There is no normal to restore

This summer, volunteers in New Haven needed 313 valid signatures to put an independent socialist candidate on the ballot for Connecticut’s 11th Senate District. After knocking on doors, standing outside stores and at public events, and talking with people across the district about Rosa Pepper-Macias, a 23-year-old hotel line cook running on the Workers’ Voice Party ballot line, they submitted 965 signatures.

The response of the community surprised some of the people doing the campaigning. “I’ve never seen the kind of enthusiasm and support towards a socialist campaign that we’ve seen for Rosa,” said Daniel Piper, a union teacher involved in the campaign. A petition signature is not a vote, much less an endorsement of an entire socialist program. But collecting roughly three times the number required for ballot access suggests that, even in overwhelmingly Democratic New Haven, there are working people willing to listen to an argument for a political alternative outside the two major parties.

This small State Senate campaign matters beyond Connecticut’s 11th District because Pepper-Macias is not running as a socialist on the Democratic ballot line while promising independence later. She begins with independence, posing a larger question for a Left confronting Trump and the increasingly authoritarian direction of U.S. politics: what does opposition look like if it does not begin and end with returning the Democratic Party to power?

The machinery Trump is using did not appear when he returned to the White House. ICE was created under George W. Bush, and the deportation apparatus expanded under Barack Obama, and reinforced under Biden. The surveillance state grew under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. The militarization of the border, the carceral state, the Pentagon, and Washington’s capacity to wage war across the globe are permanent institutions of the U.S. state. Trump has intensified their use. He did not create them.

Treating Trump as a temporary departure from a basically healthy political order makes the solution appear straightforward: defeat him electorally and put the Democrats back in power. But Trumpism emerged from crises already developing within that order. Decades of declining working-class organization and deteriorating living standards created fertile ground for right-wing demagogy, while the relative decline of U.S. power strengthened pressures for a more aggressive assertion of American power abroad and a more coercive state at home. Trump has intensified these reactionary tendencies; he did not create the social and political conditions from which they emerged.

There is no normal to restore because defeating Trumpism requires more than replacing Republicans with Democrats. The question, then, is what it would mean for working people to develop a politics of their own. Pepper-Macias’s campaign is a small attempt to put that question onto the ballot.

Connecticut’s blue-state problem

Connecticut is a revealing place to ask. This is no MAGA stronghold: Democrats control state government, and New Haven has long been overwhelmingly Democratic. The race therefore puts decades of Democratic government in one of the country’s richest states under examination.

The wealth is not difficult to find. Yale’s endowment stood at $44.1 billion in June 2025, after earning $4.5 billion in investment gains in a single year. A few blocks beyond the university, the numbers look very different. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s QuickFacts for New Haven, median household income is about $56,851, nearly one-quarter of residents live below the poverty line, and median gross rent is $1,488 a month. Statewide, the Connecticut comptroller reported that 52.4 percent of renter households were cost-burdened in 2024, with 28.3 percent spending more than half their income on housing and utilities.

Yale is not simply a wealthy university located in New Haven. It is the city’s largest employer and one of its dominant property holders. Much of its academic property is exempt from municipal property taxes because Yale is a nonprofit educational institution. The university pays taxes on taxable commercial property and makes voluntary contributions to New Haven, including more than $230 million committed through fiscal year 2033. But an analysis published by the Connecticut Examiner estimated that Yale held roughly $4.4 billion in tax-exempt New Haven property and that, without the exemption, it could owe roughly another $146 million a year in property taxes. That makes the campaign’s demand to place Yale under public ownership more concrete: it asks who should control an institution whose wealth and property shape the fiscal and social life of the city around it.

This is the terrain on which Pepper-Macias is campaigning. Her platform calls for a shortened workweek at full-time pay, public health care, tuition-free public higher education, high-quality public housing and public ownership of utilities and internet provision. More provocatively, it demands: “Place Yale under Public Ownership!” and proposes placing “the assets of large landlords like Yale under public ownership.” The point is not simply to add another tax bracket or negotiate a larger voluntary contribution, but to raise the question of who controls the enormous concentration of wealth and property in the city.

War spending, social needs and who controls production

The campaign refuses to separate Connecticut politics from U.S.militarism. Its platform calls to “STOP the war and use the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget for jobs, education, housing, food, and healthcare as rights.”

The numbers give some sense of what that could mean. The campaign estimates that Connecticut taxpayers contribute $21.71 billion toward military spending. It calculates that $1.77 billion could hire 15,000 additional elementary-school teachers, $3.48 billion could provide public housing for nearly 300,000 residents, and $6.72 billion could create 50,000 jobs at top union wages. Money spent sustaining war abroad is money that is not being spent on social needs at home.

Some of those connections run directly through Connecticut. In 2024, State Treasurer Erick Russell said that roughly 56 billion investment portfolio was invested directly or indirectly in Israel, mostly through outside investment managers. The state also directly held two Israel bonds scheduled to mature in 2025 and 2026.

Yale is part of the same story. Students have protested the university’s investments in military industries and demanded divestment from weapons manufacturers. Public filings reveal only a small fraction of its endowment, so the full extent of those holdings is difficult to establish. A $1 million grant to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces was also made through Yale’s donor-advised-fund program, in which donors recommend distributions while Yale retains legal control.

But Connecticut is not connected to the war economy only through investments. It produces for war. East Hartford-based Pratt & Whitney signed a 15-year agreement with the Israeli Ministry of Defense in December 2015 to provide “100 percent daily propulsion readiness” for the Israeli Air Force’s F-15I and F-16I fighter aircraft. The campaign calls for Connecticut to divest from Israeli investments, end weapons production and sales to Israel, and support Palestinian self-determination.

That raises a harder question: what happens to workers whose jobs depend on those industries? Ending military production is not much of a program for Pratt & Whitney workers if it means unemployment. Fossil-fuel workers face the same choice: keep jobs tied to social and environmental damage, or support an antiwar or climate program that threatens their livelihoods.

But these workers know how to build things. The people who make aircraft engines and other complex machinery have the skills to build renewable-energy systems, public transit and infrastructure—and know what their plants and machines could be retooled to produce.

Conversion therefore cannot be designed elsewhere and handed down to workers. Unions would have to fight for guaranteed jobs and wages, control over how plants are retooled, and an antiwar and just-transition program rooted in workers’ knowledge of production. A State Senate campaign cannot carry out that transformation, but it can create space for workers to discuss it rather than accept that their jobs depend forever on military spending or environmental destruction.

This is where political independence becomes concrete. Republicans and Democrats disagree about many things, but neither challenges corporations’ right to decide what gets produced, where investment goes or what happens to workers when production changes. Within those limits, jobs, climate and opposition to war can appear to be competing demands. Yet they do not have to be. Workers with the skills and machinery could produce very different things. The question is whether they should have the power to decide what those things are.

The deportation machine was already there

Immigration brings the argument into sharp focus. The first demand on the campaign platform reads: “PAPERS FOR ALL! Stop all Raids, Detentions and Deportations! Equal rights for immigrants! Abolish ICE!”

But “Abolish ICE” is not presented simply as something legislators should eventually enact. Pepper-Macias proposes workers’ defense committees, organized through unions and other workers’ organizations, to mobilize demonstrations, democratic assemblies, and strikes against raids and deportations. The platform demands the closure of detention centers, an end to transporting detained immigrants out of state, and support for families torn apart by ICE.

The emphasis shifts from asking elected officials to protect immigrants to asking what organized workers can do when ICE shows up in a neighborhood or workplace. And how does ICE find people? Follow that question, and you arrive at the surveillance apparatus already operating on Connecticut streets.

Pepper-Macias calls for “De-Flock Connecticut,” beginning with the 165 Flock cameras the campaign says operate in New Haven County. Automated license-plate readers feed databases and information-sharing networks extending far beyond the towns where the cameras stand. As CT Insider reported from police records, law-enforcement agencies nationwide ran millions of searches on Connecticut Flock data during 2025; thousands of searches involving data from at least six Connecticut departments were tagged “immigration,” “ICE,” or “ICE-assist.” The controversy has already produced movement at the state level: a new Connecticut law taking effect October 1 bars the use of license-plate-reader data to investigate suspected immigration violations, while Gov. Ned Lamont has urged municipalities to pause new installations pending a statewide review.

The campaign also demands closing the Connecticut Intelligence Center, or CTIC, in New Haven. CTIC is Connecticut’s designated post-9/11 fusion center, built to share intelligence across agencies and jurisdictions. Participating agencies include DHS, the FBI, TSA, Connecticut State Police, the Department of Correction, and the National Guard. A camera on a local street can therefore become an entry point into a much larger architecture of policing and surveillance.

Trump has greatly escalated immigration enforcement and repression, but much of the institutional machinery he is using was built over decades under administrations of both parties: ICE, fusion centers, mass surveillance, militarized policing, prisons, border enforcement and expanded executive powers. The point is not that Democrats and Republicans are identical. Their policies can have sharply different consequences. It is that defeating a Republican administration does not by itself dismantle institutions that predate it.

For Pepper-Macias, that history is also personal. Her father recently reminded her that he had taken her, in a stroller, to the massive May Day immigrant strike of 2006:  “I didn’t remember it, but I do remember seeing that mass movement get reined back into the Democratic Party with the Obama campaign. And then, of course, I saw California get hit by all those horrifying raids and deportations.” The connection between those experiences and the current repression is part of the political argument she makes: “The Obama era set the stage for the exacerbated oppression that we see today,” she says, “and we’ve discussed this connection every time I have campaigned at places like the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in Newark.”

Voting, organization, and political independence

Social movements in the U.S. have repeatedly encountered the same political funnel. A movement develops outside the Democratic Party, produces its own demands and organizations, and forces questions into public debate. As elections approach, the Republican candidate represents a serious threat; pressure mounts to subordinate the movement’s independent demands to electing Democrats. Afterward, much of the mobilization dissipates.

The contradiction became especially visible after Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign. Democratic socialism returned to mass politics, DSA expanded dramatically, and socialist-backed candidates won offices around the country. Yet the strategic problem remained: could socialists use the Democratic ballot line without eventually becoming part of the party they initially hoped to use?

Pepper-Macias’s campaign answers by starting with political independence rather than promising a break at some future date.

That affects how the election is being organized. Volunteers have canvassed District 11, collected signatures, knocked on doors, and organized open meetings and public events. The campaign’s events calendar invites people into organizing rather than restricting participation to get-out-the-vote work.

Most campaigns organize people toward voting: knock on a door, make a call, raise money, turn people out. Yet U.S. elections are rarely referendums on distinct demands. Voters choose among candidates and parties offering packages of positions and often vague promises. An independent campaign does not assume every vote endorses its entire program; it can make visible political arguments otherwise lost inside the two-party competition. Winning those demands is another matter. You can vote for affordable housing without an organization capable of confronting landlords; against deportations without a network ready when ICE enters a neighborhood; for stronger unions without organizing your workplace. Much of politics lies between political support and the collective capacity to win.

Pepper-Macias’s campaign connects electoral activity to struggles already underway in Connecticut—against ICE and surveillance, around Palestine and war, in workplaces and unions, and around housing, reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights. The aim is not to channel those movements toward a candidate every two years, but to give struggles from below an independent political expression.

That distinction matters after election day. Grassroots movements and unions can enter electoral coalitions with demands generated through struggle, only to find them narrowed, postponed or displaced once governing begins; movements can be absorbed into the organizations of politicians they initially hoped to pressure.

Political independence offers no magical protection against those pressures, nor does an independent campaign automatically produce durable organization. But it allows unions, movements and working-class organizations to enter electoral politics without making their activity dependent on the politicians they support. The problem is how movements can develop a political voice without surrendering their capacity to act.

The labor-party question

The most ambitious expression of that strategy is the call for an independent labor party. The platform declares: “BUILD A LABOR PARTY! Working and oppressed people need a mass labor party, independent of the capitalist parties, to achieve a workers’ government!” It proposes an “emergency congress, organized by all unions in Connecticut” to discuss forming such a party and breaking from the Democrats.

The obstacles are formidable. Organized labor has spent generations developing institutional relationships with the Democratic Party through endorsements, funding, professional staffs and longstanding political habits. A break would require a struggle inside labor itself, not simply a resolution announcing independence.

The proposal makes more sense if a labor party is understood as more than a third electoral machine. Workers already organize collectively for contracts, higher wages, protection from firing and safer conditions; communities organize against raids, evictions and surveillance. A working-class party, in this conception, would carry that organizational independence into politics rather than asking those struggles to dissolve into an electoral coalition every few years.

Such a party would contest elections, but elections would not exhaust its purpose. It could support strikes, mobilize against raids and deportations, participate in tenant and antiwar struggles, debate political strategy internally and hold its elected representatives accountable to an organization outside the legislature. No State Senate campaign can create such a party by itself. At most, Pepper-Macias’s campaign can propagandize for the idea, accumulate experience in independent electoral work and identify some of the people interested in pursuing it.

After November

The differences between Democrats and Republicans are real, with immediate consequences for immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, unions and oppressed communities. But that does not answer the question running through this campaign: what do working people do with their own power?

Voting is only part of the answer. An independent socialist campaign can put arguments before voters that would otherwise disappear inside two-party competition and show a constituency willing to consider an alternative. But the ballot cannot substitute for the people casting it.

No vote by itself can stop an ICE raid, organize a hotel, prevent an eviction, shut down a surveillance network, convert a weapons plant or force an employer to concede a contract. Those outcomes require people acting together, through existing institutions such as unions or by building new ones.

Better politicians cannot solve that problem on their own. People need to preserve their capacity to act in workplaces, where workers can organize and strike; in communities, where they can fight over housing, schools, policing and immigration; and politically, where those struggles can speak in their own name.

November will produce one result immediately: the vote. For a campaign of this size, it would be unrealistic to make durable new organization the measure of success. Its more immediate contribution is modest: popularizing an independent working-class program, bringing it into conversations with workers and young people, supporting struggles where it can, and accumulating experience outside the two-party system.

The fight over AI-related data-center development in Trumbull offers one example. At demonstrations against the tech industry, Pepper-Macias says, the campaign has encountered unionized workers, including some who supported Trump, alongside young activists radicalized through the Palestine solidarity movement. For her, those encounters suggest what an independent working-class politics might eventually make possible.

“The political work of this campaign does not end with the election,” Pepper-Macias says. “It will carry into ongoing campaigns for civil liberties, like the MN15, activists federally indicted over organizing against ICE during Operation Metro Surge and the fight against data centers in our state.”.

An independent campaign cannot build the organizations needed to win by itself. But it can use the electoral arena to argue for working-class political independence, strengthen existing struggles and make the case for organization in workplaces, communities and the streets as well as at the polls.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Rosa Pepper-Macias for State Senate District 11; modified by Tempest.