The Rossana Rodriguez Campaign — A Brief History

My name is Ken Barrios. I was one of two lead volunteer organizers reporting to the campaign field director and campaign manager. I am a revolutionary socialist.

The campaign to elect Rossana Rodriguez was my first time participating in electoral politics. I want to sketch out what we did so that other Leftists might use our campaign as a template to build their own political organizations and electoral campaigns.

Obviously, our approach was not perfect. We made mistakes, missed opportunities, etc. But we won and we were able to navigate the electoral field without compromising our left-wing politics. Our experience is worth learning from as the radical Left begins to engage in electoral politics.

Especially if we are serious about eventually building our own Worker’s Party, completely independent from the Democratic Party.

But to be clear, this is just my perspective from a campaign that had many core members, and many more regular volunteers. I don’t want to pretend to speak for the whole campaign. These are my observations and I welcome any criticism and/or corrections.

Origins

The Tim Meegan Campaign

In 2014, Chicago Public Schools teacher Tim Meegan decided to run for alderman in the 33rd ward against the incumbent: Deb Mell.

Meegan saw an opportunity to run a bold, left-wing campaign because Chicago’s former mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, appointed her to the seat of alderman after her father, Richard (Dick) Mell, decided to retire halfway into his term. Dick was alderman for 38 consecutive years and is a well-known member of the Democratic Party’s “Chicago Machine”. Having his daughter appointed into power made her vulnerable in a city with a reputation for nepotism.

Meegan met with various activists, including those that were interested in building a Chicago socialist campaign for mayor. These activists were inspired by the success of the socialist Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, of the group Socialist Alternative (SA).

The bulk of the campaign’s core members (Chris Poulos, Rossana Rodriguez, Nick Burt, Bobby Quélos, etc.) had no electoral experience. What they did have was years of collective experience in grassroots organizing. They put that organizing experience to work to kick off the campaign. Shortly after starting, Kate Barthelme (of United Working Families — UWF) joined on as well. This connection brought UWF’s electoral experience into the Meegan campaign.

Deb Mell had a few things going for her:
- the Mell family name
- patronage ties that her father had built
- her father’s establishment funding
- the support of the mayor Rahm Emanuel
- her identity as a lesbian woman that could be used to sway liberal voters

In spite of Mell’s strategic advantages, the Meegan campaign was able to bring the election within 17 votes of a runoff.

The near success emboldened the socialist members of the campaign. They decided to stick together after the campaign to build-off of the momentum and start an independent political organization: 33rd Ward Working Families (33WWF).

Start an organization — 33rd Ward Working Families

Having established a local organization, comrades began building a mass-party model for the new group. The purpose of the organization would be two-fold:

1. organize alongside, and provide aid for, neighborhood groups organically involved in movement work (i.e. immigrant’s rights, tenant’s rights, etc.).
2. participate in local elections (i.e. aldermanic office, ward committeeman, state representative, etc.).

Unlike other organizations, it would not weigh itself down by initiating movement work. If other groups organically took initiative, and their politics and/or goals were in line with 33WWF, and they had attainable goals: the group would consider mobilizing. Similarly, the group would not participate in all elections by default. The organization would assess the political situation, the interest and capacity of its membership, and determine what could be gained from a campaign before committing to a race. Having stated all of that, the reality was that comrades had gotten so close to winning in 2015 that they were determined to run for alderman at the next opportunity: and win.

Regarding elections, 33WWF stands out in that it develops its members and nominates members to run as candidates in local elections. This is an important distinction to most liberal organizations that eagerly look for self-appointed candidates to endorse. 33WWF is more interested in producing it’s own candidates to have a party-approach to elections. The organization would democratically build a political platform, based on lessons learned from movement work. It would also democratically nominate and vote on whom the organization would support as a campaign candidate.

33WWF is also notable in that it doesn’t promote a specific political agenda. It is not specifically socialist, anarchist, liberal, or anything. It is a neighborhood, left-wing group that is completely open to being steered by the debates and votes of it’s membership. It is a contested space for all shades of left-wing political tendencies to discuss politics and set the tone of what should be done. This makes it open and attractive to all shades of leftist activists.

Base Building in the 33rd Ward

Over the course of the four years after the Meegan campaign, 33WWF would engage in various base-building activities. It worked with the Autonomous Tenant’s Union (ATU) to fight local evictions and landlord abuses. It worked with the Albany Park Defense Network (APDN) to protest local deportations and provide courtroom support.

During this period, 33WWF also became a fixture at Deb Mell’s office. It regularly challenged her at “ward nights” (a monthly opportunity to engage the alderman with questions). The organization would use this as an opportunity to call attention to her inadvertent negligence and/or deliberate hostility to working class and immigrant communities in the ward. In 2017, it worked with the Lift the Ban Coalition to bring a referendum question to the city ballot regarding lifting the state-wide ban on rent control. This specific project caught my attention and this is when I joined 33WWF.

Over the course of these years, it became apparent that rising rents and sanctuary were critical issues in the 33rd ward. By participating in local protests and ward canvasses: the organization developed its members’ skills. It also gauged how important/unimportant different political topics were in the ward. This helped determine what talking points and platform points the future campaign would push for, based on concrete interest from the community. Lastly, it helped develop concrete relationships with local activist groups by proving that we were committed to furthering their political goals as our own.

In 2018, fresh off of the success of our push to get the Lift the Ban resolution added to a non-binding referendum in our ward (and having it win), we looked to the upcoming aldermanic election. 33WWF had a long string of success between 2014 and 2018. We had drawn increasing attention to community frustration with Deb Mell. We had made close connections with the movement groups in the neighborhood.

The overall political climate had also changed. 2018 was two years after the explosion of socialism in the USA, thanks to the 2016 presidential campaign of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. With all of the core members of 33WWF also joining the exploding Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the opportunity seemed ripe to run one of our members against Deb Mell. The electoral campaign could be used to recruit members to 33WWF, pull the political debate beyond ward management, and put another socialist in Chicago City Council (in addition to DSA-member Carlos Ramirez Rosa, alderman of the 35th Ward).

The Candidate and Structures

September 2018: petition collection kick-off

Nominate our own candidate — no need to endorse others

We put out a call within the organization for nominees to become our candidate for the aldermanic seat. Some members nominated themselves. Most of us nominated Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez. She initially declined but, after discussing the issue with close friends and comrades, she became won to the idea of being the voice that was missing in politics: that of a strong, radical, left-wing, Woman of Color. Agreeing to her nomination, she won with unanimous support at the 33WWF nomination meeting.

Seeing how much support she had, we knew that we could rely on members to put their full commitment to making this campaign a success. Additionally, Rossana held wide support outside of 33WWF.

Her years of organizing in Puerto Rico and in Chicago had given her experience with numerous activists throughout the city that trusted her and knew her politics and commitment. This would be a major factor in our campaign’s ability to attract wide layers of commitment from the entirety of Chicago’s radical left. Personally, knowing that we came from similar revolutionary backgrounds was one of the three factors that convinced me to participate in this campaign. You can read more about her background in Jacobin Magazine.

Campaign Committees

We retained very standard activist structures for the election campaign. We formed a steering committee to help coordinate and centralize the efforts of the campaign. Beneath the steering committee, we had focused committees on: volunteers, fundraising, and communications.

Our fundraising committee looked into tapping our volunteers and other supporters to donate funds. They also encouraged volunteers and supporters to throw house parties as fundraisers where people could have fun, meet Rossana, and contribute to our campaign. People that showed up to the fundraisers could also be won to becoming volunteers and/or throwing their own fundraisers.

Our communications committee designed the campaign website and it’s messaging. They designed the social media presence, in terms of social media posts and digital ads. They also ended up designing the palm cards and door-hangers that our volunteers would hand out when canvassing the ward. They even produced a series of videos to promote the campaign by focusing on both Rossana and the volunteers that supported her. Most importantly, they took the lessons from the years of engaging in movement work to craft the platform that mobilized the bulk of our volunteers. Many thanks to comrades like Bob Quelos, Nick Burt, Rebecca Burns, Yana Kunichoff, Sarah Hurd, and Lilia Escobar for the round-the-clock content and material that they produced!

Lastly, there was the volunteer committee. For the next part of the article, my focus will be this committee because this is where the bulk of my time was spent. I encourage members of the other committees to expand on their work and correct any mistakes or omissions I’ve made.

The Volunteer Committee

• Early Recruits:

We started off our recruitment drive in June 2018 by tapping into any organizations that we collectively or individually had connections with. From there, we began promoting events to meet Rossana, learn about our platform, and provide training on how to canvass.

These early training events were publicized in social media and through our networks. The trainings were held over the summer in people’s backyards and at local bars. The training events drew in greater and greater numbers of people, helping us expand our network while having fun in the process. This kicked-off our initial pool of volunteers. We would host as many trainings as possible over the summer so that we could kick-off signature collection (to get Rossana on the ballot) in September.

Summer 2018: Canvasser training event

• Precinct Captains:

While we worked on recruiting more people, we looked to our most hard-core 33WWF members to form a “Precinct Captain” team. They would be assigned specific precincts that they would canvass on a weekly basis to hit monthly canvassing goals. At first, the goals involved collecting signatures to get Rossana on the ballot. Later, they would involve finding “positive IDs” (PIDs — i.e. people who stated that they would vote for us).

The precinct captains were the shock troops of our campaign. They would go out to canvas, rain or shine. Depending on the size of the precinct, and their precinct goals, an individual captain might recruit family, friends, or neighbors to help reach their goals. The precinct captains were the first ones regularly canvassing in our campaign, and they were the last ones wrapping up activities on both election days. Most spectacularly, they were actually able to flip several precincts that had previously gone solidly to Deb Mell!

They also formed a network of people that know their precincts intimately. They each hold a level of trust and legitimacy in their precincts that makes them invaluable bridges between 33WWF and our neighbors.

• Volunteers — Shifts and Reminders

While the precinct captains kept our campaign in steady contact with the ward, the field director (Kate Barthelme) was able to put together lists of individuals and organizations that we could reach out to and recruit from. In our case, because many of our core members had long histories of activism and union work, we were able to draw on socialist groups (DSA, the now defunct International Socialist Organization, and Socialist Alternative) and unions (Chicago Teachers Union, SEIU Healthcare, etc). We also drew volunteers from people that Rossana had personally organized with or mentored during her time at Albany Park Theater Project (APTP).

The first few months of the campaign where run out of the field director’s basement. It was a very humble operation. Using Nation Builder, we would create weekly “shifts” for our volunteers to go out and cover specific precincts. A shift was defined as a specific goal that needed to be achieved, regardless of how long it took. For example, a shift would be the acquisition of 10 signatures, or of 4 PIDs. In practice, people would usually canvass for about 2.5hrs, then come back to the office to debrief and return any canvassing materials. Our normal schedule of canvassing was: Tuesday & Thursday 6–9pm, Saturday 10–1pm and from 2–5pm, and Sunday 1–4pm.

At the summer trainings, we began signing people up for canvassing shifts. Based on this initial volunteer pool, we would set up a routine to contact them constantly in order to get the maximum number of people to actually come out and fulfill their shift. This involved sending out an email three days before their “RSVP” for one of the scheduled dates. We would also call them two days before, and then send a text the day before their shift.

Our turnout was consistent and it was largely thanks to this relentless follow up with our volunteers. A special nod to Lead Volunteer Coordinator Caitlin Brady for her tireless and unforgiving work in getting our RSVPs to actually come out to canvass.

• Volunteers — Learning The Turf and Our Philosophy

We would use data from the Tim Meegan campaign of 2014, the Lift The Ban referendum results of 2018, and other data sets to determine which precincts to begin sending volunteers to. Using the Voter Action Network (VAN), which we accessed through our affiliation with UWF, we would create lists of households to approach. Each list consisted of precincts and each precinct was broken down into sub-sections we called “turfs”. A turf generally contained 120 households to visit. These would be the households that we approached to first collect signatures, then to collect PIDs.

With some volunteers and turf ready, I was tasked with canvassing alongside anyone that had never canvassed before. Canvassing with a new recruit was meant to provide two services:

1. Train the recruit on the practical aspects of canvassing.

This involved getting your clipboard with your turf, having two pens, palm cards to give to people you talk to, door-hangers to leave on doors when no one answers the doorbell, and a tote-bag to carry it all.

The new recruit would watch me engage people at the door and learn the rhythm of making a friendly greeting, quickly making a pitch, asking the person questions to get them engaged, learn about their concerns, then reaffirming our pitch to get the signature/PID. I would also walk the recruit through how we used different fields on our turf sheets to document interactions with voters.

As we visited more households, we would begin alternating between which of us would talk to the person that answers the door and who would stand there with the palm cards and door hangers. By the end, the idea would be that the recruit would feel comfortable engaging people on their own.

We would also have a “debrief”, or a recap of the whole experience, after we canvassed. This way I could find out what they enjoyed, what concerns they had (if any), and any other questions they might have about canvassing, the campaign, or political questions in general.

2. Promote 33WWF political program.

When we weren’t talking about the practical aspects of canvassing, I would try to go over the purpose and history of 33WWF. I would give a background on the Tim Meegan campaign. I’d explain that we want to grow as an organization and recruit from both movement struggles and electoral work. I would emphasize that Rossana was not a self-selected politician, but a dedicated comrade that had been nominated by our group to run for office and that we were taking a party-based approach to electoral politics.

I would draw a hard distinction between the liberal approach of endorsing self-selected politicians that are accountable to no one, and our approach of building an organization. Organizations are better equipped to survive wins/losses in movement and electoral work while maintaining their integrity. They are also better equipped to build political platforms that are based on community demands rather than the ideas of an unaccountable individual. Hopefully, sharing our political philosophy with new recruits helped motivate them to stay throughout the brutal Chicago winter and the long hours of volunteering.

• Volunteers — New Office, Comradely Culture

October 2018: The campaign gets an office

By October, we had raised enough money, and expanded our volunteer pool so much that we needed a proper office. We rented a space across from a billiards hall and cocktail bar (Surge Billiards), which would become the nightly hangout for core campaign members after long days of organizing.

We started making sure that we always had coffee and snacks at the office for the weekday shifts. We also started providing breakfast and lunch for the Saturday shifts.

With so many people showing up to canvass, we wanted to make sure that we always provided a warm and comradely environment and culture. Everyone that walked into the office was addressed as “comrade”. Personally, I also insisted on giving everyone a hug as they walked in, as well as a “thank you” and another hug after their shift was over. This project was only possible thanks to working class people donating their free time, regularly, for free. We wanted every volunteer to know that we recognized their sacrifice and that it was appreciated.

We played music and did our best to ask questions to our volunteers while they waited for us to setup the canvasses. We wanted them engage us, and each other, in conversation. This would be useful to help them inspire each other, learn from each other, and take ownership over the campaign.

We had a white-board where we tracked who had RSVP’d, who had shown up, and what precincts we were sending them to. By this stage in the game, I was going out less and less with volunteers because we had enough comrades that had learned the practical and political aspects of our routine and they could be trusted to train the new recruits.

When they returned, they were hugged and offered coffee or tea while we debriefed. We wanted to know if they had experienced anything particularly positive or negative while canvassing. Depending on any new messaging we might be testing out, or any smears from the other campaigns, we would also want to know how conversations were generally going while they were at the doors. This was much better than any expensive polling that other campaigns pay for.

Full disclosure: we also paid for polling and the one interesting thing we found out was that our organization had name recognition. But it only provided us with the same information that our volunteers and precinct captains had already provided in debriefs. Womp womp…

Before anyone left the office they were always asked about when they would be able to volunteer again. This routine was able to net us a consistent crew of people that began to sign up as regulars for specific days and/or times. Over time, we would lean on our “regulars” to take on more responsibility in training new recruits. These regulars would also step up with the precinct captains to be leaders of teams on election days.

Most of us that formed the core of the campaign considered ourselves socialists of one type or another. This meant that our campaign also attracted lots of socialists. In turn, this meant that any non-socialists that showed up at our office found themselves regularly engaging with open socialists.

This lent itself to reassuring volunteers that we were not like the Democrats, who are all talk but tend to betray their promises once they’re elected. The campaign that was promising socialist policies, and had so many open socialists volunteering for it, had to be the real deal. This emboldened our volunteers because they knew that this was a genuine, history-making crusade.

• Volunteers — Organizations can have their own shifts

An interesting innovation were the organization-specific shifts. What we did was we listed out organizations that seemed particularly excited about our campaign. We would invite them to take over a particular shift, maybe a morning shift on Saturday before a holiday, or a weeknight shift on Valentine’s Day, etc.

They would be encouraged to rally their members for the shift, follow up with their members to make sure they show up, and then we would send them out as a group to canvass. Everyone loves a selfie to demonstrate what they believe in and/or what they’re up to. Organizations are no different. Groups like CTU, DSA, SIEU, etc all got a kick out of hosting their own canvasses and then posting about it all over social media.

Out of this, some volunteers would only come back if their organization planned a shift. But many of these volunteers would come back on their own and become new regulars.

The Campaign — Real Politics

Our Platform

We built a 6-point platform. I won’t go into all of the details of each platform point in this article. You can find out more about them at Rossana’s campaign site.

Rossana’s Campaign Platform

In general, they were:

1. Fully funded public services — public schools, mental health clinics, etc.
2. Ward democracy — participatory budgeting and community-driven zoning.
3. Economic justice — $15/hr and a union, protect pensions, tax the rich and their corporations.
4. Housing for all — rent control, while also preserving and expanding affordable housing.
5. Sanctuary for all — stop deportations from our community, strengthen the Welcoming City Ordinance, abolish the Gang Database, and establish a Chicago Police Accountability Council (CPAC).
6. Climate justice — a Green New Deal, expand public transit, and fully replace our lead pipes.

Each of the points could be expanded in a variety of ways. But this was our over-arching platform. In addition to the trust that many activists had in Rossana personally, many more were attracted to our platform because it expressed genuine left-wing politics. In the wake of The Great Recession, this platform was something concrete for activists and voters to rally around.

It is important to add that our campaign never explicitly promoted itself as a socialist campaign. We leaned hard on these platform points, which were certainly socialist in nature. Whenever anyone asked if Rossana was a socialist, we did not deny it. But we did not lead with “socialism” at the doors and in our literature. What we lead with was always the platform and it’s practical demands.

Future campaigns might be more explicitly socialist. But in our context, it made more sense lead with what we wanted to achieve.

Politics at the Doors

In practice, our canvassers found that they primarily leaned on one of three platform points:

1. Housing for All
2. Sanctuary for All
3. Ward Democracy

Which point to emphasize depended on the class background of the neighborhood. In the more working class neighborhoods, canvassers would lead with rent control, stopping deportations, or both. In the middle class neighborhoods, canvassers would lead with participatory ward budgeting and community-driven zoning.

The working class sectors were all very concerned with rising rents, which we had confirmed with our recent Lift the Ban work. We encouraged our canvassers to lead most discussions with Housing for All and it was reconfirmed that it was still a primary concern for most working class residents in the ward. A pleasant surprise was how much immigrant’s rights resonated.

We had done lots of work stopping deportations, but this work was usually done within the Latino community. Rossana took it upon herself to lead her door-knocking conversations with Sanctuary for All. She reported back that people became enthusiastic about this topic across racial lines, particularly in the working class sectors. With her debriefs about how those conversations went, we made a push for our canvassers to lead more conversations with immigrant’s rights and found similar success.

Our canvassers found discussions more difficult in the middle class neighborhoods. Through trial and error, they found that the main topic to discuss with them was Ward Democracy. The middle class sectors were not worried about rising rents: they could afford their rent or mortgage. Those sectors also had ambivalence toward immigrants, or degrees of racism. What did interest those sectors was not baseline safety and comfort, it was getting their hands on more power. For them, participatory budgeting and community-driven zoning were appealing.

Smear Campaign — Defund the Police?

As we got closer to election day (Feb 26th, 2019), the Deb Mell campaign starting mailing out large cards stating that Rossana wanted to defund the police and increase crime. This was a critical test for Rossana and the campaign. A liberal response to this sort of accusation would be to deny it and immediately declare support for the police. That was not our response.

As a leftist campaign, we refused to water down our politics and shift to the center. Instead, we decided to reframe the discussion: “what does safety look like?” For the Democrats and Republicans, safety looks like increasing numbers of police and increasing the police budget. For leftists, safety is an aspect of public health.

For us, public health is about having:

1. fully funded public schools — schools with arts programs, nurses and mental health professionals, after school programs, smaller classroom sizes, functioning heating and cooling, etc.
2. neighborhoods with free medical clinics, free mental health clinics, free access to abortions and other family planning options
3. rent control, dignified affordable housing, and dignified public housing
4. access to medical professionals and restorative-justice professionals in the event of a public disturbance, so that the police are not the only resource when something goes wrong
5. expanded, better integrated, free, and green mass transit (particularly a green expansion and integration of the train system)
6. and so much more…

With Rossana taking the lead on developing this position, we pushed for our canvassers to include it in their discussions at the doors. Based on reports from canvassers, most residents agreed with us and found Deb Mell’s flyers to be ridiculous. Her move backfired. This became most apparent at a public debate between all three competitors (so far I’ve only discussed Rossana and Deb, but there was a third candidate that will be discussed later — they were mainly a non-entity).

On February 7th, a debate was held at Bateman Elementary. It was at the auditorium. Attendance was probably 250–300 people between the first floor and the balcony.

At one point, the moderator asked all three candidates about how they would cooperate with the police to keep our neighborhoods safe. The first two candidates’ responses included support for the police, but also tried to incorporate aspects of our “public safety as public health” politics. Which showed how quickly we were able to change the conversation in our ward. Then it came time for Rossana to respond.

She opened by humanizing the “criminals” that Deb Mell and both Republicans and Democrats try to demonize. She stated that, when she was a teacher: many of the students she had taught were gang members and that it was because of our society’s disinvestment that these youths had taken these paths in life. She went on to ask why the police were not able to keep our city safe when they were already consuming 40% of the city’s operating budget. She stated that she did not think more police would solve the problem. Finally, she went on to repeat our vision of a socialist vision for public safety (as noted above).

I watched the crowd after Rossana ended her response to the moderator. There was an audible gasp once she was done. Then a pause of silence. Then the only major applause the entire night! It was absolutely electrifying! This was an audience of 250–300 people. They were predominantly white and middle class. They had been shocked by her unwillingness to bow to the police and they were genuinely impressed by her political vision. This was a proud moment for the campaign. We had held our left-wing line and rather than alienating people by being “too radical”, we actually pulled them closer to the left. We had faith in our politics and in the capacity of the masses to join us.

Election Day — Round One

February 26th, 2019, finally rolled around. We setup a chain-of-command for election day and mobilized everyone we could. Our entire list of volunteers, union supporters, etc. Skipping through the details of the day, we managed to take it to a run-off. If you check out the election results for February, you’ll see that we won the day.

Total votes: 10,935
- Katie Sieracki: 1,822 (16.66%)
- Deb Mell: 4,515 (41.29%)
- Rossana Rodriguez-Sanchez: 4,598 (42.05%)

There is a lot to be said about how operations were run this day, mistakes that were made, improvisation, etc. Particularly, there could be an entire article on our chain-of-command for election days and how that setup kept campaign leadership aware of what was going on, on the ground, across the Ward. It helped us be more responsive, for example, when precinct captains and voting judges reported low voter turnout. That let us refocus comrades on hitting the doors and the phones for voter turnout.

Rather than go into all of that, I would prefer to focus on the main political lesson: we took this to a run-off because we stayed true to our politics.

Deb Mell is a liberal Democrat. But in the context of this aldermanic race, she was on it’s right-wing. She was the one that most leaned on racism to rally support against Rossana. She was the one that most talked about the police. She was also the one that tried to attack Rossana for being a socialist.

Katie Sieracki would also be considered a liberal Democrat. In the context of this race, she was definitely the centrist candidate. She would repeat some of the same political platform points that we offered, but discuss them in a way that focused on business and divorced them from socialism. She tried to navigate the center space between Deb and Rossana.

We were the leftist campaign. As mentioned before, we trusted people to respond to our politics and join us on the left. We trusted them to see through the lies and banalities of the other two candidates. We trusted that our politics were what people had been looking for since the days of Obama’s “change” campaign. A change that The Democrats were never prepared to offer, but socialists were eager to push for.

The “common sense” approach to politics is always “don’t be too radical, try to get the centrist voters by being a centrist yourself”. That common sense approach cost Katie Sieracki the campaign. She was only able to get 16.66% of the vote. If centrism was the best tactic, then she would have either won the election, or been one of the two candidates in the runoff.

The fact that we did not move to the center was one of the major lessons of this campaign: we are in a period in which it is good to promote a radical, left-wing message.

Winning

We went on to campaign hard from February 28th right up to April 2nd. Our race was so close that we wouldn’t actually know if we had won for almost another month after the run-off election. Some comrades (Kate Barthelme and Chris Poulos) had to deal with the unenviable task of regularly visiting the board of elections, talking to lawyers, etc to make sure that any recounts happened fairly.

March 2019: Final push before the run-off.

But in the end we won. About a month or two after taking office, Rossana went on to be one of the first Alderman to help coordinate Know Your Rights events in which the community mobilized to defend our undocumented neighbors from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. She was quickly proving that a politician is not just someone that shakes hands and writes laws. They are also someone that can use their political office as a megaphone to rally people to fight for working class causes.

Conclusion

There is a lot more to be said about the 33WWF and the Rossana Rodriguez campaign. This is just my memory of it and I’m sure plenty of other comrades that were core to the project could offer alternate perspectives, as well as disagree with some of the things I’ve laid out. I hope they provide additional information to add to, or correct, what I’ve laid out.

There are also lots of questions that our campaign raises. Questions like:

• In spite of our popularity and massive media attention: why did we only win by 13 votes?
• Why did some many of our PIDs not go out and vote during the runoff?
• Why is public safety the Right-wing’s primary method of attack in the 33rd Ward and what does that mean for us in 33WWF?
• As an organization, what were we not prepared for after Rossana took office? What are we still figuring out?

I hope to try and tackle these in future posts.

For now, we have a long road ahead of us, and very little time. But the successful election of 6 socialist to Chicago’s City Council, the continued support for Bernie in the 2020 election, and the explosion of the DSA shows that people are craving left-wing solutions. We have to be creative, determined, and organized enough to provide these solutions. Our campaign can help provide clues on how we build leftist election campaigns. In the longterm, this can help guide us to build a Worker’s Party. Hopefully we can learn from each other and build the better world we all deserve.

But the only way for us to learn these lessons is to throw ourselves into electoral work (i.e. petitions, referenda, partisan and non-partisan offices). This has to be in connection with our work building social movements, union organizing, etc. But by engaging politics on both fronts (electoral and movement), we are sharpening ourselves and helping sharpen the politics of the working class. These lessons will help us all collectively prepare for the struggles to come.