In which states is it possible for DSA to build a "third party"?

It's not where you might think.

Written by Alyaza B.

American electoral politics has been confined to a mere two practical party options, since perhaps 1924, but almost certainly earlier. This is unlike nearly all other contemporary democracies.  The history of American electoral politics is riddled with failed (or only temporary and weakly successful) efforts to change this state of affairs. Both historic regional parties like Farmer-Labor and modern national ones like the Libertarians and Greens have thus far only been able to influence the duopoly’s trajectory, not break it altogether.

Many within DSA desire to eventually establish an independent socialist party. However, we cannot ignore the practically existing and longstanding obstacles to this goal. To build a third party is not simply, or even primarily, a question of our own activity and support (although our organizational capacity to do this is in question)—it is one of law. In most states there exist an array of electoral laws meant to complicate or outright prevent successful third parties. Thus for any long-term third party approach to be successful, we must be strategic with our resources and our early efforts. This article is an effort to sketch out, for third-party advocates, where those resources might be best deployed—and the plethora of existing obstacles those resources will need to overcome.

(Note that for simplicity this article will not focus on states like New York or Vermont where “fusion” ballot options—which allow one candidate to be endorsed by multiple parties—exist. Instead, it will focus on “true” independent third-party ballot lines.)

Unsurprisingly, there are very few states in which an independent third party could be formed by prospective democratic socialists—at least not without consistently struggling to make ballot access. As we see it, the best five possible states for doing this in the U.S. right now are Alaska, Washington, Delaware, Florida, and Mississippi. Within that small set, only three are actually places where DSA currently has any political significance. Still, if third party advocates want to begin converting theory into praxis, these are the states which in my view would not necessitate a prohibitive focus on creating and maintaining a third party ballot line.

Alaska: An actually workable model?

By far the easiest state, in terms of electoral laws that allow third-party wins, is Alaska. The biggest stumbling block here is that there's only ever been one DSA chapter (Anchorage DSA), which is currently defunct. Nonetheless, this is a state where, under current law, a DSA third-party bid could definitely be done with proper backing and a commitment to seeing it through. Even with a comparatively small chapter, a true third party could probably be built within a matter of years.

Several facts allow for this possibility. Biggest among them is, of course, Alaska’s top-four ranked-choice voting system. This system uses two rounds: a blanket primary election in which the top four vote-getters advance regardless of party affiliation, and then a ranked-choice general election between the four advancing candidates. Provided a third party candidate can make it through the blanket primary—a likely possibility, since a significant number of races in this voting system have seen less than four candidates actually file—these features remove the largest hurdles to third-party candidates. This system also guarantees that (barring a very unusual result) third parties won’t act as spoilers. This is, in short, a stronger electoral system for third-party candidates than anywhere else in the country.

Making things even better for third-party advocates, Alaska also has a multi-tiered system of third parties. While it only recognizes four political parties (a designation which requires some paperwork and “a number of registered voters […] equal to at least three percent of the total votes cast for governor”), it also allows for political groups to form which do not meet that criterion but aspire to do so. For such groups, the law allows any person who is registered with said political group to appear on the ballot as if they were a member of a formal political party. (As one example, this mechanism allows the Veterans Party of Alaska, a political group, to run candidates on a Veterans Party of Alaska "ballot line" even when they are not one of the state's recognized political parties.)

We can thus actually propose a hypothetical model here for an Alaska Democratic Socialist Party and how that party might coexist with the DSA chapters pushing it. In its most basic form, this relation would perhaps consist of Alaska’s future DSA chapter(s) drafting and democratically voting on member candidates for political office. These member candidates would be obliged to run through the apparatus of a closely affiliated political group called the “Alaska Democratic Socialist Party,” and would ensure their voter registration is with said political group. They would then file and run on the group’s resulting "ballot line," receiving political support from their respective DSA chapter(s).¹

Such an arrangement is not immediately likely to produce winners. Alaska is, again, a place where no DSA chapter currently exists and in which socialist politics do not have a strong track record. However, it would at least give socialists a chance to be powerbrokers in certain circumstances. Tactical voting and ranking agreements are always options; and if a candidate does finish in the top-two, ranked-choice would give them a fair shot at being elected through left-of-center voting preferences. That could allow for socialists to play a role in coalition governments like the one that currently governs the state’s legislative chambers.

Washington: The goal of the “third party” matters

If our goal is merely to establish a consistent "third party alternative" and not necessarily to win, then Washington chapters can currently do this quite trivially. Washington has few  of the usual impediments for independent third parties and it is generally trivial for socialists to indicate themselves as such. Candidates filing for partisan offices simply "state the party name [they] prefer using 18 characters or less." For electoral purposes, political parties are not meaningfully recognized by the law. Practical examples here include the perennial filings of the Socialist Workers Party; Sherae Lascelles' appearance on the Seattle Peoples Party ticket in 2020; and two Socialist Alternative legislative runs in 2012 and 2014.² So if we wish to run socialist candidates as nothing more than an “alternative” to Democrats, then for Washington chapters this would perhaps be as simple as requiring candidates to run with a specific designation on the ballot as a condition of endorsement.

But if our goal is to win—or at least to come close enough—then a third-party bid has significant difficulties that would need to be overcome. Washington has a blanket top-two primary where the top two vote-getters advance to the general regardless of party. Unfortunately, primaries like this do not actually make running as a third party significantly easier. If anything, it’s made much harder. Blanket primaries are prone to almost every result except one that would lead to third parties being represented in a general election. In purple seats this system usually selects the major two parties. In one-sided seats, it usually selects two members of the dominant party because few third parties have the necessary resources to run serious campaigns. When third parties make it to a general election in blanket primaries, it is usually because nobody else contested the seat. And in this general election, tactical voting by major-party supporters presents a further and final hurdle: Republicans will consistently vote for the more conservative candidate.³

Partially because of this system, the Washington chapters of DSA collectively have just three wins to their name electorally as of writing⁴ and have not demonstrated any reliable ability to elect the candidates they support. But funding, campaign coordination, political infrastructure, and coalition building (both during and between campaigns) have also presented difficulties across the campaigns Washington chapters have run to this point. Undoubtedly these would become bigger stressors if these chapters opted to begin running many third-party candidates against the Democratic Party. When—for instance—Seattle DSA endorsed the aforementioned Sherae Lascelles and their bid for the state legislature, it placed the chapter at odds with most of the region’s labor unions and center-left apparatus. Despite raising a respectable $150,000, Lascelles was also outspent two-to-one and ultimately took just 33% of the general election vote.

As we see it: if the goal is to win as a third party in Washington, consolidating support from organized labor—and in the long term flipping it from supporting Democrats to reliably supporting the third party Washington chapters carve out for themselves—is non-negotiable. We are unaware of any other institutions in Washington that would hold the political capital, grant the needed credibility, and give the necessary political support to competitively run third party. More nebulously, the Washington chapters need to build (or co-opt) a reliable constituency to root their candidacies in. In this respect the campaigns of Socialist Alternative (particularly those of Kshama Sawant) and the Seattle Peoples Party provide valuable, short-term strategic information—the neighborhoods in which campaigns are best suited and which organizations and stakeholders need to buy in for a third-party campaign to be run competitively. These campaigns also provide valuable information on the campaign tactics and positions that play well for these voters. In the longer term though, third-party bids will need to gather and analyze new data to support future campaigns—much of the data described here is already old and only getting older.

Florida: Build from the bottom up

Florida is an interesting state with respect to third parties because it currently has both very laissez-faire ballot access laws and a relatively high DSA chapter density. In Florida what is required to register a third party is pretty straightforward: A certificate with the party constitution, bylaws, regulations, and rules. Said certificate should also include the party’s name; information on its officers and executives; and each of these officers and executives demonstrating their voter affiliation with said proposed party. With the number of DSA members and chapters in Florida fulfilling these requirements should be quite trivial, especially with coordination. (The Party for Socialism and Liberation has ballot access, and it’s hard to imagine DSA being in a worse spot to gain it than them.) But what good is a third party if it can’t influence or wield political power? This is where the difficulty in Florida lies.

There is currently one (known) socialist in office in the whole state—Richie Floyd—and, while this was a very impressive result, he was elected on a nonpartisan ballot line in an off-year election by a margin of less than two percent. The handful of other endorsements from DSA chapters in the state have yielded mixed results: Jessica Vaughn of the Hillsborough County School Board and Kim Stokes of the Lake Worth Beach City Commission won their elections but to my knowledge are not DSA members, while Doug Rivero (also not a DSA member to my knowledge) lost his race for the Hillsborough Soil and Water Conservation. When endorsing in explicitly partisan races, Orlando DSA swung and missed twice in endorsing Robin Denise Harris and Anthony Nieves. 

Thus we can see the problem: to this point in the limited sample-size we have, DSA chapters in Florida have only seen success in nonpartisan races. Contextual evidence and regional circumstances also suggest that even if they contested more elections Florida chapters would struggle to win an explicitly partisan race. While Florida has a large total number of DSA members, these members are balkanized in such a way that no Florida chapter stands out as particularly large—this is especially so relative to the population of each chapter’s territories. The South is also easily DSA’s weakest electoral region overall: Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana are all bottom-ten states for DSA election wins. Between them DSA chapters have combined for a victory rate of around 20%.⁵

The prescriptions here, accordingly, are going to be rather rote: a stronger, larger DSA with more coordination statewide will be in a better position to contest elections and win them. (A notable aspect of Richie Floyd’s win was that he received support from multiple Florida chapters.) While organizing a third party sooner rather than later is the ideal⁶, Florida DSA chapters should almost certainly continue to prioritize nonpartisan, local races instead of jumping to partisan, state-level ones. There is precedent for our electoral work avoiding the local level—New York City comes to mind, where local success has generally tailed state-level success—but in Florida this seems politically untenable, especially if the intent is to permanently break with the Democratic Party. In lieu of partisan indicators, branding, and publicity will be an important part of tying these runs with those of a state-level third party. Ultimately, there will need to be a very strong base of support—one that is almost certainly a product of being able to consistently elect people at lower levels of government first—for a third-party challenger to be credible enough to win a partisan race here.

Mississippi: Building any membership density at all

In Mississippi, more than anything, we find an issue of membership density in establishing a third-party presence. The process to establish a recognized political party here is trivial and almost maintenance-free. Unlike the vast majority of states, Mississippi requires no petitions, fees, or minimum vote totals for a party to be recognized—the party just needs to engage in bureaucracy. Prior to registering, they “must determine the method and procedures for the selection of county executive committees and the State Executive Committee(s).” Then within thirty days of organizing, they must send all relevant information on the party’s leadership and bylaws to the Secretary of State. Registration must be updated yearly, but otherwise, a party in yearly compliance with the Secretary of State seems to exist indefinitely once validated. Given how low these barriers are, the process of forming a party in Mississippi should be one that even a small chapter would have the manpower to accomplish. Certainly, it could be done with the coordination of multiple in-state chapters. 

But Mississippi has not been a kind state for DSA, and mostly for reasons not within its immediate control. Racial and educational polarization ensures the state’s white population is overwhelmingly oppositional to socialist politics, and skepticism of the socialist label from the Black population renders organizing this population equally difficult. But a lack of resources; a lack of organizations to work in coalition with or even build off of; entrenched opposition from political machines; and the overall one-sided nature of politics in this region also create barriers to socialist organizing. A combination of all of these factors is undoubtedly why Mississippi has only ever had one chapter in Jackson DSA. To our knowledge even that chapter—never large in size to begin with and perhaps composed of 200 or so dues-payers at its largest—is now defunct and only existed for perhaps three or four years in total.

It goes without saying that a lack of member density and a lack of electoral base from which to draw generally must be overcome for Mississippi to be seriously considered in this discussion, so we would propose third-party advocates address this matter before building a party. (Indeed, for third-party advocates generally, party-building seems like it should take place alongside chapter-building—and both should mutually reinforce each other.) At the bare minimum, a stable chapter with a few dozen active dues-payers seems a prerequisite for third-party organization here to make sense—what good, after all, is a party whose organizational backer eventually collapses? A hastily-organized third party effort would also be disastrous to actually building a said third party, so this revitalized chapter should either commit to that electoral work from the beginning or only begin this work after it has established local credibility on other issues. As with Florida, a municipal-first approach is likely to work best here, both for credibility reasons and as a trial run for more extensive electoral campaigns.

Delaware: The matter of intra-DSA politics

Finally, in Delaware, we find a state where the problem in moving toward a third-party line is entirely political: such a move is a gamble with an overwhelming chance of failure, and that is likely to be a hard sell for chapters with already successful electoral programs such as Delaware DSA’s.

Delaware DSA, in short, has created an electoral program that works. As of writing the Delaware chapter has a 77% win rate (17-5) across the 22 races it has endorsed in—the vast majority of which it has committed on-the-ground resources to—making it one of the most successful chapters in our organization by that metric. Their electoral successes are such that they currently have a caucus of at least four dues-paying members in the state legislature, and at least eight dues-paying elected officials in total. Those elected officials have in kind pushed for ceasefire resolutions and been instrumental in fighting for their political platform to be implemented in Delaware.

However, outside of nonpartisan races where there is no ballot line all of Delaware DSA’s candidates have run as Democrats. Why is this? Even though Delaware has low barriers to getting a third party ballot line—which requires just 769 registered voters to affiliate with a prospective party as of writing—pragmatism (and the chapter politics that informs that pragmatism) is the clear answer. Even the most charitable interpretation of available data implies third parties lose 95% or more of the time, and third parties seem to run particularly impotently in Delaware. The last third-party state legislative candidate to win in Delaware was likely elected when the Whigs still existed—and in contemporary times, very few people in Delaware run third party at all. That we could find, only around two dozen candidates have run on a third-party ballot line in the state in the past three election cycles. Of those runs, the best performance for any third-party candidate was a two-way race in 2022 where Joseph DiPasquale of the Nonpartisan Party took just 14% of the vote against a Republican. More realistically, a third-party candidate in Delaware can perhaps expect to take 3% (or less) of the vote. This is in spite of the relatively low number of votes cast per district: in 2022, many State House districts saw 10,000 or fewer votes cast in the general election.

Within DSA, many advocates for breaking with the Democratic Party advance the premise that fewer elected candidates who are collectively more radical and more oppositional would be an acceptable political tradeoff to make. Generally, advocates argue this has been done successfully in the past by both domestic and foreign socialist groups. But these priors—and acceptance of these examples as transferable to contemporary circumstances—are not shared across the whole of the organization’s membership. And as just mentioned: because most third-party bids fail, breaking is going to be a very tough sell for chapters with an already successful electoral program such as Delaware DSA’s. For most chapters (Delaware’s included) such a break is likely to mean no elected candidates, not just fewer elected candidates. Third-party advocates will most likely need to build their own present example of breaking—one that unambiguously demonstrates the viability and the benefits of such an approach—to win over skeptics in chapters such as these.

Looking ahead

It should be finally stated that: none of this advice guarantees success, nor should it be unquestioningly or rotely applied. There will be differences from state to state in what the third party path is—a serious third party will require members to be bold but also to make compromises; to intricately understand the political zeitgeist within their state; and to generally be quick thinking, well-organized, and ready to fight everything that comes their way. There is no playbook for absolute success in this domain and conversely, there is a long history of third-party failure—the odds are plainly against us and will continue to be against us in the immediate future in taking a third-party track. And even organizing the third party is still likely not sufficient. In the long term, socialist third-party gains will probably hinge on our ability to win fundamental changes to the current political system—if nothing else, third-party advocates must take up the cause of alternative voting systems (most likely single transferable vote (STV) or a form of mixed-member proportional representation (MMPR)) for this purpose or face the possibility of first-past-the-post continually reverting political progress.

But continuing the status quo—one in which third-party advocates continue to rhetorically, but not literally, organize the third party they advocate for—assures failure. So too does quixotically pushing third-party bids without a compelling reason or a roadmap to achieving political power. If the socialist third party is to be formed out of DSA then—particularly given our organizational and resource limits—it must be done with an actual strategy/model, with actual goals and concrete success/failure conditions, and with actual political buy-in both internal and external to the organization. Will any of these tasks be easy? Certainly not. But if nothing else this article should lay out where that work may have an opportunity to begin, and what will be necessary to make it viable elsewhere. Beyond that, hopefully, this information will inspire a more in-depth consideration of the process of splitting both presently and in the future. 

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1. It is worth caveating that this may need to be done more informally than described to comply with federal law around 501(c) organizations. Unfortunately, it is difficult to speculate on how regulatory law might conflict with a third-party approach and where in the strategy that might occur, so we have opted to not do that at length here.

2. Note that Kshama Sawant's time on the Seattle City Council is not an example of what is being described. Seattle's municipal races are legally nonpartisan, and there are no partisan indicators in such races–all candidates, even those registered with a party, run without a party preference.

3. This sort of tactical voting can be seen, for instance, in the 2018 Democratic-vs-Democratic matchup in Washington's 9th congressional district. This race saw socialist Sarah Smith resoundingly defeated by incumbent Adam Smith; Republicans were shut out of the top two in the primary and, in the general election, tactically voted for the latter candidate.

4. Washington DSA’s three wins: Socialist Alternative dual-carder Kshama Sawant for Seattle City Council twice (2019, 2021), and Jamika Scott for Tacoma City Council (2023). However, all three won in nonpartisan general elections. So far, no DSA endorsee has won a nonpartisan top-two primary and partisan general.

5. Astute observers may note that—while not a success story by any means—this technically means our Florida chapters punch above their weight class in contesting elections.

6. This is, more than anything, because Florida’s laissez-faire ballot access laws could change at any time under its current Republican trifecta.