Why Do Socialists Run as Democrats?

The spoiler effect and restrictive ballot-access laws are often cited as reasons why socialists in the US must run electoral campaigns in Democratic primaries. But neither explanation really holds up.

A Democratic Party HQ in Chicago (Eric Allix Rogers / Flickr)

This is part of a series of articles about socialist electoral strategy and party building. This is the first article. The second article is “The Junior Partner Strategy.” The third article is “The Real Bernie Model.”

Why do Democratic Socialists of America members (and other left-leaning activists) run as Democrats in partisan legislative elections?

Over the years, two arguments have often been made by proponents of the strategy. First, that independent DSA candidates would spoil general elections and help elect right-wing Republicans. And second, that ballot-access laws in the United States are too repressive and make independent races too onerous to do. But neither case really holds up as a justification for DSA’s continued participation in the Democratic Party.

There is, however, a quite reasonable argument for hitching DSA’s wagon to the Democrats — one I don’t agree with, but that makes a good deal of sense on its own terms. This has to do with two claims. First, that DSA would not have a large enough base of its own to elect candidates and needs Democratic Party voters who loyally “vote blue no matter who” to win in general elections. And second, that winning social democratic reforms in the US will require cooperating and making compromises with the existing Democratic Party, and cooperating with the party leadership from “within the tent” is the best way to do that. Both positions are actually closely related and share a common orientation. I don’t agree with it, but to paraphrase the Big Lebowski: say what you will about that orientation, at least it’s an argument. I will sketch out that argument in a future article.

The Specter of the Spoiler Effect

The logic is pretty simple here. Because the United States does not have a system of proportional representation or ranked-choice elections for most legislative offices, elections are decided by the candidate with the most votes — not necessarily the candidate with 50 percent + 1 support. A general election for a seat in Congress, a state legislature, or a city council that pitted a socialist candidate against a Democrat and a Republican would risk splitting the left vote and electing the Republican.

The argument has a surface plausibility as an explanation for why DSA is right to focus on Democratic primaries, but runs into a serious hitch: because of the dramatic sorting of the US electorate by geography, most of the districts where DSA candidates run would never plausibly elect a Republican. In general elections in these districts, the Democratic nominee has historically won more than two-thirds of the vote, and frequently there’s not even a Republican candidate on the ballot. In a district where the Democrat wins 67 percent or more of the vote, there’s no possibility of “splitting the vote” and risking the election of a Republican. This is because, even in the very unlikely scenario where that 67 percent were split precisely down the middle between a Democrat (33.5 percent) and a socialist (33.5 percent), both candidates would still come out ahead of a Republican (33 percent). 

In 2022, by my count, there were more than eighty congressional districts where Democrats took home over two-thirds of the vote. The number of state-legislative and city-council districts where this is true is much larger. There were also another eighty-plus congressional districts where Republicans took home more than two-thirds and Democrats stood no real chance of winning, so a socialist could also run there without playing the spoiler.

Given this, I don’t think it is compelling to argue that DSA must run socialists in Democratic Party primaries — at least in most places where DSA is strong — to avoid spoiling general elections.

Notably, in his influential piece “A Blueprint for a New Party” in Jacobin back in 2016, Seth Ackerman likewise downplayed the barriers presented by the spoiler effect for independent electoral efforts. Ackerman made an even more ambitious argument about the significance of the spoiler effect than the one I just presented. Ackerman argued — correctly, I think — that with a solid strategy and the backing of rising labor unions, independent left party efforts can actually use the spoiler effect to their advantage to push liberal competitors out of some districts (in return for not contesting other districts) and to win proportional-representation systems.

Likewise, Kim Moody makes similar points as I do about the vulnerability of one-party Democratic districts to independent challengers in his 2022 book Breaking the Impasse. Moody also argues that the record of independent left parties forming and breaking through in countries with winner-take-all elections demonstrates that those rules do not make building a new party impossible. 

These arguments in no way undermine the case for winning much-needed democratic reforms in the United States, in particular proportional representation, as I have argued elsewhere. But they do challenge the idea that, out of fear of spoiling elections, DSA must resign itself to contesting elections in Democratic primaries until electoral reform is won. In fact, as Ackerman suggests, building an independent party and campaigning for key democratic reforms ought to be seen as two parts of a single strategy for democratizing the US and securing independent political representation for working people.

Ballot Access Laws: Paper Tiger?

An alternative explanation holds that ballot access laws in the United States make it too difficult to run candidates in general elections independent of the two parties. This is the core of the argument that Ackerman made for running in Democratic primaries. Ackerman argued in “A Blueprint for a New Party” that in the late nineteenth century, political leaders in the US enacted repressive measures to make it significantly more difficult for third-party candidates to get on the ballot. In one example, Ackerman notes that an early Massachusetts law passed in 1888 required candidates for district-level races to get signatures numbering 1 percent of the total vote in the previous election. In 2014, Ackerman mentions that Illinois required upward of 3 percent of the total vote in the previous election to get on the ballot for House elections.

Ackerman is absolutely right to denounce onerous ballot-access laws in the US. However, it’s hard to maintain that they pose anything close to an insurmountable barrier to third-party efforts. They may be an extra hurdle to mounting such a campaign, but they’re very much surmountable. Despite the requirements in Massachusetts he cites, for example, the Socialist Party was able to routinely field congressional candidates in the Bay State’s House districts. In 2014, despite being a very small and marginal party and despite the ballot-access rules cited by Ackerman, the Green Party managed to get two candidates on the ballot for House districts in Illinois. In 2017, for that matter, NYC-DSA successfully got an independent socialist ballot line for Jabari Brisport in his run to be a city councilor (myself and a few others pushed to try this out to see how hard it would be). Jabari got more than a thousand votes on the socialist line.

Ackerman also raises the problem of ballot-access lawsuits. While he is correct that establishment candidates regularly try to disqualify third-party candidates, they also do this to their rivals in primary elections. Moreover, establishment forces and their allies have not shied away from using campaign finance lawsuits to harass DSA challengers. DSA candidates should expect to be harassed and subjected to “lawfare” regardless of which ballot line they run on.

Ballot access laws should be reformed, but they do not pose anything resembling an unbeatable or even debilitating obstacle to third party efforts. Third-party candidates from projects with far fewer ground troops and resources than DSA regularly get independent ballot lines for themselves.

So Why Does DSA Run in the Democratic Party?

If neither the spoiler effect nor ballot access laws necessitate DSA campaigning in Democratic Party primaries, why does DSA do this? In my next piece, I’ll explore more political explanations for the orientation, which go a lot further toward providing a coherent and defensible explanation of the strategy — though I don’t ultimately think these arguments are compelling either.