Author is a member of Metro DC DSA and served as an elected delegate to the organization's 2025 National Convention. This article is also published on DSA's national online publication, Democratic Left.
THE DSA NATIONAL CONVENTION, held every two years, is DSA’s highest decision making body, where delegates elected from chapters across the country gather to debate and vote on the organization’s direction, strategies, and response to pressing issues. During convention, delegates organize themselves for and against resolutions (and their amendments), elect comrades to the National Political Committee (NPC) — DSA’s central decision-making organ, much like our chapter’s Steering Committee — and learn from each other during formal and informal convention programming.
The 2025 convention was my first. Attending it as a delegate gave me an opportunity to clarify and focus my own politics. On the convention floor, I heard many arguments on political strategies, learned from others’ analysis and lived experience, and gathered information (including from my own experiences with the chapter) to make key decisions. This process has renewed my energy to organize in DC and within DSA. This year, we heard from Rep. Rashida Tlaib and from guest speakers who joined us from Brazil, Cuba, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Japan, and more. The solidarity we build with others around the world is real, and much of it starts at the local level and with how we organize ourselves.
So, if you’re considering running as a delegate for convention, I hope my reflections spark your own curiosity and confidence.
Before running as a delegate, I had been in the chapter for about five years, but this time does not include a laundry list of campaigns. I have mostly stuck with the Publications Working Group (and I was elected as a member of the Publications Board in 2025). I participated briefly in the Abolition Working Group, co-founded a short-lived Food Justice Working Group and right before convention was just recently dipping my toes back into chapter life through a social housing campaign inside and outside of the chapter. Though I have tried to learn by doing and through fellowships like Rising Organizers and Jane McAlevey’s training institute, I consider myself quite fresh to organizing and to politics.
I think convention is an experience that benefits every member, no matter the experience you have. Being elected as a delegate tends to require that other people in the chapter know who you are and trust the decisions you would make at convention. But that can and often does look different for everyone, whether you’ve been in the chapter for a year or 10 years, whether you’ve focused on one working group or five, and whether you’ve been building internal infrastructure or organizing your neighbors.
I am not part of a caucus, which was a concept I only learned about while running as a delegate. I did run on the Red Slate (redux) — a comrade and friend I trust asked me to consider running for convention, took the time to explain the process to me, and invited me to discuss politics and strategy with the group that eventually formed the Red Slate, making it feel pretty organic for me to join the slate. I aligned with many of my comrades on the slate, some of whom were part of different caucuses. I found it helpful to read their literature, ask questions, and use our conversations to inform my analysis and decision-making. But there are many resources available both prior to and during convention that you can use to develop your understanding. Before attending, I found it helpful to read and compare primers on DSA caucuses. Here are a few for reference: guide and companion video from LSC [Libertarian Socialist Caucus, guide from MUG [Marxist Unity Group] YDSA, guide from B&R [Bread and Roses], guide from R&R [Reform and Revolution], and guide from SMC [Socialist Majority Caucus]. (I promise these acronyms will make sense sooner than you think!) Many caucuses also print literature to flyer the convention floor, so even if you don’t know much about the different caucuses before attending convention, you certainly will by the end.
At the end of the day, how important are caucuses? They are helpful for articulating nuances in political beliefs and practices. Historically, factional politics has seemed to brew the most bad blood between members. I found that understanding both the political and interpersonal differences between members provided useful context for the heatedness behind certain discussions. That said, I deeply appreciated Megan R’s opening address at the 2025 convention. Megan emphasized that all delegates in the room are still each other’s closest allies. One of the comrades I attended convention with translated this advice into practice: See others as delegates first, and not by their caucuses.
The moment I got to Chicago, I realized that 90% of organizing happens prior to convention. After being elected as a delegate, I received many emails and personally found it tough to keep up. Members all over the country were submitting their resolutions and amendments, delegates had to vote on items to be debated on the convention floor, discussions were already happening in a convention forum … Since it was my first time, I gave myself grace to stay enough in the know. I read a couple of primers on caucuses, such as some of the ones I linked previously. For the caucuses I most agreed with, I read their platforms, analysis from prior conventions, and analysis of the upcoming convention. In the week leading up to convention (and on the flight), the key things I focused on were: reading the full compendium of resolutions, organizing my own schedule of what to attend and do across convention, and getting a basic grasp of OpenSlides (voting mechanism) and Robert’s Rules of Order (procedural context).
Most of this information is easily picked up on the floor after the first day. I personally found it useful to sit with people whose opinions and disagreements I could learn from, and to approach convention from a place of curiosity — asking questions, figuring out who to talk to and what questions to ask — to inform how I made my decisions. The one key piece of information I would prefer to read earlier next time: the NPC candidate compendium, so I knew who these candidates were if I wanted to talk to them and ask them questions.
At the 2025 convention, event organizers developed programming to help delegates learn and connect with each other on specific topics. This programming was enormously useful for bringing ideas back to the chapter.
On the convention floor, recognizing that not all points made during debates are valid arguments allowed me to process what people were sharing. In particular, I took note when I heard:
Identifying these helped me focus on the actual issue at hand, and recognize my own emotional responses, assumptions, blind spots, and jumps to conclusions. I kept asking myself: What is the tension underlying this need for debate? What is the crux of the discussion? During convention I also engaged in live correspondence, which gave me the opportunity to practice active listening and critical thinking in the moment. This may not be interesting or useful for everyone, but consider having your own tool to follow debate and make decisions.
To be clear, I don’t think I always got it right. I regretted some votes after taking more time to come to a decision, which the convention floor does not always give you. But approaching the debates with openness, curiosity, and the humility to be wrong gave me more confidence in my own analysis.
At convention, DSA can quickly and easily feel all-encompassing. I knew this would be overwhelming for me. I found my own coping strategies, such as getting up to stretch, going outside for part of every day, exercising in the mornings, and turning down parties if I was too tired (which, for me, meant I went to zero parties, but I’m okay with that). Create the permission for you to fill up your own batteries.
I also knew I might get emotional at convention, and I did several times. I got angry, disappointed, and frustrated. What helped me was setting my boundary before convention. In my responses, I set the following standard for myself: I want to try to identify the emotion I’m feeling, name it, acknowledge it, take a step back from it if I need to, and then lean into curiosity. When I am feeling frustrated, how can I turn this frustration into a question for the person I’m speaking with or listening to? I could not always follow this standard, but it was a useful mindset framing for listening to arguments I significantly disagreed with.
