Open Letter to Lower Manhattan DSA: The Electoral WG Needs a Strategy

I want to love my DSA branch, but they don’t represent me.

I’m a working-class artist and tech worker whose multiracial parents met working on a factory floor, like out of a Bruce Springsteen song. The tenets of DSA resonate with my entire life history. I live Manhattan. I’m thankful that there’s a DSA branch that purports to include my neighborhood. I’m glad that they have an electoral working group. My biggest frustration with this branch is that they seem to have no interest in working in my neighborhood.

I’ve run a canvassing and voter registration table and have canvassed with DSA for Bernie Sanders. We ran a table in my neighborhood, the Upper East Side. There was nothing but smugness and dismissiveness on the day of the table. There was a total lack of enthusiasm for running the table, unlike the many canvasses below 14th Street.

I understand the frustrations. Many of the stereotypes about the Upper East Side are true. But many are not, because there are many Upper East Sides. There are fixed-income disabled seniors who struggle to cover rent in their -controlled or -stabilized apartments. They’ve seen their friends and family have to move as one after another 4–5 story block is demolished to build a tower that will house nothing but a matrix of tax write-offs and pied-a-terres.

There are working-class families who want to send their kids to really-good-public schools up here and crowd into small apartments. There are people who have been here for generations. It’s not a transient neighborhood.

It’s also a part of the Lower Manhattan DSA branch’s “district”. If it’s going to be a part of it, if our 200-odd members are going to pay dues, then Lower Manhattan DSA needs to come up with a strategy to build power here.

I know from experience the antagonism within the political world here. But I also know that the tides are turning. The fact is that door-knocking in Manhattan isn’t what it is in Queens or Brooklyn. The same tactics might not work here. But that doesn’t mean that the area should be written off or ignored. Contempt for the area won’t get us any socialists in office. It’s incumbent upon the branch and the working group to come up with a strategy to deal with doing electoral work here.

Otherwise, if there’s going to be no effort made to have a presence or to represent the district, cut us off, stop taking our dues, and stop asking for us to be members. I would prefer another solution to two problems.

The Two Problems

The first is that Lower Manhattan needs to develop an electoral strategy that fits the district that they have rather than trying to retrofit what works in Brooklyn or Queens over here. Lower Manhattan has lots of working-class people, but not nearly the base that Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens have. That means we need a cross-class strategy. We also need a different mobilization strategy.

There also needs to be an overall strategy from within the leadership and chairs of the working group for setting up candidates to succeed.

The Process Needs Improvement

Just this week, a great candidate stepped in front of the group and was basically ignored. It resulted in a lot of wasted time and labor.

The WG leaders spend dozens of hours talking about their strategy and coming up with a questionnaire. The candidates then spend a day on that questionnaire. Then the WG spends countless hours going through each questionnaire, finding candidates that fit.

With the WG leaders spending hours talking to candidates, I would assume that if they chose only two candidates, they would believe in those candidates. I would think it would be incumbent upon the leadership of the working group that the candidates are shown as valuable, as great allies, as worthy of our time. I would think that the WG leadership would want to see their judgment validated and those two candidates moved on to at least the next step.

Yet after all of those hours of preparation and vetting, the leadership presented the two candidates as new, naked, carrying only the words in their presentation and any prior relationships they had into the room. For the many hours dedicated to the process, for the years of work in solidarity with DSA values, the male candidate wouldn’t commit to being a Democratic Socialist and this had some in the room suggesting he be disqualified for this.

The female candidate spent her time talking about a decade of relationships fighting for safe working conditions, for more union workspaces, and for police abolition. She was excited to run as a Democratic Socialist on the Upper East Side (a very challenging prospect that I know from experience). She honestly and earnestly told a room of Bernie supporters that she had supported Elizabeth Warren and I heard someone sum up this woman as “an airdropped Warren Supporter”. Another person said she probably came to DSA only after the many wins in the June 23 primary. No one from the WG leadership corrected that the final results of those primaries didn’t come until after the applications were sent out.

There was even an argument made by leadership from a Democratic club that rivals her own district club, saying, falsely, that her activism and values are no different than the favored candidate from the speaker’s own club.

A great female candidate with strong connections to labor unions was written off because of bad faith arguments. The leadership failed to contextualize her, contextualize the stakes of the election, and why they’ve presented her to us. We will never know the reason the candidate was brought in front of the group beyond her own words and what people said about her.

There’s one caveat here. There were reading materials sent out. But as a former school teacher and college professor, you can’t expect everyone to have done the reading. The kinds of conversation that surrounded the female candidate’s endorsement showed that the reading wasn’t done. There were lots of superficial questions asked that have little to do with socialist representation in the district and sounded more like a room of men applying a definition of socialism to a female candidate and seeing if they would stumble.

The two city council districts, 1 and 5, were talked about as if they’re worlds apart. Council District 1 includes Chinatown and LES but also TriBeCa, Washington Square, and SoHo. it includes about 220 DSA members. District 5 consists of 160 DSA members. That’s not a huge deficit and it’s one that could be hugely improved on over the course of an election.

What I want to see:

I’ve seen Democratic clubs treat challengers the same way we treat candidates while deferring to our favorite elected socialists without question or criticism. However, their skepticism comes often because there is no filtering process before the candidate comes to the group for a vote. If we’re going to filter candidates through a long questionnaire and then an interview process, they should be considered to have value and that value should be shared with the group during their candidate presentations.

We should be better than a Democratic club. Why bring candidates in and subject them to ambivalence or antagonism? If we trust our leadership has brought us someone good, we can talk about their merits. If we don’t know anything about them, we risk making impactful electoral decisions on baseless claims and feelings.

If we’re going to disqualify any candidate because they didn’t vote for Bernie Sanders or don’t call themselves a Democratic Socialist, say that upfront. If the leadership determined that those weren’t valid factors for disqualification, they should say that too.

If we were never going to find a way to mobilize for the Upper East Side, then why did we consider the female candidate from District 5? Should people who live in this area consider finding a socialist candidate endorsed by DSA a lost cause? If so, it should be removed from being considered a part of Lower Manhattan DSA.

Now, I would prefer to see the electoral working group create a strategy that deals with all of Manhattan. I want to see the working group leadership take leadership roles when presenting candidates, i.e. why did you bring them to us? What is their value and what do you base that on? Otherwise, we are no better than any other under-informed voter, basing our vote on feeling rather than fact.

If the WG leadership is going to bring us a candidate, they should, as the first act of good faith, present them as an ally who they want to help succeed. And before bringing a candidate from a challenging neighborhood to work in, come up with solutions for that challenge. Because if we’re going to look at the candidate and weigh the challenges of working in their neighborhood against our lack of a strategy, we shouldn’t waste the candidate’s time.