The End of the Organizing Era

Mulling the Wellstone and Sanders legacies

Who does political organizing in America? Well, almost everyone. Political action committees, NGOs, labor unions, and state parties are everywhere. Campaigns are a constant, for the presidency and everything else, so there are always canvassers, mailers, television advertisements, and text messages. Democrats, in particular, enjoy identifying as organizers, and there’s no shortage of human beings claiming the title. When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, he founded Organizing for America, which was intended to ensure the remarkable gains he made that year could continue much deeper into the century. Though Bernie Sanders did not win in 2016, he helped found Our Revolution, the progressive answer to what OFA had been.

Like OFA, Our Revolution amounted to little. There has been less written on Our Revolution’s decline because it didn’t, like OFA, cannibalize the Democratic National Committee and preside over enormous downballot losses that severely damaged the Democratic Party for the rest of the decade. Progressives have won plenty of elections since 2016, but it’s difficult to discern what role Our Revolution has played beyond doling out dollars. There is no sense of any tangible organizing body that is plunging into districts and effectively boosting Sanders acolytes or, more crucially, laying the groundwork for a post-Sanders future. Our Revolution exists—endorsements are made, issues are advocated for, and victories are declared. But ask anyone on the left how much an impact Our Revolution is having on congressional, statehouse, and other local races in 2024, and they’ll shrug. Considering how large and well-funded the Sanders 2016 and 2020 campaigns were, Our Revolution is not exactly an imposing operation.

And that, I believe, should be blamed on Bernie Sanders. He is, undoubtedly, the most significant left-wing politician in America of the last half century. Without his presidential campaigns, there is no Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, no Squad, or a broad revival of the Democratic Socialists of America. There is probably not a Biden presidency that takes populist economics seriously. There probably isn’t even a willingness of centrist Democrats to campaign on anti-corporate platforms.

All that being said, after having researched Paul Wellstone, the senator from Minnesota who died twenty-two years ago in a plane crash, I came to the conclusion that Sanders, for all his strengths, doesn’t care a great deal about political organizing. In that way, he is not unique; most politicians can only dedicate themselves so much to campaigns beyond their own. Had Wellstone lived—and if he had managed, somehow, his own presidential campaign against the Democratic establishment—the progressive left might have had the organizer-in-chief it desperately craves and mostly lacks.

Wellstone and Sanders had much in common. They were two Jewish men born before the end of World War II who arrived in Congress in 1991. They were unabashed leftists who forged their political identities in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. They were true believers who never lost the faith. The neoliberal turn of the 1980s did not lead them, like counterculture icon Jerry Rubin, into lucrative business careers. They were, coincidentally, excellent amateur athletes, with Wellstone being the real standout. Sanders was a track star in the New York City public schools while Wellstone wrestled well enough, in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, to win a scholarship to the University of North Carolina. And like Sanders, he built a political career far away from the state of his birth. While Sanders decamped for Vermont in the late 1960s to bask in the rural splendor and live an itinerant existence, Wellstone arrived in Minnesota to teach political science at Carleton College, where he was offered a tenure-track position.

Both men launched political careers that were far from inevitable. Sanders spent the 1970s running as a fringe third party candidate in Vermont, never winning an election. His breakthrough wouldn’t come until the 1980 Burlington mayoral race, where he won a shock upset by a mere 10 votes. Wellstone was a popular academic who became heavily invested in community organizing in the 1970s and 1980s. In that sense, his rise to power was like Obama’s, but the difference was the sheer amount of time and energy Wellstone invested into both organizing oppressed populations and actual policy-based campaigns to improve their lot. Organizing was, very much, Wellstone’s life, and he had a great talent for it. He founded the Organization for a Better Rice County, a group consisting largely of single parents on welfare. The organization advocated for public housing, public education, affordable healthcare, and a publicly-funded day care center.

Wellstone’s theory of change was intuitive, and was later known as the “Wellstone triangle.” The triangle was running electoral campaigns, organizing at the grassroots, and devising public policy. Wellstone cared greatly about all three. He would argue that electoral politics without community organizing was a politics absent a base, and community organizing sans electoral politics was a marginalized politics. In turn, community organizing and electoral politics without an obvious public policy agenda was a politics without direction. After his death, a political bootcamp known as Camp Wellstone was established, on these principles, to train the next generation of politicians and organizers. Among the attendees, in 2005, was a 40-year-old high school teacher named Tim Walz.

In the 1980s, Wellstone began to focus on electoral politics. He ran unsuccessfully for state auditor and became a co-chair of Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign in Minnesota. The Jackson campaign, to this day, is underexplored; it was a remarkable surge of progressive, multiracial energy in a political moment that was trying to bury liberalism for good. Like Wellstone, Sanders was an enthusiastic Jackson supporter, and it’s easy to see the Sanders 2016 campaign as a successor to Jackson’s. The 1988 experience convinced Wellstone he should run for the Senate in 1990, despite never having held elected office before and knowing, with absolute certainty, he was going to be heavily outspent. The incumbent was a Republican named Rudy Boschwitz, a wealthy businessman who had been in office for more than a decade.

Like Sanders in his bid for the Burlington mayoralty, Wellstone was given little chance of winning. He stumped in a rickety green school bus and opted to stay in the houses of supporters instead of paying for hotels. He focused intently on reaching out to groups in Minnesota who had long been ignored by local politicians, like college students, the poor, and nonwhites. He would become revered, later on, in the Hmong community for his advocacy and willingness to show up in their neighborhoods. Despite getting outspent 7:1, Wellstone narrowly defeated Boschwitz and became a United States senator. “The kids won it for you,” Walter Mondale told him.

Wellstone was the liberal conscience of the Senate at a time when Clintonian neoliberalism was ascendant. He opposed the Gulf War, voted against the repeal of Glass-Steagall, and proudly aligned himself with organized labor in a period when young Democrats were eager to leave the party’s New Deal legacy behind. One misstep was a vote for the Defense of Marriage Act, which he would later apologize for. One of his last votes, before the plane crash that would take his life, was against the Iraq War. Like Sanders, he was on the right side of history.

Would Wellstone have run for president had he not died during his re-election campaign in 2002? He was a rumored candidate in 2000 but opted against running because he was experiencing chronic back problems that would later be diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. It’s possible his condition only worsens in the 2000s and he never attempts, like Howard Dean in 2004, an insurgent campaign. We do not know, in turn, if the 2016 version of Wellstone would have had the health to mount a Sanders-style campaign against Clinton. The will, at least, would have been there.

A better question to ask is what if Bernie Sanders had a little more Paul Wellstone in him? Our Revolution isn’t Camp Wellstone. If Camp Wellstone isn’t a nationwide force, it’s had a very direct impact on Democratic politics in Minnesota, and politicians from Amy Klobuchar to Keith Ellison speak reverentially of the Wellstone organizing legacy. Minnesota is a blue state, but it is not overwhelmingly Democratic and it is not a foregone conclusion that its top officeholders will be Democrats. The Democratic success in Minnesota in the twenty-first century cannot only be attributed to Wellstone’s pioneering efforts—that would be simplistic—but it is apparent his impact, within state-level politics, is still felt in the 2020s. Walz, the Camp Wellstone alum, is one shining example.

Sanders is a dynamo within Vermont but he has never tried to displace the Republican governor there or even ensure there are new democratic socialists rising to take his place. Becca Balint, his probable successor for his Senate seat, is a proud progressive but will explicitly not identify as a democratic socialist. Wellstone never identified this way either, but the label—and the concept of reviving socialism in the U.S.—has been central to Sanders’ political project. Sanders does have a durable organizing legacy in DSA, but they exist and sometimes thrive, these days, in spite of him. The Sanders campaign inspired thousands to join DSA and almost every DSA politician in elected office, from AOC on down, can point to the 2016 campaign as a seminal moment in their lives. But Sanders himself is not a DSA member and does not promote DSA in his public remarks. He does not fundraise for them. It’s very clear he does not see DSA as an extension of his project. He does not care, generally, whether a DSA candidate wins a City Council seat in some municipality. Yes, DSA candidates will, from time to time, have a Sanders endorsement, but it stops there. Sanders’ hero remains Eugene Debs, the great socialist orator of the early twentieth century, and it’s worth pointing out that while Sanders has had much greater electoral success—Debs was a perennial third party candidate who never came close to winning the presidency—it was Debs who helped will the Socialist Party into existence and craft it into a genuine machine at the local level. At its peak, the Socialist Party won more than 1,100 elected offices in America, sent Meyer London and Victor Berger to Congress, and controlled the city of Milwaukee.

Could Sanders ever build a machine like that? Does he care to?

Sanders has not anointed a successor. AOC is commonly understood as the heir to his movement, but she is a very different kind of political figure. After several years as an insurgent, she has made it clear she is much more comfortable inside the Democratic tent. Her speech at the Democratic National Convention was well-received but not the sort Sanders would ever deliver. As the war in Gaza raged, Ocasio-Cortez hardly spoke of it and heaped praise on Kamala Harris for doing some negligible work toward a ceasefire. Ocasio-Cortez can’t be blamed for her ambition and Sanders, of course, spoke at the DNC as well. As time passes, though, it becomes apparent that AOC would rather lead the Congressional Progressive Caucus one day or campaign for the presidency as a more liberal version of Harris than be the leader of the progressive, socialist-inflected left of the United States. If another Hillary Clinton-like candidate tamps down opposition and tries to breeze to the Democratic nomination, AOC will not be rising to stand in her way. She is a team player now.

Sometimes, though, you’ve got to break away. You’ve got to be the politician, maybe, demanding that Kamala Harris actually stand for something.

Sanders has sharp instincts and a political compass that has served him well. What he lacks, unlike Wellstone, is a long-term, serious commitment to political organizing that will outlast him. He talks often of a political revolution but only in gauzy terms. The people will rise up, get into the streets, and then … If Sanders wants a political revolution, why not invest heart and soul into DSA? DSA which, for all its faults, is a functioning political organization of at least 50,000 members across America, one that continues to win elections down the ballot? Why not fundraise for them and solve their cash woes in one fell swoop? Why not stand up their machine with more professional operatives, fund clubhouses, and try to build the socialist—and non-corrupt—version of Tammany Hall? Wellstone never became prominent enough to do all of this. His successes were for Minnesota, and then his life was cut short. Sanders is eighty-three but healthy and seeking another term in the Senate. His platform isn’t too diminished. What he lacks, ultimately, is will. If Wellstone never got a chance to run for president, he had certain ambitions Sanders never mustered.