Rochester Democratic Socialists of America

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Rochester Democratic Socialists of America is the Rochester, New York affiliate of Democratic Socialists of America.

Leaders

Lyle Rubin and Karen Vitale are Rochester Democratic Socialists of America co-chairs. [1]

DSA endorsed candidates

Rochester Democratic Socialists of America, 2023 endorsed candidates.

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Barbara Rivera, Chiara Smith, Mary Lupien, Oscar Brewer, Jr., Carolyn Delvecchio, Campbell Roth, Rachel Rosner.

ROC DSA comrades

Rochester Democratic Socialists of America - Linda Edwards January 2020:

At today's Rally for Peace in the Middle East with ROC DSA comrades!

No war! No sanctions!

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— with Richard Chandonnet, Evan Mottley and Robert MacFarlane.

Members

Known members include Alfred Vitale (RocDSA Co-Chair), Ariel Cruz, Tom Messmer, Ted Brown.[2]

Rochester moves left

On June 22 2021 , Rochester, New York’s third-largest and poorest city, along with the surrounding Monroe County, experienced a political earthquake. At the top of the ticket, incumbent Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren suffered a landslide loss to challenger Malik Evans. While progressives were somewhat lukewarm on Evans, some saw Warren’s ouster as a vote of no confidence in her response to police misconduct that has plagued Rochester over the past year, including an alleged cover-up surrounding the death of Daniel Prude at the hands of the Rochester police department last March.

“Policy-wise I don’t see much difference in their platforms, but in terms of wanting her to be removed as a form of accountability to the Prude family, we see that as a win,” said Stanley Martin, who secured the Democratic nomination for one of the Rochester city council’s five at-large seats in the primary last month. Martin is an organizer with grassroots groups Free the People Rochester and VOCAL-NY, and formerly worked as a mental health counselor serving incarcerated people in the county jail.

Martin ran as part of the “People’s Slate,” a group of candidates for city council and county legislature who mounted progressive campaigns for seats held by more moderate Democrats. Three of the slate’s five candidates were successful — two for city council and one for county legislature — with one other county legislature candidate falling short by only nine votes. The two city council candidates will join one incumbent DSA member to form a three-member socialist block on the nine-member council.

“I can go down [interstate highway] 90 and pick up progressive legislators now, when a few years back, my car would have been empty,” said Rosemary Rivera, co-executive director of the grassroots organizing group Citizen Action of New York and a Rochester resident.

Support for the slate came from electoral organizing groups like Rochester Democratic Socialists of America and the Rochester Working Families Party. It also grew out of the candidates’ involvement with Black Lives Matter organizing over the past year, as protest organizers joined the campaign as volunteers.

“We had young people who had just simply had enough and were willing to move from being out in the streets to being at the doors, talking about what we’d like to do differently,” Martin said. “We know that the [Black] Panthers were in the streets and they also ran for office. It’s part of a larger group of tactics to fight for liberation on all sides.”

The slate’s platform focused most heavily on policing, transfering funds from policing to social services, and reducing the presence of police officers in crisis response.

Such a platform struck some as a tough sell in a city that has recently seen a significant rise in violent crime. “When we asked ‘What do you think the number one issue is facing Rochester?,’ the number one answer we got was crime,” Felisha Buchinger, an organizer with Rochester DSA, told New York Focus.

Rather than downplaying crime, slate candidates attempted to convince voters that progressive measures such as increasing funding for social services work better than a policing-first model of public safety.

“What we’re doing is not working. The school-to-prison pipeline is not working. Our candidates believe you need to give resources to the community so they can build better lives. When you broke it down like that, people understood and they liked it,” Buchinger said.

While the slate’s city council candidates were heavily supported by DSA, New York’s other flagship progressive group, the Working Families Party, focused its efforts on the Monroe county legislature. The county legislature primaries were even lower turnout than the already bottom-tier-participation council races.

“It’s hard to get people interested, because there’s nothing sexy about county legislature,” Stevie Vargas, chair of the Rochester Working Families Party and co-founder of Free the People Rochester, told New York Focus.

“In a lot of ways, county legislature is more important than city council,” Vargas said. Buchinger, who works with DSA and focused mostly on city council races, echoed the sentiment. “A lot of legislation is hard to execute in the city without similar legislation being passed in the county,” she said.[3]

Public Facebook group

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Rochester Democratic Socialists of America public Facebook group, as of March 18, 2017;[4]

Admins

Members

More members were added by October 15.[5]

References

  1. ↑ Chicago DSA DSA in the News. 2016
  2. ↑ [1]
  3. ↑ [2]
  4. ↑ [3]
  5. ↑ [4]
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