by Aron A-M
This past weekend, DSA’s National Political Committee voted, with 15 in favor and 12 against, to preserve itself the right to vote on an endorsement in the 2028 presidential primary. After months of beleaguered talks around procedure and timeline, we are happy that there is a clear horizon for a presidential endorsement vote, and crucially, a horizon that allows DSA to play a central role in a presidential primary campaign. With this decision the NPC has taken a step to masting a central pole for the party to organize around. The NPC has placed DSA in a position to make a decisive intervention into a generational political opportunity: building a mass socialist party through a presidential election campaign .
This decisive decision has not come without division. Critics believe that the NPC fulfilling their elected mandate is a pike to the heart of DSA’s democratic nature; the opposite is true. As Constellation has long articulated, strong and decisive socialist leadership reinforces the democratic character of DSA. Decisive leaders activate more members around our democratically-decided priorities and ensure that convention mandates are executed to the fullest extent they can be. In the absence of a central pole for our big tent, each faction and interest group collapses into silos damning our movement to stumble forward blindly into a political moment which demands coordination.
A convention mandate that is renewed every two years will never foresee the political conditions the organization will be forced to weather. Indeed, if we elected the NPC solely to implement the mandate of convention and not lead during changing political moments, we would select for organizing capability, not ideology as we currently do. The representative political nature of leadership bodies like the NPC and YDSA’s National Coordinating Committee ensures that crucial decisions made beyond the scope of convention mandate reflect the political character of convention. Taking a convention mandate as the sole source of action that can be taken by our political leadership is a critical mistake and misunderstanding of what it means to elect political leaders. Do we elect socialist leaders or executive pencil pushers? This is perhaps the greatest question I learned to answer during my two terms as YDSA’s national co-chair.
During my first term as co-chair, the NCC was tasked with running a second iteration of a campaign we had run the year before demanding the expansion of guaranteed rights for trans people, access to reproductive healthcare, and full bodily autonomy for all. Yet, just two months into our term, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the intensification of genocide in Gaza served as a political earthquake; the fundamental organizing terrain started moving under our feet more rapidly than convention mandate could account ever hope to account for. For months, YDSA struggled to mount a coherent response to the political moment, falsely believing that the most democratic thing we could do was fire on all cylinders on the TRANS! Campaign, devoting a siloed part of our organization to Palestine while the rest of national YDSA executed a campaign with sharply diminishing interest and returns.
It was five months later, in April 2024, when we fully shifted our focus to support the vast amount of chapters who were prioritizing divestment campaigns, during the rise of the encampment movement. Despite our political paralysis we were able to pivot and partially meet the moment, especially because of party-building priorities YDSA had been implementing. At that time, YDSA was undergoing a series of centralizing reforms focused on growth, development, and communications that allowed us to build the party whether we were running a campaign or not. Stipends for NCC members directly translated into an organizing turf-system, facilitating robust connections between national YDSA and chapters for the first time. This allowed for the NCC to catch up on lost time and seriously build both the student intifada and YDSA.
In the next term, the convention passed an ambitious dual mandate calling for a national divestment priority campaign and an attempt to mount a student strike for Palestine. The NCC worked steadfastly to implement this mandate, yet there came another political earthquake, the re-election of Donald Trump and the march of his ICE paramilitaries into cities across the country, just months into the term. This time, YDSA was quick to respond. My comrades in Constellation quickly authored a sanctuary campus campaign proposal that passed on the NCC and was re-affirmed uncontroversially by the 2025 YDSA Convention. Our mistake from the past term was not repeated, and national YDSA has been able to take a leading role in the sanctuary campus movement in a way we weren’t necessarily able to do during the height of the Palestine political moment, even despite being a leader in that national coalition.
The greater lesson to take away from this saga is that throughout the struggles of 2023 and 2024, the NCC not only built the party, but responded thoughtfully to the grassroots momentum of the organization . We did so in a way that didn’t abandon the political intentions and dynamism of our convention mandate. We did not abandon trans rights, bodily autonomy, or Palestine, but folded them into our evolving campaign and coalition work to ensure that beneath the veneer of every national campaign, it was a socialist politics that was at the forefront, a socialist politics that built the capacity of YDSA.
The NPC has made one correct decision, but DSA is a ship that takes far more effort to steer coherently than YDSA. There will surely be many inflection points to come that will impact the strength of the intervention DSA will have in the 2028 election cycle. 2026 has proven to be a year beyond many of our wildest imaginations, certainly a year that has exceeded much of the best desires of the 2025 Convention mandate. The NPC is the beating democratic heart of our organization between conventions, and I trust in the NPC to make adjustments to our course as necessary, while holding the line on our politics, including the Workers Deserve More program and nationally-decided political priorities.
Over the coming weeks, Constellation will lay out our vision for a principled, central, party-building presidential campaign: one which builds DSA to such heights that we can truly push back against the capitalist system and hold our ground.
Aron A-M is a former YDSA national co-chair/NPC SC member (2023-2025) and current DSA National Communications Commission co-chair.