bring as many of our supporters as possible into our core leadership team. At the same time, it recognizes a ladder of engagement, and invites us to focus on bringing each group in towards the center one step at a time. Sympathizers can become supporters, supporters can become volunteers, volunteers can become organizers, and organizers can become parts of the core team.

Not only can the campaign apply this model in general, but it can also be applied within each campaign community, as discussed in the section on building organizing committees.

How Video Can Supercharge Your Structured Organizing

In today’s campaign environment, video has become an essential part of reaching voters. But video can also be a key tool in organizing – motivating your volunteers, helping you reach and develop organic leaders, and helping you drive engagement with target communities.

First, engaging supporters as ‘spokespeople’ by recording videos with them can be a great way to make use of your volunteer potential. People connect with personal stories, and when you highlight the stories of your supporters – how they’re impacted by an issue, how it affects their community, and their organizing alongside your candidate to make a difference – your campaign gets to amplify their story alongside your candidate’s personal story. And right away, by capturing and sharing a supporter’s story, you often turn them into a super-volunteer.

These videos can then be used to engage in structured organizing. 

First, the videos can be shared externally, posted on social media, or run in targeted ads, which reach other members of the speakers’ community. This additional trust gets you closer to building relationships with potential supporters. 

Additionally, the videos can be used internally. By sharing the videos among your existing supporters, especially in a micro-targeted way, the story of your new spokesperson can help to drive deeper engagement and motivation among their peers who already support your campaign.

Organizing is about building trust through sharing our stakes and lived experiences. And when we capture our supporters’ stories on video, we can deploy them at a scale far greater than what is possible on the doors or through phonebanking.

Raising Funds To Fight

Every campaign needs funds, and structured organizing methods can also be helpful in driving up fundraising numbers.

At the most basic level, a campaign which drives deeper levels of engagement and builds real, personal relationships is going to raise more money from its supporters. But we can also fundraise in a specifically structured way, by utilizing the networks and relationships that our structured organizing methods have helped to develop.

One opportunity is to break down fundraising into geographic or affinity group-based appeals. A campaign that collects data on its supporters can deploy micro-targeted fundraising appeals that are tailored with the messaging most likely to resonate with the target community. And better yet, feature a video appeal from one of the communities’ members.

If someone receives a donor page tracking a donation target for their own neighborhood, they are not only more likely to donate, but they may also share that page with other activists who live nearby. Similarly, a union member is likely to contribute more to a donation page which tracks union member donations, because they feel a pride in the union movement and an obligation to live up to that movement’s values. 

For the same reasons, distributed organizing can be utilized to drive donor phonebanks. A union member will not only be more willing to call other union members to ask for money, but they will likely also be more successful than calling a general list. And for the highest impact, these appeals will be done by those volunteer-organizers who have already been building long-term and deep relationships with the lists they are calling for donations.

Again, structured organizing maximizes results because it provides greater significance and ownership to both volunteers and sympathizers about the impact their support can make.

Organizing Transforms Us For The Better

Progressive campaigns are tough. Taking on corporate-backed candidates means grinding out an uphill battle. And good policies and good vibes are simply not enough to win. What is needed is the maximization of people power, the maximization of collective struggle, which can be brought to bear in support of the campaign. Structured organizing provides a scientific framework to organize for that power and win.

But each election campaign is just one piece of our larger fight against the capitalist system. When we run campaigns based on structured organizing, we develop leaders and bring together communities which can make an impact beyond election day. We transform our campaigns from efforts to win elections, into propaganda and training vehicles for the kind of collective organizing that we need to win not only at the ballot box, but on the shopfloor, in our neighborhoods, and in the streets.

The post How Structured Organizing Can Help Win Elections appeared first on Working Mass.

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The Fall and Rise of Massachusetts Rent Control

Triple-decker apartments in Brighton. (Working Mass)

By: Kelly Regan

BOSTON, MA – “Uprooting members of a community degrades the public sphere,” observed Ben Greer, a Boston DSA member in multi-family residential architecture who works on affordable housing projects, decades after the fall of rent control in Massachusetts.

Displacement steals people – and thus, the public.

Statewide rent control made Boston a more affordable city for low- and moderate-income earners throughout the 1970s. This returned the city to rent control after landlords began chipping away at wartime stabilization, as tenants led by an Allston-Brighton tenant named Anita Bromberg pressured City Hall in a tenant alliance that included middle-class renters, student tenants, low-income senior citizens, and allied organizers. 

Tenants won rent control before staving off landlord greed for a few decades through the base-building that built collective organizational power: tenant organizing, eviction blocking, high-profile rallies, agitational publications, even an attempted citywide rent strike. 

After the landlords finally pushed through tenant defenses to win the 1994 ballot referendum, raising 90% of their funds for the campaign from big corporations, rents in cities like Boston skyrocketed. The rent increases had nothing to do with popular will; Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge all voted against the initiative, only for the City of Cambridge to see rents double in just four years. Meanwhile, Cambridge voters routinely elected wide majorities to their city council in favor of rent control.

The landlords of the Small Property Owners’ Association (SPOA) led the ballot initiative even though units had been “decontrolled” since 1975. Landlords could snatch back rent-stabilized units to inflate the prices after they had been stabilized for tenants. Brookline had decontrolled most of its units before the 1994 law. Landlords kept eating away, one decontrol after another.

By the time of the ballot initiative, 60,000 units were decontrolled versus only 20,000 controlled.

The Role of Struggle

While much of the story of the fall of rent control ccurred in the Legislature, the fall of tenant organizations played a key role. One at the center of the fight to keep rent control was the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee (CTOC). When tenants fought against a plan to turn working class Cambridge into “the brain center of the military-industrial complex,”  they built a committee of tenants and built an organization out of member dues. Ultimately, CTOC disbanded as both internal dysfunction and changing political climate led CTOC to disorganize.

Cultural hubs throughout Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and other Massachusetts cities died out as artists and eccentrics were forced to relocate to more suburban and rural areas. The end of rent control also changed the bourgeois business landscape, with many small enterprises closing or relocating. This decimated the local economies of entire neighborhoods and closed them off, except for the students and the rich who could afford the upscale chains that survived in places like Harvard Square. The businesses that have been able to stay open have struggled to attract and retain workers due to the state’s high cost.

As housing costs in Massachusetts continue to rise, many renters find themselves severely cost-burdened. This increase is felt not just by low-income earners, but also by middle-income earners, who are increasingly cost-burdened by rent. 

Since there are currently no restrictions on rent increases, some Massachusetts residents see increases of hundreds of dollars when renewing their leases. Residents who can’t afford the steep hike in rent must find a new home. Worcester has seen an exodus of residents who can no longer afford the city’s cost of living. Tenants from Boston are displaced to the suburbs are displaced to Worcester are displaced out; every single one leaves a void, a home lost.

Housing in Cambridge (Working Mass)

Rent Control in 2026

Thirty two years after rent control was banned in Massachusetts, housing justice advocates want to bring it back. Last summer, Homes for All Mass filed an initiative petition with Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office as the first step in a lengthy process to get the rent control ballot measure in front of Massachusetts voters.

Greer said:

All people deserve stability. Rent control allows Massachusetts tenants to be able to settle within their neighborhoods, raise families, and contribute to the community without having to fear displacement.

The 2026 ballot measure would limit rent increases to the cost of living increase with a 5% cap with exemptions for owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units and new builds within the first ten years.

The next phase, which is collecting 74,574 certified signatures, began on September 5, 2025. For a signature to count, it has to be verified by the city clerk as coming from a registered voter. This is to ensure that signatures come from Massachusetts residents. Illegible signatures or signatures from residents outside of Massachusetts are not counted. 

Boston DSA members voted to endorse Homes for All Massachusetts ballot question campaign to pass rent control in September 2025. The Homes For All coalition included organizations like City Life/Vida Urbana, Community Action Agency of Somerville, and the Chinese Progressive Association. Members in Boston DSA helped collect 1,298 of the 124,000 total signatures collected across multiple counties surrounding the Boston area.

Dominic Salvucci, a Boston DSA member living in Lawrence, Massachusetts, organized over 14 canvasses in his area. Salvucci noted that the campaign allowed him to have interesting conversations with his neighbors and bring in new organizers to Boston DSA.

According to Salvucci, the method “was also helpful in bringing in new membership and expanding the idea of class consciousness to inactive but sympathetic socialists in the region.”

Submitting at least 74,574 signatures means the Legislature has until June 2026 to vote on adopting the rent control legislation. If the Legislature votes against, 12,429 more certified signatures must be collected for rent control to be on the 2026 ballot.

While Governor Healy has spoken against rent control, other politicians have spoken in support. Boston Mayor Wu made rent control part of her platform. The executive has previously endorsed rent control and stated:

We know that other cities across the country who have implemented rent stabilization and rent control are seeing it working.

The Mayor is joined also by some legislators. Massachusetts State Representative and Boston DSA member Erika Uyterhoeven also supported the signature collection campaign for rent control. Uyterhoeven said:

Every time I’ve asked someone to collect signatures, it’s an enthusiastic yes to volunteering and joining the Homes for All coalition. I also believe this is vital work for DSA to deepen our coalition and build our power by building up our membership’s capacity for the fight ahead.

However, the bulwark of support — much like last time, in defense of rent control — has been found at the municipal level. Cities throughout Massachusetts have expressed support for rent control regulation. The Boston City Council passed a resolution in support of the rent control bill on January 30th. The cities of Easthampton and Northampton have passed similar resolutions in support of this rent control legislation. City councils signing on in support of rent control legislation doesn’t guarantee that the House or Senate will pass a rent control bill. It does show that rent control is popular among residents of those cities, which could sway some legislators. 

Previous rally outside the Massachusetts State House (PC: Maritza S)

The Landlords’ Legislature

It is unlikely that the Legislature will act on the rent control bill, even if some legislators may be exceptions in supporting rent control. The Boston Globe found that more than one in four Massachusetts legislators own multiple homes or properties. This is unsurprising in a country where the vast majority of legislators are not tenants in any state. The Globe also reported that, in 2023, at least 36 legislators own commercial, residential, or short-term rental properties. With so many landlords in the Massachusetts legislature, it’s no surprise that the fight for rent control has been an uphill battle.

And some of the same opponents remain as stalwart interest groups influencing legislative decision-making. The president of the same Small Property Owners’ Association (SPOA) that led the successful campaign to vanquish Massachusetts rent control last time has threatened his own personal capital strike. As the landlord leader lamented to the Wall Street Journal:

He later took ownership of that property, but said he sold it last year for fear rent control would return. He said he still owns five units in Beverly and Rockport, two communities northeast of Boston, but that he would consider leaving the business and even the state if the ballot measure passes.

Some Massachusetts residents are initially wary of rent control precisely because much of the conversation around rent control has been dominated by landlords.

While collecting signatures, Salvucci talked with one Massachusetts resident about how capitalist policies have led to a sharp increase in living expenses while stagnating wages. Decades have made the crisis starkly clear. The resident signed the petition for rent control and told Salvucci:

[Rent control] makes more sense when you look at it from the shoes of people who are just trying to make their way now.

When rent control was first won, tenants built the power needed block by block – apartment by apartment, spadework by spadework. The story of the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee (CTOC) also promises a road forward. As tenants organize across the region at new complexes in the greatest wave of tenant organizing since the 1970s that won rent control originally, the fight for rent stabilization follows.

The question is who will win this phase of the struggle: landlords, or tenants?

Kelly Regan is the co-chair of Boston DSA’s Housing Working Group.

The post The Fall and Rise of Massachusetts Rent Control appeared first on Working Mass.

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Your National Political Committee newsletter — Socialism Beats Fascism

Enjoy your February National Political Committee (NPC) newsletter! Our NPC is an elected 27-person body (including both YDSA Co-Chairs) which functions as the board of directors of DSA. This month, sign up for know your rights training, help melt ICE, join political education classes, and more!

And to make sure you get our newsletters in your inbox, sign up here! Each one features action alerts, upcoming events, political education, and more.

From the National Political Committee — DSA’s Growth Means Hope in Dark Times

Dear Comrades,

“The issue is Socialism vs. Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilization. The time has come to regenerate society — we are on the eve of a universal change.” — Eugene V. Debs, 1897

Great news: DSA is now over 100,000 members strong! This milestone is many years in the making, and was borne out of the tireless work of countless members to bring socialism from the margins to the mainstream since DSA formed in 1982. We encourage you to take a moment and reflect on the ways that your work has helped build us into the largest socialist organization in the USA since Eugene V. Debs’s time over a century ago, when the Socialist Party in the US at its height in 1912 counted 118,000 dues-paying members.

The capitalist class suppressed that era of burgeoning socialism with decades of Red Scare repression and propaganda — but not completely. Even past the worst years of McCarthyism and the Cold War, and then through the supposed “end of history” era of neoliberalism, many brave socialist organizers kept the flame alive throughout the 20th century. Socialists have always been organizing to build the power of labor unions and expand rights for all workers, and helped form the backbone of movements for racial justice, women’s liberation, queer liberation, against war and militarism, and for environmental protection in the United States.

Wherever people were organizing for a better, more democratic, and more just future for all working people, socialists like us were holding fast. And now, generations later, democratic socialism is going mainstream.

So many people are joining DSA today because we are a fully member-led and member-funded mass organization. Over 220 local chapters are growing because we represent a real alternative to the corporate oligarchy of our political system. We’re responding powerfully to the current political situation — channeling rage and fear over the Trump administration’s violent policies which scapegoat immigrants, trans folks, and marginalized people while making everyday life more precarious for the broader working class; and also organizing for democratic socialist victories, like our member Zohran Mamdani’s election to mayor of the wealthiest city in the world.

Zohran’s election in New York City brought a surge of new members to DSA because he represents reasons for active hope through the darkness of our time, showing how far our movement has come through the past decade. He is a product of independent grassroots organizing where strong DSA chapters, alongside labor unions and working class community organizations, work more and more like a party of our own. DSA members are winning life-changing policies for millions of people across the United States, expanding affordability and economic security for all, and showing how socialism is what can beat fascism. 

All of this has effects everywhere, not just in NYC. Some of our fastest-growing chapters are in places you might not expect, like Corpus Christi, Birmingham, Southern Idaho, Middle Georgia, and Eastern Kentucky. Folks are fed up across the country and finding ways to organize for socialism and against fascism wherever they live. Whether you were inspired by high-profile campaigns like Zohran’s or were organized at the grassroots level at local actions like union picket lines or Abolish ICE rallies, being part of a democratically run mass movement like DSA means we take back a lot of the power that capitalism has taken from us.

The weight of over a century of struggle is on our shoulders, but we stand on the shoulders of giants. Together, we can and will rise to this task. Take a moment to embrace this history, and then remember what Debs would certainly call us to do: keep going. We can never take popularity for granted. Now is not the time to rest. It’s the time to keep organizing to turn momentum into even bigger growth and more powerful wins against the dictatorship of capital that we’re all living under, and toward true democracy for all of us. Ask yourself what steps you can take today to build the socialist future of tomorrow – and keep asking others to join in! 99,999 of your comrades (and counting!) are right there with you to do the same.

¡La Lucha Sigue, Hasta La Victoria!

Megan Romer and Ashik Siddique
DSA National Co-Chairs

Help Elect Socialist Candidates! Phonebanks Starting Sunday 2/22

Are you ready to help raise money for our socialist candidates across the country? Join DSA’s National Electoral Commission to call other DSA members to help raise money for our socialist campaigns. Phonebanks start Sunday 2/22, and will be on Sundays 5pm ET/4pm CT/3pm MT/2pm PT.

Right now, we have five DSA member candidates with our national endorsement on our slate. Making calls is easy! Talk to members like you  to raise money for:

  • Adam Bojak, Buffalo DSA, New York’s State Assembly
  • Tammy Carpenter, Portland DSA, Oregon’s State House of Representatives
  • Bobby Nichols, Phoenix DSA, City Council in Tempe, Arizona
  • Andrew Hariston, Austin DSA, Travis County Justice of the Peace
  • Robert LeVertis Bell, Louisville DSA, Kentucky State Legislature

Melt ICE Off Our Streets — Give Today!

DSA members are leading the fight against the deportation regime in cities and towns across the country. So far, DSA members have raised over $25,000 to build our chapters’ responses to ICE terror. This money goes where it’s most needed, including multilingual know-your-rights literature, whistles, hand warmers, trainings, and more for the communities we defend. Even $25 dollars can help our chapters meet the moment and lead the movement to victory over fascism. Give today!

Sign Up for Sunday 2/22 Know Your Rights Training

Join the Trump Admin Response Committee on 2/22 at 2pm ET/1pm CT/12pm MT/11am PT for a Know Your Rights Training. Come hear from legal experts from the NYC-DSA Immigrant Justice Working Group about how to keep yourself and your neighbors safe from ICE.

Mutual Aid Working Group Elections — Nominations Until Saturday 2/14

Mutual Aid Working Group (MAWG) Steering Committee 2026 elections are open now, with nominations open until Saturday 2/14. Voting will be open for all MAWG members Sunday 2/15-Sunday 2/21.

The Steering Committee (SC) consists of 7-9 members including two co-chairs. SC members are expected to run trainings and virtual events, host quarterly all-member meetings, and mentor chapters. If you are interested or have questions, reach out to mutualaid@dsacommittees.org.

Our Religious Socialism Work Group is Growing! Events Sunday 2/15, Thursday 2/19, and Thursday 2/26

Our DSA Religion and Socialism Working Group brings together DSA members of all faiths to support each other, bring socialist ideas to our own faith communities, and work to combat white Christian nationalism. Join our monthly meetup Thursday 2/19 at 8:30pm ET/7:30pm CT/6:30pm MT/5:30pm PT to find out more.

Two of our sub-groups are having events this month as well! The Democratic Socialist Episcopal Association is re-launching. People of all faith backgrounds are welcome to join us in our organizing, mutual aid, and common worship. We conduct all of our work and services via our Discord server here. Join us for our weekly virtual Compline prayer services every Sunday. The next one will be Sunday 2/15. Standing regular meetings will begin Wednesday, 2/18 and be held every other week.

And help build the DSA Buddhist Circle! Buddhists of all traditions, Dharma practitioners, and Mindfulness practitioners are invited to our planning and visioning meeting Thursday 2/26 at 7pm ET/6pm CT/5pm MT/4pm PT. Feel free to review these notes before the meeting.

En Español: Housing Justice Commission Weekly Language Exchange Tuesday 2/17

Practica tu español con la Comisión para Justicia de Vivienda (CJV)!

Aprendiste español en el colegio o en el trabajo y quieres mejorar? Unete los martes a las 17:00 PST / 19:00 MEX/CST / 20:00 COL/EST / 22:00 / ARG para practicar con la CJV. Te pondremos en un cuarto de Zoom con otra persona para que practiquen juntos. Si quieres también tenemos guiones si necesitas ayuda!

Political Education Trainings Thursday 2/19 and Thursday 3/12 — Sign Up Today!

DSA’s National Political Education Committee (NPEC) welcomes all DSA members to our upcoming trainings:

And did you know? NPEC has a weekly podcast, Class! Subscribe to find out what DSA members all over the country are thinking and doing, and why, every Monday.

AfroSoc is BACK in Action! BIPOC Members, Join Our February General Body Meeting Sunday 2/22

AfroSoc, DSA’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus, is back! Join our February General Meeting Sunday 2/22 at 8pm ET/7pm CT/6pm MT/5pm PT for announcements, a chapter spotlight on ATL AFROSOC, a walkthrough of the Start a Local Chapter Packet, and general discussion on WG/committee proposals. All BIPOC, good-standing DSA members are welcomed!

Working Group (WG) proposals are still being accepted, and bylaw changes are now open for submission for March discussion. You can review our current bylaws and submit resolutions here. Debate, voting, and collective decision-making will close out the February meeting.

Help Support DSA — Join Growth and Development Committee Phonebanks Starting Sunday 2/22

Join one of our upcoming Growth and Development phonebanks!

Trainings will be provided at the beginning of each call.

Do You Have Fundraising Experience? Apply for DSA’s National Fundraising Committee!

DSA’s National Fundraising Committee is seeking members with fundraising experience. The application form is here. The Fundraising Committee supports the coordination of national fundraising efforts and serves as an advisory body for DSA’s fundraising practices and strategy. We’ll also focus on leading chapter fundraising trainings and providing support to members taking on this work locally. Committee members spend at least 4-6 hours a month carrying out committee duties.

With ambitious plans and a long road ahead, we must sustain ourselves, and that means coordinated and strategic fundraising. As a socialist organization engaged in class struggle, we must fund our own work!

DSA is Hiring! Application Deadlines Starting Sunday 2/15

DSA is hiring for the following four positions:

  • Chapter Development Coordinator, application deadline Sunday 2/15
  • Regional Organizer (Northeast), application deadline Sunday 2/22
  • Regional Organizer (South), application deadline Sunday Sunday 2/22
  • Data and Technology Director, application deadline March 3/1

You can find details, including job description and application links, on our Careers page here.

And congratulations to Kaitlin, our new Lead Regional Organizer! Her years as DSA’s Regional Organizer for the South will serve her well in her new role.

Help Build Strong Chapters! Apply for the Locals First Implementation Committee

Last month, the NPC voted to allocate $850k in Chapter Development Grants that local chapters can apply for to fund a broad range of activities, including campaign work, equity and administrative activities, and events. As part of the implementation, we are forming a dedicated team under the Growth and Development Committee (GDC) to oversee the distribution of these grants.

If you’re excited about building strong, well-resourced chapters, you can apply to join the GDC through this form. Indicate “Matching Funds/Chapter Grants” as your area of interest!

DSA Fund is Hiring a Program Lead!

The Democratic Socialists of America Fund (DSA Fund) is seeking a full-time program lead to cultivate the How We Win network of 250+ democratic socialist elected officials, staff and DSA chapters across the country.

DSA Fund is the 501(c)3 political education sister organization to the Democratic Socialists of America, investing in projects that help build a democratic socialist future. The Program Lead position can be based anywhere in the US. Please see the job description for more information. Applications are due by Thursday 2/26.

The post Your National Political Committee newsletter — Socialism Beats Fascism appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

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From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists

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By: Steve Early

This was originally published by California DSA on January 26, 2026.

DSA’s “rank-and-file strategy” has 60s roots at UC Berkeley 

“The lessons of the International Socialists can help point us in the right direction by sharing what has worked and what has failed in past decades” —Andrew Stone Higgins

Some DSA members are still pondering how they should relate, personally and collectively, to the labor movement. Should they try to become agents of workplace change while serving on the staff of local, regional, or national unions? Or should they organize “on the shop-floor”—in non-union shops or as a unionized teacher, nurse, or social worker? And then, later on, seek elected, rather than appointed, union leadership roles? 

A few years ago, the DSA convention debated this latter strategy and then narrowly passed a resolution favoring the rank-and-file route. Some members locally have joined the Rank-and-File Project which supports this approach “to fighting for a better world from the bottom up.”

Fifty years ago, Sixties leftists pondered the same options before launching their own reform efforts, within the labor bureaucracy or as challengers to it. Some had the foresight to transition from campus and community organizing to union activism in healthcare, education, and social work where college degrees were helpful and job security good.

Other former student radicals—under the (not-always-helpful) guidance of multiple left-wing formations—opted to become blue-collar workers in trucking and telecom, mid-west auto plants and steel mills, and West Virginia coal mines in the 1970s. Unfortunately, in the decade that followed, de-regulation, de-industrialization, and global capitalist restructuring produced enormous job losses and industrial contraction. 

Radicals who made a “turn toward industry” often lost union footholds they had struggled for years to gain. But thankfully, many ended up back on the academic track, retooling as teachers, lawyers or pro-labor college professors. Others became community organizers, public sector union activists, labor educators or staffers, and, in some cases, even entered the business world.

Socialism from Below

Andrew Stone Higgins’ history of the International Socialists (IS), From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, brings together individual oral histories or contributor-written chapters by 26 former members of that organization. The IS was founded in 1969 by veterans of the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at Berkeley and other hotbeds of Sixties’ activism. FSM alums featured in the book include the late Mike Parker, an East Bay DSA member whose chapter on “The Student Movement and Beyond” contains good advice for campus radicals today.

Like organizational rivals on the left less interested in promoting “socialism from below,” the IS made a decade-long attempt to “bridge the gap between a left disproportionately formed on college campuses and the working class, which, of course, remains a central concern for all American socialists.”

In Higgins’ collection, contributors like Candace Cohn, Gay Semel, and Wendy Thompson provide vivid first-person accounts of their experience leaving student life or white-collar jobs to become embedded in industry. Each of them helped fight the discriminatory treatment of women and/or African-American workers widespread in the blue-collar world they entered in the 1970s.

Cohn became politically active as a member of Students for a Democratic Society at the University of Michigan. After graduation, she moved to Pittsburgh and helped create a local advocacy group for Mon Valley workers exposed to hazardous health and safety conditions.  She then became “one of the first women hired into basic steel since World War II” at U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, “the world’s largest coking operation and its filthiest and deadliest.”

In the mill, “sexual harassment was non-stop, both from foremen and from older white co-workers.” Nevertheless, Cohn built relationships with black workers and other female steel workers, started a shop floor paper, Steelworkers Stand Up, and helped rally fellow rank-and-filers on behalf of Ed Sadlowski and his “Fight Back” slate in a 1977 international union election.  

Sadlowski was a “left social democrat,” who was heavily red-baited during his exciting but, ultimately unsuccessful, challenge to labor-management partnering in the steel industry. “In the employer’s offensive that followed,” Cohn writes, “tens of thousands of steelworkers were thrown onto the street, mills shuttered, and steel valley voices silenced.” She was able to retrain as a labor and civil rights lawyer.

Like Cohn, Gay Semel went to law school after her tour of duty in the IS, as its national secretary and editor of Workers Power, an “agitational newspaper” featuring a popular column called “Labor Notes.” Before that, she worked as a telephone operator in N.Y.C. In that well-timed intervention, she got herself expelled from the Bell System company union then representing her-co-workers, which the Communications Workers of America was trying to oust. As a lawyer, she spent most of later career working for CWA, the union she also tried to support, back in 1971, when she wouldn’t cross its picket-lines during a nine-month strike by 38,000 N.Y Tel technicians.

Unlike Cohn and Semel, Wendy Thompson actually made it to the finish line of a good union pension in the auto industry after becoming a labor-oriented radical during her junior year abroad (in France, circa May 1968). Thompson worked for General Motors at a Chevy gear and axle plant, with a predominantly black workforce. Surviving lay-offs and repeated management attempts to fire her, Thompson battled sexism on the shop floor, contract concessions, and the long dominant influence of the Administration Caucus in the United Auto Workers (UAW).

During her 33 years in the plant, only one Administration Caucus critic was ever elected to the UAW international executive board. But the 2022 membership vote to ditch convention voting for top officers—and switch to direct election by the rank-and-file—enabled a slate backed by Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) to win what Thompson calls an “unprecedented victory—and a great culmination of my many years of activity” on the shop floor.

A Hard Sell

The recollections of individual IS members definitely support Higgins’s conclusion that their “pre-party formation” of 500 failed to create an organizational culture “more fully welcoming to diverse working-class recruits.” The latter numbered only about one-fifth of the IS’s peak membership, and, according to Higgins, here’s why:

While refreshingly democratic and seriously committed to political education of new members, the IS culture of deep reading, broad discussion, fierce debates, and long, numerous meetings was a hard sell to prospective members, pressing familial obligations, and a limited amount of free time.

And then there was the internal feuding that disrupted the group’s initially well-coordinated labor work. In 1976-77, the IS split three ways. Several hundred loyalists stayed put; seventy five formed a group called Workers Power, and one hundred created the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which grew bigger over the years but then suddenly imploded in 2019. In the mid-1980s, as part of a more constructive “regroupment” process, Workers Power members got back together with remaining ISers to form Solidarity, a looser network of socialists which publishes the journal Against the Current.

According to former Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) supporter Dan LaBotz, now a Brooklyn DSA member and co-editor of New Politics, “one of the principal reasons for the IS split was differences over the labor work,” which some members argued was “making the group more conservative.” 

As feminist historian Barbara Winslow recalls, the grounds for her expulsion from the IS, in the late 1970s, was arguing “for a larger engagement in all possible areas of working-class women’s struggles—blue-, white-, and pink-collar movements as well as other women’s liberation activities.”  She and her then husband, former IS National Industrial Organizer Cal Winslow, became targets of a subsequent purge, when they were expelled from the ISO, despite being among its founding members.

Contributors to Higgins collection like UC Santa Barbara Professor Nelson Lichtenstein, David Finkel, co-editor of Against the Current, and others cite TDU and Labor Notes as the main legacies of the IS. That uniquely durable labor education, rank-and-file organizing, and alternative media project was launched forty-six years ago, during an era when other socialist or communist formations were still mired in highly competitive self-promotion. 

For example, their organizational newspapers usually put a higher priority on new “cadre” recruitment than helping to build broad-based, multi-tendency rank-and-file movement. In contrast, as Thompson recalls, “the IS clearly rejected the model that many socialist groups had of maintaining their front groups rightly under their control. Originally staffed by IS members, Labor Notes became a project where workers would feel they were in a comfortable milieu but also a pond where socialists could swim.”

This may have “violated all the norms of so-called Leninism,” Finkel notes. But, in the end, a more ecumenical approach was critical to developing a multi-generational network of rank-and-file militants that now meets every two years with 5,000 or more in attendance, as opposed to just 600 in the early 1980s, which was good turnout back then. (To attend the June, 2026 Labor Notes conference, register as soon as possible at https://www.labornotes.org/2026.)

This very readable volume has much solid advice for socialists trying to revitalize existing unions or create alternatives to them today.  One key lesson is that building a big labor or political tent is better, for the left, than becoming a small one. If you prefer the latter result, then endless meetings, too much organizational “discipline,” and fractious debates over the finer points of Marxist theory—followed by destructive purge—will get you there pretty quick. On the other hand, if you want to be an individual or organizational long-distance runner on the labor left, there are, in this book, some very good role models to follow.

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor: A Collective History of the International Socialists, edited by Andrew Stone Higgins, Haymarket Books, available March 2026.

Steve Early is a longtime labor activist, journalist, and author. He is an East Bay DSA member who belonged to the New American Movement (NAM) in the 1970s and favored the socialist group merger that led to DSA’s formation in 1982. He has been a contributor to Labor Notes since 1979 and, for many years, served on its editorial advisory board. He can be reached at Lsupport@aol.com.

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