The Socialist Field, on the Ballot

It is election day, and for once the left has a map.

Across 38 states, Democratic Socialists of America chapters are tracking 262 races on the ballot tonight — three U.S. Senate contests, a dozen House races, a wave of state and local offices, and 103 ballot measures besides. The Grid has built a roster of the 162 named candidates on that list: a filterable, sourced page of who is running where, what each candidate has actually said they are running on, and the source we checked it against. It is live at https://solidaritygrid.org/candidates and its statuses will flip as tonight's calls come in.

Three fights in the Senate

The federal field is small, and all three Senate races are in states the rest of the country will be watching.

Angie Nixon, Florida. The state legislator and small business owner won her party's primary in an upset and has earned endorsements from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. She is running out of Florida as an avowed democratic socialist, with Medicare for All at the center of the campaign.

Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan. The former Detroit health commissioner is running against incumbent Rep. Mike Rogers on a platform his own campaign states plainly: get money out of politics, put money in your pocket, pass Medicare for All. El-Sayed is the most prominent name on the ballot tonight, and the race is being watched as much for what it says about the Democratic divide as for the seat itself.

Greg Levy, Ohio. The community organizer, veteran, and self-described socialist from Akron is running as an independent in Ohio's Senate race — and the other side apparently thinks he matters. Federal filings show conservative PAC money behind the spending promoting him, and in one mailer fight, Ohio Democrats funded a mailer promoting the Libertarian candidate while Republicans funded one promoting the socialist. That is a kind of map.

The House field

The House races are where this cycle's upsets showed up in the primaries, and where the platforms get specific.

Melat Kiros, Colorado's 1st District. The attorney and doctoral student, 29, upset incumbent Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary — the biggest primary-season story for the party's left. Her stated platform: Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending the war in Gaza.

Chris Rabb, Pennsylvania's 3rd District. A decade in the Pennsylvania House as one of its most progressive members, and a member of Philadelphia DSA as of this year, Rabb is running for Congress on a platform that reads like a working-class checklist: Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, a data-center moratorium, public grocery stores, and a higher federal minimum wage.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, New York's 13th District. A community organizer and field staffer on Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign, Chevalier upset the field to take on Adriano Espaillat, and came out as a democratic socialist in 2025. Claire Valdez, running in New York's 7th District, is a state legislator and a member of New York City DSA since 2019 who won the primary with Mamdani's backing over the handpicked successor of Rep. Nydia Velázquez.

Donavan McKinney, Michigan's 13th District. The state legislator, 34, defeated Shri Thanedar in the primary and is running on Medicare for All, utility rate reform, and money out of politics.

And the seats the movement is trying to hold: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York's 14th District — the first democratic socialist elected to Congress — and Rashida Tlaib in Michigan's 12th District. Also on the ballot: Mai Vang in California's 7th District, Lauren Jewett in Louisiana's 1st District, Angela Gonzales-Torres in California's 34th District, and William Lawrence, running to unseat Rep. Tom Barrett in Michigan.

The ground floor

The federal list is the front page, but the DSA table is mostly local — which is where most of the democratic socialists on the ballot tonight actually are.

Nithya Raman is running for mayor of Los Angeles, the biggest city race in the field. In Minnesota's Twin Ports, one chapter has three people on the ballot: Jennifer McEwen for the state Senate (District 8), Liish Kozlowski for the state House (District 8B), and Kris Eilers for the St. Louis County Commission. In New York, New York City DSA is fielding two Assembly races — Samantha Kattan (District 37) and David Orkin (District 38). The rest is the long ground floor: city councils from Phoenix and Tempe to St. Petersburg and Burlington, county races in Pulaski, Sonoma, Multnomah, Frederick, and Prince George's, and school boards in Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, and San Francisco.

Off the candidates

DSA chapters are tracking 103 ballot measures tonight, and some of them have names: Michigan's Prop 2, the "Mop Up Michigan" constitutional rewrite; California's one-time wealth tax for state-funded health care programs; Missouri's fight to protect abortion rights, plus measures to revert gerrymandered maps and strengthen the petition process; and Virginia's votes on reproductive rights and on restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions. Measures do not make the roster — they are not people — but they make the map.

How to track tonight

• The Roster (https://solidaritygrid.org/candidates) — all 162 candidates, filterable by office, state, status, and name. Every entry carries its source and the date it was last checked, and as races are called, statuses on the page flip from running to elected or lost.
• DSA's election night tracker (https://2026.electoral.dsausa.org/) — live vote tallies for every race DSA chapters are tracking, updated as the night goes on.
• The live blog from Democratic Left, DSA's news arm, where chapters weigh in as the calls land.

Get out and vote where you vote like your life depends on it. In a lot of cases it does. If a name should be on the this list and is not, send it to the editors.