NEW YORK—With just over a hundred days standing between the country and the November midterm elections, the Communist Party USA’s National Committee gathered here July 11-12 with a single overriding message: Everything now runs through the fight to break MAGA’s hold on Congress.
That was the frame co-chair Joe Sims set in his keynote, delivered a week after the country’s 250th anniversary (full text here, video here).
“This meeting of the National Committee must be focused on the November midterms,” Sims told the gathering. “There’s no question before the party, the working class or the U.S. people that’s more important. Everything revolves around defeating the MAGA forces. You name it: labor rights, civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, the environment, peace, and indeed democracy itself.”
Sims argued the political winds are shifting.
“If the election were held today, the generic ballot suggests a 5% advantage for beating the GOP in the House,” he said, adding that “so far, the primaries show that momentum is on democracy’s side.” Taking the Senate out of Republican hands, he acknowledged, may be a tougher challenge.
Sims pointed, however, to Democratic Socialists of America wins in New York City and Colorado as evidence of “a deep radicalization” underway in the working-class electorate.
He tied that momentum to a shift among organized labor, tracing it back to the January ICE occupation of the Twin Cities and the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, through the AFL-CIO’s Fred Redmond joining a People’s World May Day town hall, to Liz Shuler and Redmond’s endorsement of May Day itself.
“That was big,” Sims said. Still, he cautioned against overstatement: “Was that stamp enough? No. A lot more needs to be done ideologically, politically, and programmatically.”
“Socialist moment” vs. anti-communism
A recurring theme was the CPUSA stepping out from the shadows electorally. Citing wins by Dom Shannon and Cesar Ruiz De Castilla in Philadelphia along with party members now preparing campaigns in Columbus, Peoria, Kansas, and Brooklyn, Sims declared: “I say, run comrade run! We’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. And that means we’ve got to start running under our own colors.”
A number of candidates from the CPUSA, running as part of broad, community-rooted coalitions, have been elected to public office in various locales around the country in the past couple of years, and Sims said there needs to be more of that.
He described decades of caution around open Communist identification as “rubber bands” left over from a more repressive era: “The time has come to cut those rubber bands. They’re a drag on growth, they contribute to inactivity, and they curb party initiative.”
Sims pointed to polling—a March 2025 YouGov/Cato Institute survey showing 62% of adults under 30 favor socialism and 34% favor communism — as proof that “the socialist moment” has returned, quoting one young communist’s Instagram post that “Gen Z loves communism.”
He balanced that optimism with a warning about escalating repression: FBI raids on the Ohio Organizing Collective, life sentences of 30 to 100 years for eight defendants in the Texas Prairieland prosecutions, federal charges against University of Michigan students, the collapsed Broadview 6 case in Chicago, RICO indictments of 60 Stop Cop City activists in Atlanta, and an IRS effort to strip non-profits of tax-exempt status.
He also cited a Justice and Treasury Department inquiry compiling a list of 145 organizations tied to Cuba solidarity, including the CPUSA. “Sitting on the sidelines may well result in the democratic opposition sitting in jail,” he said. “If the past is prologue to what’s coming, they’ll come after the communist left first.”
Sims closed by describing an exchange billionaire Elon Musk had on X after being urged to abandon “classical liberalism” because “universal suffrage leads to universal suffering.” Musk replied, “I have wised up.” Sims’s retort: “Musk and Co. are not the makers. Actually, you and I know they’re fakers. It’s the working class that are the makers… We are coming for the fakers—that’s why the socialist moment is rising again, so let the shaking begin!”
115 days to flip Congress
Political Action Commission chair Joelle Fishman put numbers on the task: a net gain of three seats flips the House, four flips the Senate. “We have 115 days to organize a massive voter turnout so big it can overcome all the neo-fascist attempts to steal this election and shut down democratic rights,” Fishman told the National Committee, formally launching the party’s “Solidarity Summer/Fall” campaign.
Fishman described an eight-point program built from district and club discussions at the party’s recent elections conference: concentrating resources on priority races, plugging into the AFL-CIO’s “Labor 2026” voter program, joining the Freedom Summer/Fall coalition’s July 17-19 “Good Trouble Lives On” voting rights mobilizations, supporting May Day Strong-style actions, backing Communist Party candidates already in the field, using People’s World as an organizing tool, expanding club membership, and drafting a bilingual national platform.
“People are looking for transformative politics based on their needs and dreams, not corporate dark money and AIPAC,” she said.
People’s World presented an outline of its plans to cover all the key midterm races, particularly those being targeted by organized labor, whether they are national, state, or local. It was noted that a number of labor movement figures have recently made positive remarks about the role the publication plays in its reporting.
The AFL-CIO’s Redmond, for instance, said on May Day that People’s World is “spreading the gospel of this movement far and wide” and that it tells the “important stories about working people and families in a way you just do not hear anywhere else.”
Editor John Wojcik pointed out that People’s World is “one of the few outlets that has helped spread the news about the AFL-CIO’s decision to place 50,000 ‘election protectors’ in the field in the weeks leading up to Election Day” and said that coverage like this helps build the publication’s reputation.
Strikes multiply, union density still low
The Labor Commission’s report described a labor movement “in a period of motion.” It noted SEIU’s return to the AFL-CIO after two decades, delegates’ pledge to organize two million new members and mobilize two million new voters for the midterms, and the UAW’s convention vote to divest union funds from Israel.
It also flagged active fights: 1,700 Colorado Teamsters locked out by Cargill, over 800 Indiana Steelworkers locked out by BP for more than 100 days, and Michigan nurses on strike against Henry Ford Hospital Systems for eight months.
“These examples demonstrate that workers are ready to fight, and it’s happening everywhere,” the report stated, while noting union density remains “barely 10%” and urging CPUSA clubs to put young members into shop-floor jobs.
Fights on multiple fronts
The African American Equality Commission’s report tied the “Freedom Summer 2026” mobilizations to the Supreme Court’s gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, urging clubs to build coalitions against what party leadership has termed a “Civil Rights Counterrevolution” and to keep pressure on the Target boycott.
The Peace and Solidarity Commission and International Department both flagged the tightening U.S. blockade of Cuba as an urgent priority, urging members to lobby for congressional bills to end it, while the Organization Department reported facilitating coordination on the Target and Cuba campaigns and pointed to continuing weaknesses in dues collection and communication with the South.
Taken together, the reports pointed to a party trying to convert a favorable electoral moment, and a rising interest in socialism among younger voters, into organization on the ground before November.
The closing political summary given by Co-chair Rossana Cambron drove home the point that although the people’s movements and the CPUSA are in the midst of major fights, they are also in a moment of opportunity.
“As a party, we are moving in a direction that will have an impact. We may not be able to fully see it right now, but history tells us that’s the case,” Cambron said, encouraging members to stay motivated and to remember their long-term goals.
She also urged party leaders, members, and candidates to “let people know who we really are” in the course of their coalition work. Visibility “beyond our immediate circle,” she argued, is a means to ensuring the party has allies when attacks come while also enabling Communists to “be proactive in building community.”
“What we do today lays the basis for what we will be able to do tomorrow,” she said.
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