How to Win Red States With a Labor Party
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Labour Party
11 min read
The article discusses forming a Labor Party in America - this Wikipedia article covers the actual 1996 attempt to create one, its strategies, why it ultimately failed, and lessons for future attempts
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Proportional representation
13 min read
The author argues that proportional representation is a prerequisite for effective third parties nationally - understanding how it works in other democracies provides crucial context for evaluating this claim
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Minnesota Farmer–Labor Party
10 min read
A historical example of a successful American third party that won statewide elections by organizing workers and farmers - directly relevant to the article's strategy of labor parties winning in specific states rather than nationally
A stupid portion of my career has been spent writing things in the category of “The Democratic Party should do X.” (Common variations of this include “Why isn’t the Democratic Party doing X???,” “Fuck the Democrats for not doing X,” and “We’ve been saying for years that you idiots should do X, but here we are, in hell.”) This is a tiring pastime, and one that has produced little discernible return. Let us discuss something that has the potential to be a more productive use of time, for those of us who want to make some progress in the class war, before we all die of old age.
For many decades, the labor movement has debated the utility of forming its own political party— a Labor Party. I have written about this debate before. The short version of what I wrote was: On the national level, and in particular concerning presidential elections, forming a third party tends to be counterproductive, because it has the effect of pulling votes away from the party closest to your beliefs and thereby helping the party most opposed to your own beliefs. If organized labor or anyone else wants to form an effective third party on the national level, they must first tackle the underlying issue of our winner-take-all electoral system. They must fight for proportional representation, a thing that does in fact exist in more enlightened democracies than ours. With proportional representation, a third party can operate effectively in national elections without simply sucking votes away from the party closest to it and helping its enemies. Want a Labor Party that can run a righteous presidential candidate? Great. Say your plan for achieving proportional representation. Until then, it is probably more effective in the real world to focus on pulling the Democrats left.
However! There are other places, on the state and local levels, where a Labor Party or something similar, could be effective. That’s what I want to talk about today.
Think about Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayor’s race. It established DSA as a legitimate electoral political force. How did DSA help defeat the power of organized money? By using organized people. The campaign claimed more than 100,000 total volunteers, who knocked on many hundreds of thousands of doors across the city. There were other factors—a charismatic candidate running against a bunch
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