12.11.2026
Setting terms in Congress
Democrats won more convincingly than expected in the midterms, and the DSA now has its eight-strong Bloc in Congress. There is also talk of a presidential run by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. How to navigate the coming challenges? DSA member Joseph Perez analyses the results and suggests ways forward
By the Associated Press count following the November 3 midterm elections, the Democrats had won 255 House seats, with about a dozen races still uncalled - its biggest House majority since 2008. In the Senate it holds 54 seats after flipping seven Republican ones, among them Texas, Kansas, Iowa and South Carolina. It also leads narrowly in the two races still being counted, in Alaska and Mississippi. Six candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) won House seats: Darializa Avila-Chevalier and Claire Valdez here in New York, Melat Kiros in Denver, Donavan McKinney in Detroit, Chris Rabb in Philadelphia and Angela Gonzales-Torres in Los Angeles. Counting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, that makes eight.
Before drawing any lessons, I want to add two cautions. The first is that the wave was carried mostly by candidates no-one would call socialists, such as Roy Cooper, Sherrod Brown and James Talarico. Our own House wins came in districts the Democrats would have held regardless. The second is that our platform was not what people voted for. Republicans spent the fall tying Democrats, moderates included, to the DSA’s platform and were routed anyway, which ought to retire the claim that socialists drag down the ticket. But people were voting against Trump. The president is already blaming the voting machines, so the fight to defend the count is far from over, even though the count went against him.
These results change two of the arguments I made in my Cosmonaut article last week. The central one, in my view, still stands.
End of alibi
A Democratic Congress still cannot override a veto, which takes two-thirds of both chambers. But 54 senators are enough to scrap the filibuster by a simple majority, as both parties have already done for nominations. From January, the filibuster is no longer something the Senate does to the Democrats. It is something they choose to keep, and any bill that dies there dies with their consent.
The closest precedent is 2006, not 2018. That year the Democrats won both chambers under a president of the other party, on a wave of anger at the Iraq War. In the spring of 2007 they sent George W Bush a war-funding bill with a timetable for withdrawal. He vetoed it, and within weeks they passed the money without the timetable. Voters who had sent them to Washington to end the war learned what a majority without the presidency is worth. The Democrats learned that they could ride out the disappointment, as long as they had the veto to blame.
The new members already know what they want this majority to vote on. Kiros has named Medicare for All, an end to corporate capture and an arms embargo on Israel as the conditions progressives should set. Before the election, the Bloc - an informal group of leftwing primary winners – signalled that it would use its votes to force floor votes on Medicare for All, defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and cutting aid to Israel. These are the DSA’s demands too. The DSA programme, Workers deserve more, calls for Medicare for All, an end to military aid to Israel and the abolition of ICE, and DSA’s statement the day after the election named those three as what voters had endorsed. They are popular: KFF’s September poll found two-thirds of Americans in favour of Medicare for All, the highest share it has recorded. And the leadership will not easily grant them. In August, Hakeem Jeffries told Meet the Press that Medicare for All is not legislation he supports.
DSA should take up these demands, but it also has to explain why they keep losing. A floor vote on Medicare for All is a concession that a Speaker with 30 votes to spare can easily afford. He knows how it ends: if the bill clears the House at all, it dies in the Senate, and the defeat reads as one more lost policy fight. The problem is not public opinion. Medicare for All loses to the filibuster, to the donors both parties answer to, and, if it ever passed, to a Supreme Court that has the last word on what Congress does.
This is why the demands I proposed for the Speaker vote matter more now than they did before the election. A voting rights bill that answers Callais1 and proportional representation for the House can both be passed as ordinary legislation. The requirement that House members be elected from single-member districts is an act of Congress, not a clause of the Constitution. A voting rights bill would still have to survive the same Court that struck down Louisiana’s map on equal-protection grounds. Even so, with both chambers the Democrats could put both bills on Trump’s desk, and socialists should demand exactly that: end the filibuster to pass them, and make the president veto them in public. If he does, everyone will be able to see what blocks democratic reform. It is the presidency and the Supreme Court, the two institutions our programme calls for replacing.
Taken together, the slate makes a single argument. We want the votes on Medicare for All and an arms embargo, and we want the reforms that would let a majority for them actually govern. A vetoed voting rights bill would make the case for a new constitution better than any pamphlet we could write.
My case for treating the Speaker vote as a test assumed the Democrats would win a narrow majority. They did not. With 255 seats and counting, Jeffries could lose more than 30 Democratic votes and still win on the first ballot. DSA will have eight members in the next House, and not all of them intend to break. The holdout strategy that Steven R proposed in Tribunes in the Halls of Congress2 is simply not available in this Congress.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the vote no longer matters. What has changed is what it tests. When a handful of votes could hand the House to the Republicans, members had a real argument for falling in line. That argument is gone. A first-ballot vote for someone other than Jeffries now costs the Democratic majority nothing. What it can still cost is the member: a committee assignment, the leadership’s goodwill, help in the next primary. A Speaker with 30 votes to spare can punish defectors cheaply. The vote therefore comes down to one question, which is whether our members value their standing in the Democratic caucus more than they value DSA’s claim on them.
Conditions
One might object: ‘Why ask our members to cast a vote that changes nothing?’ But a vote that changes nothing in the chamber can still change something in our organisation. It would be the first public record of whether DSA’s members in Congress act together, on DSA’s terms, when it costs them something.
The early signs are more mixed than I expected. Back in June, Kiros told Axios that she would not back anyone for leadership who takes corporate PAC money,3 and that progressives should spell out their conditions before giving their votes on leadership and spending bills. That is the right instinct. But the bargaining plans belonged to the Bloc. Before the election, working with progressives already in Congress, its members privately floated committee seats, resources for their districts, changes to House rules and floor votes on their priorities, without any formal list of demands. Since the landslide, one Democrat told Axios that the Bloc “has way less influence”, and some on the left now want the Congressional Progressive Caucus to take the lead instead. Its chair, Greg Casar, endorsed Jeffries for Speaker in September.
With the bargaining power gone, I expect the floor votes to fall away and the committee seats and district money to stay. Those benefit the members themselves, and only the members. If that is the trade, DSA’s name will have been used to bargain for careers. That is exactly what the party-surrogate model produces.
Where the new members stand is still an open question. Valdez has told the Washington Examiner she is “so far uncommitted” and Avila-Chevalier says she has not decided. Kiros went further, saying a progressive may need to step forward if Jeffries does not offer an ambitious platform. No Democrat has announced a challenge, but this is the clearest hint yet of a real alternative on January 3 2027, when the new Congress takes office, and it changes what a first-ballot protest could look like. Scattered votes for whoever each member happens to prefer would be a gesture. One named progressive, backed by every DSA member in the House on a shared platform, would be a statement.
It matters, though, who chooses that candidate and who writes the platform. Jeffries has already met some of the holdouts. If the alternative and its platform come out of conversations like those, among a few members and their advisors, we are back where we started, with individual politicians deciding what DSA stands for. If DSA’s own bodies adopt the platform and ask our members to vote for it, then even a vote that cannot ‘win the gavel’ would be the closest thing we have had to a socialist fraction acting as one.
I also have to concede a point. In my previous article I wrote that our members, unlike the Freedom Caucus, had no base that would reward them for a fight. Axios reports that House Democrats, incoming members among them, have been fielding calls urging them to vote against Jeffries (about 150 in one new member’s case). There is more appetite for confrontation than I gave it credit for. Phone calls are not an organisation, though. They do not decide anything, and they cannot hold anyone to a decision.
After the wave
The window I described, between election day and Ocasio-Cortez’s decision, is now open. Her team has circulated a memo to “interested parties and allies” that lays out her role in the midterms: her endorsements, more than $3 million in contributions to Democrats, and her billing as a top surrogate alongside Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. The memo leaves the presidency, a Senate run and the House all on the table. It is a good document of its kind. It presents her as an asset to the Democratic Party, on her own timetable, which is exactly what a candidate’s memo is for. DSA, meanwhile, has an endorsement timetable, but still no standing policy on what it would ask of any candidate.
The wave will strengthen the day-one camp. The argument will go something like this: ‘The left is winning, so DSA should tie itself to its strongest figure before the moment passes.’ There are two answers. The first is the one I gave above: this was the whole party’s wave, and mostly its centre’s. The second is a problem my previous article did not anticipate. Ocasio-Cortez will spend 2027 as a member of a governing majority, casting votes on spending bills, aid to Israel, war powers and whatever deals the Democratic leadership cuts with a lame-duck president. The danger I described from 2009 and 2010, of sharing the blame for a majority’s record without ever holding real power, now arrives before she has even declared.
DSA will have to decide how it treats that record, and some of the test will be set by others. House progressives, among them Jayapal, plan to force a floor vote on Medicare for All next year, Axios reports, partly to make support for it a must-have for anyone hoping to win the 2028 primary. Jayapal frames the goal as preparing for the day Democrats hold the White House, as well as Congress. It is a fair test, and DSA should want Ocasio-Cortez to pass it. But it is a test for a Democratic president, set inside the Democratic Party. It says nothing about what she owes the organisation whose name she carries, and our conditions have to cover what theirs leave out. A standing policy adopted now would settle that in advance. Without one, every vote she casts in 2027 will turn into a fight over whether we should have endorsed her.
The landslide took away the bargaining power that made the Speaker vote interesting to reporters, and it left the part that matters to us. If the National Political Committee lets January 3 arrive without a decision of its own, the Bloc, the Progressive Caucus and Jeffries will settle what our members do, and we will read about it in the press. If it acts now, we will find out whether DSA can set terms for its own members, when nothing is at stake but its own principles.