Endorsements

Like most DSA chapters, Southern Maryland DSA occasionally endorses candidates in elections. Our endorsement process is as follows

• The candidate completes this questionnaire and emails it to southernmarylanddsa@gmail.com
• Our Electoral Committee plans a virtual Q&A session with our membership, where the candidate answers both questions prepared ahead of time by the Electoral Committee, as well as questions from members.
• The questionnaire and the notes from the Q&A session are sent to all members and included in the agenda of the next General Body Meeting
• At the General Body Meeting the Electoral Committee motions for endorsement and the chapter members vote. The vote must reach a 2/3 majority threshold

It is important to note that DSA handles endorsements differently from many progressive organizations and labor unions. At DSA’s 2025 convention, DSA voted to reaffirm our “goal of becoming an independent mass socialist party” which is “united around a democratically created program that outlines goals that, enacted together, will allow the working class to rule and end capitalism.” As such, although many of our endorsed candidates run as Democrats, we practice the party surrogate strategy of temporarily using other parties’ ballot lines while building our own class independent program and party infrastructure.

Because of this, we do not do “paper endorsements” but rather coordinate closely with our endorsed candidates and invest significant capacity into campaigning for them. Moreover (as should be clear from our questionnaire) we expect our endorsees to campaign openly as democratic socialists, to fight for our program, and to represent consistent socialist principles.