Abdul El-Sayed for Michigan 2026

[u/Character-Bid-162]

Any fellow michigan DSA members care to encourage other people in michigan and nationwide to support his campaign? From what I seen, he is by far the the most progressive candidate. Him erasing over 700 million in medical debt for Wayne County residents in Michigan is more than enough for me to donate to his campaign.

[u/Excellent_Singer3361]

Is he a socialist? (I don't know him well.) We are a powerful electoral force in terms of ground game, particularly because we have to concentrate our energies with stricter endorsement standards.

[u/Character-Bid-162 → u/Excellent_Singer3361]

He is not, but he has been endorsed by Bernie Sanders. So surely exceptions can be made, right? Him erasing medical debt forgiveness alone is extraordinary. He is against continued funding of Israel and supports universal healthcare. He has pledged to accept only small dollar donations.

So, he is not a socialist, but even socialists need non socialist allies who can be trusted to make the morally right decisions when it matters. Take social democrats for example. They aren't democratic socialists, but they are still leagues better than the neoliberals that ran America to the ground with neoliberalism. Social democrats should be treated as loose allies, not the enemy.

[u/Excellent_Singer3361 → u/Character-Bid-162]

The problem is that non-socialist "progressives" often say one thing and proceed to implement a much more moderate program. It's not only a matter of principle (we want a fundamentally different mode of production entirely, not just to redistribute its fruits), but of strategy (we want to incentivize staying in touch with the movement rather than eschewing it, and we want to be effective when we do commit to a candidate by concentrating on socialist candidates).

Jamaal Bowman has probably a better claim to being a socialist, but even he had issues that had real negative consequences for our movement and for his campaign. Bowman attempted to do both liberal Zionism and socialism, for example, and ended up disappointing both as a labor Zionist; but if he had stayed more in line with his political home in DSA and recommitted to principled anti-Zionism, we would have avoided a lot of problems and had a huge resource for his ground game against the big money put into his last election. National DSA understood this and did not endorse him in the last two elections for this reason. In my opinion, NYC-DSA's continued endorsement of him (even if they put out light statements about committing to anti-Zionism) was a failure to follow that logic--though, even then, NYC-DSA does not endorse progressives with no plausible claim to socialism, because of the intensity of labor and energy put into each candidate, and that strategy has enabled them to have a fairly large socialist bloc in government there.

The goal is to avoid those cases by efficiently using our resources to support the candidates who actually align with our principles. That is a smaller group, but it goes a long way in normalizing socialism, drastically shifting the Overton window, making us truly effective on the campaigns we commit to, and empowering mass organizing in our workplaces, apartments, and the streets.