Confessions of a Party Parasite

Centrist Democrats are right. DSA is an obligate parasite, because that is the niche the major parties have created.

The Democratic Socialists of America’s victories in the New York Democratic primaries on Tuesday have occasioned a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Democratic establishment. Zohran Mamdani’s victory last year could be explained away. He was, by June, obviously a generational political talent. And while Andrew Cuomo still had a massive amount of influence in New York Democratic politics (it’s easy to forget now that he was a prohibitive favorite in polling in the race up until the very end), he had few real friends left in the game. Many were upset that Mamdani won, but few were all that put out that Cuomo lost.

Tuesday’s victories were different. In New York’s Seventh Congressional District, Claire Valdez beat Antonio Reynoso handily, despite Reynoso’s position as Brooklyn Borough President, the support of the Working Families Party, and perhaps most importantly, the fervent support of the retiring thirty two year incumbent for that district, Nydia Velazquez. In the Thirteenth CD, Darlializa Avila Chevalier beat Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and boss of the last remaining machine in New York City politics. Moreover, neither Valdez nor Avila Chevalier are talents on Mamdani’s level. Their wins were powered not by superstar talent, but by the organizing apparatus that NYC-DSA has built over the last decade.

This was not AOC mounting a sneak attack on an unaware Joe Crowley, or Jamaal Bowman beating an Eliot Engel who was too frail to campaign. This was a frontal attack against some of the most entrenched positions in NYC Democratic politics, and it was a total DSA victory (and I’m not even getting into the six out of seven victorious races for the state legislature).

For the Democratic establishment, the announcement of the results Tuesday sounded like one of the seven trumpets heralding the end of days. Staying true to form, the establishment’s response has been to complain about the unfairness of it all. Letitia James mopes that DSA’s candidates “are relatively new to the body politic” (she may wish to reflect on why voters apparently did not view this as disqualifying in the way that she does). Former DNC chair Jamie Harrison asks “If your movement is so strong, why does it keep needing the Democratic Party’s ballot line, infrastructure, volunteers, donors, and voter file to win?”

Notable election loser has thoughts.

This line of argument is growing increasingly popular. DSA candidates, it is said, aren't real Democrats, and are using the Democratic Party's ballot line against it. Cuomo dead-ender Melissa DeRosa gave the most vivid articulation of this line of argument when she called DSA “parasites”: “they are going to latch onto the Democratic Party and feed off of it, with the overall goal of taking it over and killing it.”

They aren't wrong.

Parasitism is far from the worst metaphor you could come up with to describe DSA’s relationship to the Democratic Party. But what the establishment doesn't want to admit is that they are ones who have made parasitism a rational strategy. Species, after all, develop evolutionary strategies to fit ecological niches. And the major parties in the US have created a niche for parasites like DSA by making it impossible for third parties to compete.

The most basic way this is true is the use of a single member district first past the post (FPTP) electoral system for all legislative seats, both state and federal. A FPTP system often yields a severe disproportion between votes cast and representation gained. For example, in a district where sixty percent of the population votes Democratic, and forty percent votes Republican, the forty percent of voters who are in the minority don’t have their choice reflected in the outcome at all. The people who cast sixty percent of the ballots are allocated one hundred percent of the seats, since there is only one seat to allocate.

A proportional representation (PR) system leans the other direction. PR requires multi-member districts. So imagine a congressional district elected three representatives to the House, rather than just one. Now, if voting results were the same, the Democrats could conceivably get two representatives, and the Republicans one. Forty percent of the vote would now yield one third of the seats allocated, and sixty percent would yield two thirds. The degree of disproportion between votes and seats would be dramatically decreased.

The disproportion between votes and seats that FPTP systems create makes establishing third parties far more difficult. In a PR system, a party that is not yet established as a major party, and can win only twenty percent of the vote in a given district, can still plausibly win some representation, and thus have something to show for their efforts. In a FPTP system, such a party goes home with nothing on election day, leaving its supporters wondering what the point was. Moreover, in a FPTP system third parties risk playing spoilers, and handing the election to a party they oppose even more than the main party with which they are competing for votes.

In the US, single member districts are mandated for congressional seats by the Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967. The UCDA was enacted primarily to prevent Southern states from reacting to the Voting Rights Act by allocating all of their congressional seats through at-large elections, effectively disenfranchising their new black electorates. In response, congress mandated single member districts as the exclusive form of allocation.¹

On the state level, however, parties have more choice. New York state could pass a law tomorrow creating multi-member districts for the state legislature and instituting a PR system to elect them. Indeed, New York City used to use PR to elect members to the city council, but the major parties eliminated it when leftist third parties were able to use it to gain a foothold. And that’s the same reason the Democrats who are now complaining about DSA using their ballot line won’t back a shift to PR today. They want barriers to entry against political competitors.

The problem, of course, is that this system doesn’t actually eliminate political competitors, in the sense of people who don’t like the policy that incumbents are making. Maintaining FPTP just makes it so that starting a third party is a less viable option for accomplishing their goals. But if that road is closed, people will take another. And the obvious alternative is, instead of contesting for power from outside of the dominant party, to instead contest from within.

What’s more, the dominant parties have themselves enhanced outsiders’ ability to contest from within by making primaries mandatory. In 42 states, primaries are compulsory for state level offices. In other words, if your party wants to run someone for governor or state assembly, it must, by law, hold a primary. 86% of the American population lives in a state where this is the case. In the remaining states, primaries are still often used, but there are also options for nomination via convention for some offices.

Combine these compulsory primaries with the FPTP system, and the result is obvious. Challengers to the dominant parties will choose to run in party primaries, rather than trying to build a third party. Winning a primary is, after all, vastly easier. In the general election during a presidential campaign, turnout in New York state runs about 60% of eligible voters. On Tuesday, about 5% of the state’s electorate turned out for the primaries. Winning these elections requires mobilizing a far smaller number of voters. Moreover, once a challenger wins, they basically inherit the party machinery of their opponent. While building a new party requires building institutions for fundraising, communications, etc from scratch, winning a primary allows the challenger to simply take over much of this apparatus from their opponent. When the electoral system creates a niche like this for challengers, it is fanciful to imagine that it won’t be filled. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

While, in my opinion, both FPTP and compulsory primaries are bad policy, they are different from the next category in that neither is prima facie unfair. I don’t think the state has any business telling political parties how to select their candidates, but if all parties are subject to the same requirement, it’s not really biased against any party. Similarly, FPTP creates strong pressures towards a two party system, but doesn’t really determine which parties will end up on top.

But the US also has a number of laws that simply privilege the major parties and discriminate against third parties. As Seth Ackerman has argued, “some US electoral procedures are unknown outside of dictatorships.” A few states explicitly in state law draw a distinction between the major parties and challengers, and impose restrictions on the latter but not on the former. For example, in Georgia, a political party is recognized by the state if its gubernatorial candidate gets at least 20% of the vote, or if its presidential candidates gets at least 20% nationwide. If a party doesn’t meet this threshold, it needs to collect signatures equal to 1% of the eligible voters in a district to run a candidate. This practice is basically unknown in other rich democracies, and more typical of autocratic rule.

In the rest of the states, the situation isn’t much better. Typically, states require minor parties to gather signatures in order to get on to the ballot. This itself is not unusual internationally. In Canada, for example, candidates for parliament need 100 signatures in a district. What’s distinctive about the US is the scale of signature collecting that is required. In Florida, for example, getting on the ballot (for minor parties, which are defined as parties with less than 3% of eligible voters registered with them statewide; major parties can simply pay a fee to get on the ballot) requires parties to collect signatures equal to 3% of eligible voters in the district. For statewide office, this comes out to more than 400,000 signatures. In general, the Supreme Court has ruled that a signature requirement of up to 5% of eligible voters is not an unfair requirement. In Europe, by contrast, a threshold that exceeds 1% is recognized as a violation of fair election standards.

Moreover, the dominant parties actively change ballot requirements in order to prevent third party competition. In Ohio in 2013, the Libertarian Party was having a lot of success drawing on Tea Party energy and anti-RINO sentiment. In response, Republicans passed a law stripping third parties of their right to participate in state-run primaries, and instituting a requirement (previously recognition had been administrative and basically automatic) of about 50,000 signatures for ballot access. In Arizona around the same time, the GOP passed a law increasing the number of signatures required by a minor party by more than 2,000%, again targeting the Libertarian Party. As a result, the Libertarian Party, which had regularly fielded a dozen or more candidates in Arizona elections, was not even able to get its gubernatorial candidate on the ballot in 2018 or 2022. When the major parties are challenged, they react by making it even harder for third party candidates to compete.

There’s a particular irony to Melissa DeRosa leading the charge against DSA. DeRosa was in the Andrew Cuomo administration, and has devoted her life after his resignation to the quixotic task of restoring his good name (an endeavor in which Andrew Cuomo himself seems considerably less invested). The Cuomo administration actually engaged in exactly the kind of weaponization of ballot restrictions against third parties described above. Here, the target was the Working Families Party (WFP). The WFP is a left wing party that takes advantage of New York’s laws allowing fusion voting, where multiple parties are allowed to endorse the same candidates. Using fusion voting and intervention in Democratic primaries, the WFP managed to build coalition that frequently challenged Cuomo’s reign over state Democratic politics. In response, in 2020 Cuomo pushed through a law targeting the WFP.

Prior to 2021, parties in New York retained ballot access automatically if their last gubernatorial candidate had received 50,000 votes. Under the new law, the threshold moved to whichever was greater - 130,000 votes or 2% of votes cast. and now included presidential votes. A party that declined to nominate a presidential candidate, or failed to meet the threshold, would lose its ballot line. Additionally, the law also raised the number of signatures required for new parties to qualify for ballot access from 15,000 to 45,000.

This is the great irony of the party parasite accusation. DeRosa and other establishment hacks want to argue that DSA is doing something untoward by running in Democratic primaries. But the entire reason DSA has seized on this strategy is that the dominant parties have colluded to make any other strategy impossible.

Parasitism is one of the most common strategies in the animal kingdom. Somewhere on the order of half of all species engage in it for at least part of their lifecycle. It works because there are a lot of ecological niches for parasites to fill. The major parties have created an analogous situation with their cartel-like behavior.

1. From today’s perspective, there’s an obvious irony here. The UCDA outlawed proportional representation and mandated single member districts to protect black representation in Congress. But with the death of the Voting Rights Act, southern states are now able to use gerrymandering to make it impossible to elect black representatives (or any Democratic representative, for that matter). PR seems like an obvious solution here, though getting southern states to adopt it is another question altogether.