For the Left, there’s always a danger that electoral politics can devolve into backroom deals among insiders, quarrels over which compromises are acceptable and co-optations of activist energy by the Democratic Party. Elections can be all about winning office, at the expense of winning anything else. But this year, in New York, socialists have been taking a radically different approach: using electoral campaigns — and the power of the socialist officials once elected — to organize their communities.

Justine Medina, a political organizer on the 2020 reelection campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), the socialist congresswoman who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, observes that many of AOC’s staff come from “movement backgrounds,” activists and organizers who “a few years ago would not have been involved in electoral politics at all.” This has allowed the campaign to do much more than just reelect a democratic socialist congresswoman (still no small feat in the United States of America). AOC’s organizers saw that they had an opportunity to do something bigger: help build the movement.

Running a socialist campaign during a deadly pandemic and almost equally devastating recession, it was clear to AOC and her team that her community needed help, and that as an unusually charismatic and popular public figure, AOC was in a particularly strong position to be of service. The campaign raised over a million dollars in food relief, delivered eleven thousand bags of groceries, and distributed more than a hundred thousand masks to the community.