The Junior Partner Strategy

Almost a decade after launching an electoral rebellion inside the Democratic Party, the US left’s electoral arm increasingly plays the role of a junior partner to party leaders.

Bernie Sanders meets with Joe Biden in 2023. (Official White House Photo / Wikimedia Commons)

This is part of a series of articles about socialist electoral strategy and party building. The first article is “Why Do Socialists Run as Democrats?” This is the second article. The third article is “The Real Bernie Model.”

Defenders of the electoral tactic of running socialists in Democratic Party primaries argue that doing so is a means to an end that few on the left would object to: building a strong, independent socialist force in electoral politics. Contesting Democratic Party primaries is only a tactic — these defenders claim — forced on the left by the fact that the US has winner-take-all elections and that it’s hard to get an independent ballot line in general elections. It’s these “rules-based” or technical justifications for the use of Democratic Party primaries that I rebutted last week.

At the end of my piece, I teased two related reasons that I think really get to the heart of the left’s focus on Democratic Party primaries: 1) the desire to elect left-wing candidates as soon as possible and 2) the desire to pass meaningful legislative reforms in the near future. (In one response to my article on Twitter, a critic summed up his explanation for why socialists run on the Democratic line: “Actually it’s because they want to win.” I’m grateful to the critic for teeing up this article!)

These reasons share a common logic: that the left must enter into some kind of partnership with the existing Democratic Party, first relying on the Democratic base — which the party has constructed and maintained over decades — to win elections, and then relying on coaxing and persuading existing Democratic Party politicians to get the needed votes to pass social democratic reforms. I call this strategy the “junior partner strategy” because it involves the left, as very much the younger and weaker element, entering into a kind of partnership with a powerful force in US politics, the left’s “senior partner”: the established leadership of the Democratic Party.¹

Junior Partner in the Districts

One half of the junior partner strategy hinges on the ideas that socialists are not yet powerful enough to win contested general elections, and that electing leftists as soon as possible is key to being able to take effective political action. The argument goes like this: if you don’t win, your project won’t grow because your activists will desert you and you won’t attract new groups of people to your side. This laser focus on “winning” and winning as soon as possible (which crops up in other forms on the left too, including in the name given to one internal DSA tendency that defends the organization’s commitment to Democratic Party primary runs) justifies socialists running in Democratic primary elections.

Two facts are particularly important here. First, the US has a de facto two-round election system in which candidates first pass through a primary and then go on to a general election where, in most districts, one party dominates and can be fairly certain of electing its nominee with little trouble. Second, turnout in the “first-round” primaries in most of these districts is abysmally low. For example, in the 2018 election that elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, only about 30,000 people voted in the primary compared to about five times that number who voted in the general election (and many more just abstained). AOC won the party’s nomination with about 17,000 votes, meaning that by running in the Democratic primary she only needed to assemble a coalition of about 3 percent of all the eligible voters in the district to win.²

This set up makes Democratic Party primaries especially vulnerable to attack from the left, at least in districts that meet two criteria: the Democrats are comfortably entrenched, and there is a concentration of the left’s current base, which is mostly made up of millennials and Zoomers working in nonprofits, health care, the arts, tech, and the public sector. A well-organized faction (like DSA or, when it was more active, Justice Democrats) can walk into a primary in such a district and have a chance, even if it only has a relatively small number of activists and relatively little money. It can reasonably hope to talk to a substantial portion of the highly engaged voters needed to win the election in a very small primary electorate. The left’s opponents on the other hand, having grown complacent over years, have historically tended to have weak bases and low organizational capacity, giving the left’s scrappy operations a reasonable shot at coming out on top.

Once the primary is won, the general election is almost always uncontested. Democrats and independents aligned with the Democratic Party turn out to the general election and loyally vote for the candidate with a “D” next to their name, unaware — because the victorious left usually does not wage a general election campaign — of the politics of their new socialist representative. (AOC’s election was an exception on this count because of the intense national attention she received.) The candidate appears to be “blue” and that’s what matters; even though, to those really in the know, they are red.

As a means to an end — “winning” as quickly as possible — the strategy is elegant, and the formula has been repeated across the country with modest success (though in recent years, as establishment Democrats become more aware of the threat to their left, the left’s win rate has declined). The fact that the vast majority of people in the district are not in any meaningful sense organized for, mobilized behind, or in many cases even conscious of the radical politics of the new representative they’ve “chosen” is rarely discussed. It’s important to emphasize (and I’ll return to this in a future post) that as a consequence of their method of election, these newly minted socialist politicians make themselves indebted to the party whose loyal voters they borrowed to win the general election.

Junior Partner in the “Halls of Power”

Socialists — to their credit — are not just interested in winning elections. They are primarily concerned with serving (and hopefully organizing and empowering) their base. Even when the junior partner strategy helps socialists win elections, they are few in number in Congress, state legislatures, and city councils. They need a theory for what to do once they’re there.

The reigning theory on the left today for what comes next after election day is sometimes called the “inside-outside strategy.” Socialists can act as the left-wing flank of the Democratic Party and coax, prod, push, and persuade Democratic politicians to vote for social democratic reforms.

The left aspires to deploy a carrot-and-stick tactic for this operation. The stick is the threat of a primary challenge against Democrats reluctant to support the left’s reform program. The carrot is offering established politicians the hope of warmer relations with a well-organized party faction, possibly to head off future primary challenges or even to lend the left’s strength to an ambitious progressive’s future bid for higher office. Both left politicians and activists turned “grassroots lobbyists” are deployed to make the case to skeptical Democrats to their right that they should support the reform in question. Recent left-wing attempts to shape policy at the federal and state level follow this approach: from pushes by Bernie Sanders and the Squad to influence the failed Build Back Better Act to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Build Public Renewables bill at the New York state level.

Once again, however, the key is that the left enters the game very much as a junior partner — the smaller, weaker force seeking consent from the stronger senior for its plans. The temptation to sweeten the deal and offer more to the senior partner in return for supporting whatever the priority of the moment is is strong. A junior partner, by definition, must accept the senior’s terms on many questions. Sometimes this is even explicitly articulated as part of the task of “organizing our colleagues in the legislature” (an actual phrase I’ve heard used multiple times by multiple people to describe the Squad and DSA’s tasks in Congress, state houses, and city councils).

So Goes the Theory

Here’s how the two halves of the junior partner strategy are supposed to come together to build a stronger left (the “theory of change”): First, elect our people as fast as possible. Second, pass substantial redistributive reforms by putting a fire under Democratic politicians to our right via the threat of future primary challenges but also by “organizing our colleagues.” Third, once the reforms are passed, take credit for those reforms and make the case that the “left-wing difference” can explain why they were won. And then fourth, parlay that credit into winning a bigger base for our politics. Sooner or later, a virtuous circle will kick in: The more socialists elected, the greater our leverage to win reforms. The more reforms won, the bigger our base will grow. The bigger our base grows, the more socialists will be elected.

A virtuous circle in theory… but one that pays scant attention to the options available to the left’s senior partner in the Democratic Party to respond. In fact, the virtuous circle sketched here — that makes the junior partner strategy plausible — seems to imply that the left’s senior partner is too dumb, too weak, or too distracted to respond with countermoves of its own. And this is the challenge I want to turn to in a future piece in this series. A strategy that does not take into consideration how one’s opponents are likely to reply, and that does not assess the weaknesses in one’s own plans, is no strategy at all. So how have the left’s senior partner rivals replied? Moreover, is it really true that the path sketched out in the junior partner strategy is even the best or most plausible way to build a base and win reforms?

More on these questions soon. For now, let me know what you think of this review of the left’s dominant electoral strategy in the comments below.

1. I’m not implying any kind of moral judgment by using the phrase “junior partner.” Sometimes it is necessary for a group to be the junior partner to a stronger force that it shares common goals with. For example, the left played the part of a junior partner to the relatively more conservative labor leadership in the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s (the necessity, challenge, and shortcomings of this approach was ably described by Al Richmond in a chapter on the CIO in his memoir, A Long View From the Left, even though I don’t agree with all of his conclusions). I use the term in this case as a statement of fact about the balance of power in a partnership between “senior” establishment Democratic Party politicians and “junior” socialist dissidents inside the party. 

Often the relationship between socialists in office — in DC and Albany for example — and powerful Democrats is described in very similar “mentor/mentee” or “senior/junior” language by others who know those relationships from the inside. After Ilhan Omar won her primary election in 2018, for example, Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi called her weekly to give her advice. Omar’s staff would announce Pelosi’s calls affectionately by saying “Auntie Nancy’s calling.”

2. At the start of 2024, AOC’s congressional district included about 730,000 adults, of which about 80 percent or 584,000 were eligible to vote. Assuming that the size of the district was somewhat smaller in 2018: 17,000 / 550,000 = 3 percent.