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INTRODUCTION

Until today, electoral strategy debates within the Democratic Socialists of America have been argued on the same terrain. They have strategized within the constraints of the U.S. electoral system, but there is an alternative way of thinking about electoral strategy. The alternative demands a new kind of organizing aimed at eliminating those constraints. I call the strategy structural eliminativism, grounded in the practice of democracy organizing.

Structural eliminativism is the idea that some projects of social change require the elimination of structural obstacles for those projects to succeed. When applied to the project of building a mass working-class party, the idea is that the success of that project necessarily depends on eliminating the legal obstacles that frustrate multi-party democracy.

Democracy organizing is the idea of building power through collective action to enact legislation that reforms elections and governance. In this way, democracy organizing is distinct from electoral organizing–it’s not organizing to win elections, it’s organizing to transform the laws that govern elections and elected officials. That is, organizing to transform the law of democracy.

Within DSA’s project to build a mass working-class party, the function of democracy organizing is to strategically organize to transform the law of democracy by concentrating on the elimination of legal obstacles that frustrate our electoral aspirations. The idea is not to compete with pre-existing electoral strategies, but to supplement them. At a minimum, a structural eliminativist strategy aims for public finance matching programs and rank-choice voting. At a maximum, a structural eliminativist strategy aims to kill the two-party system.

EXPERIENCING THE POWER OF LAW

In September of 2018, I started my freshman year of college. I was a naïve and ignorant 18-year-old child of uneducated immigrants, yet I was politically curious. In my first semester, I took a course on Comparative Politics. I never did the readings, I barely showed up for class, and I do not recall most of what the course was about—except for one topic: electoral systems. 

I vividly remember my professor explaining the difference between a non-proportional and proportional electoral system. A non-proportional electoral system, she said, is designed to manipulate electoral outcomes in a way that does not accurately represent group preferences. She explained that these systems are designed to favour two-party democracy, such as in the United States. A proportional electoral system, she said, is designed to produce electoral outcomes that accurately represent group preferences. She explained that such systems are designed in a way that favors multi-party democracy. Through my professor, I learned about the power of electoral systems.

The summer after my freshman year, I interned for my local state representative in New Jersey. The internship was generally mundane. I made calls, I wrote letters, and I bullshitted with co-workers. One day I overheard a conversation between the chief of staff and a staffer. They were discussing a conflict during a legislative committee. “He had her dragged out,” she said. The “he” was George Norcross—an insurance executive, prolific fundraiser, and political machine boss. The “she” was Sue Altman—the executive director of the New Jersey Working Families Party, an organization leading the fight against Norcross’ political machine. Sue was protesting at a hearing where George testified on his use of tax incentives. The chair of the hearing had Sue forcibly removed by state police.

Fast forward to January of 2020, when I began interning for Working Families. Through research, I learned that George had been fundraising for gubernatorial, municipal, federal, and state elections, for decades. Through fundraising, he built a political machine: winning election after election, enriching himself at the expense of working-class communities. Such as in one instance, for example, where he manipulated government tax breaks in Camden—home to some of New Jersey’s poorest black and latinx working-class communities. Through George Norcross, I learned about the power of campaign finance. 

In 2019, I left my summer internship and started an independent political organization (IPO) in my hometown with a childhood friend. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders was ramping up his primary campaign for president. Through my IPO, and my eventual internship with Working Families, I developed relationships with congressional candidates across the state answering Bernie’s call for a grassroots “political revolution” from the bottom up. That slate of candidates came to constitute a state-wide movement. For the first time in my young adult life, I felt the power of solidarity, and with solidarity, hope. Little did I know what was about to come next. 

Early in that period, I attended an event. Overhearing a conversation, I heard an organizer use the phrase the county line. Later on, in another conversation, I heard a candidate saying, we’ll see if we can beat the county line. And again, in a presentation, we have to target the county line. Frustrated, I finally found the courage to ask, “What the hell is the county line?” 

An organizer explained that the county line referred to the way Democratic Party county committees designed ballots to legitimize establishment candidates and delegitimize grassroots candidates. County committees—a part of the official infrastructure of the Democratic Party—would place endorsed candidates in a perfectly straight column with the language “X Democratic Party County Committee, Inc.” Meanwhile, challengers to endorsed candidates would be placed in ‘ballot Siberia,’ chaotically sorted into different rows and columns far away from the pristine Democratic Party column. The purpose of the design was to psychologically influence voters into perceiving some candidates as more legitimate than others. The saying among organizers was that no one has beat the county line in over 50 years. At the end of the democratic primary, every movement campaign lost. Through county committees, I learned the about power of ballot design.

FROM NEW JERSEY TO CHICAGO: Chicago DSA & RE-THINKING ELECTORALISM

Fast forward to February 2025, when I joined an organization called Chicago DSA. With my organizing days long behind me (as well as my days of being a bad student), I moved to Chicago in 2023 to pursue a doctorate in philosophy. I began to see education as a vehicle for social change. Through my program, I spent time studying political philosophy. I became particularly enamored with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s/60s and Karl Marx. Eventually, after the 2024 presidential election, I realized that philosophy wasn’t going to change the world. With the memory of electoral anger at the Democratic and Republican parties, I turned back towards organizing.

Initially I joined DSA out of a vague memory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s membership. When I joined, I did not know what to expect. I was exploring. Then, at a DSA 101 orientation, our chapter co-chair Sean Duffy went on to explain the aspiration of DSA to become a mass political party. In that moment, my soul shined with joy. My experience as an organizer in New Jersey taught me the harsh lesson that the U.S. electoral system is designed to systematically exclude working-class communities from the democratic process, while privileging a capitalist class. The experience of exclusion within the Democratic Party, especially, left a gaping hole in my political identity. I was hopeless, but DSA offered a political home.

Eager and excited, I began exploring the Political Education Committee. At my first meeting, the Committee spoke about Socialist Night School and explained that they were in the process of organizing a new semester. One of the semester’s sessions was titled “Do We Need Our Own Party?” With curiosity, I volunteered to help organize the session alongside Sean and another comrade, Alan M.

Sean and Alan went on to suggest a few readings that laid out established positions and debates. I learned about the idea of “proletarian disorganization,” of a “dirty break,” of an “independent surrogate,” of an “independent ballot line,” and so on. With conviction, I dove into the readings, analyzing them vigorously and finding them both interesting and confusing. 

They were interesting because they were all anchored in a strategic conversation about creating a party that I had never been exposed to. I found value in the idea of weaponizing the Democratic Party to sharpen class contradictions. I found value in not focusing too much on party association and more so on developing an independent organization. I also found value in concentrating on organizing the working class, while affecting electoral conditions through extra-electoral activity.

They were confusing because they all seemed to avoid an extensive discussion of the power of structural legal obstacles that frustrate third party success: a non-proportional electoral system, a private campaign finance system, and establishment party control over ballot procedures. Rather, they were mainly focused on the question of independent organization and that organization’s relationship to the Democratic Party. In retrospect, what frustrated me about the debate was that it seemed to accept the constraints of the U.S. electoral system–strategizing within those constraints, as opposed to outside them.

STRUCTURAL ELIMINTAVISM: RE-THINKING ELECTORALISM

Faced with this problem, I turned towards solving it through my coursework. In doing so, I started to realize that the nature of the problem proposed a solution. What if, instead of organizing within the electoral obstacles, we organized to eliminate them? 

Thinking back to my studies, I realized that the proposition of eliminating structural obstacles was not a new idea. The civil rights movement, for example, organized for the right to vote without the right to vote by eliminating discriminatory racial classifications. Likewise, some Marxists historically organized for collective ownership without such ownership by eliminating the legal distinction between owners and workers. What if, I thought, we organized for a mass political party without a formal party by eliminating structural obstacles within the U.S. electoral system? The culmination of my thinking was a strategy I called structural eliminativism, the idea that some projects of social change require the elimination of structural obstacles for those projects to succeed.

In my view, DSA will never be a mass political party unless it eliminates the structural obstacles that frustrate our electoral success. The U.S. electoral system is systemically designed to uncontrollably frustrate our electoral aspirations. We are dominated by an electoral system designed to entrench two parties. We are dominated by a private campaign finance system designed to privilege the political influence of capitalist elites. We are dominated by ballot procedures weaponized to exclude working-class candidates from challenging the democratic establishment. If we are to achieve the project of building a political party, we must eliminate the structural obstacles that constrain multi-party democracy and the success of working-class electoral organizing.

In practice, eliminating structural obstacles can be both maximalist and minimalist. At a minimum, we can organize to eliminate disadvantages through piecemeal reforms that make it easier to win elections. Public finance matching programs and rank-choice voting are paradigmatic examples. In New York City, for example, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign benefited from over $13 million dollars in public funding, while also benefiting from cross-endorsements that strengthened his position as the anti-Cuomo candidate. In Chicago, a group of our members, including myself, are already doing this minimalist kind of work by exploring the endorsement of the Fair Elections Coalition—a group of organizations advocating for a public matching program in Aldermanic races. 

Meanwhile, at a maximum, we can organize to eliminate the two-party system. Every 20 years in Illinois, for example, voters are given a ballot proposition to call a state constitutional convention. Through that convention, voters elect delegates through electoral procedures constructed by Illinois State Representatives. Notably, the convention provides an opportunity to re-design the state’s electoral system. Which, in Illinois, is not a radical idea. Up until the 1980s, the Illinois state legislature embodied a version of multi-party democracy through cumulative voting and multi-member districts. Meanwhile in 1991, citizens of Peoria successfully filed a voting rights lawsuit that forced their city council to move from winner-takes-all to cumulative voting. By re-designing the electoral structure of Illinois, through a constitutional convention and/or strategic litigation, we can effectively kill the two-party system in our home state, which would open the legal door to a working-class party.

None of this is to say that we should abandon our current electoral efforts, of course. Chapters should continue weaponizing the Democratic party line, organizing the working class, building independent infrastructure, and experimenting with independent candidates towards strategic goals. This is to say, however, that there is another way of solving our problems as a dominated political group in an oppressive electoral system. We can strategically eliminate the obstacles that oppress us and we can eliminate them through a new kind of organizing.

A NEW KIND OF ORGANIZING: DEMOCRACY ORGANIZING

Democracy organizing is the idea of building power through collective action to enact legislation that reforms elections and governance. In this way, democracy organizing is distinct from electoral organizing. You are not organizing to win elections. You are organizing to transform the laws that govern elections and elected officials. That is, you are organizing to transform the law of democracy.

Democracy organizing is a long-standing tradition, practiced especially by advocates for voting rights. When the Women’s Suffrage Movement was organizing for the right to vote, they were democracy organizing. When the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s/1960s was organizing for the right to vote, they were democracy organizing. Democracy organizing exists in a tradition that stands alongside the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Sylvia Pankhurst, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Fanny Lou Hamer, embedded in a deep relationship with the socialist movement.

Interestingly, the tradition of democracy organizing is often practiced when alternative options are not available. For example, the Suffrage and Civil Rights Movements were organizing for the right to vote without the right to vote. The lack of alternative options is notable because it poses a curious question: when you can’t win through electoral organizing, what do you do?

In my view, the problem that voting rights activists faced bears a striking resemblance to our own problems as DSA. We want a mass-party, yet we exist in a two-party system. We want working-class electoral representation, yet we exist in a private campaign finance system. Just like the voting rights activists, our options are limited. The only difference is that we have some agency. We can win some seats at some levels of government. Extraordinarily, we have done this. Still, no matter how hard we try, the structural barriers we are embedded in frustrate our aspirations and facilitate internal conflict within the organization over our relationship to the dominance of established party institutions. Despite the creative use of our collective power, we inescapably find ourselves in situations where there is an extremely limited range of electoral options. We find ourselves in a slightly different, yet similar, situation: when you can’t win through electoral organizing alone, what do you do?

The strategic response is democracy organizing. By building power through collective action aimed at strategic democratic reforms, we can supplement our electoral efforts through a transformation of the U.S. electoral system. In practice, this can look like a variety of things. 

From the example of NYC DSA’s Democracy Working Group, we can establish Democracy Working Groups in chapters across the country. From the example of our members in Chicago DSA, we can explore projects like the Fair Elections Coalition. From the example of Peoria, Illinois, we can file strategic lawsuits that aim to challenge the constitutionality of legal requirements that entrench two-party politics. From the example of Illinois history, we can strategically organize a constitutional convention that successfully re-designs the Illinois state legislature. From the example of the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Suffrage movement, we can engage in non-violent disobedience and insider lobbying, by organizing direct actions at strategic locations such as marching through the state legislature, organizing sit-ins at city council, and crashing private fundraisers.

Whatever form it might take, democracy organizing is a strategic solution to our electoral problems. We do not need to exclusively organize within the constraints of the American electoral system. Instead, we can organize to eliminate those constraints. By supplementing electoral organizing with democracy organizing, we can strategically open the door to multi-party democracy and transform the American electoral system over time.