If your goal is to win any electoral power at all immediately, sure. But that’s not the strategy with these. It’s pure movement building and mass political outreach. Bigger campaigns have bigger splashes. Every single possible metric we could have for the success of the party at our current stage was met during the presidential campaign. Now the strategy can be carried out in a more developed, broader fashion. The party is much bigger, stronger, and more deeply rooted than it was before the presidential election. We contested where the eyes were and it worked.

We’ve done the city council and school board thing. We’ve even won some. It’s not effective at building a party or a movement, given the position we were in. It won’t be too long until this is a much bigger, much more well-trained organization able to tackle many elections at once across the country at all levels. Going in this order means the core of the party’s strategy, connections, and membership are centered on the local in an extremely grassroots fashion that is vibrantly revolutionary. The bulk of all cadre work by far is non-electoral and that is what we need to build. We only take on an election when it won’t get in the way of that. Starting too soon leaves you suctioned helplessly to electoral politics because it’s the only thing you were able to do before developing the maturity and practice PSL’s current strategy has created. It’s what you practiced and what you trained on.

Sawant is a good example of what we don’t want. A cluster of fractured organizations hyper focused around one historically progressive city and a single political figure who can’t win anymore elections. That shit’s going nowhere and it sure as fuck won’t be a nationwide revolutionary vanguard party.

The goal is not “successful electoral apparatus”. It’s “successful socialist revolution”.