Compared to liberals and progressives, socialists have a unique perspective about the purpose of electoral politics and winning elected office. We understand that the mass social change we want cannot be accomplished unless millions of ordinary people are moved to fight for their own liberation in the class war against bosses and billionaires. To that end, the socialists we elect have a historic role to play in bringing this about by operating primarily as organizers who bring workers into the struggle alongside them.

Within the modern left, most electoral endorsements have been viewed strictly as a commitment to support candidates throughout their campaign: to fundraise, build up their communications infrastructure, and develop a field program to knock thousands of doors and talk to voters. If our endorsed candidates win, the level of support we offered during the campaign immediately drops off after Election Day and we move on to the next campaign. Very rarely, if ever, do we devise a plan during the endorsement process for how they will operate once in office and what they should prioritize. We send them off on their own into completely hostile legislatures designed and controlled by two political parties completely beholden to capital and hope that they alone can beg and bargain for reforms on behalf of the working class.

Over the last half century this individualistic approach has ultimately been unsuccessful in winning gains for the working class or in getting our class organized to fight. As DSA becomes more adept at winning elections in the vacuum created by a pro-genocide Democratic Party, our modern task as socialists is to think of Election Day as a checkpoint rather than as the finish line. In practice, this means orienting our endorsed candidates and elected officials towards the primary goals of making more socialists, building socialist organization, and leading as spokespersons of our independent party.

At the 2023 Metro Detroit DSA Membership Convention, our chapter’s highest decision-making body, members voted to take the first steps in this direction by launching the Socialists in Office Committee (SIOC) as a body in which elected chapter leadership would coordinate our organizing work with our endorsed elected officials, also known as Socialists in Office (SIOs). The resolution and amendment we passed called for an organizing-focused purpose and vision for the SIOC that prioritized creating our own party-like infrastructure so we could recruit and train socialist candidates from within our own ranks, who would think of themselves primarily as organizers of the working class, rather than purely as legislators. It was also a move towards building a working-class movement outside of electoral work by using our SIOs’ offices to reach, educate, and organize their constituents into class struggle and self-activity. Unfortunately, very little has been done to see this through since then.

At our 2025 Convention, members passed an amendment to the SIO Committee consensus resolution that created a unique and experimental ‘Geographic Working Group’ as a space for rank-and-file DSA members residing within State Representative Dylan Wegela and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s overlapping districts to regularly meet with and organize alongside them. Our SIOs are surrounded on a daily basis by politicians ranging from corporate Democrats to fascist Republicans who serve the same ruling class, so we imagined this group as the socialist antidote and support system. The idea was to experiment with a new concept of how to operate in office and carve a path towards our political independence. The amendment included the clause below, which initiated both this article and a verbal summary of it given by group members at the December 2025 General Meeting.

The Geographic Working Group will issue a report at both the six month (December 2025) and twelve month (June 2026) mark to:

• provide an update on progress towards our goals and explain any roadblocks to accomplishing them
• offer an analysis and critique to consider whether it should be replicated by future similar bodies or other SIO Committees around the country
• normalize open reporting on the progress of this and other unique experiments in the chapter — all of which can be expected to have misses and fails, which are acceptable so long as the lessons learned are defined and shared with membership similar to past electoral campaigns

Since Dylan Wegela was endorsed by the chapter while in office in 2024, he has been requesting help to launch bottom-up organizing projects in his district with support from Metro Detroit DSA members. Calling back to his experience of leading rank-and-file Arizona public school teachers in a statewide strike in 2018, this approach is meant to bring his constituents into permanent mobilization beyond a typical re-election campaign cycle. The idea was to put them in touch with socialist organizers and strategy, building towards a long-lasting base for socialist politics and worker self-organization in his district. Because of his limited staff capacity, this vision needed help from DSA members.

Dylan’s predominantly working class district (Garden City, Westland, Inkster, Romulus) is geographically distant from the main concentration of where chapter members live and is a 30–40-minute drive from Detroit and Hamtramck, the city where we hold our monthly General Meetings. In 2022, when the Electoral Committee declined to move Dylan’s endorsement request forward, to instead focus on Rashida, one of the main reasons was that just five dues-paying members lived in his district. Since membership bumps in response to both Trump’s re-election and Zohran’s primary win as well as intentional recruitment by both Dylan and this group, there are now 40 dues-paying members in his district.

We believed that if we did the work to create a regular, local, in-person meeting space within Dylan’s district and conducted careful outreach and onboarding, that many of the new members in the district would be more likely to show up and organize with a group located closer to them. Texting through the list of members in Dylan’s district produced around 10–15 onboarding calls. Almost everyone we talked to expressed some amount of demoralization over Trump’s reelection and a desire to build more local connections with socialists. Many felt compelled to finally get active because of Zohran’s primary victory in June. Throughout our meetings, we’ve also heard:

• Folks have been more likely to participate in DSA through this group since it’s very close to them and they get to meet their socialist neighbors. The group offers DSA members a way to connect with their neighbors and talk about shared concerns. The smaller group setting has been an easier way to interact with each other and start to build community and social connections.
• Folks have come into DSA already socialist-leaning and gone to their first DSA meeting but were overwhelmed with how much was going on. This group felt like an easier point of engagement with DSA.
• The group has felt like a welcoming space for DSA members to bring their friends and significant others.

As of the December 2025 General Meeting, the group has met eight times with an average attendance of around 12 people, usually composed of DSA members, non-DSA members brought along by members, and constituents that Dylan recruits through door-knocking, social media, or coffee hours. We meet in person every two weeks, and the Signal group chat that people are invited to after attending a meeting is at 33 members. Only six of those members had participated in DSA prior to joining this group and three people have been moved to join DSA through participation in it. Dylan joins every meeting, calling the group “a refreshing reminder that none of us are in the struggle alone,” and says, “We’re seeking to answer an essential question for our movement: Now that we hold office, how do we use it to organize the working class and grow our mass movement?”

The group’s meetings run for two hours and start with someone reiterating our political purpose (Dylan and Rashida need a mass movement behind them and this group can help develop socialist organizers and potential future socialist candidates to make that happen) and experimental concept (this is how SIOs should use their elected office). Each attendee then introduces themselves and shares why they’re a socialist or what brought them to the meeting, followed by a 30-minute political discussion based on a reading (distributed in advance) on basic socialist theory, organizational democracy, or electoral organizing strategy. These political discussions are based around easy-to-read, short Jacobin articles and have acted as a way to onboard new members and non-members alike who are new to socialism and organizing. They’ve also allowed us to talk about the broader goals of socialist organizing and our theory of social change beyond just supporting our SIOs.

We spend the rest of our meetings working on organizing plans, as a means to develop group members who have never organized into experienced leaders. Our projects are in various stages and led by different members:

• Collected signatures for the Michigan For The Many campaign, the three chapter-endorsed statewide ballot initiatives, including at the October No Kings rally in Livonia and the November Santa Land parade in Westland. Notably, none of the nonprofits leading the ballot initiatives had established a presence in this area. Signature collection at events has been used as a conversation opener to talk to people about socialism and DSA, give them one of our DSA palm cards, and try to recruit to our group.
• Started power mapping of Dylan’s district so we can learn about local political dynamics, as a counter to the typical “insider politics” preferred by establishment political operatives.
• Launched a public donation drive in response to the government shutdown and SNAP benefit suspension, to funnel donations to local food pantries.
• Planned a group budget for the year to fund food, drinks, and a private meeting space. The budget allows more transparency to the chapter for our plans and helped us to deliberate on our priorities, like meeting in person, every two weeks, at a quiet, private space with plenty of room to expand, and offering food to entice more folks to attend.
• Organizing tenants at a 300-unit apartment complex in Inkster. This was initiated by Dylan, with a town hall attended by 50 tenants, after he learned many of them were living in really bad conditions and did outreach to the whole building by mailing them surveys about it paid for with office funds. Organizing is temporarily on hold, due to political dynamics with Inkster City Council members who collaborated with Dylan on the event. They preferred to wait until the spring to do an outdoor community engagement event before building the tenant organizing group.
• Building towards a public event led by Dylan, Rashida, and Westland/Wayne and Dearborn teachers as a way to facilitate communication among multiple teacher unions and help DSA members in those unions to organize with their coworkers. SIOs, public school teachers, and local DSA members organizing together are some of the key components towards the long-term goal of establishing a local socialist political machine.

Group members have shared responsibilities for running the meetings, with some members facilitating our political discussion by preparing discussion questions beforehand and others taking turns to take notes and chair. Distributing the work teaches through experience, including experience in making group democratic decisions.

Diane, from Romulus, says the group is “investing our time and efforts directly in the communities we live in, building our grassroots movement while building our DSA chapter as a whole.” In October, Diane spent 19 days in the hospital. “This group stepped up to support me in my recovery, creating a GoFundMe. This is community in action,” said Diane, adding, “Being a part of this group made me see how change can take place in my own community and I have discovered my own voice in creating the changes I hope to see.”

We plan to continue expanding this group as a training ground to create more socialist organizers in an area where our chapter has not previously had an established presence. For workers to take over and transform society, we need to be everywhere we can to produce more organizers and force the hand of capital in legislatures and workplaces. Socialist organizers developed through this group can confidently go out into their neighborhoods, unions, and workplaces and lead other workers.