The United States is undergoing a political upheaval that threatens to overturn nearly a century of hard-fought gains achieved by organized labor and the civil rights movement. U.S. foreign policy is actively constructed to make the world a more dangerous and brutal place, with support for militarization in Europe and genocide in Palestine. At home, civil liberties are eroding as union members are abducted for political speech and academic institutions are bullied into submission. The shocks emanating from our government’s restructuring of economic and social policy threaten to undermine the purchasing power and savings of millions of workers.

The most concerning aspect of this upheaval is the absence of a programmatically organized left-wing political force capable of intervening at the national level. This vacuum poses a severe threat not just to Americans but to the lives of billions of people around the world. The U.S. left needs to constitute itself into a political organization that combines a defense of domestic social spending and democratic rights with an internationalist vision of ending war, fighting climate change, and reducing inequality within and between countries. This requires building an organization around a political program with specific and quantifiable short, medium, and long-term objectives. The flip side of the crisis we face is an increase in the number of people willing to consider political alternatives to the status quo. Rather than allow liberals to claim the mantle of opposition to a regime they laid the foundations for, socialists must win the leading role in the fight against international far-right authoritarianism.

Our program begins from an analysis of the basic principles of the US political system, which leads to three observations.

The first observation is that under the U.S. political system, it is necessary to acquire power at the federal level to have major influence on national political discourse and legislative priorities. This means it is insufficient to contest local elections in isolation from a broader plan to leverage local support into a base for federal politics. Using local and state governance alone, for example, arms sales to Israel cannot be directly blocked, outside of creative approaches such as the Mask off Maersk campaign.

The second observation is that federal politics is exorbitantly expensive (a Congressional run costs between $2-3M) and restrictive, and this results in a domination of politics at this scale by well-funded political factions, such as the fossil fuel lobby, the pharmaceutical lobby, and the pro-war lobby. In order to participate meaningfully in the U.S. political process and defeat these lobbies, socialists must constitute themselves into a party that can raise funds to compete in costly elections and build networks that can turn out votes. We believe DSA is that party.

The third observation is that left-wing policies taken individually have the potential to be extremely popular almost everywhere in the United States. Relatively conservative state electorates have a history of approving changes via ballot measures, such as minimum wage increases and paid sick leave. Socialists have also demonstrated an ability to win legislative changes at the local level that meaningfully reconfigure state institutions and that could enable long-term base-building – with a plan to translate local power into federal power.

A clear example of this is the campaign to win rent control in Pasadena, which mobilized dozens of activists around electoral action that successfully modified the constitution of Pasadena to crack down on landlords through a new state institution: a citywide rent board. Following the win, activists have been able to canvass tenants to compel landlords to follow the law and reverse rent increases. Many of the leaders from this campaign went on to organize the first simultaneous unionization of graduate student workers and postdoctoral fellows at Caltech.

In order to build federal power, we must overcome the U.S.’s restrictive electoral system with a base built up through local campaigns, emphasizing a coherent program across the country. Socialists in DSA should use local priority campaigns leading into 2026 to build a voter and fundraising base. These campaigns will also be used to cultivate leaders who can then be selected by the NPC to run as DSA cadre on a Congressional slate in 2028.

In order to be effective, DSA must narrow down the priority campaigns it uses as avenues for this project. These should be: Medicare for All, bringing down the cost of living, unions for all, ending political corruption, and ending endless wars. These five categories represent areas where specific blueprints for successful local organizing exist (such rent control, labor law reform, and local arms embargo campaigns). While there are many more tasks that must be accomplished (addressing the climate crisis, for example), it is important to narrow down DSA’s priorities for the purpose of a power-building program. Our task is to leverage concrete and meaningful wins into accumulating the kind of base and federal political power that is necessary to make progress on all of our core ambitions, such as an international Green New Deal.

Leading into the 2026 elections, local chapters would select one of these five possible priority campaign routes and receive the technical assistance and expertise necessary to win ballot measures or mount pressure campaigns related to those priorities. In the process of running those campaigns, DSA would build voter lists and construct fundraising apparatuses while also developing DSA member-leaders who could run for Congress in 2028. A coordinated national effort by our party would then be initiated to elect these candidates to Congress in winnable, strategic districts.

Once elected, this left-wing faction would exert influence within the political process to press for reforms that reduce barriers to labor and electoral organizing for socialists. They would also serve as the clear voice of DSA in national politics, allowing us to inject our perspective into mainstream discourse.

Building a bloc in Congress to force political change federally is not only critical, but possible. In the 1980s, former United Farm Worker organizers launched the Neighbor to Neighbor campaign, a coordinated, targeted effort to build support for candidates who would vote against military aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. This effort mobilized 70,000 people in key Congressional races and was ultimately successful, leading in 1988 to a 219-211 vote to cut off military aid to the Contras. Our party can fight to establish a block to do the same for military aid to Israel today.

A party that has successfully fought for rent control and labor law reform in dozens of cities. A party with over 300,000 dues paying members. A party with five DSA members in Congress – people like* Zohran Mamdani (NYC-DSA), Rafael Jaime (DSA-LA), Kelsea Bond (Atlanta DSA), Jake Ephros (NJ DSA) – who are highly committed to and enmeshed within its organizational apparatus. A principled socialist party that is prepared to exert meaningful pressure on and work with a progressive presidential administration government to force it to enact major changes to domestic and foreign policy, for an expansive welfare state and an end to U.S. militarism.

*None of these leaders are running for Congress right now, but are all examples of the kinds of leaders DSA could run in the future.