The path to defeating the Republican right runs through the Democratic Party. It was the Democrats' failures that created the conditions for Trump in the first place: decades of neoliberal economics, a militarism that put a kinder face on empire but never questioned it, and an economic agenda that spoke to working people but answered to donors.
Bernie Sanders, the Squad, and a generation of progressive challengers have tried to reform the party from within—and the Democratic establishment has fought them at nearly every turn. Corporate donors, media gatekeepers, and the internal mechanics of the DNC are all designed to absorb and neutralize insurgent energy. Trump broke through those kinds of defenses on the right in 2016—but he had ruling-class interests on his side. Progressives don't have that luxury. So how do we actually win?
This question has split the left into two camps: #DemEnter—take over the Democratic Party from within—and #DemExit—build independent power outside it. The debate has been going on for years, and too often it devolves into each side treating the other as the problem rather than the oligarchy we're both trying to defeat.
I see this as a false choice. We don't need one strategy. We need a coalition that can pursue both without tearing itself apart.
Zohran Mamdani's mayoral victory in New York proved that a bold populist insurgency can beat the Democratic machine from within. But inside strategies alone aren't enough—and neither are outside ones. The organizations that understand this best are already building from a fusion approach. The Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America maintain their own independent organizational power—their own membership, their own platforms, their own capacity to mobilize—while strategically using Democratic Party infrastructure to win races and build governing power.
Our Revolution is focused on taking over the party through down-ballot races.
The Sunrise Movement is building the kind of power that can pressure whoever is in office.
And the US Green Party, while infamous for unsuccessful presidential runs, has built a real base at the local level—city councils, school boards, and other positions where grassroots organizing translates directly into wins. For those that believe local politics matters (and I do), I have to give credit where it's due.
Whether we fight inside or outside the Democratic Party, or focus on building regenerative alternatives beyond traditional politics, these are all fronts in the broader fight against corporate rule. The point is to pick one and invest in it instead of spending our energy tearing down the other strategies all the time.
The Green Party Playbook Isn't Working
That said, this doesn't mean we shouldn't have real conversations about what isn't working.
Put simply, the Green Party's top-down strategy has not been effective. After decades of pursuing long-shot bids for the presidency, they have yet to even break 5%. At a time when dissatisfaction with both parties is at all-time highs, roughly 85 million people chose not to vote at all rather than vote third party. Between Trump (an authoritarian narcissist) and Harris (whose conservative policy agenda and phoned-in response to Gaza likely cost her the election), those 85 million people rejected both options but also didn't support the Green Party enough to even register a symbolic protest vote. They just stayed home.
The congressional track record is equally grim. As Alan Minsky has documented, since 1946 there have been over 17,000 elections for the U.S. House of Representatives. The number won by third-party or independent candidates can be counted on one hand, and not one has been by a Green. In the Senate, a few independents have won in the past 80 years — Bernie Sanders, Angus King, and Joe Lieberman among them. Not one has been a Green either. Statewide and local races tell a similar story: across literally millions of elections since WWII, the number of third-party victories is less than one-tenth of 1%.
We can blame the media and all the structural barriers that contribute to this, but without deep structural changes to the Green Party itself, and without getting ranked-choice voting implemented first, blaming external factors is pointless. We have to work with the reality we've got and adapt accordingly.
Critics rightly challenge corporate Democrats for running conservative-lite candidates over and over again, just hoping neoliberalism will win this time. John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris all ran on a conservative neoliberal agenda, and won once in response to four years of Trump. We'd be doing ourselves a disservice to not recognize that repeating the same Green Party playbook isn't a wise move either. We've got to mix it up.
What Alignment Could Look Like
To be fair, the Green Party does have practical reasons for running presidential candidates. In 40 states, maintaining ballot access depends on how many votes the presidential ticket receives. Without those votes, even local Green candidates face far more onerous petitioning requirements to get on the ballot at all. Presidential campaigns also generate media attention and volunteer recruitment that down-ballot races simply can't.
These are real organizational needs, but here's the tension: the Green Party's presidential campaigns have never come close to winning, and the spoiler dynamic—real or perceived—has done enormous damage to the party's relationships with the broader progressive movement. The 2000 Nader campaign in Florida remains a wound that hasn't healed. In 2024, Republicans actively supported Jill Stein's ballot access efforts in swing states while Democrats tried to remove her—both sides recognizing the strategic dynamic. When your candidacy is more useful to your opponents than your allies, something has gone wrong strategically.
The Green Party's local track record is more impressive and deserves more recognition than it gets. In 2024 alone, Greens won 43 out of 91 local races—a 48% win rate for city council, school board, tribal council, and special district seats. At least 153 Greens hold elected office across 21 states, and the party has won over 1,600 races since 1985. For those of us who believe local politics matters—and I do—that's real, meaningful work that earns respect. But the pattern is stark: of the 81 partisan state and federal races Greens contested in 2024, not a single one was won. The Green Party wins where it builds local relationships. It loses everywhere else.
So the question isn't whether the Green Party should exist. It's whether the Greens are willing to adjust their strategy so that their presidential ambitions stop undermining the very movement they share goals with. There are several ways this could work.
First, the Green Party could adopt a safe-states strategy for presidential races—actively encouraging supporters to vote Green in deep-red and deep-blue states where the outcome is predetermined, while endorsing the Democrat in genuine swing states. This wouldn't require abandoning the presidential campaign or its ballot-access function. It would simply mean acknowledging what everyone already knows: that a Green vote in California or Wyoming changes nothing about the presidential outcome, while a Green vote in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin might. A Green Party that said to progressives, "We've got your back where it counts—now support our right to build where it's safe to do so"—that's a party the rest of the movement could work with instead of fight against. The goodwill alone would be transformative.
Second, the Greens could make ranked-choice voting their central mission—because RCV is literally the structural reform that would make Green candidacies viable. Under RCV, voters can rank a Green candidate first and a Democrat second without fear of spoiling. The spoiler problem that has defined and damaged the Green Party for 25 years simply vanishes. If the Greens had spent the money and volunteer hours from their last three presidential campaigns on RCV ballot initiatives instead, they might have already changed the electoral math in a dozen states. And RCV isn't the only option. Ballot initiatives on housing, healthcare, minimum wage, drug policy reform, and campaign finance have all passed in states where the same progressive candidates couldn't win. The Green Party has a national infrastructure and dedicated volunteers—imagine that energy directed at putting bold policy directly to voters, building the kind of wins that demonstrate real power and lay the groundwork for the day when Green candidates can compete without the structural deck stacked against them.
Third, and most ambitiously, Greens could run candidates inside Democratic primaries in the same way DSA does—maintaining their organizational independence while using the Democratic ballot line as a vehicle in races where it provides a structural advantage. DSA members who run as Democrats don't stop being democratic socialists. They simply recognize that in a first-past-the-post system, the ballot line is a tool, not an identity.
I know this might sound blasphemous, but ultimately, Greens need to decide what matters most: is their fist commitment to a failing strategy (out of principle) or is their first commitment to win and deliver material goods to the people by any means necessary?
The Green Party's platform on economics, ecology, and peace overlaps enormously with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. What stops most voters from supporting Green candidates isn't disagreement—it's the rational calculation that they can't win. Rather than spending another decade hoping that calculation changes, consider what Mamdani and the DSA have already proven: a progressive running inside a Democratic primary generates exactly the kind of enthusiasm and volunteer energy that Green presidential campaigns have always aspired to but never achieved—because voters can see a path to victory.
None of this requires the Green Party to abandon its identity. It requires recognizing that the movement is bigger than any one organization, and that strategic cooperation between Greens, DSA, WFP, Our Revolution, and progressive Democrats would be vastly more powerful than the current arrangement, where groups that agree on a majority of policy spend significant energy working against each other during elections.
That cooperation also requires strategic patience, especially around the presidency. Earlier I suggested a safe-states approach as one way to reduce the damage of the spoiler dynamic, and I stand by that as a minimum. But the deeper issue isn't how Greens run for president—it's when. I think about it like a chess game. You don't go for checkmate after four moves. You build power from below first—through local wins, through RCV campaigns that change the structural math, through a coalition of dozens of progressive members in Congress representing millions of voters. Then a third-party presidential run becomes something other than a symbolic gesture. It becomes credible.
Without that foundation, the calculus that keeps voters away from third parties isn't going to change—and we shouldn't expect it to. It hasn't changed in over a century of trying. Eighty-five million people stayed home in 2024 rather than vote Green, even facing two historically unpopular candidates. That's not a messaging problem. That's a structural one, and it gets solved structurally, from the ground up.
The Greens' local work is already building in that direction. The question worth sitting with is whether the presidential strategy helps or hinders that bottom-up project. I have my opinion, but more importantly, I'd love to see that conversation happen between Greens, DSA, WFP, and the broader progressive movement—not as a turf war, but as allies figuring out how to stop leaving power on the table.
The Best of Both Worlds: #DemEnter and #DemExit
With third party initiatives no where close to contesting power in a serious way, we're faced with the urgent need to defeat the Republicans and the corporate Democrats, and so I find myself agreeing the best path for most of us is an insurgent campaign to take over the Democratic Party through aggressive primarying and a bold, populist agenda.
Mamdani's campaign is the blueprint—and he's not alone. Graham Platner and Kat Abughazaleh are running inspiring campaigns against oligarchy and in favor of a bold people-first agenda. Brad Lander, endorsed by Mamdani and Sanders, is challenging corporate Democrat Dan Goldman in New York. Nida Allam, backed by Justice Democrats, WFP, and the Sunrise Movement, is taking on an incumbent in North Carolina. Justice Democrats has endorsed a dozen primary challengers for 2026, none of whom accept corporate PAC or AIPAC money. And the strategy is already producing results beyond New York: labor organizer Taylor Rehmet won a Texas state senate seat in a district Trump carried by 17 points, and Analilia Mejia—endorsed by Sanders and AOC—won her New Jersey congressional primary. These aren't isolated long shots. This is the beginning of a coordinated insurgency that ought to be a model for dozens more races across the country.
As Minsky and others have concluded, the Democratic Party is the only institution powerful enough to contest and defeat the Republican Party and their corporate owners in 2026 and 2028.
So does that mean yes to #DemEnter and no to #DemExit?
Actually, I'm saying yes to both—following a path that allows the two strategies to complement each other rather than conflict.
We need progressives to take over the Democratic Party via aggressive primarying everywhere. But we also need to build independent power. Les Leopold has shown how we can do this without becoming spoilers: run independent candidates in safe red districts, providing a true "second party" option where there effectively is none.
The math is compelling. There are 132 congressional districts that Republicans won by at least 25 points. In those deep-red districts, there's no Democratic Party to spoil. A progressive independent running there isn't a third party—they're a second party.
Dan Osborn proved this in Nebraska, nearly defeating Sen. Deb Fischer (R) in 2024 as an independent, in a state Trump won by 20 points. He's back in 2026 against Pete Ricketts, with polls showing a dead heat. His platform—protect Social Security, ban billionaires from buying elections, end pharmaceutical profiteering—rings true to voters in bright red Nebraska precisely because he's running against billionaire domination of politics, independent of both parties.
So the playbook is: run independent candidates where feasible and primary corporate Democrats everywhere else. Bernie Sanders, among others, has signaled support for this strategy, which takes the best parts from #DemEnter and #DemExit and gives us the best shot at a united front against the forces that own both corporate parties.
Les Leopold suggests we bolster this independent movement with a Workers Political Association, which has polled well across the spectrum.
The Lonely Progressive Problem
Now, the honest objection from the #DemExit side: “We've seen what happens when progressives enter the Democratic Party. The machinery subverts them. Party leadership controls committee assignments, directs donor networks, and sets the legislative agenda—and progressives who don't play along get frozen out. Over time, even the boldest voices start casting compromising votes, accepting bad deals, and pulling their punches. They stop drawing sharp lines with party leadership, and start choosing their battles in ways that feel like retreat.”
This is real, and it deserves a real answer.
But consider what we're actually looking at. Sanders and AOC aren't operating inside a progressive party. They're operating inside a corporate party where they are vastly outnumbered. When Sanders votes for a defense bill or AOC softens a position, that's not evidence that #DemEnter doesn't work—it's evidence that #DemEnter hasn't gone far enough. A handful of progressive voices inside a caucus of 213 corporate Democrats aren't going to transform the party. They're going to get ground down by it. The fact that they've held as much ground as they have, essentially alone, is remarkable.
Sanders's problem has never been a lack of conviction. It's a lack of backup. Give him 20 allies in the Senate who share his commitments and the negotiations change completely. The pressure to compromise doesn't evaporate—politics is compromise—but the terms of compromise change. Right now, progressives negotiate from a position of near-total isolation, which means every deal is lopsided. With real numbers, they become a bloc that has to be bargained with, not managed. That's not a fantasy—it's how the Freedom Caucus transformed the Republican Party in under a decade with roughly 40 members.
Will those 50 progressives still disappoint sometimes? Absolutely. But here's the terrain-level reality: 50 imperfect progressives with actual votes on actual legislation will always accomplish more than 50 ideologically flawless voices shut out of every room where decisions are made. Purity in exile is still exile.
What If Our Champions Ran for Positions They Could Win?
This is where third party strategy becomes most frustrating to think about. Cornel West is one of the most brilliant public intellectuals of his generation. What if he had run for a congressional seat in a New York Democratic primary instead of mounting a presidential campaign? That's a race he could plausibly have won. Hell, I'd even settle for a Mayor West!
The same pattern is playing out right now in California. Butch Ware—a UCSB professor of African and Islamic history, former Green VP nominee, follower of West African Sufi traditions, and genuinely compelling organizer—is running for governor on a grassroots-funded platform of single-payer healthcare, climate action, and immigrant protection. He's already earned a cross-party endorsement from Nina Turner, something virtually unheard of for a Green candidate. But California uses a top-two primary system, where all candidates regardless of party appear on one ballot and only the top two advance to the general. Ware would need to outpoll every Democrat but one just to make it to November. No Green has ever come close in a California gubernatorial race.
And that's the frustration. Ware is exactly the kind of candidate progressives need—a scholar, an organizer, someone who can articulate a radical vision without alienating ordinary people. If he ran for a state senate seat in the Santa Barbara area, where he's a known professor with local roots, he'd have a real shot at winning. Instead, it's another cycle of an inspiring campaign followed by structural defeat and no power gained.
Now, the obvious pushback: Mamdani was a longshot too, and he won. True—but the difference is structural. Mamdani ran inside the Democratic primary in a deep blue city where the primary is the general election. He only had to beat other Democrats, and he had a decade of NYC-DSA chapter building, WFP organizing, and tenant union infrastructure behind him before the campaign even launched. Ware is running as a Green in California's top-two system, where every candidate from every party competes on one ballot and only the top two advance. He doesn't just need to beat other progressives—he needs to outpoll every Democrat but one and every Republican simultaneously, with a fraction of the organizational base.
Longshots are worth taking when the structure allows them to break through. But there are real costs to picking fights the math won't allow you to win. When defeat comes—and it almost always does—it breeds the very apathy and cynicism our movements are trying to overcome. And there's the opportunity cost: every cycle spent on a blocked path is a cycle where a winnable race goes unfought.
To fight apathy, we need fights we can win. One more fearless progressive voice in Congress or City Hall, with an actual vote on actual legislation, could do far more to advance the cause than any number of campaigns that end in noble defeat. The movement already has plenty of inspiring voices. What it needs is votes in the rooms where legislation is written.
Electing Progressives Is Only Half the Battle
The real test comes after election night. This is where the left has historically failed: we mobilize to elect someone, then demobilize and watch from the sidelines as they get ground down by the machine. The traditional playbook offers two options—pressure from outside ("hold their feet to the fire") or insider co-governance among a handful of organizational leaders—and both leave the mass base that did the actual work of winning sitting on the couch.
NYC-DSA has been pioneering a different model. Their Socialists in Office Committee keeps endorsed legislators working in lockstep with thousands of rank-and-file members on concrete campaigns—not just lobbying, but organizing together. Through that structure, they helped win increased taxes on the wealthy in 2021, major tenant protections in 2019, and significant climate legislation in 2023. That's not "feet to the fire." That's mass governance—movements and elected officials operating as parts of the same project.
Mamdani's mayoral campaign showed what this looks like at scale: over 100,000 volunteers didn't just vote for him, they knocked doors, made calls, and organized their neighborhoods. The question now is whether that infrastructure transitions from campaigning to governing—whether those 100,000 people help shape the administration's agenda through popular assemblies, neighborhood councils, and participatory budgeting, or whether they go home and wait to be disappointed. A socialist administration without an organized mass base gets isolated and weakened. An administration that governs with its base becomes harder to stop.
That's the model. Pressure from the left is what keeps #DemEnter candidates honest—but it works best when it comes from an organized base that sees itself as part of the governing project, not outside it. You can only move someone who has a vote. But you can move them a lot further when 100,000 people have their back.
The goal isn't to elect perfect progressives. It's to elect enough progressives that the imperfect ones have room to be bolder—and then stay organized enough to make sure they use that room.
Focus on the 85 Million
That's my take. With this playbook, we don't all need to agree on where to put our energy—there's a complementary role for everyone. So let's set some ground rules for disagreeing without destroying each other in the process.
First, let's remember the 85 million people on the sidelines. There's no need to attack Democratic voters as “complicit” or third-party voters as “spoilers” when millions of non-voters can be moved by good policy, good organizing, good messaging, and good leaders. Apathy may well be our greatest opponent. Victory goes to the strategy that inspires the most people to shake off their understandable apathy and fight for the world they want.
Electoral politics is also just one tool. The day-to-day work is still organizing—our workplaces, mutual-aid networks, and movements that refuse to be co-opted by party structures.
It's high past time to stop wasting energy attacking each other's strategies and focus on building pluralistic movements and coalitions that challenge the oligarchy that rules us.
Whether the lane we choose is taking over the Democratic Party, growing independent alternatives, winning specific campaigns, pushing for Ranked Choice Voting, or fighting outside the electoral system entirely, the goal stays the same: dismantling corporate power, resisting militarism, and securing widespread economic and social prosperity on a thriving planet.
A Pocketbook Guide To Take With You
This piece covered a lot of ground. Here's a brief recap:
First. Primary corporate Democrats aggressively, everywhere. This is the real fight—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.
Second. Run independent, working-class candidates in safe red districts where they can't spoil—and where the Democratic brand is a liability anyway.
Third. Fight for ranked-choice voting everywhere as the structural reform that makes both tracks easier and eventually dissolves the spoiler debate entirely.
Fourth. Build power between elections. The campaigns that win don't materialize out of thin air. Mamdani's 30,000 canvassers 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 played out when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley in 2018 — not because she ran a brilliant campaign from scratch, but because years of DSA and Sunrise organizing in Queens had already built the volunteer base, the small-dollar donor network, and the community relationships that made an upset possible. When Brandon Johnson won the Chicago mayoralty in 2023, it was the Chicago Teachers Union's decade of political infrastructure that put him over the top.
This is where the real work lives: in unions, tenant organizations, mutual aid networks, ballot initiative campaigns, and the independent media that reaches the 85 million people who've tuned out of conventional politics entirely. Electoral campaigns are where this power gets deployed, but they're not where it gets built. Find your lane in the between-election work. Invest in it for the long haul.
And if you're still hesitant about engaging with electoral politics at all—if the whole system feels too corrupt to touch—consider this: power isn't dirty. Rejecting all institutions as compromised doesn't keep your hands clean. It just ensures the left has no influence over the decisions that shape people's lives. The right understands this intuitively. They organize to dominate media, courts, school boards, and state legislatures precisely because those institutions are powerful. They will never stop trying to take power no matter how corrupt the system is. We simply can't afford to cede that ground. When a muscle like democracy is weak, the answer, always, 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 our lives. Full stop.
So whatever path you choose to support, just remember, our movements need you.
May each path win victories for us all.
Tim Hjersted is the director and co-founder of Films For Action, a library dedicated to the people building a more free, regenerative and democratic society.