For more than a decade, the left has argued with itself about the Democratic Party. One camp says take it over from the inside. Call it #DemEnter. The other says walk away and build something new. Call it #DemExit. Both camps want the same outcome: an end to corporate control of our politics and a government that answers to working people. And both have spent far too much energy fighting each other instead of the people who profit from that fight.
Why the Democratic Party at all? Because every other road has hit a wall. The Republican Party is fully fused with corporate power, and there is no anti-corporate insurgency coming from the right. Third parties almost never win above the local level. Of more than 17,000 House elections since 1946, third-party and independent candidates have won a handful. Broken as it is, the Democratic Party is the only institution with the infrastructure to contest and defeat the Republicans and the corporate interests behind them.
After a year of insurgent wins, I think the argument is settled, and the answer is both. Each strategy works best on different terrain, and each makes the other stronger once we stop treating them as rivals.
I made the full case in my last article. What follows is the short version. Seven chess moves you can carry with you, pass to a friend, and discuss at your next meeting.
1. Primary corporate Democrats aggressively, everywhere.
It works. In 2026 alone, a wave of bold progressive challengers beat the Democratic establishment in primaries from New York to Michigan, often against incumbents with decades in office and millions in outside spending. Organized people can beat organized money. But money still wins races, and a well-funded PAC can still flatten a good candidate running alone. That's why one upset is never enough. What matters is how many we stack up.
The goal is a bloc. Progressives inside the party today are vastly outnumbered, and isolated members get ground down. Fifty movement-backed members in the House, with shared red lines and the discipline to vote together, would have to be bargained with. The Freedom Caucus remade the Republican Party with roughly 40.
This is the real fight, and the fight most people skip. Who we vote for in primaries is about vision—what kind of country we're actually building. Who we vote for in the general is about terrain—choosing the conditions under which our movements will organize and fight.
Progressives and liberals don't have to agree on everything to recognize that organizing under a flawed democracy is a fundamentally different challenge than organizing under authoritarianism. We need each other.
Which means we need a coalition deal, and it's a simple one: progressives show up in the general to defeat the worst option, and liberals show up in the primary to support the most progressive option possible.
"I'll vote blue no matter who in November if you vote for the boldest progressive in the primary."
This is how we unite people who share a majority of the same goals and face a common enemy that wants to crush us both.
2. Run independent, working-class candidates in safe red districts.
There are 132 congressional districts that Republicans won by at least 25 points. In those districts, there's no Democratic Party to spoil. A progressive independent running there isn't a third party. They're a second party. And where the Democratic brand is a liability anyway, a candidate free of it can reach voters no Democrat ever will.
Dan Osborn proved this in Nebraska, nearly defeating Sen. Deb Fischer as an independent in 2024 in a state Trump won by 20 points. His message of protecting Social Security, banning billionaires from buying elections, and ending pharmaceutical profiteering landed in bright red Nebraska because he was running against billionaire domination of politics, free of a party brand voters had already rejected.
3. Fight for ranked-choice voting everywhere.
Under RCV, voters can rank a progressive first and a Democrat second without fear of spoiling, which makes both tracks easier and eventually dissolves the spoiler debate entirely.
Every city and state that adopts it rewards candidates for building coalitions instead of punishing them for it, and makes the coalition deal above easier to keep.
4. Build power between elections.
The campaigns that win don't materialize out of thin air. Mamdani's 100,000 volunteers weren't recruited during the campaign. They were inherited from years of NYC-DSA chapter building, Working Families Party organizing, and tenant unions that had already activated thousands of New Yorkers around housing and economic survival. The campaign was the harvest. The organizing was the planting. The same story explains Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 2018 upset of ten-term incumbent Joe Crowley, built on years of DSA and Sunrise organizing in Queens, and Brandon Johnson's 2023 Chicago mayoral win, built on the Chicago Teachers Union's decade of political infrastructure.
This is where the real work lives: in unions, tenant organizations, mutual aid networks, ballot initiative campaigns, and independent media that speaks to the 85 million people disenfranchised by the status quo.
We also need to stay organized after election night. The common mistake is to elect someone, go home, and then watch them get ground down. Movements that govern alongside the people they elect, like NYC-DSA's Socialists in Office Committee, give those officials the backup to hold the line.
5. Organize locally inside the Democratic Party.
Winning primaries is only half of an inside strategy. Behind every candidate sits a party apparatus most voters never see. Precinct delegates elect county leaders, county leaders fill state committees, and state committees choose members of the DNC. These bodies recruit candidates, direct resources, write the rules, and decide which communities get attention between elections.
If progressives win a handful of primaries and leave that structure untouched, the corporate wing keeps the machinery that recruits, funds, and pressures our candidates once they're in office. And much of that power belongs to whoever consistently shows up.
So if this unglamorous but vital work calls to you, learn your state and county rules. Become a precinct committee member or delegate. Recruit others, organize slates, contest county and state committee seats, and elect party leaders accountable to working people.
Progressives have already made real, if uneven, inroads this way. Sanders-aligned organizers won sustained leadership of the Nebraska Democratic Party, while a DSA-backed slate swept Nevada's state-party leadership in 2021. Nevada's reversal two years later carries an equally important lesson: winning an internal election is not the same as building durable power.
Taking over the party requires a broad base, competent administration, independent movement organizations, and year-round organizing long after the leadership vote is over.
Find your lane in the between-election work and invest in it for the long haul.
6. Build the new economy beyond politics.
Elections decide who holds power over the old system. Just as much depends on how fast we build the new one, and much of that work requires no one’s permission.
The localization movement is rebuilding local economies so communities can feed, power, and govern themselves. Worker cooperatives put workplaces under democratic control, and union organizing gives workers a real voice where they spend most of their waking hours. Regenerative farms are restoring soil, and food co-ops and CSAs connect them directly to the families they feed. Community solar co-ops put energy in the hands of the people who use it. Community land trusts take housing off the speculative market for good. Tool libraries and repair cafés let neighbors share what they’d otherwise each have to buy. Schools run democratically teach our kids the skills essential for a revitalized cooperative society.
And towns across the country are passing community rights ordinances, local laws that assert a community’s right to block fracking, factory farms, data centers, toxic dumping, and the other projects corporations try to force on them. These ordinances challenge the legal doctrines that let corporate rights override the will of the people who actually live there.
Every one of these is a school for democracy. People who learn to run their own workplace, farm, or power co-op discover they can run a lot more.
7. Win the spirit battle.
Apathy and cynicism are the inner enemies that stop us before we even try. Cynicism is especially seductive because it tells us that the system is too corrupt to touch, every institution is compromised, and seeking power will only compromise us too. It disguises withdrawal as moral purity and powerlessness as virtue.
But power isn't inherently dirty. It is simply the capacity to shape the conditions of our lives. It can be concentrated and abused, or shared and democratized. Rejecting every institution as compromised doesn't keep our hands clean. It merely leaves those institutions—and the decisions they make—in the hands of people who have no hesitation about using them against us.
The right understands this intuitively. They organize to dominate media, courts, school boards, state legislatures, and political parties precisely because those institutions are powerful. They will never stop seeking power, no matter how corrupt the system becomes.
The question then is not whether power will be exercised. It is who will exercise it, for whose benefit, and under whose control.
We simply can't afford to cede that ground. When a muscle like democracy is weak, the answer must be to strengthen that muscle, not allow it to atrophy further.
If the left stands for anything, it is the fight for democracy over corporate rule. The people must have democratic control over the decisions that shape their lives. Full stop.
There's a role for everyone, so let's argue and organize without destroying each other. There's no need to call Democratic voters complicit or third-party voters spoilers when 85 million people sat out the last election. Millions of non-voters can be moved by good policy, good organizing, good messaging, and good leaders. Victory will go to the strategy that inspires the most people to shake off their understandable apathy and fight for the world they want.
So whatever path you choose, just remember: our movements need you.
May each path win victories for us all.
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For the full argument, with the data and the debates behind each of these points, read the original article this pocketbook summarizes.
Tim Hjersted is the founder and director of
Films For Action, an online
library dedicated to the people building a more free, regenerative and democratic society.
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