The recent election victories of left candidates in New York and far beyond—many carrying the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) moniker—have captured national headlines. But the attendant excitement has left a key question unanswered: How can left candidates for high-profile mayoral and congressional offices best govern once they’ve been elected? 

Combining a democratic socialist worldview with the often mundane work of actually governing remains largely uncharted political territory. Bernie Sanders has been at that work for many decades, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for going on one. And now we have New York’s Zohran Mamdani and Washington, D.C., Mayor-elect Janeese Lewis George, the most recent socialists to capture the national spotlight. 

Way outside that spotlight we have many left activists who were recently elected to—or already serving in—much lower-profile local and state offices. At least one state, New York, now even has a formal socialist state legislative caucus. 

There and in other states, some socialist lawmakers have outside-the-chamber support groups that can help them strategize and better build for a radical restructuring of the society we call home. Having like-minded allies, inside and outside a legislative body, can make an enormous difference. Allies can be invaluable. They can keep left lawmakers grounded, strategic, and ultimately successful. 

All elected left activists confront a tension that never fades. How much should we throw ourselves into mastering the legislative lay of the land and achieving small victories, even if that means parking the promotion of broad social change on the back burner?

But others among these newly elected activists take office without any support systems, without any serious constructive guidance on how to navigate their new daily responsibilities.

Maybe I can help with that. I’ve been a socialist activist for over 50 years. I’ve also been a teacher, a union leader, and, most importantly for these particular reflections, a state lawmaker. First elected in 1986, I served in the Maryland legislature for 36 years, 28 of those in the state Senate, exiting in 2023 to direct Maryland’s Energy Administration for the state’s newly elected governor. 

I’ve endeavored to hold true to my socialist values while fighting for realizable reform. What lessons have I learned? What mistakes have I made? Plenty of both. Well-intended efforts, I’ve learned, don’t always end well.

All elected left activists confront a tension that never fades. How much should we throw ourselves into mastering the legislative lay of the land and achieving small victories, even if that means parking the promotion of broad social change on the back burner? How much should we concentrate on moving up the legislative leadership chain—by becoming good Democratic Party soldiers—as the best path for arriving at a place where we can finally be a powerful force for good? 

Or should newly elected left activists simply focus on exposing what’s going on legislatively rather than rolling up their sleeves to influence those goings-on, even if that isolates them in their chambers? 

On top of this push-pull, there’s the never-ending drudgery of legislating. You can’t ignore the “small stuff.” You go to committee, you ask questions, you offer amendments on bills that have little or anything to do with classic battles between labor and capital. Do you support opticians or ophthalmologists on scope of practice? How about making a minor change in the name of a state postsecondary institution? You learn to use your time wisely, while still showing up for your constituents. 

This reality can leave little time for key reflective questions. Am I just becoming a good, liberal reformer no longer recognized as a fighter willing to take on the corporate sector? Or, am I working too single-mindedly at establishing my left credentials? 

From organizer to elected

During my decades as a state lawmaker, I did occasionally veer too far in one direction or the other and found myself having to course correct. But those over-reaches didn’t happen often, and I can thank my experiences as an organizer for that. The situations I faced as a lawmaker, I found, kept forcing me to rely on past lessons learned in the organizing trenches. The years I spent building an activist caucus that would eventually lead an 8,000-member local teachers union, the years I spent as a union organizer, the years I spent working, across multiple states, as an education policy analyst—all these experiences kept me grounded as an elected state legislator, and helped me understand the importance of making course corrections and making those corrections quickly. 

Back in December 1990, I had the privilege of helping to organize a “Welcome to Washington” party for Bernie Sanders, then Vermont’s newly elected representative in Congress. By that time I had already spent four years on my state legislative journey, four years trying to marry a socialist perspective with the pragmatism that legislating invariably takes. Bernie was starting his congressional career after years of honing his political skills in Vermont as Burlington’s mayor. 

He recently recalled an article he once saw in the local Burlington paper. A resident, asked what he thought about having a socialist mayor, answered simply: “Well, I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting the snow off the streets a lot faster than they used to.” 

“You gotta do your job,” Bernie added after telling that story. “If you’re on the city council, the school board, the state legislature, you gotta do it. And if you do your job well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many other issues.”

I’ve watched since then as Bernie has confronted all the legislative challenges that left lawmakers must by necessity confront. I watched as he consistently met those challenges. 

The right blasts away at you. Your legislative colleagues mutter that you’re too far “out there.” Left purists dismiss you as not out there far enough. You do your best in this environment. You make errors. You make adjustments. You learn.

I like to think that I’ve met the challenges I faced as well. By my last Senate term, I was chairing one of the Maryland Senate’s four committees. With that committee gavel, I shepherded into law the “Blueprint for Maryland’s Future,” a nationally lauded education reform package that included a historic rise in spending for public schools, brought record help to low-income students, and substantially raised teacher salaries—as well as implemented a variety of creative new instructional practices. 

In my final legislative session, lawmakers also adopted my Climate Solutions Now Act. This legislation established one of the nation’s most aggressive set of climate standards, over the distinct displeasure of powerful utilities and large building owners. Even the Senate president wanted to “slow our roll.”

On other legislative fronts—most notably in battles against corporate power and the swagger of the state’s richest—I couldn’t match that sort of success. My allies and I made little progress in struggles to rein in the capitalist class. The clear lesson I learned: Our deepest pockets may well give in at times on social reforms, issues like reproductive rights or civil rights. But they draw a bright line when any challenge puts in jeopardy their bottom line.

My efforts to raise corporate and high-income tax rates never made it off the starting blocks. Neither—in my blue state—did initiatives to close corporate tax loopholes or limit how much CEO pay corporations could deduct off their taxes. The fat cats and their lobbyists hardly had to lift a finger to quash any real resistance to their wealth and power. 

For an elected left activist, life in a legislative body can sometimes feel like living an Alice-in-Wonderland existence. You’re constantly walking a tightrope. The right blasts away at you. Your legislative colleagues mutter that you’re too far “out there.” Left purists dismiss you as not out there far enough. You do your best in this environment. You make errors. You make adjustments. You learn.

After nearly four decades in the legislative left, I’d like to share some of what I’ve learned. I hope the five lessons that follow can be of some help to newly elected left activists and all those activists wondering whether they ought to try to join their  ranks. 

#1) Stand up to bullies and their red-baiting.

In my first bid for a seat in Maryland’s House of Delegates some 40 years ago, I knocked on doors, mobilized over 100 volunteers, and attended meet-and-greets at every opportunity. We ended up winning handily.

Eight years later, in 1994, I began a run for Maryland’s upper chamber. I felt my support crew and I could out-work and out-organize any opposition, just as we had back in 1986.

But we faced one enormous challenge. The Senate president—a classic political insider by the name of Mike Miller who would later go on to become the longest-serving state Senate president in the nation’s history—thoroughly disliked me and everything I stood for. Miller saw me as a radical teacher union leader, as someone who was always questioning authority and had no interest in ever playing for “the team.”

Even worse, from Miller’s perspective, my primary bid for the Democratic nomination was taking on a 16-year sitting senator, another Senate insider who just happened to be Miller’s right-hand man and the chair of the Senate’s very powerful Finance Committee.  

One day during the Maryland 1994 legislative session, after I had announced my intention to run for the Senate, I ran into the Senate president in a state capitol hallway. After checking out the tiny earring I had in one ear, Miller, always the wiseass, quickly cracked that “the Senate has a dress code and that code doesn’t include earrings.” 

“At least,” I snapped back, “it’s not in my nose pulling me around against my will.”  

That exchange would quickly set the primary contest tone. Then, suddenly, an unexpected development. With my campaign’s ground operation gearing up nicely, the incumbent senator had apparently seen the writing on the wall. Six months before the September primary, he abruptly resigned from his Senate seat to take a cushy state job. My path into the Senate suddenly seemed free and clear.

But not for long. I began hearing rumors that the Senate president was asking other local elected officials to run for the now open Senate seat. Miller and his allies, the Washington Post reported, had approached a popular state delegate, a county council member, and the county police chief to run against me. Miller was also promising major fundraising help, as much as $100,000, a huge amount of cash for the time.

That June, three months before the primary, I joined about a thousand other county political players at the annual outdoor bullroast that my county’s most powerful politician, Congressman Steny Hoyer, hosted every year. Walking around the grounds, I came upon a group of labor leaders I knew standing in a group. I stepped in to join them. Lo and behold, the group included the Senate president.

“How you doin’?” Miller asked me from a few feet away.

“I’d be doing a lot better,” I replied, “if you’d stay out of my goddamn Senate race.”

“Mike,” I would go on to passionately add, “I will be in the Senate chamber come January, and I can come in as an angry son-of-a-bitch or someone who wants to get along.”

What happened next? Over the next few weeks, Miller backed off. He stopped seeking a candidate to run against me. Later, at the county Democratic Central Committee’s meeting to temporarily fill the vacant Senate seat, Miller signaled to the committee to go ahead and select me. The juice, he had realized, wasn’t going to be worth the squeeze. 

The lesson here: If you stand up and challenge those trying to intimidate you, they’ll often back off or even completely collapse. By standing up, you lay down a marker. You gain leverage and wind up in a stronger position. 

A postscript: Just before my Senate swearing in, Miller was talking to my brother, a Los Angeles Times journalist he had just met, while waiting for me to arrive.

“So where is your Sandinista brother?” Miller asked, coyly referring to the left guerillas who overthrew Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.  

Red-baiting would persist, at both “joking” and serious levels, throughout my lawmaker years. A Republican once resorted to openly red-baiting me during a Senate floor debate. At that particular time, I chose not to fight back. I didn’t need to. His attack gained absolutely no traction because, by that time, other lawmakers had come to see me as a serious legislator. You need to pick your battles.

#2) Don’t shy away from promoting a progressive agenda, but make solidarity specific.

Back in my teacher union activist days, I sat on our local’s panel that interviewed candidates for our national union’s congressional endorsements. At one point, this panel—led by our local’s new progressive majority—interviewed a then young Steny Hoyer, who would later go on, of course, to become the House majority leader. We opened the interview with all the traditional questions on educational matters that Hoyer expected. Hoyer gave admirable answers.

Then we moved to other issues. Where did Hoyer stand, we asked, on defense spending? Did he support Ronald Reagain’s anti-ballistic missile system? What about progressive taxation? I could soon almost see the proverbial steam starting to come out of Hoyer’s ears. Why are these young punks, I could imagine him thinking, grilling me on military spending? Why can’t they stay in their educational lane?

Over 20 years later, at a meeting with my county state Senate colleagues, we had Rep. Steny Hoyer as our guest. Hoyer talked about his battles within the Democratic congressional caucus. He then pointed to me with a knowing smirk. Over the years, Hoyer noted, he had also had similar battles with local left activists. Hoyer hadn’t forgotten that union interview. We teacher activists had made a lasting impression. 

Over the course of my legislative years, police arrested me twice for peaceful protesting. Both arrests came in front of the White House. The first, early in my initial term, involved a protest against sending Maryland’s national guard to intervene against a popular insurrection in Central America. The second arrest, years later, came during a protest against expanding the environmentally hazardous Keystone XL pipeline.  

That sort of protesting branded me, in some eyes, as a commie crazy out to subvert the “American way,” a branding no doubt reinforced when, in 2003, I introduced legislation at the statehouse calling for closing the lucrative “combined reporting” corporate tax loophole’s options.

Corporate interests did not at all appreciate this advocacy. Combined reporting, for example, requires corporations operating in multiple states to report their revenues and expenses together, “making it harder,” as the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy has pointed out, “to avoid state taxes by moving money around.” At a Maryland Chamber of Commerce luncheon, a Comcast lobbyist called me out as the combined reporting legislation’s lead sponsor. Only “far left-whackos in the Democratic Party,” he added, “think it’s a great idea.” I responded with a Baltimore Sun op-ed. Over two dozen states, that piece noted, had already adopted combined reporting.

In the end, my combined reporting legislation did gain a significant number of co-sponsors, but not enough votes to pass. Still, in an era when no one ever ran and won as a democratic socialist, the initiative did help spotlight the links between class and tax policy—and leave it clear where I stood.

While it’s important for left lawmakers to speak out on behalf of working families and against corporate greed at every opportunity, we don’t want our listeners—be they our fellow lawmakers, the media, or our constituents—to start rolling their eyes when we rise to speak. We want people in our audiences listening to us, not tuning out with a dismissive “there we go again.” 

To keep our concerns salient, we need to link the issues we’re raising to the concrete impact these issues will have on working families and small businesses. We need to point out who specifically benefits from discrimination. We need to build solidarity with specifics.

In the mid-1990s, political and corporate leaders in Baltimore wanted to attract a new professional football team to the city after losing the original Baltimore Colts to Indianapolis. As a means to that end, they proposed building a new stadium with state tax dollars.

A trio of progressive state senators—Chris Van Hollen, now a U.S. senator, Brian Frosh, a future state attorney general, and I—joined to lead an effort to stop this giveaway of state resources. To coalesce the broad opposition to the stadium proposal, we concentrated on a single core refrain: no public money for private stadiums. On the state Senate floor, in press conferences, and in numerous op-eds and rallies, we stayed on that message. We highlighted the outrage of using tax dollars to help football team owners get richer. That money, we stressed, could be far better spent on meeting public needs. We detailed examples of those needs.

In this stadium battle, we took on Maryland’s governor, the state legislature’s presiding officers, and Baltimore’s mayor—Democrats all—and the state business sector. Despite this power array against us, we came close to succeeding. The state Senate authorized stadium funding by just three votes, 25 to 22. 

COMING NEXT: More lessons about policy battles, why you should expect the unexpected, and the imperative of working with allies and building coalitions—and the importance of setting priorities.