Socialists have to mean what we say and say what we mean. The working class cannot win power for itself without a political vehicle of its own, and the Democratic Party is not – and will not ever be – that vehicle. Our long-term project has to be building that new party, which means taking bold steps to learn how to do so.

We need to take chances as they come, not only to do our part but also to teach future socialists. We have a chance, if we are willing to step out of our comfort zone, to set an example and engage in a practical experiment in true political independence. In order to make this meaningful step towards political independence – to create a campaign our comrades across the country and across time can point to as an example to build on and learn from – we, as a chapter, will have to invest heavily in it. 

Three years ago, Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez and I published an article arguing that, at some point, socialists will have to make the conscious decision to take those first steps towards true political independence, building an independent political party. In that article, we acknowledged that those initial steps towards independence would be the most difficult, because it will mean stepping into the unknown. 

Now is the time. Alderman Sigcho-Lopez of the 25th ward (which includes Pilsen, Little Village, University Village, and Chinatown) intends to run for Congress as an independent in the Fourth Congressional District, a seat held by Jesús “Chuy” García since 2018. The district is a progressive district with a majority Latino population covering much of Chicago’s southwest side and a number of working-class suburbs, including Cicero, Berwyn, and Bridgeview up through Melrose Park. Sigcho-Lopez is a known quantity who has won tough elections and is a committed socialist with a vision of building independent power for the working class. By breaking with the Democrats, he will not be able to count on much formal institutional support from major unions or organized progressive groups. 

Hard as that break may be, it is increasingly necessary. The Democrats’ popularity is at an all-time low, and beyond that, they have proven themselves incapable of facing down the advance of right-wing authoritarianism. Just as they’ve done for the last thirty years, they are relying on their place in the two-party duopoly to be the default choice when the Republicans go ‘too far’ and are content to hold power for no more than a few years before the Republicans return with even more dangerous politics. 

In New York City, organized socialists showed that they can win power in high-profile, high-stakes races. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary showed that socialists can provide an organizational base, working with other groups and constituencies to win even against the odds. Until his primary win, Mamdani had institutional support only from United Autoworkers District 9A, a reform local that endorsed him six months before. Major unions and progressive groups stayed away, and a Working Families Party endorsement came only three weeks before the primary. He couldn’t rely on massive six-figure checks or million-dollar donations, and instead had to raise money from tens of thousands of small-dollar donors as the entirety of his fundraising.  

Mamdani’s win was a thunderclap for the Democrats. It showed that true bottom-up organizational power can, in fact, win big offices, and that even without progressive NGOs or union officialdom, even a self-proclaimed socialist can win, and win big, when their support is built from the bottom up and involves thousands of people who believe in the campaign’s vision. 

Still, Mandani’s (and the NYC Democratic Socialists of America’s) win comes with a lot of caveats: matching funds, ranked-choice voting, the presence of historically unpopular opponents in Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo. Nonetheless, it was a remarkable feat that proves that with full commitment and a vision, bottom-up politics works. 

If the New York mayoral race was a thunderclap, the Democrats losing a safe, progressive seat to an independent challenger from the left – one who didn’t even need their ballot line – would be an earthquake. It would knock down the key pillar that keeps movements from leaving the Democrats behind: the ‘brand loyalty’ of voters to the Democratic Party ballot line. It would set an example for how socialists can build the coalitions needed to win independently. This model would relieve the pressure on organized groups, including unions, to stick with Democrats as the lesser evil. Without that pressure, the gates to true working-class independence can open. 

But ours has to be a long-term plan. We cannot keep trying to design a strategy and abandon it after one cycle. Political independence requires experimentation, trial, and error. We learned much from the Mamdani victory; now we must see if we can go further. Winning in this district will require a lot of things to go right and an immense amount of resources. 

The Fourth Congressional District is the right campaign, and Alderman Sigcho-Lopez is the right candidate, to start the long work of building an independent socialist party for the working class. Knowing the nature of the serious challenges ahead shouldn’t be a reason not to do it; it should inspire us to make sure our experiment is a worthwhile one by giving everything we’ve got. 

Money

If he fails to win formal union support, Sigcho-Lopez will have to raise half a million dollars (if not more) from small donors. That number is only an estimate; Chicago-area districts rarely have competitive elections to go by. The closest analog is probably the highly competitive 2024 Seventh Congressional district primary race between incumbent Danny Davis, Melissa Conyears-Ervin, Kina Collins, and others. Davis spent just under $1 million to win that primary; Conyears-Ervin spent $750,000 to get 22% of the vote, with the other three candidates combined spending around $350,000 for another 26%. That’s $1.1 million for 48% of the vote. 

Sigcho-Lopez will start with decent name recognition, so he won’t have to spend as much just to be known. On the other hand, he will have to overcome the Democratic Party’s ballot line advantage. Let’s say conservatively that he will need to spend $500,000 between now and November to win more votes than Patty García, Chuy’s preferred successor. The average donation to Mamdani was around $75, so to raise half a million dollars from small donors, the campaign would need around 6,500 donors. 

Mamdani had 54,000 such donors, with 63% or 34,000 of them from inside New York City. If the same proportions hold for Sigcho-Lopez, the city probably maxes out at around 4,000 donors, i.e., the same proportion of 63%, which alone is very ambitious and still requires raising money across the country. This means nationalizing the campaign, and giving socialists everywhere a reason to invest in our effort to build independent political power in Illinois. 

To compensate for the tendency to default to the Democratic Party ballot line, the campaign will have to be visible everywhere in order to give the sense that it can win. That means thousands of volunteers putting in tens of thousands of hours to reach every voter, but it also means lots and lots of money to boost its message. With institutional support likely to go to the hand-picked Democrat, there will need to be organizing at the grassroots level to get people involved directly in the same way Mamdani’s campaign organized workers directly rather than hoping to win over union leadership.

This will require targeted support from the strata of workers most able to give at a slightly higher level: unionized workers and professionals with more disposable income who can give between $250 and $500 in one election cycle. That means identifying such members in our chapter and in the national organization, communicating the vision of the campaign, and getting them to give. One hundred such donors means $25,000 to $50,000; five hundred means as much as a quarter million. That requires work and building on the organic connections our members have with workers. 

Votes

Patty García is by most standards a progressive, and Chuy was one of the most progressive members of Congress. That means every vote Sigcho-Lopez wins will be a vote for democratic socialist politics, not just a protest vote against a weak or moderate Democrat. That alone would be an important step in learning how to build an independent socialist vehicle.

Chuy García announced he would not be seeking reelection immediately before the close of petition-gathering for the Democratic primary, and only his chief of staff, Patty García, was ready with petition signatures. She will be unopposed in the primary and face only nominal Republican opposition in the general election. The Fourth was created as Illinois’ first majority-Latino district in 1992, and since then, only two people have held the seat: Luis Gutierrez and Chuy García. The latter took the seat in a similar hand-off from Gutierrez. In other words, in Illinois’ only Latino-majority district, the voters have never had a meaningful election, especially since the district was also substantially re-drawn in 2022. 

For that reason, it is somewhat difficult to forecast what could happen. It is useful to know, though, that in 2022 the general election vote was about 134,000, with 49,000 (37%) coming from Chicago, and 7,500 (6%) from Sigcho-Lopez’s 25th ward. The Democrat won with 91,000 votes, with a Republican drawing 37,300 and a candidate from the Working Class Party gaining 4,600. 

That same year, 38,000 people voted in the Democratic primary and 12,200 in the Republican primary for the district. That’s a difference of about 83,000 between self-identifying (and presumably partisan) Democrats and Republicans and the total number of voters. To win, Sigcho-Lopez would need to win enough of those more casual voters and peel off enough Democrats. The math is not friendly, but it is hardly impossible; he would need to win about 60,000 votes, or just over half of the non-Republican vote, since, assuming there are 150,000 voters and 25% go with a Republican, that leaves about 110,000 voters.

Sigcho-Lopez has won two bruising elections in Chicago. Nobody has ever voted for Patty García for anything, and because she is unopposed, nobody will really be voting for her even in the primary. Can Sigcho-Lopez grow a base of the 7% of the district in his ward (around 7,000 votes) and win over 50,000 voters in one of the most progressive districts in the country in the wake of a shady hand-off of power? It hardly seems impossible; if there is any way to see how far the democratic socialist message can get, now is the time and the Fourth District is the place. 

The Candidate and the Cadre

One way to characterize Byron Sigcho-Lopez is a ‘firebrand.’ Certainly, he has been the least compromising socialist elected official we have seen in a long time. His hostility to the Democratic Party establishment has been open, often to his political detriment. While he is a Democratic Party Committeeman (and so technically a part of the Cook County leadership structure), that does not seem to have dampened his appetite to take on and break from the party. Byron is an ideologically committed socialist. 

His time in office has been turbulent, with a variety of conflicts both within and outside of his ward. Nevertheless, he has repeatedly shown himself to be tireless and always on the front line anywhere the working class is under attack.

Sigcho-Lopez has worked closely with the Chicago DSA going back to the chapter’s early involvement in the Lift the Ban campaign in 2017, when he invited us to participate. The South Side branch brought the rest of the chapter into the work, running referenda in support of lifting the ban on rent control in a number of precincts and becoming one of our earliest electoral efforts. He remained closely connected to the chapter’s Socialists in Office (SIO) committee and kept lines of communication open. 

He is not, however, ‘cadre’ in the usual sense; his relationships across his ward and the Fourth Congressional district are not a result of his political development inside DSA. They predate his relationship to CDSA, and as an elected official, they are considerably wider than the chapter could ever provide. 

The Campaign

If not a cadre candidate, would this therefore be a ‘cadre campaign?’ It will have to be. Taking on a Democratic party candidate from the outside – not trying to knock out an establishment Democrat from within, but costing the party a safe seat, in an election year  where every win will be vital – will dry up just about every resource outside of what organized socialists and bottom-up people power can provide. If formal institutional support is not forthcoming, DSA and CDSA, and whatever other local groups are willing to join in coalition to take on the Democratic establishment, will have to do the hard work of organizing affinity groups in support of the campaign. That includes community groups, unions, ethnic and religious organizations, and other political formations where formal support can’t be expected. 

CDSA will need to orient itself heavily towards this campaign. Organizing within our unions, building on our relationships with other community and affinity groups, stepping up to captain door-knocking and fund-raising operations, creating media, and staffing the campaign to produce policy, are among the myriad things needed to win. 

The process matters. If we invest strongly in developing our relationships across the district and the city, building our internal campaign, media, and coalition-building skills, honing our message of political independence, and identifying thousands of people who agree with our vision of an independent working-class party, democratic socialism wins. Even if the campaign fails, those relationships and experiences will be a net win for the cause, but only if we take the effort to build them seriously. 

In other words, it is not worth endorsing this campaign if we as a chapter are not going to leave everything on the field. We must do the work to discover what it would takes to win against the Democratic Party from the outside, despite what it may take.

The post Independence Requires Investment: The Time is Now for an Independent Run appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX is challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB in a lawsuit that could undermine the enforcement of national labor law.

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The author of this piece chose to remain anonymous.

This is a review and commentary on “A Queer Marxist Trans Feminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction” by Nat Raha, from Transgender Marxism. This review is from an agender perspective.

In the essay, Raha says that domestic social reproduction is a “feminine act.” In other words, they reify gender based on the particular gendered expression that occurs in the context of various societies where gendered signification is fungible, and ultimately arbitrary, based on which generation you’re in. In other words, the essay romanticizes a domesticated, sexist view of femininity, where feminine people do domestic work. I always disliked the word feminine, as it implies a traditional, binary sex, and never tries to overcome this binary to go beyond a representational view of gender.

Gender is fungible in every generation you’re in. Queerness itself is outside of time, responsible for all change – temporality, time itself, and the variable context of each generation is what constitutes the gendered expression of each era. Gendered expression does, as the book says, have its own emotional labor that one must go through for queer people. For queer people such as myself and my partner, not being recognized as queer is a sort of invisibility that can occur. Essays like this erase the experience of being agender. An agender view of these gendered phenomena is that like capitalism and its axiom of profit, gender is not extended anywhere in space. Heteronormativity is in contrast to queer gender, which takes traditional gender and performs it as straight people perform it, or it bends the expression.

But for me, gender expression is fungible. Archers in the past wore high heels; indigenous peoples and royalty such as pharaohs wore leggings and makeup. The makeup industry made makeup a feminine thing, as with other things that are bought and sold back to us through gendered expression of capital; we try to differentiate ourselves as the particular tries to differentiate itself but end up only creating a new universal. This is what occurs in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in the “Sense Certainty” and “Perception” sections. When you point to a thing, you get a universal of language. Language can only speak about things on a general level; it cannot capture the infinite difference of sense, and our ideas about gender are in fact immobile.

Because the only things which relate to the immobile motor in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti Oedipus are Oedipus, capital, and heteronormativity, it makes me wonder: is gender itself a sort of machinic normativity, reproduced by representational sameness? Whenever we try to say gender is a fixed idea, we are not recognizing that our concepts of gender flow as through a stream, or as through the flows of the mega-machine; whatever its dominant beauty standards deem is gender is bought or sold to us. Ultimately, this strain of Marxist feminism does not want to produce rhizomatic views of gender that are not based on binary dichotomies. They focus on an idea of a binary domesticated sexism, but nonetheless think femininity relates to a very narrow time in history’s view of domesticity and femininity. It’s a performative contradiction.

The essay suggests that there should be compensation for all the extra work that queer people do that is not caught up in the creation of surplus value for capitalists, like emotional labor and nurturing actions. Wouldn’t it be beneficial to call nurturing and mutual aid a human action, instead of further stigmatizing and entrenching rigid gender boundaries that make one think they need to repress their emotions to perform as a man or diminish their needs for the sake of others to perform as a woman? That’s an ass backwards view of gender, and gender itself is an identity which is formed under capitalism. It would be better to reject it for a view that does not even have a work/play divide. In Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman shows that work and play are a false dichotomy, a dichotomy that goes unaddressed by essay 5 of Transgender Marxism. It would instead claim emotional labor for “femmes” and reify gender essentialism amidst its claims to emancipation. Another performative contradiction.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of DSA Cleveland as a whole.

Sources/Further Reading:

• Transgender Marxism
• Perlman, Fredy. Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
• Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit
• Gilles, Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus

The post Critique of Transgender Marxism, Essay 5 appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America.

By Anthony D., Diane R., Ashley H., Dave N.

Compared to liberals and progressives, socialists have a unique perspective about the purpose of electoral politics and winning elected office. We understand that the mass social change we want cannot be accomplished unless millions of ordinary people are moved to fight for their own liberation in the class war against bosses and billionaires. To that end, the socialists we elect have a historic role to play in bringing this about by operating primarily as organizers who bring workers into the struggle alongside them.

Within the modern left, most electoral endorsements have been viewed strictly as a commitment to support candidates throughout their campaign: to fundraise, build up their communications infrastructure, and develop a field program to knock thousands of doors and talk to voters. If our endorsed candidates win, the level of support we offered during the campaign immediately drops off after Election Day and we move on to the next campaign. Very rarely, if ever, do we devise a plan during the endorsement process for how they will operate once in office and what they should prioritize. We send them off on their own into completely hostile legislatures designed and controlled by two political parties completely beholden to capital and hope that they alone can beg and bargain for reforms on behalf of the working class.

Over the last half century this individualistic approach has ultimately been unsuccessful in winning gains for the working class or in getting our class organized to fight. As DSA becomes more adept at winning elections in the vacuum created by a pro-genocide Democratic Party, our modern task as socialists is to think of Election Day as a checkpoint rather than as the finish line. In practice, this means orienting our endorsed candidates and elected officials towards the primary goals of making more socialists, building socialist organization, and leading as spokespersons of our independent party.

At the 2023 Metro Detroit DSA Membership Convention, our chapter’s highest decision-making body, members voted to take the first steps in this direction by launching the Socialists in Office Committee (SIOC) as a body in which elected chapter leadership would coordinate our organizing work with our endorsed elected officials, also known as Socialists in Office (SIOs). The resolution and amendment we passed called for an organizing-focused purpose and vision for the SIOC that prioritized creating our own party-like infrastructure so we could recruit and train socialist candidates from within our own ranks, who would think of themselves primarily as organizers of the working class, rather than purely as legislators. It was also a move towards building a working-class movement outside of electoral work by using our SIOs’ offices to reach, educate, and organize their constituents into class struggle and self-activity. Unfortunately, very little has been done to see this through since then.

At our 2025 Convention, members passed an amendment to the SIO Committee consensus resolution that created a unique and experimental ‘Geographic Working Group’ as a space for rank-and-file DSA members residing within State Representative Dylan Wegela and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s overlapping districts to regularly meet with and organize alongside them. Our SIOs are surrounded on a daily basis by politicians ranging from corporate Democrats to fascist Republicans who serve the same ruling class, so we imagined this group as the socialist antidote and support system. The idea was to experiment with a new concept of how to operate in office and carve a path towards our political independence. The amendment included the clause below, which initiated both this article and a verbal summary of it given by group members at the December 2025 General Meeting.

The Geographic Working Group will issue a report at both the six month (December 2025) and twelve month (June 2026) mark to:

• provide an update on progress towards our goals and explain any roadblocks to accomplishing them
• offer an analysis and critique to consider whether it should be replicated by future similar bodies or other SIO Committees around the country
• normalize open reporting on the progress of this and other unique experiments in the chapter — all of which can be expected to have misses and fails, which are acceptable so long as the lessons learned are defined and shared with membership similar to past electoral campaigns

Since Dylan Wegela was endorsed by the chapter while in office in 2024, he has been requesting help to launch bottom-up organizing projects in his district with support from Metro Detroit DSA members. Calling back to his experience of leading rank-and-file Arizona public school teachers in a statewide strike in 2018, this approach is meant to bring his constituents into permanent mobilization beyond a typical re-election campaign cycle. The idea was to put them in touch with socialist organizers and strategy, building towards a long-lasting base for socialist politics and worker self-organization in his district. Because of his limited staff capacity, this vision needed help from DSA members.

Dylan’s predominantly working class district (Garden City, Westland, Inkster, Romulus) is geographically distant from the main concentration of where chapter members live and is a 30–40-minute drive from Detroit and Hamtramck, the city where we hold our monthly General Meetings. In 2022, when the Electoral Committee declined to move Dylan’s endorsement request forward, to instead focus on Rashida, one of the main reasons was that just five dues-paying members lived in his district. Since membership bumps in response to both Trump’s re-election and Zohran’s primary win as well as intentional recruitment by both Dylan and this group, there are now 40 dues-paying members in his district.

We believed that if we did the work to create a regular, local, in-person meeting space within Dylan’s district and conducted careful outreach and onboarding, that many of the new members in the district would be more likely to show up and organize with a group located closer to them. Texting through the list of members in Dylan’s district produced around 10–15 onboarding calls. Almost everyone we talked to expressed some amount of demoralization over Trump’s reelection and a desire to build more local connections with socialists. Many felt compelled to finally get active because of Zohran’s primary victory in June. Throughout our meetings, we’ve also heard:

• Folks have been more likely to participate in DSA through this group since it’s very close to them and they get to meet their socialist neighbors. The group offers DSA members a way to connect with their neighbors and talk about shared concerns. The smaller group setting has been an easier way to interact with each other and start to build community and social connections.
• Folks have come into DSA already socialist-leaning and gone to their first DSA meeting but were overwhelmed with how much was going on. This group felt like an easier point of engagement with DSA.
• The group has felt like a welcoming space for DSA members to bring their friends and significant others.

As of the December 2025 General Meeting, the group has met eight times with an average attendance of around 12 people, usually composed of DSA members, non-DSA members brought along by members, and constituents that Dylan recruits through door-knocking, social media, or coffee hours. We meet in person every two weeks, and the Signal group chat that people are invited to after attending a meeting is at 33 members. Only six of those members had participated in DSA prior to joining this group and three people have been moved to join DSA through participation in it. Dylan joins every meeting, calling the group “a refreshing reminder that none of us are in the struggle alone,” and says, “We’re seeking to answer an essential question for our movement: Now that we hold office, how do we use it to organize the working class and grow our mass movement?”

The group’s meetings run for two hours and start with someone reiterating our political purpose (Dylan and Rashida need a mass movement behind them and this group can help develop socialist organizers and potential future socialist candidates to make that happen) and experimental concept (this is how SIOs should use their elected office). Each attendee then introduces themselves and shares why they’re a socialist or what brought them to the meeting, followed by a 30-minute political discussion based on a reading (distributed in advance) on basic socialist theory, organizational democracy, or electoral organizing strategy. These political discussions are based around easy-to-read, short Jacobin articles and have acted as a way to onboard new members and non-members alike who are new to socialism and organizing. They’ve also allowed us to talk about the broader goals of socialist organizing and our theory of social change beyond just supporting our SIOs.

We spend the rest of our meetings working on organizing plans, as a means to develop group members who have never organized into experienced leaders. Our projects are in various stages and led by different members:

• Collected signatures for the Michigan For The Many campaign, the three chapter-endorsed statewide ballot initiatives, including at the October No Kings rally in Livonia and the November Santa Land parade in Westland. Notably, none of the nonprofits leading the ballot initiatives had established a presence in this area. Signature collection at events has been used as a conversation opener to talk to people about socialism and DSA, give them one of our DSA palm cards, and try to recruit to our group.
• Started power mapping of Dylan’s district so we can learn about local political dynamics, as a counter to the typical “insider politics” preferred by establishment political operatives.
• Launched a public donation drive in response to the government shutdown and SNAP benefit suspension, to funnel donations to local food pantries.
• Planned a group budget for the year to fund food, drinks, and a private meeting space. The budget allows more transparency to the chapter for our plans and helped us to deliberate on our priorities, like meeting in person, every two weeks, at a quiet, private space with plenty of room to expand, and offering food to entice more folks to attend.
• Organizing tenants at a 300-unit apartment complex in Inkster. This was initiated by Dylan, with a town hall attended by 50 tenants, after he learned many of them were living in really bad conditions and did outreach to the whole building by mailing them surveys about it paid for with office funds. Organizing is temporarily on hold, due to political dynamics with Inkster City Council members who collaborated with Dylan on the event. They preferred to wait until the spring to do an outdoor community engagement event before building the tenant organizing group.
• Building towards a public event led by Dylan, Rashida, and Westland/Wayne and Dearborn teachers as a way to facilitate communication among multiple teacher unions and help DSA members in those unions to organize with their coworkers. SIOs, public school teachers, and local DSA members organizing together are some of the key components towards the long-term goal of establishing a local socialist political machine.

Group members have shared responsibilities for running the meetings, with some members facilitating our political discussion by preparing discussion questions beforehand and others taking turns to take notes and chair. Distributing the work teaches through experience, including experience in making group democratic decisions.

Diane, from Romulus, says the group is “investing our time and efforts directly in the communities we live in, building our grassroots movement while building our DSA chapter as a whole.” In October, Diane spent 19 days in the hospital. “This group stepped up to support me in my recovery, creating a GoFundMe. This is community in action,” said Diane, adding, “Being a part of this group made me see how change can take place in my own community and I have discovered my own voice in creating the changes I hope to see.”

We plan to continue expanding this group as a training ground to create more socialist organizers in an area where our chapter has not previously had an established presence. For workers to take over and transform society, we need to be everywhere we can to produce more organizers and force the hand of capital in legislatures and workplaces. Socialist organizers developed through this group can confidently go out into their neighborhoods, unions, and workplaces and lead other workers.

Socialist in Office: Training New Socialist Organizers in Dylan Wegela’s District was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Atlanta DSA is proud to once again endorse our comrade Gabriel Sanchez for re-election to the Georgia State House, representing District 42. 

In 2024, we made history by electing Representative Sanchez, the first Democratic Socialist in Georgia’s State House, on a platform of housing, healthcare, and an economy that works for all of us. Now, he’s running for re-election in 2026 to continue to fight for working families, stand up to fascism, and build a better Georgia for all. Atlanta DSA is thrilled to back our comrade once again.

Gabriel has been an active member of Atlanta DSA since 2019 and has spent years supporting striking workers on picket lines, organizing to Stop Cop City, campaigning for abortion rights, and advocating for a Free Palestine. During his first term, Gabriel continued fighting for working Georgians in the State House with support from a staff made up of DSA members. He introduced bills to raise the minimum wage to $20 and end corporate ownership of Georgia homes, voted to eliminate subminimum wages for disabled workers and against tax cuts for the wealthy, and authored and held a hearing for a bill to end rental price fixing via AI software. Gabriel also brought his many years of experience as a community organizer into his first term. Over the past year, he has hosted in-district mutual aid events in partnership with Atlanta DSA, as well as town halls and meet and greets to speak directly with residents about the pressing issues they’re facing right now. Our chapter is extremely proud of the work Representative Sanchez has done, and we look forward to continuing to build a Georgia for all alongside him.

As a proud Democratic Socialist, Gabriel is refusing money from corporations or their PACs. Just like last time, we’re running a grassroots campaign of, by, and for working people, and we need your help to win this election. Donate now at SanchezForGeorgia.com 

In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Atlanta DSA knocked thousands of doors in District 42 to talk directly to voters about Gabriel’s campaign for housing, healthcare, and an economy for all. We’re planning to do the same next year. Sign up now to volunteer with our campaign at atldsa.org/Volunteer4Gabriel and stay tuned for info about a kickoff canvass in the new year. Let’s re-elect Representative Gabriel Sanchez!

There are several ballot initiatives circulating petitions this cycle. The members of the GRDSA are proud to endorse Invest in MI Kids, MOP Up Michigan, and Rank MI Vote. If successful, these initiatives would mean real change for Michiganders.

We are circulating petitions! Our goal is to contribute 1,000 collected signatures for the Invest in MI Kids and MOP Up Michigan campaigns. If you are interested in volunteering, please fill out this form.

Invest in MI Kids – investinmikids.org

We support this ballot initiative because every student deserves access to excellent public education. This excellence requires proper facilities, educational material, and well-paid teachers. To fund these vital elements of education, this initiative would create a 5% fair share surcharge on income over $500K ($1M filing jointly) to be deposited in the State School Aid Fund. It will also add a requirement that money from the School Aid Fund be spent exclusively on local school districts.

MOP Up Michigan – mopupmichigan.org

MOP = Money Out of Politics

We deserve fair utilities, a clean environment, and honest elections. But as our bills continue to grow, utility companies use political contributions to avoid accountability and slow down reform. This ballot initiative would reign in corporate control of government by prohibiting companies with over $250,000 in government contracts from making campaign contributions. Additionally, the initiative introduces finance laws which would require donor information to be made more clear in political communications.

Rank MI Vote – rankmivote.org

NOTE: The Rank MI Vote campaign has suspended signature gathering for their 2026 statewide campaign.

We believe every voter should feel comfortable voting for their best option, rather than the better of two bad options. Rank choice voting is an alternative voting system where the voter ranks up to five candidates for each office, as opposed to picking one option. This allows the voter to rank their favorite candidate first, even if they aren’t likely to win, before ranking their second, third, etc. Voters may still vote for just one candidate or leave that office/section blank. If the votes are tallied and no candidate has enough votes to win, candidates with less votes are eliminated and back up choices are used until one candidate wins.

Dishonorable Mention

There are a few bad petitions circulating as well. There are some that would require IDs to vote and one to cut taxes, Ax MI Tax. Decline to sign these regressive initiatives.

The post GRDSA for the Many – We support money out of politics, funding education, and rank choice voting! appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.

Happy belated Thanksgiving, and apologies for the tardy newsletter. Remember that it’s now flu season, so make sure that your immunizations are up to date (or you too might fall behind on your work!).

The legislative season is around the corner, and legislators are dealing with the fallout from federal budget cuts, with which come an intensification of the ever-present calls for austerity. This year, some of our most vulnerable friends and neighbors were thrown on the street and left without food. GMDSA believes not just that everyone deserves housing and food, but that the money exists — what we need is the political will. That’s why GMDSA’s second annual convention voted to make Tax the Rich our priority campaign for 2026. 

Our members also voted on a new slate of officers and committee chairs. Congratulations in particular to Will Fritch, our new East Branch Co-Chair, and Nana Brownell, who will be returning to that same role for West Branch. 

Upcoming Events

• GMDSA is sponsoring “For Ukrainian Self-Determination: Building International Working Class Solidarity,” featuring our very own Sen. Tanya Vyhovsky and Traven Leyshon. Discussion begins December 15th at 5pm at Migrant Justice (179 S. Winooski Ave., Burlington) .

• Talk about your job and learn about shop-floor organizing from peers at Workers' Circle (co-hosted by the Green Mountain IWW) on the second and fourth Wednesdays of each month. The next one is at 6pm and is also at Migrant Justice on December 10th.

GMDSA Meetings 

• Labor Committee meets December 8 at 6pm 

• Membership Committee meets December 8 at 7pm

• Electoral Committee meets December 9 at 6pm

• Communications Committee meets December 

• General Meeting on December 20th (details TBA; check our calendar)

TState News

• Burlington’s democratic, member-run, GMDSA-sponsored cinema is now open for business. Congrats to Partizanfilm on its successful opening!