Nearly a year ago, Missouri voters — opposed by unitary control of state government by the far Right — did the unthinkable. They repealed a Right-to-Work law — to the tune of 67% of the vote — that had been shoved down their throats by Republican legislators and wealthy mega-donors like Rex Sinquefield and David Humphreys.

The writing has been on the wall for Missouri labor for a long time. Democrats have been a superminority in the Missouri legislature for years, forced to engage in procedural guerrilla warfare and gubernatorial goalkeeping to stop catastrophic legislation. Sometimes, it worked — but it often did not.

The war of attrition took a toll, and exposed the full limits of liberal politics and transactional legislative dealmaking. During the 2016 legislative session, I talked to two Democrats who came off the House floor during a heated debate on austerity cuts to higher education funding. They looked at me with thousand-yard stares and no answers on how to stop Missouri Republicans from defunding public universities. 

The next few months did not help. A streak of good luck in statewide office ended catastrophically in November when Republicans ran the table on Donald Trump’s coat-tails, granting them their long-awaited path to destroying organized labor in Missouri. With (now former) Governor Eric Greitens, the way was clear to wage a scorched earth campaign against unions.

But it did not work out like that. 

Instead, Missourians fought back, organized a petition to place right to work on the ballot, and sent a clear message to the ruling class with a landslide vote in opposition.

Missouri’s victory against Right-to-Work was not a legislative victory, nor was it was not led by individual politicians (or even politicians at all, really). Rather, the fight against Right-to-Work was won because a working-class coalition, led by labor unions, decided that their route to fighting back wasn’t through the corridors of power: it was through uniting Missourians against the corporate interests that rule their state. Prairie populism did what legislative dealmaking and traditional campaign politics could not (as demonstrated by Right-wing Democrat Claire McCaskill’s loss a few short months later).

Missouri’s defeat of Right-to-Work through citizen referendum was a historic first, and their choice to circumvent traditional candidate-based electoral politics in favor of advancing key working-class and populist measures through ballot initiative raises a strategic question for the Left: if Democrats won’t actually deliver on prioritizing the working-class, will voters?

The victory in Missouri says yes, and suggests that this is a viable path forward for the Left — particularly our organization, Democratic Socialists of America — which avoids pinning our hopes solely to candidate politics, avoids the reductionist framework of the “clean” and “dirty” break, and which avoids the entanglements and false promises of transactional politics and legislative maneuvering. In other words, it avoids relitigating the same, often tired debates about our relationship to the Democratic Party by expanding what we conceive of as electoral work, and how we use the ballot box to advance socialist politics.

It’s also a replicable approach that isn’t restricted to Missouri: twenty-six American states have some form of direct democracy, and fifteen (including Missouri) offer their citizenry full rights to not only enact statutes, but also amend the state constitution.

Importantly, these rights exist on the local level — not just at the statewide — and exist in an even wider range of states than denoted above. In Pennsylvania (which specifies “no initiative and referendum" above), home rule municipalities and counties can amend their charters through ballot initiative, even though such initiatives are banned at the state level. In my chapter’s jurisdiction ballot initiatives have been used to secure a ban on fracking, environmental protections for local ecosystems, and a right to clean water and air. Such initiatives are a viable approach for our chapter to advance key working-class demands opposed by the entrenched professional class — lawyers, centrist and neoliberal Penn State professors, and business owners — controlling the local Democratic machine.

The viability is demonstrated by a number of notable successes by DSA chapters. San Francisco DSA took on landlords and property developers via ballot initiative and won an unprecedented universal right to counsel for tenants. The measure was so successful that London Breed, Mayor of San Francisco, rushed to take credit. By driving a wedge between power brokers and the people, San Francisco DSA’s campaign showed the fundamental division of interests between those who possess, and those who are dispossessed. Moreover, they did so by making the masses of people rather than elite actors and intermediaries the agents of change.

The same was true in Fargo, North Dakota. Red River Valley DSA helped spearhead an approval voting system that won in every single precinct in the city — a city in which the local power landscape and material conditions are dramatically different from Northern California’s Bay Area — and broke “first-past-the-post” as a structural barrier against Left-wing candidates. In doing so, Red River Valley traded on the same prairie populism — often suspicious of traditional partisan alignments — on display in Missouri: one which has, in the past, built deeply Left-wing movements in the American plains that demanded expanded rights for farmers and workers, and even demanded (and won) the social ownership of capital.

Ballot initiatives obviously can’t and shouldn’t replace running candidates. In Missouri, the state legislature has relentlessly fought against electoral reform passed via ballot initiative in November of 2018. The ruling class won’t simply acquiesce to reforms threatening their power, and to ensure the long-term viability of sea changes in the balance of power, we need to run candidates that will fight to preserve and expand our wins — not based on their power as elite intermediaries, but based upon mass, working-class power, and based upon a vision of a permanent campaign that stretches beyond election day.

But moving rights through initiative can help secure real gains and build enduring power for the working-class, bring the working-class into direct conflict with the ruling class, and forge a sense of common interest transcending traditionally “partisan” politics. Take the question of expanding union rights, for example. In states where ruling Democrats are unwilling to expand labor rights, or outright reactionaries are hostile, ballot initiatives can prove a viable path to shift the terrain of power. States like Nevada and Arizona have growing labor insurgencies and political power structures unwilling to expand union rights; in Arizona, for example, public school teachers that went on strike in 2018 lack basic union rights like collective bargaining. Turning to ballot initiatives to expand rights through mass working-class action, instead of tailing the Democratic Party, helps turn flashpoints of open class warfare — like the present strike wave — into a lasting shift in the balance of power.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the political terrain is too grim. On the Left, the idea of accomplishing fights on this scale is seen as too far out of reach — a curious argument, given that we aspire to overthrow an economic order that has prevailed for over two centuries!

In reality, this is a route forward for DSA: an expansion of electoral strategy grows the terrain of the possible without engaging in the dead end of settling for the least of evils or solely hitching our fortunes to individual politicians. Building and pushing coalitions supporting ballot initiatives allows the Left, labor unions, and the organized working-class to drive an agenda that doesn’t rely on elite intermediaries.

It allows us to take a fundamental question to the public: which side are you on?

Written by C.M. Lewis. To learn more about Centre County DSA, follow them on Twitter.