Finding inspiring socialist candidates

Doctor, gym bro and pro-Palestine activist Abdul El-Sayed is the latest in a line of cut-through, charismatic and avowedly socialist Democratic candidates to win a primary in the USA.

With selections coming up in the Green Party of England and Wales, it’s time we focussed on finding our own Mamdanis, El-Sayeds and AOCs. Here’s the ecosocialist case as to why.

We live in a hyper-political moment - everyone thinks and posts about politics constantly, but very few are in a political organisation. In the 1950s the Tory Party had 3 million members. Now the Greens recruiting 230,000 is a remarkable feat.

This crisis of organisation is less of a problem for the right. They can rely on a combination of the authoritarian leader/follower dynamic, lone wolf violence, occasional riots, huge amounts of funding and a sympathetic press to win elections and exercise power. For us, it’s harder. Our strength is in collectivity, organisation and solidarity - people-power in the parlance of the Momentum years - rebuilding the idea that we can trust each other again, and engage in common endeavour.

So the question is, how do we build a party in a time of anti-organisation, where individualism reigns. I believe the only way is to leverage some particularities of the moment, and that means finding charismatic, hyper-visible leaders who can hijack the attention economy and move people emotionally, getting them to take action and - ultimately - join the party.

The growth of the DSA is a case in point. They’ve had four distinct waves: the first Sanders campaign in 2015 and the subsequent election of Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary win in 2018, Sanders’ second campaign in 2020 and finally Zohran Mamdani’s campaign in 2025. Every huge jump in membership was because of an inspiring candidate running for office.

The first was the most wild. Bernie never even told his supporters to join the DSA. Many of them did so because he called himself a Democratic Socialist during his primary run. After the campaign ended, his supporters looked for what next and googled the phrase - democratic socialism. And what was the top result? A tiny, decades old socialist organisation with a few thousand members called the Democratic Socialists of America. Now they’re topping out 120k members.

This is one of the many reasons I’m focussing on candidate work in the Green Party. We have a real shot at winning 10 - 70 seats at the next election. In one scenario, we elect a bunch of inspiring, Zohran-style candidates who recruit hundreds of thousands more members and shift the entire zeitgeist of British politics to the left. The other is that we end up with an uninspiring bloc of liberal, technocratic MPs who constantly smother the party’s ecosocialist potential.

As part of this work, I helped run a training and wrote a guide with Greens Organise on how to find inspiring socialist candidates. It’s based on the best recruitment operations from across the world, majoring heavily on DSA and left efforts to recruit working class candidates in the USA. It’s tailored to Green activists finding candidates for parliamentary selections this year.

What came through in our research is how many candidates are to a certain extent found and supported, and how essential this is in our modern media environment:

AOC didn’t just decide to run for the house, she was nominated by her brother and then supported by the US organisation Justice Democrats. Zohran Mamdani didn’t make the leap on his own, he was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America years before he was even an assembly member.

Recruitment is what makes the difference. This is doubly the case in our hard and exposing media environment. Everybody has an online footprint, and the press will use anything they can to take down socialist candidates. This means encouragement and support is more important than ever.

The guide runs through every step of the search from understanding what makes a good candidate, understanding your constituency, building your team and long list, making the ask, vetting candidates and winning the selection. I really hope it’s useful, and if you have comments, questions or additions please get in touch.

Greens Organise are going to do lots more work in support of candidates. And with parliamentary selections starting in Sept/Oct and the London Mayoral selection in 2027, we all need to start the search.

If you want to help, I want to hear from you. If you’re active in your local party and want to find a candidate, are thinking of running yourself, or are totally outside the Green Party but still want to help with this work - email me at josephalextodd@gmail.com and I can put you in touch with the right people.