![]() “That’s what Bernie Sanders is asking people to do when he talks about a movement that needs to be bigger than just getting him into office,” Ellerbroeck said. He and other Iowa DSA leaders want their groups to provide a consistent force for socialist change in the state long after Sanders campaign staffers have packed up and left. (This cycle, the caucuses will take place on a Monday.) It’s both an undemocratic and a “deliberately confusing” process,” Ellerbroek said-a process neither he nor members of his chapter want to prop up with their time or funds. The state Democratic Party has been fielding complaints to this effect for years from Iowans with inflexible work or personal schedules. ![]() ![]() “The caucus is not an accessible process,” Joe Ellerbroek, who co-chairs the Des Moines DSA alongside Schoonover, told me. “It makes more sense for us to focus on building that movement, to make that longer-lasting change.”Īnother part of the Iowa members’ aversion to formally participating in electoral politics is their disdain for their state’s biggest claim to fame: the caucuses, which every four years help determine the rest of the presidential race. “In Ames, Iowa, that is not the case,” he said. People criticizing Iowa’s DSA chapters tend to live in larger cities with active labor movements, Miranda told me. “There’s a fear that if we engage in too much electoral organizing we are losing our capacity to imagine outside the system that we are currently living in,” he said. It’s “a lot bigger than a few back-and-forths on Twitter,” Javier Miranda, the 25-year-old leader of the DSA chapter in Ames, Iowa, told me. “As much as many of our members love Bernie, we see our importance more so in building class consciousness and working-class power in our communities, because that will ultimately last longer.” “Iowa DSA chapters don’t have as many resources compared to other larger cities,” said Alex Loehrer, 32, who co-chairs the DSA chapter in Iowa City. Three Iowa DSA leaders told me that while members are allowed to volunteer for Sanders on their own time, the chapter won’t formally campaign for him. The committee then established an independent campaign for Sanders called DSA for Bernie, which operates separately from the official Sanders campaign and which individual chapters can join.īut as the February 3 caucuses creep closer, Iowa DSA members will be focused on local efforts, including organizing local tenants’ unions. “He’s not a factor in our organizing at all.” Individual members would be welcome to volunteer for Sanders on their own time, she said, but campaigning for him as a chapter would distract from their local efforts, which include advocating for tenants’ rights and raising the alarm about so-called crisis pregnancy centers.īack in March, the DSA’s National Political Committee leadership team voted to endorse Sanders, after a controversial vote in which only about a quarter of DSA’s membership weighed in. Members in the Iowa chapters have been clear from the get-go about their 2020 plans: “We don’t talk about Bernie,” Caroline Schoonover, a co-chair of the Central Iowa group, told me back in April. There are currently five official DSA chapters in Iowa, none of which existed before 2016-the year the organization began to see explosive growth nationwide on the heels of Sanders’s first presidential bid. The dustup gets at another key question: Does the DSA want Sanders, specifically? Or do its members merely want socialism, with or without the movement’s most visible surrogate? How and whether DSA members can reconcile these tensions could have significant implications both for Sanders’s 2020 campaign and for the success of the socialist movement in America for years to come. The Iowa chapters’ decision-and the exasperated response from other members-illuminates the divide within the DSA over how best to build a socialist movement: One theory of growth is through a concerted effort around electoral work the other is rooted in prioritizing local efforts and direct action. “Early states will be key for momentum and Iowa DSA chapters’ failure to help energize the progressive Iowa voters and new caucusgoers is a giant mistake,” tweeted Honda Wang, a DSA member from Brooklyn, recently, igniting a days-long Twitter spat among DSA members from various regions. ![]() But some DSA members in other parts of the country think their Iowa comrades are wasting a crucial opportunity. With just five months to go until the Iowa caucuses, chapters in the state have chosen to focus on local projects and tenants’-rights work rather than spend time and resources working for Sanders. But not every DSA chapter is campaigning for the Vermont senator. Last weekend, hundreds of members of the Democratic Socialists of America across the country kicked off local efforts to elect Senator Bernie Sanders as president of the United States. ![]()
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