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LABOR CAN’T REMAIN SHACKLED TO THE DEMOCRATS  
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Neal Meyer
May 30, 2026
Jacobin
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_ In much of the US, Democrats’ reputation is utterly toxic to
working-class voters. Running independent candidates may be the way
forward for labor and the Left in many regions — potentially
planting the seeds of a new party. _

There is plenty of room for two pro-labor electoral strategies to run
parallel to one another: running left-wing candidates inside the
Democratic Party in blue states and congressional districts, and
independent labor populists in red states and districts, Bill Clark /
CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

 

Review of The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our
Own: How Working People Can Build Independent Political Power by Les
Leopold (J. P. Zenger Books, 2026)

In 1992, West Virginia was one of the country’s “bluest” states,
while Democratic victory in Connecticut — today very much one of
the bluest — was hardly assured. This was not a product of the
unusual three-way contest that year between Bill Clinton, George H. W.
Bush, and Ross Perot. Nor was it due to Clinton’s personal charisma
and Southern roots. Four years prior, when Bush faced off against the
stiff and technocratic Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, West
Virginia was one of a handful of states that went blue, while
Connecticut went red by a comfortable margin.

West Virginia and Connecticut are object lessons for what has since
become of American politics in Les Leopold’s latest book
[[link removed]],
The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own: How
Working People Can Build Independent Political Power. In the last few
decades, Democrats have lost considerable ground with working-class
voters and in struggling regions across the country, but they have
built new strongholds in communities and states that have come out
ahead in a new “postindustrial” economy.

Leopold is well positioned to wade into the debate about what this
means for unions’ political strategy. He is the executive director
of the Labor Institute [[link removed]] and the
author of the The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor (2007), a rich
biography of one of the late twentieth century’s great but mostly
unsung union leaders, Tony Mazzocchi
[[link removed]]. But
Leopold’s newest work is not an account of how we got to this point
(for that, check out his Wall Street’s War on Workers [2024], as
well as my work in Catalyst
[[link removed]]).
Instead, Leopold dedicates the bulk of We Need a Party of Our Own to
what labor activists, unions, and other progressives should do to
escape from the Democrats’ toxic brand. He makes a serious and
convincing case for why labor should join the electoral battle by
running candidates in general elections as independents, and how this
could pave the way to building a new third party — a relatively
rare argument these days.

A Toxic Brand

The anchor for We Need a Party of Our Own is a unique poll
[[link removed]]
conducted by the Labor Institute and the Center for Working-Class
Politics. Surveying three thousand voters in Wisconsin, Michigan,
Ohio, and Pennsylvania, Leopold and his collaborators show that there
is real support for a pro-labor reform agenda in the Midwest. These
voters strongly support taxing the rich, government controls to stop
price gouging by big business and the pharmaceutical industry, a
public sector jobs program, and aggressive steps to stop companies
that take federal money from doing mass layoffs.

This pro-labor agenda is popular, especially among working-class
voters, but people justifiably don’t trust Democrats to advance it.
The party’s brand is in the gutter: Voters sympathetic to Democrats
view them as weak and ineffective. Independents think the party is out
of touch. Republicans think Democrats are corrupt liars.

A pro-labor agenda is popular, especially among working-class voters,
but people justifiably don’t trust Democrats to advance it.

Leopold doesn’t make this point explicitly, but all three
perspectives are products of the same basic problem. The liberal
former governor of New York, Mario Cuomo — father of the recently
defeated Andrew — was famous for saying that politicians have to
“campaign in poetry but govern in prose.” Another way of saying
this is that politicians say one thing and do another.

Voters correctly clock that this has been routine practice for the
last few generations of Democratic politicians. When the party is in
the minority, Democrats usually talk a big game about universal health
care, creating good-paying jobs, and rebuilding the labor movement.
But there’s always a reason, once back in power, why they can’t
deliver on campaign-time poetry. No wonder that those most sympathetic
to the party think it falls short because it is weak, those most
hostile to it think it has been corrupted, and those in between think
it’s out to lunch. All three groups are looking for reasons to
explain the disconnect between campaign promises and policy results.
Each explanation is damning to the Democratic brand in its own way.

Politics of, by, and for Workers

Leopold’s analysis of what has gone wrong shares much in common with
the current progressive take on the party’s problems. But Leopold
makes a more novel argument as he moves to prescribing solutions. For
Leopold, the party’s brand is so tarnished among working-class
voters that well-meaning candidates who run under its banner will be
hobbled by a “Democratic penalty” that makes their odds of
election slim. The solution is to make a clean break with the party.

Leopold proposes that labor-backed candidates run instead in general
elections as members of an “independent workers’ political
association.” Though he’s well aware that the name needs work, his
polling data shows that such an organization would have much greater
popular support than the Democratic Party among working-class voters.

 
 
To those who would raise immediate concerns about spoiled elections
leading to more Republican victories, Leopold has an effective
response. Thanks to the disappearance of a competitive Democratic
Party in much of the country and the gerrymandering war of the last
decade, there are more than one hundred congressional districts where
Democrats put up guaranteed losers or run no candidate at all. The
same holds true in elections for the Senate in more than a dozen red
states.

These districts are ripe for a new electoral strategy. Leopold
proposes that unions focus on recruiting working-class independents to
run instead. If elections are spoiled in favor of the GOP in these
places, it’ll be because Democrats insist on running candidates
whose chances of winning are next to nil.

There’s always a reason, once Democrats are back in power, why they
can’t deliver on campaign-time poetry.

It’s a promising approach that a number of candidates in 2026 are
testing out. Union mechanic Dan Osborn is repeating his bid two years
ago to be elected senator from Nebraska; Osborn is doing surprisingly
well in polling this year, even taking the lead
[[link removed]]
in the first poll conducted since February. Osborn is joined by a
number of other independents running for Congress in the
labor-populist lane, including Mike Thurow (Wisconsin), Nate Powell
(Washington), and Bill Hill (Alaska). The key, actionable takeaway
from We Need a Party of Our Own is that labor and its allies should
build substantially on these early experiments in the run-up to the
2028 election.

Leopold’s argument here is a welcome take on party politics in the
United States, and one more grounded in reality than what you’ll get
from some on the progressive left. It has become conventional wisdom
that party labels and ballot lines are meaningless, and that running
left-wing candidates as Democrats has no downside. But as Leopold
shows, for the vast majority of Americans party labels are
exceptionally important devices for understanding their choices come
election time. They are so _meaningful_ that candidates championing an
otherwise popular policy platform, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, get
dragged down and lose because of their party’s toxic brand.

This may not be a problem, for now at least, in deep-blue parts of the
country. But outside the big cities, the labor movement and the Left
don’t have the luxury of denying that the party’s brand is a major
problem.

On to a Political Revolution

There’s a difference, however, between running independent
candidates and building a political party. It’s the latter project
that Leopold’s book is really dedicated to promoting, and for him
the success or failure of that project will hinge on what the labor
movement decides to do.

He has no illusions on this score. The vast majority of union leaders
are still hostile to the idea of making a clean break with the
Democratic Party. Leopold also reports that labor officials he
interacts with are so frightened by the prospect of internal fights
breaking out with union MAGA voters that they block opening up
political debates. This is a misguided strategy, since it reinforces
the idea that union leaders are making shady pacts with Democrats, and
that the only alternative to the Democrats is Republicans. It also
stymies much-needed conversations in unions about what’s actually
going wrong in this country and how to fix it. When progressives and
union leaders refuse to include members in debates about their
unions’ strategies, they cede the argument to the Right.

Leopold proposes a national educational campaign to promote the idea
of running independent labor populists and the need for a new
political party to bring them together. Building off of the Labor
Institute’s “Reversing Runaway Inequality” trainings
[[link removed]], this educational campaign could
build momentum among rank-and-file unionists for a new political
strategy, ratcheting up pressure on union leaders to strike out away
from the Democratic Party.

Outside the big cities, the labor movement and the Left don’t have
the luxury of denying that the Democratic Party’s brand is a major
problem.

Coupled with some successful experiments by independent labor
populists who don’t wait for permission from tactically conservative
union officials to run, it’s possible to imagine such a strategy
making some headway. And if at least some labor leaders can be
convinced to redirect even a portion of the considerable biannual
tribute they give to corporate Democrats toward independent labor
populists, the strategy could gain real traction.

But on the question of how to go from running independent candidates
to building an independent party, there are two notable omissions in
this otherwise compelling book.

First, Leopold’s platform for an independent working-class political
organization leans heavily on economic issues. But any hope for a
future working-class political party surely depends at least in part
on upending the rules of the political game in the United States. In
2016, Bernie Sanders championed the call for a “political
revolution.” That seems more urgent than ever. Without proportional
representation and ranked-choice voting in presidential and Senate
elections, public financing of campaigns and a ban on political
spending by corporations and the rich, and breaking the power of the
reactionary-dominated Supreme Court, it’s hard to imagine that a
third party will ever make much headway.

Of course, making the case for democratic reforms seems, at least on
the surface, to be a harder task than making the case for economic
redistribution. But if an oligarchy really controls American politics
today, the case has to be made somehow. A thorough democratization of
the political system will be a necessary first step to winning
economic reforms.

 
 
Ours wouldn’t be the first labor-based political movement to face
this kind of problem. The labor and social democratic parties of the
late nineteenth century also had to first break the political
stranglehold of oligarchies before moving a social democratic economic
agenda forward. The Chartists in Britain — one of the world’s
first truly working-class political movements — foregrounded the
need for political reforms and won the support of millions of workers.
Every working-class party after them followed a similar track: break
the political power of oligarchs first, then redistribute income and
wealth. At one point in his book, Leopold calls for the drafting of a
new “People’s Charter” to serve as a program for a new
working-class political movement. Such a charter should make room for
democratic reforms, especially if an independent workers’ political
association aspires to transform itself into a new Labor Party.

It’s hard to imagine how any progressive, pro-labor electoral
strategy can sidestep what its relationship to DSA will look like.

Second, while he spends a considerable amount of time assessing the
limits in the strategy of the Working Families Party (WFP), Leopold
mentions the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) only once in a
quote taken from Steve Bannon. DSA today is the largest
membership-based democratic organization on the Left — a far
different beast [[link removed]] than the
WFP, which remains a staff-driven effort weighed down by its own
tactical conservatism. DSA has a serious electoral strategy that is
making headway across the country, not just in much-publicized races
in New York City. In just the last few weeks, its candidates won big
in Kentucky, Oregon, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. A recent estimate from
members of the organization’s National Labor Commission put the
number of DSA union members at fifteen thousand. Setting aside unions
themselves, that means that DSA is one of the largest organized groups
of politicized union members in the country, if not the largest.

It’s hard to imagine how any progressive, pro-labor electoral
strategy can sidestep what its relationship to DSA will look like.
This is an especially important and thorny issue for imagining a route
to forming a new third party. The new democratic socialist movement
and especially its standard bearers — Bernie Sanders, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani — are, for now at least, mostly
committed to a strategy of working inside the Democratic Party. (To
Sanders’s credit, he has been very supportive
[[link removed]]
of independent labor populists too but not, as far as I know, of any
talk of launching a new party.)

For now however, there is plenty of room for two pro-labor electoral
strategies to run parallel to one another: running left-wing
candidates inside the Democratic Party in blue states and
congressional districts, and independent labor populists in red states
and districts. In mounting a challenge of this kind, the labor left
would be turning the hyperpolarized political geography of the United
States against _both_ parties: eating away at the support for centrist
Democrats in the big cities and on the two coasts and at the support
for MAGA Republicans in the Rust Belt, the South, and the prairie
states. As Bernie would say, “maybe, just maybe” that’s a road
map for building a new political party.

_NEAL MEYER is a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of
America. He cowrites the Left Notes newsletter, which covers politics,
the labor movement, and philosophy from a democratic socialist
perspective._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
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