I sat down with Doug Leake, co-chair of Delco DSA, to talk about the Swarthmore Nine, progressive organizing in Delaware County, and what it actually takes to build a left political infrastructure in a county that spent 150 years under Republican machine control.

Delco DSA’s current priorities

Pride is up first — they’ll be at both the Media parade and the Upper Darby resource festival. After that, the Swarthmore Nine case is front and center. After nearly a year of trying to connect with Swarthmore’s Students for Justice in Palestine, Doug finally linked up with them at the No Kings march in Media last month. DSA has since connected them with UDTJ and Kyle McIntyre, and Doug’s been helping them navigate a county most of them don’t know.

The Swarthmore Nine and Tanner Rouse

One current and one former students are facing up to a year in prison for a campus protest. Doug’s argument is simple — the moment the DA’s office got involved, it stopped being a campus matter. New DA Tanner Rouse inherited this case from Stollsteimer and could drop the charges tomorrow. The path to getting him there is public pressure, and Doug breaks down exactly what that looks like in practice.

DSA and the Democratic Party

DSA Delco isn’t the enemy of the Democratic Party. Doug’s framing: they’re going to drag Democrats kicking and screaming to victory. His experience with regular Delco residents has never been negative. The friction is always with party leadership — not with the people.

Why local politics is where the left wins

Doug makes a compelling case that the national left keeps going for the crown and missing. Bernie’s two losses convinced him to think smaller. Local politics is relationship-driven, low-resistance, and the place where you actually build the infrastructure to win bigger fights down the road.

Chester, voter turnout, and the representation gap

The city with the most Democrats in Delco has some of the lowest turnout in the county. Doug connects this to exhaustion, not apathy — and flags a real racial representation gap in the Delco Democratic Party that nobody wants to talk about out loud.