by Marckus T
So I didn’t vote in last Tuesday’s primary. For someone deeply invested in political change, staying home wasn’t just me being apathetic. It was a conscious choice because looking at the Ohio ballot, there was absolutely no revolutionary opposition to the status quo. The results across the state aren’t just disappointing. They basically show how the Democratic Party establishment keeps a stranglehold on politics by limiting who is even “viable” to run.
For us socialists, it really highlights the massive gap between having radical rhetoric and actually having the organized material power to challenge the system. We talk a lot about material dialectics, and this primary is a perfect social experiment playing out in real time. The establishment applied their pressure, the progressive wing failed to organize a material counter-pressure, and the resulting synthesis is just more of the exact same stagnant politics that have been failing working-class Ohioans for decades.
The Uncontested Gubernatorial Illusion
Take the race for Governor. Amy Acton ran completely unopposed. We basically had no choice on state leadership. This lack of competition is just classic managed democracy, where the establishment handpicks candidates so a left-wing insurgency can’t even get off the ground.
When the party only gives you one path, voting is just a formality and not actual working-class agency. The Ohio Democratic Party would rather run a completely safe, uncontested moderate and lose to a Republican than risk a primary where a socialist or true progressive might actually agitate the working class and shift the conversation. They make the barrier to entry so high with signature requirements and fundraising expectations that grassroots campaigns are starved out before they even file their paperwork. This isn’t an accident. It is a calculated structural bottleneck designed to keep working people choosing between two flavors of capitalism.
Forhan and the Failure of Individualist Insurgency
Then there’s the Attorney General race, which was the only real clash between a self-described radical and the party machine. Elliot Forhan getting crushed by over 20 points is a huge lesson for our movement. It proves that rhetoric is not organization. Forhan ran a really lackluster campaign that was totally isolated from work unions and socialist infrastructure.
There’s a huge difference between shallow individualist advocacy and deep structural organizing. Forhan’s campaign was flawed by design because he substituted radical aesthetics for actual base-building. In the age of social media, it is really easy to fall into the trap of thinking that going viral or having edgy talking points translates to actual votes. But political power doesn’t come from a Twitter following. It comes from knocking on doors, having hundreds of one-on-one conversations, and building trust in working-class neighborhoods.
Because he couldn’t unify the left in Ohio or build a dedicated mass base, his insurgency just got flattened by the party’s money and institutional weight. Doing true organizing for a candidacy means doing the rigorous and unglamorous work of building collective power before the election, not just making a bunch of noise during it. You cannot substitute ego for an organized mass base.
The Sherrod Paradox
Sherrod Brown’s dominance is still a thing because he remains the only prominent figure using a pro-worker “Dignity of Work” narrative. He is obviously not a socialist, but the vacuum to his left exists because we haven’t built a competing power base capable of offering a materialist alternative for the working class. Him winning by 90% isn’t a total endorsement of his politics, it’s just the complete absence of a radical challenge from within the Democratic Party.
While Greg Levy is providing an alternative by running as an independent, this primary proves the Democratic establishment faces zero internal threat from the left. And frankly, we have to be honest about the material reality of third-party runs right now. The current political atmosphere is so hostile and unstable that running outside the two-party system just isn’t a realistic tactic for us yet. It is a sad reality, but the structural barriers are simply too high. Until we build up our own massive and disciplined electoral infrastructure, those independent campaigns will continue to be starved of resources and media oxygen before they can even get off the ground.
“Dignity of Work” is a great slogan, but as socialists, we know that true dignity doesn’t come from just having a slightly nicer boss or a slightly better wage under capitalism. It comes from the working class actually owning the value of what they produce. But because we haven’t stepped up to provide that alternative on a massive scale, working-class Ohioans are left clinging to the best available option the Democrats will allow them to have.
Ceding the Battlefield: The Danger of Anti-Electoralism
I know there are comrades in our movement who think electoral politics is a complete waste of time, just a bourgeois trap that feeds the establishment instead of building revolution. And theoretically, yeah, that skepticism makes sense. The capitalist state isn’t built to dismantle itself.
But looking at our material conditions, this total lack of opposition is exactly why Ohio politics are so stagnant. Unopposed elections are why Republicans keep dragging the state further red without even trying. If we refuse to field candidates, we aren’t starving the establishment. We are literally handing them the keys to the state.
Look at the material victories we’ve already won though. With Cleveland DSA’s trans rights priority project, we fought for and passed protective legislation in Lakewood that is in effect right now. In Cleveland, we are deep in the fight pushing a ballot initiative to force that same legislation onto the city council’s agenda. We treated that project like socialist science. We formed a strategy, we tested it by organizing in the real world, and we secured a material victory. We are proving that organizing in good faith with the community forces tangible changes to protect the working class and marginalized folks.
We’re flexing our power in local issue-based campaigns, but we are completely ignoring electoralism, which is half the political battlefield. Why build up all that structural power just to surrender the ballot box? If we can run a complex, city-wide ballot initiative, we have the skills to run our own class-conscious candidates.
The Call to Action: Building Accountable Leaders and the Campaign Megaphone
The reality of these primaries shouldn’t just alienate us, it should be fuel for the fire. If there are no revolutionary candidates on the ballot, we have to put them there.
This means people taking the initiative themselves. Don’t wait for the establishment to tap you on the shoulder. We need politically motivated comrades stepping up right now, asking the hard questions, and figuring out what it takes to get a campaign off the ground.
But to be absolutely clear, this isn’t just a call to run candidates just to oppose the status quo without a real strategy. We can’t recreate the exact conditions we’re fighting against by launching unaccountable, candidate-centric campaigns that just copy the establishment’s playbook. We have to do things fundamentally differently.
What makes our electoral strategy structurally different is absolute democratic accountability and deep political alignment. We aren’t just looking for casual allies, we are building a core of deeply dedicated organizers. A socialist candidate isn’t a free agent. They are a delegate of the organization. Doing things in a new way means ensuring that a candidate is in such deep agreement with the democratic values of the chapter that going rogue wouldn’t even cross their mind. It has to be a core value of the candidate themselves that it is imperative to stand true, dedicated, and strictly disciplined to what the organization as a whole values. We don’t just endorse a candidate and hope for the best. We lift up a comrade who is already deeply embedded in our collective struggle.
When we have that level of structural discipline, the campaign turns into something way bigger than a single politician. It becomes a massive megaphone. Using that megaphone does two crucial things. First, it popularizes our politics on a massive scale, putting our platform in front of thousands of voters and making the organization a recognized, household name for working-class power.
Second, and most importantly, it intrinsically ties into the organizing work we are already doing. A disciplined electoral campaign doesn’t exist in a silo. When our candidates and volunteers are knocking doors or speaking on a debate stage, they are directly uplifting projects like the trans rights ballot initiative. The campaign acts as an amplifier. It builds the soft power of public narrative and popularity, which we then convert into the hard power needed to actually pass our initiatives and force the state’s hand.
By fusing our electoral campaigns with our pre-existing issue campaigns, we stop playing defense. We start building a comprehensive political machine. We can’t wait for the establishment to offer us a seat at the table, we have to build our own apparatus from the ground up. The DSA is the vehicle to do that. By committing to this organized project, building accountable leaders, and launching strategic campaigns, we can transform this alienation into the material power we need to break the status quo and finally secure tangible changes for the working class of Ohio.