How to Win Red States With a Labor Party

We can take political power without asking Democrats for it.

United Mine Workers, Brookwood, Alabama, 2022. (Photo: Getty)

A stupid portion of my career has been spent writing things in the category of “The Democratic Party should do X.” (Common variations of this include “Why isn’t the Democratic Party doing X???,” “Fuck the Democrats for not doing X,” and “We’ve been saying for years that you idiots should do X, but here we are, in hell.”) This is a tiring pastime, and one that has produced little discernible return. Let us discuss something that has the potential to be a more productive use of time, for those of us who want to make some progress in the class war, before we all die of old age.

For many decades, the labor movement has debated the utility of forming its own political party— a Labor Party. I have written about this debate before. The short version of what I wrote was: On the national level, and in particular concerning presidential elections, forming a third party tends to be counterproductive, because it has the effect of pulling votes away from the party closest to your beliefs and thereby helping the party most opposed to your own beliefs. If organized labor or anyone else wants to form an effective third party on the national level, they must first tackle the underlying issue of our winner-take-all electoral system. They must fight for proportional representation, a thing that does in fact exist in more enlightened democracies than ours. With proportional representation, a third party can operate effectively in national elections without simply sucking votes away from the party closest to it and helping its enemies. Want a Labor Party that can run a righteous presidential candidate? Great. Say your plan for achieving proportional representation. Until then, it is probably more effective in the real world to focus on pulling the Democrats left.

However! There are other places, on the state and local levels, where a Labor Party or something similar, could be effective. That’s what I want to talk about today.

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Think about Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayor’s race. It established DSA as a legitimate electoral political force. How did DSA help defeat the power of organized money? By using organized people. The campaign claimed more than 100,000 total volunteers, who knocked on many hundreds of thousands of doors across the city. There were other factors—a charismatic candidate running against a bunch of clowns, for one. But there are charismatic potential candidates who could run against clown shows all over the country. The most fundamental lesson of Zohran’s victory, to me, is the ability of very well organized campaigning, a candidate with genuine beliefs, and a set of policies focused on actually helping working people to defeat well-funded establishment opponents who have the support of establishment pillars like the business world and the mainstream media.

Now think about Dan Osborn in Nebraska. A former union leader who ran as an independent and pulled 47% of the votes in 2024 against a Republican opponent in a deep red state. Now Osborn is running again, against zillionaire Republican Senator Pete Ricketts in the 2026 race. He is a legitimate contender. He focuses on working class issues. He is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. He is a union man and makes that a central part of his campaign identity.

Many pieces have been written about the potential for replicating Osborn’s example in other red states, running left wing populist candidates as independents in places where the Democratic candidate has, effectively, no chance. But few of these pieces have explicitly thought through the possibility of using this model as a basis for a real Labor Party in this country. When I think about the sort of Labor Party that could win things in 2025 and achieve tangible progress—not the sort that is just a feel-good project for people who share my own politics—I think about a party that A) Is led by, primarily funded by, and explicitly arises from the labor movement; B) Is unencumbered by the toxic Democratic Party brand; C) Has a platform focused on genuinely helping the working class, and trying to turn the tide of the class war that we have been losing for decades; and D) Focuses its efforts on elections in red states where being a Democrat is a heavy liability. In other words, a Labor Party does not have to replace or compete with the left wing of the Democratic Party, which is fully capable of doing things like primarying shitty centrist Democrats in progressive districts. Instead, it can be a tool to break the stranglehold that the Republicans have got on half of the states in the country, by successfully using culture war issues, lies and bigotry, and sophisticated forms of voter suppression.

Red states are full of working people who are getting screwed by Republican policies yet vote Republican anyhow because they loathe the Democratic Party so much. Those people can be won back by working class candidates who campaign on pro-worker issues, and are not Democrats.

Dan Osborn: Not a fascist.

With 100k volunteers in a city of 8.8 million people (2.8 million of whom are registered voters), Zohran’s campaign achieved the staggering accomplishment of recruiting more than one percent of the total citizens as campaign volunteers. This is not going to be easily replicated anywhere. But the strategy of a well-organized and well-disciplined ground game can probably be effectively replicated with a lower number of volunteers—let’s say, half a percent of the total citizens. So let’s play with a few numbers.

There are a dozen states in America where Trump got 60% or more of the vote in the last election. These are the reddest states in the country, the places where the Democratic Party is most marginalized and least able to win. Not coincidentally, many of them are also the poorest states in America, and most exploitative of their own working class citizens.

All of these states have below-average union density. Even though a small percentage of the work force is unionized, however, that can still add up to a lot of people. Keep in mind the rough benchmark (that I made up) above, and ask: In these red states, could an independent pro-worker candidate recruit a number of volunteers equal to half a percent of the total population of the state? Below, I have listed those dozen states, along with their total union membership, and how that number compares to the benchmark of half a percent of the total population. Here they are, in descending order of redness:

Wyoming
Trump vote: 72%.
Union density: 5.6%
Total union members: 14,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 2,935

West Virginia
Trump vote: 70%.
Union density: 8.8%
Total union members: 61,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 8,850

North Dakota
Trump vote: 67%.
Union density: 5%
Total union members: 18,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 3,985

Idaho
Trump vote: 67%.
Union density: 5%
Total union members: 43,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 10,010

Alabama
Trump vote: 65%.
Union density: 6.6%
Total union members: 140,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 25,790

Kentucky
Trump vote: 64%.
Union density: 8.8%
Total union members: 156,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 22,940

Arkansas
Trump vote: 64%
Union density: 3.5%
Total union members: 45,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 15,440

Oklahoma
Trump vote: 66%.
Union density: 5.3%
Total union members: 91,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 20,475

Tennessee
Trump vote: 64%.
Union density: 4.7%
Total union members: 136,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 36,140

South Dakota
Trump vote: 63%.
Union density: 2.7%
Total union members: 12,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 4,625

Mississippi
Trump vote: 61%.
Union density: 5.2%
Total union members: 59,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 14,715

Louisiana
Trump vote: 60%.
Union density: 3.9%
Total union members: 69,000
Half a percent of the total population would be: 22,990

Union density and membership via BLS; population via 2024 Census estimate.

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What have we learned? That in every single one of the reddest, most Republican states in America, the number of union members far exceeds the number of people that would be necessary to form a volunteer base sufficient to propel an outsider or anti-establishment candidate to victory. (In fact, although I was being conservative by saying a campaign would need half of one percent of the population, note that in every one of these states the number of union members exceeds a full 1.1% of the population, which is what Zohran had volunteering for him in NYC.) If this does not make your eyes flicker with possibility, then brother… you should probably be working for the Democratic Party, because you have no vision.

A red state.

We need not pretend that every single union member in a red state would automatically rush to volunteer for an independent, pro-labor candidate. It would only take a fraction of the union members in any of these red states to form a sufficient volunteer base to fuel a legitimate run for, say, Senate by an independent, Dan Osborn-like Labor Party candidate. This base could be bolstered by natural allies: DSA in these red states, the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party, and by the enormous sea of regular, not very partisan people who have completely tuned out of electoral politics due to well-deserved cynicism.

Drawing on your own cynicism, you might reply: “Tons of these red state union members are Republicans. Plus the unions there are weak. Plus the culture war issues are too strong.” These tedious objections are all rooted in an analysis of what exists now rather than what could plausibly and realistically exist with a bit of planning and funding and effort. Yes, many red state union members are Republicans. But they are Republicans in a two-way contest, without any independent Labor Party to consider. These union members have never been offered the choice of a candidate who says, “I am a working person, I am a union member, I am here to fight for the workers, I am just like you. I am here to give you universal health care and living wage jobs and to tax the fuck out of the rich, like your boss, and make them pay.”

Yes, many unions in red states are weak and worn-down by the hostile anti-union political environment that surrounds them. The Democrats have been of little help. But imagine a Labor Party that is founded by and funded by the national labor movement itself, that comes from unions just like them, that recruits candidates from their ranks, and that draws up its platform directly from the priorities of the unions themselves. It is much easier to rouse unions out of their stupor when you give them a chance to provide the candidates and write the platforms, rather than putting them always in the role of supplicants to political parties that are alternately hateful or ineffective.

Yes, Republicans have succeeded in getting many working class people to vote for them by weaponizing the lie-filled media environment and leaning into bigotry and racism and culture war bullshit. Yet the one thing that you cannot propagandize people about is their own lives. Working people know exactly how little they make, how expensive their awful health insurance is, how paltry their public services are, how hard their jobs are, and how repulsive their bosses are. These things are precisely the foundation of an independent, worker-first Labor Party platform. Freed from the taint of the Democratic Party brand, there is no reason to think that a candidate leaning on these issues could not attract support in a red state full of low-income working class people.

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The devil in you may whine, “Republicans will just smear this as a left wing socialist thing!” Guess what: Republicans will smear everything, everywhere, always. Changing your behavior for this reason gives them power. Practice purging this particular thought from your mind forever.

America’s biggest unions and institutions like the AFL-CIO could quite easily fund a Labor Party along these lines just by redirecting a portion of the money that they already give to the Democrats. This would have the salutary effect of motivating the Democrats to be more pro-worker by creating competition for union support—support that has long been taken for granted because the Republicans were such an impossible option for any union leader who is not a patsy to support. As long as the Labor Party strictly focused its efforts on red states where Democrats cannot win anyhow, it would not fall into the trap of splitting the liberal vote in competitive three-way races.

In truth, the branding of this thing is less important than the substance. It doesn’t matter much whether this strategy is carried out by founding a new, standalone Labor Party, or just by creating an organized, strategic infrastructure to recruit and train and fund independent, working class candidates that come from and are answerable to the labor movement itself. Correctly done, this project is not one that would be seen as an enemy of progressive Democrats, or even of DSA. It could be an effective tool for breaking the Republican stranglehold on the lives of millions of working people who have been abandoned by weak centrist Democrats, and who have never been given a better option. It does matter that this be a coordinated, well-organized national collective effort, and not just a bunch of one-off candidates in different places trying to do this themselves. This kind of central organization, with organized labor organizing campaigns to organize voters, is a necessary ingredient of beating organized capital.

Health care for all. Higher wages for all. Good public services that help working people. Tax the rich bastards and make them pay their fair share. Support unions. Fuck your asshole boss. This platform transcends red and blue. As in many things, the labor movement is the path out of our dilemma. Let’s get cracking.

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Also

• Related reading: The Real ‘Third Way’ Is the Labor Movement; What Is Centrism?; Confirmed: Unions Squandered the Biden Years; What It Means to Be ‘A Tad Radical.’

• If you find the concept of the labor movement as a path out of our political abyss to be interesting, you would enjoy my book, “The Hammer.” Order it from an independent book store, or I’ll send you a signed copy for $40 via Paypal. Unrelatedly, I appeared on French television the other day talking about the media’s embarrassing coverage of Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. Dangerous socialism has transcended America’s borders.

• You’re reading How Things Work. Thank you for that. This site is pure, uncut independent journalism. We have no corporate sponsors and no paywall. We are free for anyone to read, regardless of income. How do we do it? It’s all thanks to the financial support of readers just like you, who choose to become paid subscribers for the low, low price of six bucks a month or $60 for the whole year. That’s not much, when you think about it, and it makes this whole place possible. If you like reading How Things Work, take a quick second right now and become a paid subscriber yourself. I would appreciate it and so would Santa. Thank you, my friends.