Why We Endorse: The Case for Nithya Raman
Photo by Klose Up Photography of Nithya Raman’s kickoff canvass.
SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the authors.
Last week, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson made the unprecedented move to strip Nithya Raman of her powerful post as Chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee in a clear act of political retaliation for daring to run against Mayor Karen Bass, one of his close allies. In a video explaining Harris-Dawson's move, Raman pointed to the avalanche of money being spent by AirBnB and the real estate lobby to bolster Mayor Bass’s war chest, arguing that our city government has been bought out by wealthy special interests and does not serve the needs of working Angelenos. The race between Karen Bass and Nithya Raman is thus shaping up to be a high stakes showdown between those who own extraordinary amounts of capital and those who do not.
Next week, DSA-LA will consider whether to endorse Nithya Raman’s insurgent bid to defeat incumbent Karen Bass and become the next Mayor of Los Angeles. Raman is a democratic socialist and dues-paying member of DSA and has been endorsed twice by the LA chapter in her campaigns for City Council in 2020 and 2024. Despite some challenges in our chapter’s relationship with Raman over the past six years, DSA-LA members should enthusiastically vote to endorse Raman and throw our weight behind her campaign over the next three months.
Every DSA member will agree that a DSA endorsement is not like those made by most organizations. We do not make “paper endorsements” and just add our logo to a candidate’s campaign literature. When we collectively and democratically decide to endorse a candidate, we commit to the mobilization of significant resources in the form of money and member time to embed ourselves into the campaign and propel the candidate to victory.
Beyond this broad consensus about the unique value of a DSA endorsement, or the “DSA difference”, there is little agreement about what criteria we should use to decide whom to endorse. Some DSA members will evaluate endorsement decisions by asking whether a candidate is individually “deserving” of DSA endorsement or politically pure enough to have their name associated with ours. This quintessentially liberal attitude distracts from the central purpose of DSA endorsements, which is to deliver concrete material gains to the working class and build towards democratic socialism.
In this article, we propose a comprehensive theory of how we should understand DSA endorsements and make strategic decisions about whom and when to endorse. This theory of endorsement rests on three key assumptions.
We endorse candidates to move forward on the democratic road to socialism.
DSA’s endorsements are not statements of our values but vehicles for our power.
Engaging in mass struggle makes us stronger, abstentionism makes us weaker
1. We endorse candidates to move forward on the democratic road to socialism.
In 1968, Marxist political theorist Nicos Poulantzas made the theoretical case for the democratic road to socialism. He was writing in the wake of the twin failures of the Soviet Union and mid-century European social democracy to usher in a socialist utopia in which the working class democratically owned and operated the means of production.
Poulantzas argued that the path forward for socialists was to pursue two aims in tandem. First, socialists should contest for power and influence within representative democracy, a system which had itself only been won through mass popular struggle. With this power, socialists should pursue reforms that shift control of the economy away from the capitalist class and towards workers. These reforms should seek to deepen existing working-class victories while sharpening internal contradictions within the state, generating a long-term process of building towards the horizon of democratic socialism. Second, this representative power should be pursued in parallel with the proliferation of forms of bottom-up working-class self-activity. Today, we can locate such self-activity within institutions like labor unions, tenant unions, and mass membership organizations like ACCE, NDLON, DRUM, and DSA.
With this long-term horizon in mind, we should endorse candidates with realistic plans to use elected office to deliver concrete material gains for the working class. These material gains should tangibly shift the balance of class power from the owners of capital to workers, moving us forward on the democratic road to socialism. At the municipal level, a good example of such an intervention is the reorientation of the city budget towards city services, like street repair and public transportation, and away from ruling class interests such as the police budget and corporate giveaways.
We need to balance two impulses: practicality and ambition. We need to be prudent about investments of resources, while being bold and pushing the limits of what was previously possible. DSA should be particularly poised to intervene into moments of rupture between organized capital and progressive forces, even though these moments may emerge unpredictably and in ways that are beyond our control. When such moments of rupture do arise, we can actively organize to reshape the terms of debate around a socialist analysis and direct that progressive energy into durable growth for our movement. By repeating this strategy year-after-year, chapters can bolster DSA’s legitimacy among the working class and develop a cascading network of voters, members, organizers, and leaders to grow the capacity to take on increasingly ambitious challenges in each successive election cycle.
DSA has generally adopted a strategy of endorsing candidates who are dues-paying DSA members and are willing to identify as democratic socialists. But it is important to note that we do not pursue this strategy simply because electing more self-identifying socialists is a worthwhile end in itself, but rather because doing so has proven to be the most effective path forward to building democratic socialism.
Now, let’s be clear, Nithya Raman is a democratic socialist (most recently clarified in this cycle’s endorsement questionnaire) and has refused to sever ties with our organization when pressed by hostile journalists and political actors. But it is nevertheless important to make the case for a DSA endorsement in terms of how a candidate’s governance would materially advance our movement, rather than with reference to their self-identification.
“We endorse candidates to build political power by developing new leaders, making contact with new voters, and building up collective institutional knowledge about how to run effective electoral operations.”
On the City Council, Raman led the passage of the largest reform of tenant protections in city history, which enacted some of the strongest tenant rights laws in the country. She also led the fight to amend the city’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance, lowering the allowable rent increase for 1.5 million renters to just four percent per year. While street homelessness has continued to increase throughout the city, it went down in Raman’s district by 49% last year. Raman made these gains by pursuing a social service and care-first approach in partnership with mutual aid groups and healthcare providers, instead of calling the LAPD to conduct violent encampment sweeps.
Raman’s mayoral platform would be even more transformative. She plans to open LA’s first Office of Tenant Protections, which would give our city’s vibrant tenant movement a foothold within city government and the opportunity to expand the scope of their organizing. Her affordable housing policy would dramatically lower rents across the city by finally ending our city’s system of de facto racial segregation and ramping up affordable housing production in wealthy neighborhoods that have historically resisted development. She has articulated her vision for ramping up production by affirming DSA’s core priority of building public and social housing instead of running away from our platform.
Raman has advanced a realistic plan to end unsheltered homelessness by the end of her first term. Socialists should be leading the fight to end street homelessness, given that it has emerged as an issue that singularly defines the failure of Democratic Party governance in deep-blue cities and is fueling right-wing reaction across the country, exemplified by Spencer Pratt’s surprisingly potent candidacy right here in Los Angeles.
Raman has also pledged to reorient the city’s budget around essential city services, such as streetlight repair and pothole filling, instead of the bloated police budget. Her commitment to delivering municipal services that the working class actually depends upon echoes the high-water mark of the United States’ socialist movement—the Sewer Socialists in 20th century Milwaukee—and what NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani calls “pothole politics.” Raman also plans to implement a citywide unarmed crisis response system, which has been one of DSA’s core objectives since the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings.
2. DSA’s endorsements are not statements of our values but vehicles for our power.
There are profound contradictions inherent in DSA’s aspirations to become a nationwide political party winning races in a diverse range of political conditions. If we want to wield power from Northern Brooklyn to Nebraska, we must develop a rigorous analysis of power and an appraisal of how we build and deploy that power through tools like electoral endorsements. Big-tent political parties have historically had to tolerate a wide range of opinions on various issues, but brought people into their coalition with programmatic unity around a core, delimited set of material concerns.
When considering political endorsements, DSA members often fall into the trap of assessing a given candidate based on whether or not the candidate is truly “one of us” or are a “real socialist.” When we pursue this mode of interrogation, we make the mistake of viewing our elected officials as the leaders of our movement, trusting only “cadre candidates” who come from within DSA to reliably pass legislation that builds towards socialism.
Many DSA members fear that any divergence between a Socialist in Office (SiO) and DSA’s stated views sullies the ideological purity of the organization and somehow invalidates the power we built by electing them. The truth is that we are a mass socialist organization with over 120,000 dues-paying members and the power to articulate our collective values and strategic rationale for endorsements to the working class. We should continue to make our values clear through mechanisms such as our national and local platforms, interviews given by our elected leadership, and public-facing writing about our projects and long-term strategy. Ultimately, we need to build DSA into a political party capable of exerting decisive influence on candidates who both are and are not cadre members of our movement. And we need to do this while building a long-term socialist political agenda that can stand on its own feet, independent from the short-term political calculations of our endorsed politicians.
We do not endorse candidates merely to spend political power that we have already built. Rather, we endorse candidates to build political power by developing new leaders, making contact with new voters, and building up collective institutional knowledge about how to run effective electoral operations. Through this process, we produce the political and organizational capacity to take even bigger swings in future cycles. This includes contesting for power at higher levels of government such as state and federal legislatures, which have the ability to levy the wealth and income taxes that are central to a socialist redistributive agenda.
Cadre candidates are the gold-standard model for candidates that we aspire to endorse and elect. These include candidates such as Zohran Mamdani and Claire Valdez, who were politically developed by coming up through our organization’s ranks and have a degree of commitment to our project that can only come from being intimately involved in building it.
In DSA-LA’s case, we have not yet elected a single cadre candidate to office. This is not a mark against any of our DSA-endorsed elected officials on the LA City Council, who have been strong partners in our fight for a socialist Los Angeles. However, none of these electeds came up within our organization and none of them currently see our organization as their essential political home in the way that Zohran and Claire do.
If DSA’s endorsements were primarily statements of our values, then we would exclusively choose to endorse cadre candidates, regardless of their ability to win competitive elections. DSA-LA would have chosen not to endorse Hugo Soto Martinez, Eunisses Hernandez, Ysabel Jurado, Dr. Rocio Rivas, or any other candidate that did not emerge from our chapter and pledge fealty to our program.
But DSA’s endorsements are not just statements of our values, they are vehicles for our power. And electing a cadre candidate requires a significant amount of political power that must first be built by endorsing and winning non-cadre candidate races. In NYC-DSA's case, before running Zohran for mayor they had already elected six members of the New York State Legislature (including Zohran) and two members of NYC City Council, as part of a long-term power building plan that the chapter set into motion in 2018.
DSA-LA has also seized crucial opportunities to wield and grow our power by endorsing non-cadre candidates who share a basic alignment with our near-term political priorities. We have played leading roles in electing them into office and then co-governing with them through our Socialists in Office Committee, delivering material gains to the LA working class and bringing thousands of members into our chapter.
Now, DSA-LA has a rare opportunity to build on this success and elect one of these endorsed members, Nithya Raman, to the most powerful position in city government. If DSA-LA endorses and takes a leading role in Nithya’s general election campaign, it would give us a unique opportunity to campaign citywide for an exciting democratic socialist with mass appeal, similar to our chapter’s experience during Bernie 2020. We could recruit a network of leaders across the city, especially in neighborhoods like Palms, Koreatown, and Westwood that are fertile ground for socialist politics but currently lack any socialist political representation.
“choosing to not endorse Nithya will not bring us any closer to building the power necessary to accomplish those same goals.”
Nithya’s campaign would in turn allow us to grow our citywide organizing capacity as we look towards 2028, where DSA-LA has set an ambitious goal of running cadre candidates for the state legislature and Congress, as well as a democratic socialist candidate for president. NYC-DSA went from around 6,000 members to over 14,000 members over the course of Zohran’s campaign, showing that running candidates for executive office is an extremely effective way to grow DSA.
3. Engaging in mass struggle makes us stronger, abstentionism makes us weaker.
The loudest voices opposing DSA-LA’s endorsement of Nithya Raman will draw attention to isolated examples where Nithya has diverged from our chapter’s goals. But members should not let the confusion sown by those voices obfuscate what is an otherwise straightforward truth: choosing to not endorse Nithya will not bring us any closer to building the power necessary to accomplish those same goals. Instead, it is by endorsing Nithya and meeting our city’s working class at their doors and on the phones that we will take a necessary step forward in building the power necessary to win our boldest demands.
The alternative to the strategy that DSA-LA has pursued for the last six years would have been to abstain from the electoral struggle until the perfect candidate and the power to elect them miraculously emerged from within our ranks. But the reality is that such a candidate would not have emerged unless we did the hard work of engaging in mass struggle and organizing with imperfect non-cadre candidates. Similarly, the alternative to endorsing Nithya Raman is not to endorse a cadre DSA member that can win the seat. The alternative is to do nothing and forgo the best opportunity to flex and grow our organizing muscle before the once-in-a-generation chance to take power for the working class in 2028.
DSA has been rejecting abstentionism since our organization’s founding. In the modern era, our commitment to engaging with the actually existing terrain of political struggle led DSA to endorse Bernie Sanders’ campaign for President in 2016. At that time, DSA had around 6,000 members. Today, we find ourselves north of 120,000.
Two things about this decision should be emphasized. First, Bernie Sanders was not a cadre DSA member. In fact, he was never a member of any mass political organization and had significant misalignment with DSA on a variety of issues, including Israel. Second, if DSA had chosen to abstain from the 2016 or 2020 presidential races, we would still be a marginal presence in American politics instead of being an increasingly powerful political force that has more than tripled our bloc in Congress in just one cycle.
Concluding Thoughts
DSA-LA members should proudly vote to endorse Nithya Raman for Mayor and throw our weight behind her campaign. Endorsing her does not mean that we support everything that she has ever said or done. Endorsing her does mean that we choose to seize a unique opportunity to fundamentally transform Los Angeles city government to finally serve the working class, gain thousands of new members, develop leaders, and build a city-wide coalition. Despite past turbulence in our chapter’s relationship with Raman, we should be clear-eyed about the fact that making the decision to abstain from this race does nothing to build the power necessary to actually deliver on our demands.
We should instead make the affirmative choice to build our chapter’s power by embedding our chapter into Nithya’s campaign and making a bold intervention that moves us forward on the democratic road to socialism. Nithya’s platform would produce concrete improvements to the day-to-day lives of working people and our chapter will have the opportunity to work with her to fundamentally reshape the balance of power between workers and capitalists across Los Angeles. Democratic socialists should be playing a leading role in what may be a defining showdown between the forces of capital and LA’s burgeoning left-wing movement.
DSA-LA is faced with our biggest choice in years. There is currently a void in the left-opposition lane to Karen Bass and the Democratic establishment. Is DSA-LA going to sit on the sidelines and cede power to progressive liberal organizations? Or, worse, will we stand idly by as Bass wins a second term and doubles down on her increasingly corrupt pay-to-play politics, allowing the forces of capital to deepen their stranglehold over our city? DSA-LA should seize the moment and become the leading left-wing political force in Los Angeles, making ourselves central players in reshaping America’s second-largest city.
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If you are a DSA-LA member and would like to help organize our chapter around endorsing Nithya, please sign onto this petition and an organizer will reach out to you: https://dsa4nithya.fillout.com/general