Socialists have to mean what we say and say what we mean. The working class cannot win power for itself without a political vehicle of its own, and the Democratic Party is not – and will not ever be – that vehicle. Our long-term project has to be building that new party, which means taking bold steps to learn how to do so.

We need to take chances as they come, not only to do our part but also to teach future socialists. We have a chance, if we are willing to step out of our comfort zone, to set an example and engage in a practical experiment in true political independence. In order to make this meaningful step towards political independence – to create a campaign our comrades across the country and across time can point to as an example to build on and learn from – we, as a chapter, will have to invest heavily in it. 

Three years ago, Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez and I published an article arguing that, at some point, socialists will have to make the conscious decision to take those first steps towards true political independence, building an independent political party. In that article, we acknowledged that those initial steps towards independence would be the most difficult, because it will mean stepping into the unknown. 

Now is the time. Alderman Sigcho-Lopez of the 25th ward (which includes Pilsen, Little Village, University Village, and Chinatown) intends to run for Congress as an independent in the Fourth Congressional District, a seat held by Jesús “Chuy” García since 2018. The district is a progressive district with a majority Latino population covering much of Chicago’s southwest side and a number of working-class suburbs, including Cicero, Berwyn, and Bridgeview up through Melrose Park. Sigcho-Lopez is a known quantity who has won tough elections and is a committed socialist with a vision of building independent power for the working class. By breaking with the Democrats, he will not be able to count on much formal institutional support from major unions or organized progressive groups. 

Hard as that break may be, it is increasingly necessary. The Democrats’ popularity is at an all-time low, and beyond that, they have proven themselves incapable of facing down the advance of right-wing authoritarianism. Just as they’ve done for the last thirty years, they are relying on their place in the two-party duopoly to be the default choice when the Republicans go ‘too far’ and are content to hold power for no more than a few years before the Republicans return with even more dangerous politics. 

In New York City, organized socialists showed that they can win power in high-profile, high-stakes races. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary showed that socialists can provide an organizational base, working with other groups and constituencies to win even against the odds. Until his primary win, Mamdani had institutional support only from United Autoworkers District 9A, a reform local that endorsed him six months before. Major unions and progressive groups stayed away, and a Working Families Party endorsement came only three weeks before the primary. He couldn’t rely on massive six-figure checks or million-dollar donations, and instead had to raise money from tens of thousands of small-dollar donors as the entirety of his fundraising.  

Mamdani’s win was a thunderclap for the Democrats. It showed that true bottom-up organizational power can, in fact, win big offices, and that even without progressive NGOs or union officialdom, even a self-proclaimed socialist can win, and win big, when their support is built from the bottom up and involves thousands of people who believe in the campaign’s vision. 

Still, Mandani’s (and the NYC Democratic Socialists of America’s) win comes with a lot of caveats: matching funds, ranked-choice voting, the presence of historically unpopular opponents in Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo. Nonetheless, it was a remarkable feat that proves that with full commitment and a vision, bottom-up politics works. 

If the New York mayoral race was a thunderclap, the Democrats losing a safe, progressive seat to an independent challenger from the left – one who didn’t even need their ballot line – would be an earthquake. It would knock down the key pillar that keeps movements from leaving the Democrats behind: the ‘brand loyalty’ of voters to the Democratic Party ballot line. It would set an example for how socialists can build the coalitions needed to win independently. This model would relieve the pressure on organized groups, including unions, to stick with Democrats as the lesser evil. Without that pressure, the gates to true working-class independence can open. 

But ours has to be a long-term plan. We cannot keep trying to design a strategy and abandon it after one cycle. Political independence requires experimentation, trial, and error. We learned much from the Mamdani victory; now we must see if we can go further. Winning in this district will require a lot of things to go right and an immense amount of resources. 

The Fourth Congressional District is the right campaign, and Alderman Sigcho-Lopez is the right candidate, to start the long work of building an independent socialist party for the working class. Knowing the nature of the serious challenges ahead shouldn’t be a reason not to do it; it should inspire us to make sure our experiment is a worthwhile one by giving everything we’ve got. 

Money

If he fails to win formal union support, Sigcho-Lopez will have to raise half a million dollars (if not more) from small donors. That number is only an estimate; Chicago-area districts rarely have competitive elections to go by. The closest analog is probably the highly competitive 2024 Seventh Congressional district primary race between incumbent Danny Davis, Melissa Conyears-Ervin, Kina Collins, and others. Davis spent just under $1 million to win that primary; Conyears-Ervin spent $750,000 to get 22% of the vote, with the other three candidates combined spending around $350,000 for another 26%. That’s $1.1 million for 48% of the vote. 

Sigcho-Lopez will start with decent name recognition, so he won’t have to spend as much just to be known. On the other hand, he will have to overcome the Democratic Party’s ballot line advantage. Let’s say conservatively that he will need to spend $500,000 between now and November to win more votes than Patty García, Chuy’s preferred successor. The average donation to Mamdani was around $75, so to raise half a million dollars from small donors, the campaign would need around 6,500 donors. 

Mamdani had 54,000 such donors, with 63% or 34,000 of them from inside New York City. If the same proportions hold for Sigcho-Lopez, the city probably maxes out at around 4,000 donors, i.e., the same proportion of 63%, which alone is very ambitious and still requires raising money across the country. This means nationalizing the campaign, and giving socialists everywhere a reason to invest in our effort to build independent political power in Illinois. 

To compensate for the tendency to default to the Democratic Party ballot line, the campaign will have to be visible everywhere in order to give the sense that it can win. That means thousands of volunteers putting in tens of thousands of hours to reach every voter, but it also means lots and lots of money to boost its message. With institutional support likely to go to the hand-picked Democrat, there will need to be organizing at the grassroots level to get people involved directly in the same way Mamdani’s campaign organized workers directly rather than hoping to win over union leadership.

This will require targeted support from the strata of workers most able to give at a slightly higher level: unionized workers and professionals with more disposable income who can give between $250 and $500 in one election cycle. That means identifying such members in our chapter and in the national organization, communicating the vision of the campaign, and getting them to give. One hundred such donors means $25,000 to $50,000; five hundred means as much as a quarter million. That requires work and building on the organic connections our members have with workers. 

Votes

Patty García is by most standards a progressive, and Chuy was one of the most progressive members of Congress. That means every vote Sigcho-Lopez wins will be a vote for democratic socialist politics, not just a protest vote against a weak or moderate Democrat. That alone would be an important step in learning how to build an independent socialist vehicle.

Chuy García announced he would not be seeking reelection immediately before the close of petition-gathering for the Democratic primary, and only his chief of staff, Patty García, was ready with petition signatures. She will be unopposed in the primary and face only nominal Republican opposition in the general election. The Fourth was created as Illinois’ first majority-Latino district in 1992, and since then, only two people have held the seat: Luis Gutierrez and Chuy García. The latter took the seat in a similar hand-off from Gutierrez. In other words, in Illinois’ only Latino-majority district, the voters have never had a meaningful election, especially since the district was also substantially re-drawn in 2022. 

For that reason, it is somewhat difficult to forecast what could happen. It is useful to know, though, that in 2022 the general election vote was about 134,000, with 49,000 (37%) coming from Chicago, and 7,500 (6%) from Sigcho-Lopez’s 25th ward. The Democrat won with 91,000 votes, with a Republican drawing 37,300 and a candidate from the Working Class Party gaining 4,600. 

That same year, 38,000 people voted in the Democratic primary and 12,200 in the Republican primary for the district. That’s a difference of about 83,000 between self-identifying (and presumably partisan) Democrats and Republicans and the total number of voters. To win, Sigcho-Lopez would need to win enough of those more casual voters and peel off enough Democrats. The math is not friendly, but it is hardly impossible; he would need to win about 60,000 votes, or just over half of the non-Republican vote, since, assuming there are 150,000 voters and 25% go with a Republican, that leaves about 110,000 voters.

Sigcho-Lopez has won two bruising elections in Chicago. Nobody has ever voted for Patty García for anything, and because she is unopposed, nobody will really be voting for her even in the primary. Can Sigcho-Lopez grow a base of the 7% of the district in his ward (around 7,000 votes) and win over 50,000 voters in one of the most progressive districts in the country in the wake of a shady hand-off of power? It hardly seems impossible; if there is any way to see how far the democratic socialist message can get, now is the time and the Fourth District is the place. 

The Candidate and the Cadre

One way to characterize Byron Sigcho-Lopez is a ‘firebrand.’ Certainly, he has been the least compromising socialist elected official we have seen in a long time. His hostility to the Democratic Party establishment has been open, often to his political detriment. While he is a Democratic Party Committeeman (and so technically a part of the Cook County leadership structure), that does not seem to have dampened his appetite to take on and break from the party. Byron is an ideologically committed socialist. 

His time in office has been turbulent, with a variety of conflicts both within and outside of his ward. Nevertheless, he has repeatedly shown himself to be tireless and always on the front line anywhere the working class is under attack.

Sigcho-Lopez has worked closely with the Chicago DSA going back to the chapter’s early involvement in the Lift the Ban campaign in 2017, when he invited us to participate. The South Side branch brought the rest of the chapter into the work, running referenda in support of lifting the ban on rent control in a number of precincts and becoming one of our earliest electoral efforts. He remained closely connected to the chapter’s Socialists in Office (SIO) committee and kept lines of communication open. 

He is not, however, ‘cadre’ in the usual sense; his relationships across his ward and the Fourth Congressional district are not a result of his political development inside DSA. They predate his relationship to CDSA, and as an elected official, they are considerably wider than the chapter could ever provide. 

The Campaign

If not a cadre candidate, would this therefore be a ‘cadre campaign?’ It will have to be. Taking on a Democratic party candidate from the outside – not trying to knock out an establishment Democrat from within, but costing the party a safe seat, in an election year  where every win will be vital – will dry up just about every resource outside of what organized socialists and bottom-up people power can provide. If formal institutional support is not forthcoming, DSA and CDSA, and whatever other local groups are willing to join in coalition to take on the Democratic establishment, will have to do the hard work of organizing affinity groups in support of the campaign. That includes community groups, unions, ethnic and religious organizations, and other political formations where formal support can’t be expected. 

CDSA will need to orient itself heavily towards this campaign. Organizing within our unions, building on our relationships with other community and affinity groups, stepping up to captain door-knocking and fund-raising operations, creating media, and staffing the campaign to produce policy, are among the myriad things needed to win. 

The process matters. If we invest strongly in developing our relationships across the district and the city, building our internal campaign, media, and coalition-building skills, honing our message of political independence, and identifying thousands of people who agree with our vision of an independent working-class party, democratic socialism wins. Even if the campaign fails, those relationships and experiences will be a net win for the cause, but only if we take the effort to build them seriously. 

In other words, it is not worth endorsing this campaign if we as a chapter are not going to leave everything on the field. We must do the work to discover what it would takes to win against the Democratic Party from the outside, despite what it may take.