Socialists’ First Breakthrough
Left-wing electoral challenges came and went throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but all fell short in the face of Tammany Hall’s dominance and the United States’ antidemocratic two-party system. A breakthrough came in 1917, when, in the immediate aftermath of US entry into World War I, Socialist Party (SP) leader Morris Hillquit ran a dramatic and energizing antiwar campaign for New York City mayor. Though Hillquit came up short, his campaign helped elect a wave of socialists to state and municipal office.
Coming into office in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s October Revolution, these elected officials faced the full force of the First Red Scare. Some socialist legislators were expelled from their seats, but just as effective was electoral coordination between New York Republicans and Democrats, who combined forces to field fusion ticket candidates against the Socialists. This, along with a Tammany-crafted redistricting plan that diluted socialist strongholds — and the SP’s debilitating split in 1919 — left the electoral project in ruins by 1921.
This failure made clear that the fight for electoral reform would be crucial to sustaining power against the two-party system. One reform that proved key in the fight against Tammany was proportional representation (PR). PR is an electoral system that allows for multiple winners per district, where parties are awarded seats based on their proportion of the vote. This more easily allows third parties to achieve representation and mitigates the threat of gerrymandering. PR contrasts with the United States’ single-member, winner-take-all system, which creates a “spoiler effect” that predisposes us to the widely hated two-party duopoly. For these reasons, socialists have long advocated for PR. It was listed as the first demand in the German Social Democratic Party’s Erfurt Program in 1891, and today proportional representation is the world’s most popular electoral system.
In the 1920s and early ’30s, a movement experiment with PR grew in New York. When proportional representation was adopted in municipal elections in 1937, it facilitated rapid electoral success for the Left, including the election of two Communists, before McCarthyism and a racist backlash killed the system in its infancy. But with Eric Adams reverting to Tammany-style schemes and a contemporary socialist electoral movement still on the march, it’s a good time to renew the fight for PR.
In fact, it has already been experiencing a small revival across the country. PR is now used in eight US cities, five of which have adopted it within the last decade. New York’s recent adoption of ranked-choice voting (RCV) already moves the city halfway to PR, and a push for its restoration would expand democracy and give the Left more room to establish itself as an electoral force.