The author of this article is the campaign manager for Byron Sigcho-Lopez.
On July 21, the Illinois State Officers Electoral Board removed independent democratic socialist, Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez, from the November congressional ballot in IL-04. This was a clear, coordinated effort by outgoing Congressman Jesus “Chuy” Garcia to dynastically usher in his own chief of staff, Patty Garcia, hours before the primary filing deadline. Garcia is only required to obtain 697 signatures while Sigcho-Lopez needed 10,816 valid signatures to qualify for ballot access. The Democratic Party machine inside Chicago made their position clear to working class communities – workers desires are second to the political operatives and billionaire donors maintaining the status quo.
All over the country, socialist ideas and politics are winning, slowly, but surely. In the last month alone, democratic socialists have notched victories that would have seemed impossible just years ago. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani defeated machine Democrat Andrew Cuomo for mayor in 2025 and helped sweep three congressional primaries on June 24: Darializa Avila Chevalier toppled five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat, Brad Lander defeated Dan Goldman, and Claire Valdez won an open Brooklyn seat. DSA picked up at least six state legislative seats in the same cycle. In Denver, 29-year-old Melat Kiros unseated veteran incumbent Diana DeGette. Independent socialist candidate Salim Adofo won a city council seat in Pittsburgh.
Despite the denialism of the Democratic Party and the neo-fascist Red-baiting, the broad socialist movement is growing, winning seats within the capitalist state. These developments are also revelatory; illuminating the class contradictions of our times and the appetite of the masses of people for fundamental social change.
Now, some will conclude from these victories that the Democratic Party is becoming “our” party – a party of and for the working class and oppressed. Illinois tells a different story.
Here in Chicago, Illinois, the Democratic Party establishment has used every legal and political tool available to kick an independent socialist off the November ballot. The Independent Socialist campaign of Byron Sigcho-Lopez’s (endorsed by the PSL, Chicago DSA, and the Cook County Green Party) was not running inside the Democratic Party.
When Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez announced he would run as an independent socialist for Illinois’ 4th Congressional District, he said something simple and true: “We are not tied down by party rules. We are not waiting for the Democratic Party to give us permission.”
And that is precisely what makes it dangerous to the machine. The recent DSA victories, significant as they are, ultimately occur within the Democratic Party and build its brand. Byron’s fight was about something different: class independence. The machine understood that immediately, and that is why it came for him.
How we got here
Let’s recall how we got here. U.S. Rep. Jesús “Chuy” García announced his retirement just hours before the filing deadline for the Democratic primary leaving no time for anyone but his own chief of staff, Patty García, to get on the primary ballot. She needed 697 signatures to claim the nomination unopposed. Sigcho-Lopez and fellow independent Mayra Macías were required to gather a minimum of 10,816 valid signatures each to appear in November. And they did it. Then the objectors arrived. The machine’s operatives went into attack mode against the campaign.
Two of the three objectors, Sandra Mendez and Rene Munoz, are documented signers of Patty García’s own petitions. The third, Jeremy Rivera, used Cook County Commissioner Alma Anaya’s campaign office address to file his petition records request. Anaya attended Patty García’s election night party in March. Illinois campaign finance records show Rivera was paid $7,400 by State Rep. Norma Hernandez’s (D-77th) campaign for political work.
These are not coincidences of dispassionate objectors. This is political coordination by the Democratic Party machine and its operatives to hinder the democratic will of the people. The machine operatives know that the socialist horizon is upon us – this is their attempt to push it back in Illinois, but we know that history will absolve us and the struggle is not over by any means.
A machine protecting its own
Even the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board (no friend of socialism!) called García’s maneuver “egregious” and his role in the ballot challenge “another blight on his legacy.” The Tribune noted it was “puzzled” why Governor JB Pritzker’s operation would involve itself at all.
We are not puzzled. This is what machine politics looks like when challenged from the socialist left.
Pritzker, (worth $4.3 billion according to Forbes) the wealthiest elected official in the country, has built his political career and presidential ambitions on Democratic Party discipline holding from the precinct level on up. An independent socialist alderman who fights for tenants, opposes corporate handouts, and challenges the governor’s opposition to taxing big business is not a minor annoyance.
He is proof that the Democratic nomination is not a road to power for the working class and oppressed people, and that voters tired of corporate Democrats have somewhere else to go. If that idea spreads, it threatens everything machine politicians like Pritzker and García depend on. That is why this challenge is not about clerical errors. It is an attempt to use the machinery of the state: the boards, the lawyers, the technical objection process – to do what the machine could not do by winning votes honestly.
The critical difference: Independent vs. Democrat
Most DSA victories have been won inside the Democratic Party. Running as a Democrat removes the most punishing structural barrier in American electoral politics: ballot access. In IL-04, a Democrat needs 697 signatures. An independent needs 10,816 – plus the near-certainty of a coordinated legal challenge designed to exhaust the campaign before a single vote is cast.
DSA’s approach has real, concrete wins in a sense, however, it comes with structural costs a revolutionary socialist analysis takes seriously. Running inside the Democratic Party means operating within an institution controlled by the same class you are fighting. Your ballot line, your party label, your access to institutional infrastructure: all granted by and revocable by the very machine you challenge. The moment your bloc becomes genuinely threatening, the institution moves against you: primary challenges, redistricting, the thousand informal mechanisms of party discipline.
Byron’s independent run makes the class question explicit and undisguisable. The voters of IL-04 would have faced a direct choice between the machine’s anointed candidate and an independent socialist who built his base block by block, signature by signature, without anyone’s permission. An independent socialist winning a congressional seat would demonstrate something far more dangerous than any DSA primary victory: that the Democratic Party is not necessary. That working people can build their own power outside of it. That is why the machine could not allow it.
This is not new
In 2024, the Democratic Party deployed lawyers to challenge the ballot access of Claudia De La Cruz – PSL’s presidential candidate – in Georgia and Pennsylvania, even after tens of thousands had already signed petitions to put her there. The pattern is the same whether the office is the presidency or a congressional seat in Chicago: when the two-party system feels real pressure from the socialist left, it does not out-organize that pressure. It tries to make it illegal to exist on the ballot at all.
The House of Representatives voted 236-183 in November 2025 to formally reprimand García. Twenty-three Democrats crossed party lines. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez called it “undermining the process of a free and fair election.” David Axelrod called it “Chicago machine tactics.” Even the institutions most invested in Democratic Party credibility said so on the record! The recognition of corrupt machine-like politics within the Democratic Party remains hollow simply because the Party establishment has done nothing to stop either the rise of the anointed Patty Garcia, or the removal of independents like Byron from the ballot.
Here we are, yet again, the Democratic Party establishment is undermining democracy, all the while claiming to be in opposition to the anti-democratic politics of the Trump administration and the Republican Party. An admission of corruption is quite different than taking action against it, and the Democratic Party won’t move against Chuy or Patty, because to do so with vigor, in this instance, would empower independent voters and politics to their own chagrin.
Where do we go from here?
No process that overturns 17,000 signatures on the basis of address formatting – while waving through a candidate who needed 697 – has any claim to being about election integrity. It is about control. The Democratic Party establishment did not make this campaign, and it certainly will not break it. As revolutionary socialists, we know that elections under capitalism are limited, but they are periods of time that create a heightened state of political awareness in society and that we can use participation in the electoral system to expose that very system itself.
It is still incumbent on socialists to build independent working-class political organizations that do not need the Democratic Party’s permission to exist, be political, or contend for power. The PSL argues that we need a multinational revolutionary socialist party, that can unite the working class and oppressed, and fight the capitalist class on every terrain on the road to leading a revolution and taking state power.
The lesson of Byron’s fight is not that independent socialist politics scaled to the level of a Congressional seat is impossible. The lesson is that the machine fights hardest against what it fears most: socialism and class independence. An independent socialist in Congress that is unbought, unbossed, unanointed is a scary scenario the capitalist class is afraid of. However, an energized, organized, politically educated, mass base of workers and oppressed people unbound by the two-party system is what they are most afraid of. And that is what we must continue to build with the utmost vigor and enthusiasm.
Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Melat Kiros all won inside the Democratic Party. Byron Sigcho-Lopez is fighting to win outside of it. Both are part of the same rising tide of working-class political consciousness and interest in socialism that the establishment is scrambling to contain. They will not contain it. This is our time as socialists, capitalism is becoming increasingly unpopular at a time when the legitimacy of the capitalist state is being seriously questioned and undermined. This is precisely why we are facing these challenges, yet we continue, undeterred, with our heads held high.
More than 17,000 people in this district said, with their own signatures, that Byron should be on that ballot. The machine said otherwise. The people of this district and the socialist movement standing with them will have the final word. Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, at a time of revolutionary upsurge and capitalist crisis that: “…communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.” Byron Sigcho-Lopez has hidden nothing. The machine has hidden everything. The people of IL-04 can see exactly who is telling the truth. History will absolve us.
