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Over the weekend, delegates from the Massachusetts Democratic Party met to discuss what their official agenda for the upcoming elections cycles would be. This event is of interest, in our view, for two reasons. First, it's a preview of what a national midterm convention for the Democrats might look like, if they hold one next year. Second, since the people who show up to a political convention in an off year, and in a blue state, are the vanguard of the vanguard, it could be a preview of what the 2028 Democratic presidential race might look like (possibly Hillary vs. Bernie, part 387, it would appear).
Reader H.R. in Jamaica Plain, MA, was in attendance, and agreed to send in a report. Without further ado:
I was a delegate to the Massachusetts Democratic State Convention on September 13, which became a vigorous face-off between two strategies: one that advocates for moving to the center and being vague about what the party wants to accomplish (as exemplified by Chuck Schumer and New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo) and one that advocates for being bold and explicit about the party plans for working people (as exemplified by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani).
First, some background: The Massachusetts Democratic Party grassroots volunteers are organized into Ward (portions of cities) and Town Committees. Members are elected on the presidential primary ballot and each committee has a maximum allowed number of members (set by the state party). In between presidential primaries, people can become members by other means specified in the Ward and Town Committee by-laws. In my experience (I've been on two different Boston Ward Committees, because I moved), attending six meetings allows one to become a full voting member up to the maximum number of members allowed. (An interesting side note is that in 2017, a large influx of younger Democrats joined these committees across the state in response to the first election of Donald Trump.)
These committees do a major portion of the party's work, including voter registration, holding candidate forums and educational events and endorsing local candidates. Another responsibility is running an annual caucus to elect delegates to the state convention. In even years, statewide candidates (including for U.S. Senate) must get a vote of 15% of the delegates to get on the Democratic primary ballot. Every 4 years, the state convention enacts a party platform. As it happens, 2025 is a platform convention year. The caucuses were mostly in April; any registered Democrat can attend and run to be a delegate.
In order to craft the 2025 platform, a series of online meetings were held to gather testimony (and people could also submit suggestions in writing). The Platform Committee then drafted a new platform which may have been reviewed by the co-chairs of the Ward and Town Committees, but wasn't sent to the delegates until August 22, where a pointer to it appeared at the bottom of a very long "delegates newsletter." Personally, I looked for a particular section that I had worked on in 2021, and it was still there, though the name was changed from "Public Safety and Criminal Legal Reform" to "Community Safety." I found that many specific planks from 2021 were gone in 2025. In fact, it seemed that much of the input from the online meetings had been ignored. A young man in the party who serves on both one of the Town Committees and in the Young Democrats of Massachusetts Disability Caucus did a thorough comparison and published a two-page paper on all the platform planks that had been removed by the 2025 Platform Committee. With nearly 50 individual items removed, the draft platform had managed to offend huge swaths of the party rank-and-file, including folks advocating for health care, peace, climate action, election reform, criminal justice reform, LGBTQIA+ rights and many others. A few examples: Fossil fuel divestment of public pensions; single-payer healthcare; elimination of all sub-minimum wages; same-day voter registration; abolition of civil asset forfeiture. Quote from the two-page comparison document:Democrats take offense at this draft because it silences decades of organizing and erases the victories we already won. At a time when Republican authoritarianism threatens democracy, MassDems should be leading the nation with bold commitments, instead of cowering and watering them down.What quickly emerged was a coalition of progressive organizations and labor who concluded that the only practical way to restore all the missing sections and planks in the 2025 draft was to completely replace the 2025 text with the 2021 platform and many, many activists started to rally around this plan. A website was published, meetings were called, whips were organized for each state Senate district (delegates sit by these districts and if actual votes are taken, the voting is organized that way). I was one of the whips and we all were in a WhatsApp chat, where the "whip of whips" sent instructions during the parliamentary maneuvering. On September 5, the chair of the Party and the chair of the Platform Committee sent an e-mail to all delegates defending the 2025 draft. This e-mail tried to justify (but poorly, in my opinion) the attempt to rewrite the platform from scratch, removing many specifics.
According to the convention rules, to get an amendment to the draft platform considered at the convention, signatures of 500 delegates had to be collected between Friday evening and 10:00 a.m. Saturday morning and submitted to the party functionaries. While the 2000+ delegates waited to get to the business part of the convention, we heard many speeches and the business didn't start until early afternoon. The most important thing to know is that the Chair ruled the "replacement" amendment had not qualified, despite the fact that 980 signatures were submitted. The well-prepared activists appealed the decision of the chair, and after a lot of maneuvering, the amendment was given its 10 minutes of debate time (5 minutes "pro" and 5 minutes "con") and it passed on an overwhelming voice vote. Note that because the speeches took so long and some people were apparently just there to party, quite a few delegates left for a party Gov. Maura Healey (D-MA) was throwing at 2 p.m., which was when things were just getting interesting. Nonetheless there was still a quorum. Possibly this reduced the "No" votes in the hall. Possibly the chair's maneuvering to prevent any vote had the effect of increasing the "Yes" votes. After the amendment was adopted, more parliamentary maneuvering and the amended platform was also passed by a voice vote.
Quote from the young man mentioned above, who was the first proponent to speak during the "debate":You don't grow our tent by cutting the protections for the people holding up the tent; the workers, veterans, immigrants, LGBTQ+ community, communities of color and people with disabilities.I think those of us who waged this fight (and I was a pretty minor participant) felt that the approach being taken by Mamdani won out in Massachusetts this weekend. This fight also brought together many, many disparate organizations, which, if they stay together in coalition, can only strengthen the progressives in Massachusetts. If the 2025 platform had prevailed, I think a huge portion of grassroots activists would have walked out of their roles and the Party would have been greatly weakened.
Among the speeches, that of State Auditor Diane DiZoglio (D) was notable when she said that some leaders in the party think the "D" next their names stands for "dictator." The platform fight showed that insiders trying to control the Massachusetts Democratic Party can be defeated by the grass roots. It was another sign that the Sanders/AOC/Mamdani approach is the successful one.
Thanks, H.R.! (Z)