This might be our best hope to hang on
This might be our best hope to hang on
Especially if Senate Democrats blow it
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
Tonight we’ve got a big feature on some amazing grassroots organizing in swing states, big news on voting rights, and a look at one of the nation’s biggest labor battles. Let’s get to it!
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Over the next few months, Republican legislators in dozens of states will draw new legislative and congressional maps, gerrymandering as many districts as possible with ruthless precision.
Absent some miracle that inspires Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to rediscover their long-lost souls and permit the passage of federal voting rights legislation, the right-wing Supreme Court means a year of Republican voter suppression bills and a coming round of laser-precision gerrymanders will be just about impossible to stop or overturn. As always, it will fall to grassroots progressive and civil rights groups to deal with the fallout, and while the White House’s now-infamous suggestion that they “out-organize” the all-out assault on voter rights rightfully pissed people off because it seemed to signal preemptive capitulation to the worst members of the party, it may well be that the local organizers and community groups on the ground that have to once again do the yeoman’s work to at least mitigate the damage.
This newsletter has spent much of the year spotlighting local and state-based groups doing this kind of essential year-round, grassroots-level organizing, with a particular focus on swing states such as Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona. Today, we’re looking at a rising operation that has a growing presence across those and other key swing states.
For all the ways technology has changed how political campaigns operate, some classic tactics remain essential. As I wrote in the Washington Post last November, Democrats’ decision not to engage in door-to-door campaigning cost them down-ballot elections nationwide, and while their ground game was ostensibly grounded due to Covid, it wasn’t an anomaly. Since the 1990s, Democrats have increasingly abandoned a proven model of politics that’d won them a century’s worth of elections and political power. The lone significant exceptions to this de-emphasis on community organizing and door-knocking were the Dean campaign in 2003-2004, which was undone by the media and other Democrats during the presidential primary, and the Obama campaign in 2008, which rode the model all the way to the White House.
Alan Cottrell worked on that Obama campaign, then served in the administration as a cybersecurity analyst. But his heart remained in political organizing, which he continued to pursue alongside his policy work, so when it became obvious that control of the Senate would hinge on this past January’s runoff elections in Georgia, Cottrell looked south from his DC-area home to help out.
As Cottrell put it, Stacey Abrams and a constellation of progressive groups in the state had done “an amazing job” of registering voters and getting people activated, winning Georgia’s electoral votes for Democrats for the first time since 1992, so he sought to supplement their work. Cottrell built an operation with local volunteers, eschewing the offers from other out-of-state Democrats out of respect for the raging pandemic. With a team of 14 volunteers, they focused on parts of the state that did not have such a robust operation.
“They were hiring people to go knock on doors, but what that meant to them was that they would go drop off lit,” Cottrell tells me. “We don't call that knocking on doors, we call that a lit drop. I ran into this in South Fulton County, in Macon, and in Columbus. You’ve got to go talk to people.”
With only a few months between the November election and the runoff election day in January, they set out to talk with as many people as possible. While respecting Covid protocols and the wishes of any resident who felt uncomfortable talking in person, the small team went to the Republican strongholds of central and southern Georgia, seeking out repeated contact with any voter that was not listed as a registered Republican. Every conversation produced an observation form filled with notes about every resident, from their demographic details and family size to the political issues that mattered to them most.
Each morsel of information allows a campaign to better tailor specific messages and provides candidates to engage more intimately with potential voters. Segmenting the voter file is especially important when it comes to targeting those that aren’t particularly politically engaged, which was Cottrell’s group’s specialty.
“The reason why they don’t turn them out is that people who don't vote in every election don't know [about runoff elections]. Campaigns send mail to voters who voted in three of the last four elections or two of the last three elections,” he says. “They won’t send mail out to people who vote frequently. But we were showing up and asking them to vote, showing up with people of their own ethnicity, people who had their own stories.”
Cottrell’s group also followed up with voters to correct their ballots, providing another crucial service to people who aren’t as engaged.
Many of these infrequent voters were in Georgia’s Black Belt counties, where turnout often sinks precipitously in runoff elections. Instead, thanks to this increased engagement — as well as the historic nature of the election, work by other groups, and now-Sen. Raphael Warnock’s unique reputation in the state — Black voters powered an increase in turnout in those counties.That provided the margins needed for both Warnock and now-Sen. Jon Ossoff to win their elections, giving Democrats their thin Senate majority.
With the immediate mission accomplished, Cottrell decided to expand the program. Along with a continued presence in Georgia, his new organization, which he’s dubbed Hope Springs From Field, is now operating in the key swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida.
With a much longer lead time before the next set of major elections, volunteers have been canvassing every single weekend. Led by Obama campaign field alums and, in places like Georgia, young Black students, they have multiple goals: Build connections with voters, take notes on both their personal demographics and political concerns, update their registrations, and build relationships with locals. They also ask people to fill out comment cards and deliver them to local elected officials, in many cases the first stirrings of engagement with the government. And when it gets closer to election day, they’ll have a bifurcated GOTV strategy, ensuring that they stay in touch with people who haven’t cast ballots yet.
The operation is growing exponentially. Over the past eight weekends, they’ve had 2,156 unique volunteers knocking on doors, and in addition to the crucial conversations and political engagement, they’ve also managed to register 223 voters and update 667 existing voter registrations with new addresses. In Florida, they focus on swing counties such as Osceola, Polk, and Seminole counties; in Wisconsin, it’s largely blue counties that need to further increase turnout to win state elections; and in Texas, they’ve keyed in on growing counties with varying politics, seeking to both persuade and activate new and infrequent voters.
Cottrell says that he has a vision for an even larger group and a way to make it financially sustainable, which is to say that he wants to pay canvassers and provide them more resources in the field. Doing so won’t just help Hope Springs From the Field, but also help infuse campaigns and local parties nationwide with talent while reviving the political ground machine approach that has been so effective for so long. The Democratic Party withered operationally under Obama, and while the DNC is now working to rectify the situation, outside help will be crucial.
Reminder: I cover lots more news, keep up on these stories, and publish interviews throughout the week in the issues sent out to premium members!
Workers Rights
California: In a potentially groundbreaking decision released late Friday, a California Superior Court judge ruled Prop 22 illegal and unenforceable. The law, approved by Californians after a $200 million campaign by big tech gig companies that fooled voters into thinking they were helping Uber drivers, would limit the rights of gig workers in perpetuity, even those who work for companies or in sectors that do not currently exist.
In striking the law down, the judge wrote that it “appears to only to protect the economic interest of the network companies in having a divided, ununionized workforce, which is not a stated goal of the legislation.”
Lyft, Uber, Instacart, and the other companies that bankrolled the campaign have promised to appeal. Here’s hoping that Biden’s NLRB makes it a moot case, anyway.
Wisconsin: Three cities in the state are going to pilot universal basic income (UBI) programs. Madison, Milwaukee, and Wausau have each received money from a number of foundations and donors, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Madison has nearly $1 million to work with right now and plans on offering 125 residents about $500 a month.
Nabisco: On Friday, hundreds of unionized workers at the Nabisco factory in Chicago went on strike, joining their striking brothers and sisters at Nabisco’s two other US facilities in Portland, OR and Richmond, VA. Employees at the company’s distribution center in Aurora, CO are also out on the picket line.
I’ve been working closely with these workers to get the word out about their strike, which is predicated on a number of serious greivances. Most of them have been working without a contract since 2016, have had their pensions frozen and retirements wrecked, and are now being asked to take gigantic concessions after helping Nabisco make record profits during the pandemic. Mondelez, Nabisco’s parent company, closed major in Atlanta and New Jersey earlier this year, outsourcing 1000 jobs to Mexico and raising the stakes for the remaining employees.
Here’s our latest video about the strike, filmed on location in Richmond:
We also produced a video in Portland, which we released on Wednesday, and will have more coverage coming from Chicago later this week. Right now I’m boycotting foods from Mondelez and PepsiCo, which subjects workers to even worse conditions, and it’s unnerving to realize just how much of the grocery store those two companies control. Corporate consolidation is very bad!
Voting Rights
Florida: There are 82 municipal elections still to take place across Florida this year, and with no help from national Democrats in sight, local officials and activists are very worried that the state’s new voter suppression laws will function exactly as intended.
Speaking of bad voter supression laws in Florida… A few weeks back, I relayed the good news that the state’s attorney general decided not to appeal a judge’s decision to block a ridiculous cap on donations to ballot initiative campaigns. The latest development, however, is not as happy an update: The progressive groups behind a trio of voting rights initiatives have suspended their campaigns and will instead try to qualify the initiatives for the 2024 ballot.
Sean Shaw, the former state legislator and AG candidate running point on the initiative campaigns, told me today that the months of uncertainty caused by the now-voided GOP law hobbled their efforts enough that it’s now impossible to collect the huge number of signatures necessary by the deadline, which the judge in the case did not adjust.
It’s a significant blow for hundreds of thousands of would-be voters in the state. Among other things, the initiatives aimed to create an automatic voter registration system in the state, counter the recent attack on mail-in voting, and fix the absurd returning citizen disenfranchisement law that the GOP used to gut a successful 2018 ballot initiative. As a result, a lot of people will not be able to vote in the 2024 election.
North Carolina: The state’s long-festering felon disenfranchisement law bans otherwise eligible residents from voting until they’ve paid off all fines and fees and finished probation. Right now that is keeping more than 55,000 people from casting their ballots, a huge number for a mid-sized state. The state NAACP and several of those would-be voters are suing the state over the law in hopes of returning their right to cast a ballot, and in what is a very interesting twist, the NC Department of Justice’s lawyers don’t deny that the policy disproportionately disenfranchises Black citizens.
In fact, they even admit that the law was explicitly motivated by racial animus. Their argument is that the right to vote isn’t actually a right… which, well, isn’t entirely incorrect. Despite losing two seats last year, Democrats control the NC Supreme Court, so perhaps this case will go better for people of color this time.
Texas: After valiantly holding out for more than a month and trying to rally federal action, the Democratic legislative diaspora preventing the passage of a major voter suppression bill has collapsed.
Enough Democrats returned to the capitol and stepped foot on the House floor on Thursday night that Republican Speaker Dade Phelan was able to call a quorum, allowing the GOP to send the voter suppression bill to the elections committee. The House will resume session again on Monday, and because it was already approved by the state senate earlier this month, the bill is on track to be on Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk by the end of the week.
Absent federal intervention, the collapse of the Democratic resistance was inevitable. Still, in classic Democratic fashion, some of the caucus’s older and more conservative legislators are throwing their more idealistic and principled colleagues under the bus, groveling to Republicans as if doing so will score them political points or some kind of preferential treatment later on. The statement made by Rep. Garnet Coleman was particularly troubling:
Coleman, one of the longest serving Democrats in the Legislature, said he hoped his presence in the Texas House would spur other Democrats to end their quorum break and begin the process of repairing relationships frayed by the fight over the elections bill.
“I feel like it’s the right thing to do,” Coleman told The Dallas Morning News.“I think sometimes we don’t look at what something does to an institution. If we don’t start working to make the world work again, it will never happen.”
“I do feel that I contributed to this idea that you’ve got to burn something down in order to improve it,” Coleman said. “I regret that.”
It’s a statement absolutely Manchin-esque in its delusion and misunderstanding of the political and existential emergency we face. Government will not suddenly function as intended if Democrats capitulate to Republicans, it’ll simply become that much easier for Republicans to cement their power and inflict pain on tens of millions of people.
The suggestion that it’s Democrats that are burning the legislature down mistakes institutions for actual democracy, mirroring the knowingly cynical argument made by Sens. Manchin and Sinema that the filibuster must be saved in order to avoid irrevocably damage to Senate comity, even if it means the end of free and fair elections.
Democratic Climate Politics
There’s a hurricane pummeling the east coast right now, including here in New York City. The Belt Parkway across Brooklyn and Queens is flooded into a hydroplaning waterslide nightmare, subway stations across the boroughs are swamped and trains are delayed, and there are power outage warnings.
It’s been nine years since Hurricane Sandy wrecked the city and surrounding areas, a generational disaster that inspired memorial concerts and zero actual governmental action to prevent future calamities. Governor Cuomo’s vanity projects and Republican control of the federal purse strings have left us totally unprepared for the growing terrors of climate change. Now that Cuomo is stepping down and Democrats are pursuing a major infrastructure bill, there is hope for some kind of belated investment to mitigate the worst of the coming chaos… if a cabal of useless party conservatives in the House, with the backing of Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, don’t blow it all up.
Thankfully, it looks like that may no longer be a threat. Maybe that’ll show party leadership that bad Democrats can be bullied and forced into line when it really matters. I know there’s one urgent bill that could really use that kind of boost this fall…
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