For two days in March 2021, the Las Vegas outpost of the Democratic Socialists of America was perhaps the most powerful DSA chapter in the country, with its candidates gaining control of the whole Nevada Democratic Party.
Then the intra-party bloodletting began. Two years and one election cycle later, some DSA-aligned candidates are running for re-election—but the Las Vegas DSA isn’t endorsing them. “This is our lesson, and we hope socialists everywhere will pay close attention: the Democratic Party is a dead end,” the socialist group announced in a statement last month.
At Saturday’s Nevada Democratic Party elections, more than 400 members of the party’s central committee will gather to vote for its next leadership. The results could have serious implications for the party’s future. A more centrist bloc of candidates, with its roots in Nevada’s longrunning “Reid Machine,” is seeking to retake the party from the left-wing faction that swept party elections in 2021. But the left isn’t trying hard to defend its turf, with the DSA backing away from its own incumbent candidate—and from the Nevada Democratic Party entirely.
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The rivalry between Nevada’s socialists and the state’s establishment Democrats has its roots in the 2016 presidential primary, when the DSA rallied behind Bernie Sanders and the state party’s elected leaders behind Hillary Clinton. Rather than dissipate during Donald Trump’s presidency, the DSA built its ground game in Nevada, with an eye on Democratic Party leadership.
Some mainstream Democrats viewed their moves with apprehension. In February 2021, with DSA-backed candidates poised to sweep party leadership elections, Nevada Democratic leadership moved $450,000 out of state party funds, and into a national fund for Democratic candidates. When DSA candidates won every single leadership position, they inherited a significantly lighter party bank account.
Tick Segerblom, a former state senator and current member of Nevada’s Clark County Commission, is a DSA member. He said the socialist group had been optimistic after its 2021 wins.
“I think from the DSA’s perspective, they felt like they were getting control of a mechanism which they could use to pursue their ends, their policies,” Segerblom told The Daily Beast. “But as a person who’s been there before, I could see that winning that election didn’t mean too much.”
After the money, the state party’s establishment staffers were the next to go. Two days after the election, the entire Nevada Democratic Party staff quit rather than work with the new leftist leadership.
“I honestly don’t think they had any idea what they were getting into,” Segerblom said. “It started out bad and got worse.”
Still, some socialists viewed the election as an opportunity. Sanders and his aides backed the progressive effort, throwing their weight behind the new DSA-backed Nevada Democratic Party chair Judith Whitmer. Whitmer, in turn, pledged to propel Democratic candidates to victory in 2022.
Instead, the opposite happened. Disgruntled Democrats aligned with the party’s former leadership decamped to the Washoe County Democratic Party, which began running campaigns independently of the state party. Whitmer allies mulled retaliatory moves, drafting a plan to de-charter the Washoe County Democratic Party, NBC News reported this week. (The plan was ultimately scrapped.)
Amid the infighting, Nevada’s Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak, became the only incumbent governor to lose his 2022 re-election bid.
Even Sanders’ camp expressed dissatisfaction with their allies.
“The senator is pretty disappointed in Judith’s chairmanship, specifically around her failure to build a strong grassroots movement in the state,” a person familiar with Sanders’ thinking told Politico. “A lot of us feel sad about what could have been. It was a big opportunity for Bernie-aligned folks in the state to prove some of the folks in the establishment wrong. And that hasn’t happened.”
Whitmer did not return The Daily Beast’s requests for comment, but told Politico that she was surprised by the senator’s reported disappointment.
During Saturday’s election, Whitmer will face off against rivals on the right to retain control of the state party. But she shouldn’t expect much support from the DSA chapter that helped her score her initial victory.
In a Feb. 13 open letter, the Las Vegas DSA announced that “as the election for a new Nevada State Democratic Party Chair approaches, the Las Vegas chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America feels compelled to state publicly that the chapter has not endorsed any candidate.”
“We also want to shed light on what the admittedly disappointing relationship between LVDSA and the NSDP [Nevada State Democratic Party] has been like for the last two years,” the letter reads, listing grievances like the party’s decision to transfer $450,000 in funds and what the group decried as a lack of communication with establishment Democrats.
“Ready to be mobilized, we awaited instructions,” the group wrote. “The instructions never came. Nor, indeed, did any real communication. We openly acknowledge our part in allowing the relationship to fall flat. We deferred to the people who’d actually won these offices, naively expecting them to think of us as partners in organization and mobilization.”
The statement comes amid an ongoing debate among DSA members as to the role—if any—socialists should seek in the Democratic Party. The DSA’s New York City chapter, its largest, has succeeded in getting members elected to office on the Democratic Party line, inspiring a fierce debate over what socialist lawmakers should actually do.
“To participate in lawmaking, retain their committee chairs, and bring bills to the floor, socialist members have to—at least occasionally—compromise and play nice with the leaders of their chambers,” Dissent magazine described the dilemma last year. “Whereas DSA’s strategy was once exclusively about running candidates, breaking things, and being maximally confrontational, electeds must now balance that antagonistic spirit with an obligation to pass things that materially improve their constituents’ lives, even if they fall far short of revolutionary reforms.”
In its open letter, the LVDSA accused its candidates of moving away from the DSA after winning office. Whitmer, in particular, came under scrutiny from both wings of the state Democratic party, following concerns about members being purged from the party’s central committee rolls.
“Fuck this,” Kara Hall, internal chair of the LVDSA, tweeted about the scandal. “Doubt you’ll see socialists supporting Judith again this time around. The Democratic Party is a dead-end.”
Segerblom said the group felt burned by the candidate who’d represented their first big foray into the Democratic party.
“I think they felt betrayed,” he said. “They felt that she would at least be consistent with them and keep them involved. Per their statement, she hasn’t done that.”
For now, the LVDSA says, it’s taking on a more antagonistic relationship with the Democratic party it once hoped to run.
“We don’t want milquetoast progressive reformist-reforms; we want socialism,” the group’s letter reads. “We won’t get it by playing the DNC’s games, and we won’t get it by being a mildly obnoxious thorn in their side, either. Our task is to out-organize them entirely, and not merely within the confines of the voting booth.”
Segerblom suggested that the move might come at the expense of political influence.
“It’s unfortunate because they can be a vehicle for progress, and truthfully it is a vehicle for progress. But I guess they just have a bad taste in their mouth,” Segerblom said. “They would rather be on the outside pushing progress than on the inside.”
