A Socialist Organizer’s Guide to 2026

A month-by-month guide to the coming year — the big dates in elections, union fights, and international events that can be anticipated ahead of time.

Joseph Beuys’s Fahne (Flag) at the Lenbachaus in Munich. (Photo by Neal)

This is a month-by-month guide to the big fights — electoral, labor,¹ international — that we can anticipate ahead of time in 2026. I hope it will be useful for Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leaders, union organizers, and movement activists thinking about how to make the most of the next twelve months.

Of course, politics is much much more than elections and union contract campaigns. We don’t know what might happen in Donald Trump’s threatened war with Venezuela or in the ongoing fight over tariffs. Israel has already violated the ceasefire in Gaza and has kept up a lower-profile terror campaign there, but that could escalate further. The battle to win the year ahead, and to put MAGA and Trump on the defensive, will be waged in countless struggles, both in those we can anticipate and in those we can’t.

Month-by-Month Guide

January

New York City’s new socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani will be inaugurated on January 1, with a major block party planned to celebrate the occasion.

When Congress resumes in January, it’ll be plunged right back into the fight about the future of health insurance and the subsidies provided to buy Obamacare plans. Republicans are on the defensive because the end of the subsidies means a major increase in premiums for millions — including a disproportionate share of residents represented by Republicans. The ongoing controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein documents shows no sign of abating either. The drip-drip stream of revelations about Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s attempts to stonewall the release of more documents won’t help tamp down on interest. Impossible to say what’s in the documents to come, but it’s conceivable this could envelop the administration in 2026. By the end of the month, we’ll know whether the federal government will shut down again as well — the government’s funding runs out once more on January 30.

Ongoing and potential labor fights:

• First contract battles continue at Starbucks and Amazon’s Staten Island fulfillment center, as does the fight for a contract for 4,300 United Auto Workers (UAW) at a Volkswagen Tennessee plant.

• Twenty thousand nurses at many of NYC’s private hospitals could go out on strike — 97 percent of workers voting authorized a strike a few days ago. Meanwhile, negotiations for 50,000 Mail Handlers continue.

• The contract expires for 29,000 University of California’s UAW academic workers. In their fight with the university system’s administration, they will join about 12,000 other UC system workers already bargaining for a first contract.

February

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for 30,000 Steelworkers at oil refineries across the country and 30,000 Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in New England. The first of several contracts for AT&T workers also expires in February (covering about 9,000 workers; the others cover about 7,000 workers and expire in April).

March

In March, activists from around the world will assemble in Porto Alegre in Brazil for the first International Anti-Fascist Conference.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for about 20,000 Food and Commercial Workers in Arizona and for 17,000 school bus drivers and other school workers covered by the Teamsters.

April

Hungary will hold a parliamentary election. For the last fifteen years, the right-winger Viktor Orbán has ruled over Hungary and established a semiauthoritarian regime there. It is a prototype for far-right parties all over the world, including the Republican Party here in the United States. But in 2026, Orbán faces a serious challenge, and polls suggest his party may lose to a new center-right competitor. If the far right falls in Hungary, it would be a setback for their international counterparts.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for 50,000 New York state public sector workers and 34,000 building workers in New York City represented by Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 32BJ.

May

In 2022, Gustavo Petro became the first left-wing president of Colombia in the history of the country. The next presidential elections will be held this month. Petro has been a prominent spokesperson for international solidarity and a strong critic of Israel and US imperialism, but much of his domestic agenda has been stalled by the opposition majority in Congress. Will Colombia join the wave of Latin American countries moving rightward?

Potential labor fights:

• A contract for 200,000 Letter Carriers expires, as do contracts for 20,000 grocery workers in Ohio, 16,000 National Nurses United (NNU) Veterans Affairs health care workers, thousands of members of the Writers Guild of America, and one thousand graduate students at Brown. Thousands of higher ed workers in Oregon’s public university system also have contract expiration dates in June.

June

There will be big primary fights in Maine and New York this month. In Maine, the populist oyster farmer Graham Platner is running against the state’s governor, Janet Mills, for the Democratic nomination for senator. Mills is the favorite of the national party establishment, while Platner is backed by Bernie Sanders and the UAW.

New York’s primary later in the month will pit the growing left in New York City against the conservative wing of the party, which is playing defense in a number of congressional and state legislative races. Whether or not there is a strong primary challenge to New York’s conservative Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, will be an important factor in the inevitable fight between the state government and the incoming Mamdani administration.

The UAW will meet for its national convention, and candidates for the union’s leadership will be nominated. The Teamsters will also hold their national convention. And Labor Notes will hold its biennial conference of thousands of rank-and-file workers in Chicago.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for 96,000 SEIU public sector workers in California, 14,000 UFCW members in Michigan, and 12,000 Electrical Workers in Los Angeles.

July

Prediction: the 250th birthday of the United States will be a subject of much political debate.

Potential labor fights:

• A contract for thousands of hotel workers in New York City expires.

August

Major US Senate primaries between the progressive left and the conservative centrist wing of the party continue in August in two big tests. Can Medicare for All–backer, Bernie 2020 activist, and doctor Abdul El-Sayed beat the centrist wing’s candidate, Congressmember Haley Stevens? A similar fight between a left-leaning progressive and an establishment Democrat will also happen in Minnesota. If the left progressive wing of the party can capture Minnesota, Michigan, and Maine, it’ll have a strong beachhead in the Senate for the first time.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for about 25,000 NNU members at Kaiser in California, for 20,000 Verizon workers in the Northeast, and for 6,000 graduate students at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

September

The midterm election campaign for Congress and state governments will go into full swing. Elections for the leadership of the UAW will also take place, with President Shawn Fain up for reelection.

Sweden will hold a parliamentary election in September; the current center-right government is backed by the far-right Swedish Democrats. Speaking of Scandinavia, Denmark will also hold an election this year, although the exact date is to be determined. Both are small countries but with potentially significant results since they represent two different ways of handling the populist far right. The Swedish election will test whether the center right’s alliance with the far right will diminish support for the latter. Current opinion polls suggest there will be a small but significant swing left but very little change in support for the far right itself. In Denmark, the Social Democrats have tried to counter the right by adopting a more restrictive attitude toward immigration. Both the parties to the left of the Social Democrats and the far right seem to have gained ground since the last elections in 2022.

Potential labor fights:

• Contracts expire for 80,000 health care workers with SEIU in New York and for 25,000 Steelworkers based mostly in Midwestern states.

October

Ballots will go out for the elections for president of the Teamsters, with counting happening in November. Incumbent president Sean O’Brien is running for reelection. His term has been especially controversial since his friendly overtures to Trump in the last two years.

Brazil and Israel hold general elections this month. Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will run for reelection and is the front-runner in polling, but he’ll need to assemble a majority to win (Brazil uses a top-two runoff system if no candidate gets a majority). A win for the Workers’ Party in the presidential election and a strong showing by the parties of the left in elections to Congress would secure Brazil as a bulwark against the rising Latin American right. In Israel, most polls suggest neither the fascist coalition under Benjamin Netanyahu nor the official opposition will get enough seats to have a majority. But Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, led by his Likud party, remains very popular.

Potential labor fights:

• The contract expires for 17,000 Boeing workers in Seattle.

November

The midterm elections for Congress and for state governments will be held. The hopes of everyone opposed to MAGA will ride on a strong showing for Democrats. Expectations that such a blue wave is in the offing are growing, but there is one hard rule in American politics: never trust the Democrats to run a strong campaign. Split between its centrist and progressive left wings, Democrats habitually run vacuous election campaigns that try to be all things to all people and inspire no one as a result.

There’s no sign that 2026 will be different, but growing popular opposition to Trump might be enough to defeat the GOP anyway in the House and in state races. Democrats will have a much harder time retaking Congress’s upper house, where decades of declining support for the party in rural America has finally resulted in a Senate map where Democrats are almost completely uncompetitive in a majority of states. That ensures that Democrats’ path to retake the Senate — barring a major change — will always be very narrow.

Potential labor fights:

• The contract for 300,000 municipal employees in New York City expires. With a new socialist mayor, the negotiation of a new contract for the city’s public sector workers could be an important fight that could set the terms for the mayor’s relationship with unions going forward.

December

Probable presidential candidates for both parties will start to emerge after the midterm elections, as the presidential election, still technically two years away, really gets underway.

Potential labor fights:

• The contract covering baseball players expires.

1. I cribbed the labor fights (ongoing and potential) to watch in 2026 from Keith Brower Brown and Natascha Elena Uhlmann’s watch list published by Labor Notes. I just mention potential contract fights involving more than 10,000 workers or others that seem particularly notable. Keith and Natascha give a much more extensive treatment of where these fights will occur and what they’ll be fighting over; check their piece out.