As a power struggle engulfs the Democratic Party, a leading progressive organization, the Justice Democrats, announced a new candidate recruitment campaign targeting both open seats and incumbents and deep-blue congressional districts.
In a statement Tuesday, Alexander Rojas, the group’s executive director, said that the organization is launching a campaign to recruit working-class Americans to run for office.
“To be the party of the working class, we need more working class leaders in power,” he said. “Leaders like the elected Justice Democrats in Congress have shown us another way of doing politics is possible and represent the promise of uniting our fractured nation into a multiracial democracy where everyone thrives and no one is left behind.”
The Justice Democrats launched during President-elect Donald Trump’s first term in 2017 and initially garnered attention for helping to elect members of the “Squad,” like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in the 2018 midterms. Indeed, the group emerged as an antagonist of entrenched centrist Democratic leadership by primarying members like former Rep. Joe Crowley, the then-chair of the House Democratic Caucus, in the Bronx district now represented by Ocasio-Cortez.
The announcement comes amid a power struggle over the future direction of the Democrats in the wake of a crushing defeat in the 2024 election, which saw the party perform better with the richest third of Americans than the poorest third of Americans for the first time since the early 1960s.
“It’s time to end the era of career politicians and the corrupt campaign finance laws that keep them in power. Our mission is clear: we must usher in a new generation in the Democratic Party, led for and by the working class, to take on billionaires and corporate power,” Rojas said.
The announcement also comes against the backdrop of a Democratic Party with a vacuum in leadership at the top and no clear consensus on how best to deal with the incoming Trump administration.
A large portion of the national party has already begun to capitulate to parts of Trump’s agenda, with 48 House Democrats voting to pass the Laken Riley Act, a bill that would force immigration officials to detain undocumented immigrants who have been accused of theft of over $100. It would also allow state attorneys general to sue to force the federal government to arrest and detain specific undocumented immigrants. Six Democratic senators have endorsed the measure as well.
The first concrete development in the future of the party is set to come in early February, with the election of a new chair of the Democratic National Committee. Two of the leading contenders for the position are Ben Wikler, the party chair from Wisconsin and an unabashed progressive, and Ken Martin, the party chair from Minnesota who entered the race with the endorsement of 100 of the 448 DNC members who vote in the chair election.
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