Co-Chair Candidate Profile: Sean Bridge

The Activist interviewed the candidates for national co-chair at the 2024 YDSA national convention. Sean Bridge discusses their run for co-chair.

YDSA’s National Convention is on the horizon. Though the event will be online this year, the key elements that make convention important will remain. Hundreds of YDSAers will gather to discuss, debate, and vote on resolutions impacting all areas of socialist organizing, from labor to Palestine and much more. What passes on the convention floor becomes policy, determining the strategic and ideological direction of America’s largest youth socialist organization. The NCC is YDSA’s highest organizing body, comprised of “co-chairs” who sit on DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) and at-large members. This year, five candidates are running for the position. 

The Activist sat down with Sean Bridge, from University of Cincinnati YDSA, and spoke about her decision to run. 

Sean’s statement on her candidacy can be found here. 

The questions and responses in this interview have been edited for clarity. 

Q: Talk about when you joined UC YDSA, why you joined, some of the campaigns your chapter has undertaken, and how these experiences taught you what it means to be an effective organizer.

Sean: I joined DSA as a whole in September of 2021, and then throughout that Fall, I helped start up the bylaws and Constitution for the University of Cincinnati, YDSA chapter. That spring was our first spring as an official chapter, and I served as the chapter Secretary. The following year, I was elected as co chair. We started running a free laundry campaign, and we grew considerably over that time. We then switched to running a housing campaign in response to a housing crisis on our campus due to the university admitting too many students compared to the amount of housing they had. So it was an extensive anti-gentrification campaign, and that was a big thing that we were running up until the beginning of this past year, where we switched to running a trans rights campaign in connection with YDSA national’s Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Never Surrender campaign. From the beginning of the chapter to now, we’ve grown from five steering committee members to 50 members. We struggled during that period; about halfway through our term, we saw a significant fall off in membership and had some steering committee resignations as well. And so I helped rebuild the chapter, especially over this past school year, into having an active base of members, who attend meetings and actively participate in the chapter campaigns. That showed me and gave me the experience necessary to ensure that chapters run campaigns that engage their membership, engage the student body as a whole, and do deeply and widely felt things.

Q: Given all of your work at the local level, when did you really decide to run for co-chair? 

Sean: So, after the 2023 convention, I started really getting deeply involved in national. I joined the campaign organizing committee and helped run the trans campaign. I was then appointed co-chair of the communications committee at the beginning of this year, 2024, and I helped lead YDSA comms especially during the student Intifada that we saw at the end of the spring semester at universities across the United States. During this whole period, I saw the amazing work that our NCC members have been able to do by meeting one on one with Chapter leadership and helping to mentor chapters directly. Still, also some of the faults of the NCC currently have a lot to do with coordinating with their committee co-chairs, coordinating and delegating work adequately out to committees so that the capacity of national can be expanded, developing new leaders in the national organization, and having a wider access of materials, training, and mentorship that the NCC can provide to the chapters. And so I want to ensure  that in the future, we continue the great work we’re doing with our one on ones but expand that into areas of expertise that other people not on the NCC have to give that knowledge to chapters. And so I decided to run based on that. I am in the Constellation Caucus with one of our current co chairs, Aron Ali McClory, as well as two of our current NCC members, Vivian Dai and Callyn [Johnson]. So I talked with them about it as well, and because of my work chairing the Communications Committee for YDSA national. As well as the fact that I have attended like every NCC meeting for the past two years. You know, they really encouraged me to run and throw my hat in the ring for being co chair of YDSA national.

Q: Could you briefly summarize your platform and how it differs from some of your opponents?

Sean: A big part of my platform, as well as Aron’s, who I’m running for co chair with, is really cohering YDSA national into a strong organization so that we can fulfill the role that we want to as a party, a working class party, in the United States. So a big thing that I believe is that the value that YDSA brings to the current movement is our ability to bring coherent politics, coherent strategy and a coherent theory of change to all of our campuses. And that’s done through the wealth of knowledge that YDSA members hold nationwide. Currently, that knowledge is often gate kept behind personal connections of NCC members or people in national leadership or connections within their caucuses on the national level. So what I want to do is take that wealth of knowledge that our YDSA members have and integrate them structurally into YDSA national through having robust member led committees. This way every YDSA member, irrespective of their caucus affiliation, regardless of their connections, can get access to that experience of YDSA members across the country, from the South to the coasts to the Midwest. Furthermore, by really building out — some people would pejoratively say — bureaucracy of YDSA National, we will be able to institutionalize that experience and knowledge so that everybody can get access to the same level of training, mentorship and political development on the national level.

Q: You mentioned being a member of Constellation Caucus. Could you talk a little bit about constellation, what your values are, and how you differ from other caucuses, ideologically?

Sean: So Constellation is the only caucus that exclusively conducts our politics within YDSA.  Due to that, a lot of our political platform points focus on the structure of YDSA national and how we should be going about the work that we’re doing. For YDSA to have a coherent vision, we need to strengthen national beyond just the NCC. It’ll help us institutionalize the experiences of YDSA members across the country who have been participating in activism in university, as well as increase the overall capacity of YDSA National.  The NCC has only nine people, and so they only have so much time and capacity they can spend on things. By having a solid set of national function based committees. Our vision is that they will be able to supplement the work and fulfill the political direction that the NCC wants to take.  [Furthermore,] it builds more leaders who can, later on down the line, be NCC members and potential co-chair candidates. Additionally, we believe in a specific form of anti imperialism. We believe that our primary role as socialist is to oppose US imperialism in whatever form that it manifests, and that means that when we are looking towards socialist parties across the world. We should start out with solidarity with these organizations and not criticism.

Q: Perhaps the biggest issue in in the YDSA and DSA space is Palestine.  Could you talk about your work on the comms Committee during the height of YDSA  involvement in the encampments, what sort of the flaws or issues you’ve seen with our work on Palestine, and what you would do if elected co-chair? 

Sean: My work on the comms committee started basically in January of 2024 when I was building the committee’s infrastructure, which was very convenient for the uprising we saw across campuses in the United States. The Communications Committee’s primary work was connecting with the local chapters’ work in their universities, getting video interviews from them, getting videos from their campuses, or getting pictures from their campuses, making them postable. This work often included blurring out people’s faces or adding captions to videos, posting them from the YDSA national account, and inviting the local chapter or local coalition to co post with us; this allowed us to really be at the forefront of this national movement for Palestine. Additionally, when [students] faced oppression on campuses, and we knew about [the police] going in, we would have people who were staying up ready to repost calls to action, to send specific tweets politicizing the situation. This [work] was most notable during the raid of Hinds Hall at Columbia University, where we had people staying up listening to WCKR, the student radio at the time, and tweeting about that live from YDSA’s national account. And so I spent a lot of nights doing that. In the beginning, we did it for Yale, we did it for Columbia, and we did it for UCLA when they faced attacks from Zionist counter protesters. I would like us to do more next year, and specifically with comms, I would want us to transfer the skills from national to  local chapters. We were planning on setting up a way for local chapters to connect with the National comms committee to receive training on press releases or specific advice on the wording or messaging they should be sending out with a particular press release they were considering.  I would want to make sure this is one of the big things that we’re doing next year if I’m elected.

Q: I was going to ask about the issue of endorsing candidates or not endorsing candidates who are considered insufficiently pro Palestine, specifically referring to the RE endorsement of AOC. I believe you said at the NCC a debate that you would endorse AOC, but with conditions. Could you expand on that a little more, and talk about what DSA and, indeed, YDSA’s relationship should be with electeds?

Sean: Specifically with AOC, I would have voted for her endorsement with the conditions put forward by Bread and Roses [caucus] and amended by Ahmed. Ideally, our candidates would be what are often called cadre candidates. They would have been members of DSA before getting elected; they would have been active in their local chapters, participated in the local democracy of the chapters, participated in the national democracy at convention, and all around have an understanding of what DSA is, understand its value, and see DSA as its political home. AOC is not that kind of candidate. So when we are relating to these kinds of candidates, it’s essential for us to set clear lines in the sand for what we as an organization want to see out of them. We cannot expect them to follow our line or even know our line all of the time unless there’s proactive communication with them. And, with AOC specifically, I know there has been, on the national level, a lack of communication there.  For YDSA’s electoral program, I think that — except in the rare circumstances where they are a chapter in a majority Student City Council District — YDSA should follow and participate in the electoral work of their local DSA chapter, mainly because YDSA, on its own generally, does not have the capacity to run a whole candidate for election in a city council race. But even in those situations, we should be primarily endorsing on the local level. These cadre candidates came up through their YDSA chapters, participated in the work of the YDSA chapter, and were running as members of the YDSA chapter. That was part of their platform; they clearly identified as YDSA members in their campaign and politics.

Q: Perhaps the second most significant issue in YDSA right now is the budget. There were cuts made earlier this year to various elements of the YDSA budget. We’ve been operating with a reduced budget since then. I understand that this year’s convention will be online as a result. Could you talk a bit about these cuts, what you think should be done to recoup that lost money, and how you would manage YDSA’s budget if you were elected co chair?  Where would you put money and why?

Sean: An unfortunate reality is that DSA was in a massive budget deficit, and there was no situation in which YDSA funding did not see any cuts. There were going to be cuts across the board in the context of the broader DSA budget; our NPC, our co chairs this year, did a really fantastic job at preserving as much of the YDSA budget that they were able to by organizing one on one conversations with current members of the NPC and discussing how to save essential things like NCC stipends — which I think has been pretty essential for expanding the connectivity between national and local chapters, as well as expanding and preserving our chapter grants to help fund work. I think realistically, the best way to recoup additional funds for YDSA and to get back the funding that was lost this year is going to be by growing DSA as an organization and by increasing the number of dues paying members. I want to be clear that I will ensure there are no additional cuts to YDSA’s budget. We should actively fight for an in person conference next year because conference is so essential to the political development of YDSA members across the organization. However, I think things like convention will be highly dependent upon what DSA decides for their convention, whether online or in person.