[In elections, we are facing setbacks locally and more broadly. A
bold new experiment in West Virginia offers lessons for long-term
success. ] [[link removed]]

HOW TO DEVELOP MOVEMENT CANDIDATES AND WIN RURAL GOVERNING POWER

 
[[link removed]]


 

Katey Lauer
April 8, 2021
Waging Nonviolence
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ In elections, we are facing setbacks locally and more broadly. A
bold new experiment in West Virginia offers lessons for long-term
success. _

Katey Lauer leading a WV Can’t Wait training., Facebook/WV Can’t
Wait

 

There’s a buzz right now in America’s heartland. It’s the sound
of dozens of electoral experiments getting off the ground this spring.
Organizers are dusting off the wounds and exhaustion of 2020 and
beginning to rev their engines for the next two years. 

The road ahead is not a clear one. Anyone who tracked the down ballot
election results this fall knows our state houses are falling to more
and more corporate control. Those same state legislatures are in the
middle of redistricting, which means more and more gerrymandering.
Meanwhile, national corporate media — not to mention our growing
information silos — continue to drive polarization.

This is why organizing in rural and small towns remains essential
right now. It’s also why those of us working in places like this
have spent the last several months on the phone with each other,
trying to figure out what the hell to do against growing odds. 

Here in West Virginia — where we are building a movement-based
electoral institution — we don’t go a day without getting phone
calls. We’ve talked to organizers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana,
Indiana, Washington, North Carolina and Georgia in just the last
week. 

All of these organizers know that despite some movement candidates
winning at the top of the ticket last November, those victories are
fragile and don’t paint the full picture of the terrain. We are
losing locally and broadly. And when we look around, it’s clear that
one reason is we have no bench — no roster of well-practiced players
to pull into the game. 

One organizer in Georgia said to me two weeks ago: “OK, here’s the
deal. We’ve got seven seats here. All but one of our districts are
gerrymandered. And there’s no one to run. The people we can convince
to put their names on the ballot, well, they don’t even know where
to start.” 

I know how that feels. Similar roadblocks are everywhere, especially
in rural and small town places that have long been abandoned by
philanthropy, party leadership and national organizations. 

Still, we have hope — and perspective. 

It was three years ago, when a group of us organizers created WV
Can’t Wait. In the last cycle, we recruited and trained 101
candidates, all of whom ran together under a shared banner. Eleven are
now office holders — from state house to city council, from board of
education to prosecutor. What’s more, hundreds of West Virginians
who had never run, volunteered for a campaign, done a financial report
or knocked on a door before, now have. We created the largest
electoral infrastructure our state has seen in decades, in one big
sweep. 

And yet, if I’ve learned anything from reflecting on these last few
years, it’s this: There’s no easy way forward. Or rather, the work
ahead of us is generational. The political landscape we’re staring
down is, in part, the result of a 40-year strategy, executed by our
opponents, to concentrate wealth and to use the old tools of racism
and cultural-elitism to disarm us in mounting a collective defense. 

All of this is to say: The way we get out of this mess is by mounting
a 40-year strategy of our own. It’s by running ambitious, bold,
local experiments. 

It won’t be easy. It requires steadfastness, flexibility, saying
_no_ to old strategies and patience — not to mention a plan.

The good news is none of this requires starting from scratch. And this
season is the perfect one for swapping lessons. Here’s what we’ve
learned in West Virginia about recruiting, training and assisting
rural and small town movement candidates over the last three years.
Here’s what we learned about how we can start to build a bench.

1. BUILD RECRUITMENT INTO EVERYTHING YOU DO

Nearly every one of the candidates who ran as a part of WV Can’t
Wait in 2020 was recruited through a one-on-one conversation with our
gubernatorial candidate, Stephen Smith, or another organizer on our
team. Some of the folks we recruited were incumbents or had already
announced — far more had never been asked to run before and the vast
majority of them were first-timers. 

Importantly, nearly all were community leaders in some way: Tess
Jackson was a teacher, active in the widely publicized 2018 strike,
and ran for State House; Danielle Stewart helped lead the fight for a
non-discrimination ordinance in Beckley, and ran for mayor; Rosemary
Ketchum, known for her volunteerism and attention to folks on the
margins, ran for City Council.

These one-on-one meetings, where we recruited candidates, were built
into our team’s schedule every single day: before town halls and
after, on car rides to the next location, on Saturday mornings when we
couldn’t find another time. We knew not every one-on-one would
result in recruiting a good candidate, so volume mattered. 

What’s more, we made our recruitment of candidates public. We asked
folks at town halls to nominate others. We created a contact form
where people could sign up. We invited folks to get in touch in press
interviews. Recruiting was a constant. 

2. FRAME THE CONVERSATION

Over time, we learned a few key ingredients that made these
recruitment meetings successful, beyond the typical components of a
one-on-one. First of all, Stephen (who did the vast majority of these
meetings) used them to teach our movement strategy and our plan to
win. Sometimes he’d ask: “Can I tell you how I think we’re gonna
pull this off?”_ _(By “this” he meant taking on the wealthy Good
Old Boys of both parties and getting movement candidates into office).
It was a chance to meet people’s healthy and totally reasonable
skepticism. He’d teach the structure of WV Can’t Wait in broad
strokes. He’d talk about the value of a slate — how we have more
power if we run together because we can back each other. He’d say,_
_“Not everyone is going to win. But the more of us that run, the
more of a chance we’ve all got.”_ _And then he’d caution folks,
“Also, if you’re going to run, run twice. You’ll have a much
better chance in a second race. You’ll know what to expect, and the
earlier organizing you did will build on itself.”

We’d use these meetings to get explicit about what we could offer
too: training, invitations to speak at WV Can’t Wait Town Halls,
coordination on field. Running for office is daunting — we used
these conversations to show folks they wouldn’t have to go it alone.
(Learning from what did and didn’t work in terms of resourcing
candidates over the last three years, we now have this draft of what
we’re looking to offer candidates in the 2022 cycle
[[link removed]].) 

3. ASK CANDIDATES TO COMMIT TO A SET OF PRINCIPLES BEFORE THEY’RE IN
OFFICE, AND HOLD CANDIDATES ACCOUNTABLE TO THEM

We never committed to a candidate in a one-on-one meeting. For
candidates to be accountable to the movement, they needed to make a
set of commitments before we’d back them.    

Every candidate on our slate signed onto a WV Can’t Wait Pledge,
promising to refuse corporate cash, never cross a picket line, never
hide from a debate and never punch down (or blame someone who is
bearing too much for what they carry). More than half of our slate
also signed onto the WV Can’t Wait Platform, called the New Deal for
West Virginia.

Once candidates made these commitments, they then had access to the
many benefits of the movement: help hosting fundraisers, a volunteer
pool, candidate training and so on. And candidates were also held
accountable. Four times in two years our base raised questions as to
whether or not a candidate had broken a pledge or platform commitment.
Each time, a movement leader reached out to that candidate, offered a
conversation and talked through the issue. Three of the four times we
were able to clarify that the commitment had not been broken. A fourth
time, we did in fact remove a candidate from the slate. These
accountability processes were held relationally, person to person. 

Asking candidates to sign onto a pledge and platform promoted our
expectations for candidates and encouraged candidates to be bold. It
works. Voters were attracted to our slate precisely because our
candidates had a real agenda.

4. TEACH THE LIMITATIONS OF WHAT A CANDIDATE CAN DO AND WHERE CHANGE
COMES FROM

The foundations of WV Can’t Wait were pieced together in mass
strategy meetings, a full year before we went public. At one of those
early strategy meetings, we cued up video ads of prominent
politicians, some of whom we were more sympathetic to, and others whom
we liked less. Uniformly, these ads told a version of this story_:
things are bad, elect me, I’ll fix it, they’ll be better. _No
wonder we’re cynical about electoral politics!

As folks who had done community change work for decades between us,
what grated on us most about these ads was how untrue they were. They
pretended that one guy (and it was often a guy) could fix all the
problems we faced. But never in American history has that happened,
and certainly not in West Virginia. Politicians didn’t lead our Mine
Wars, politicians didn’t lead our teachers strikes. Working people
did, movements did.

We left that meeting deciding that we would teach — in town halls,
press interviews, our volunteer trainings, wherever possible — how
change actually happens. This became a fixture of our story and our
actions.

When Stephen was asked in an interview about our education plan —
“Do you really think you can make this happen if you’re in
office?” — he didn’t point to himself as a savior. He would
teach: “This is the biggest lie in politics, that any one politician
is going to save us. The only way we’ll get the kind of government
we deserve is if we come together and take it. That means we need
1,000 leaders, not one. If we’re going to pass this education plan
that was written by our state’s educators, we need you.”

To be clear, this takes a while to stick. Our mainstream cultural
institutions — especially the press — have a hard time telling
stories of candidates (or any figure head) where that person is a part
of something bigger than themselves. Pushing our true story meant we
had to practice strict narrative discipline. 

But it was worth it: It built trust amongst our base because more
trust is available when you say things that are true. It placed
responsibility — for wins, setbacks, conflicts, simply doing the
work — in all of our hands. This in turn meant that our leadership
roles and decisions had real weight, and it answered unlikely
voters’ well-earned skepticism. When folks asked, “How do I know
this guy isn’t full of crap like everybody else?”_ _we had an
honest answer. All in all, it helped us create and build commitment to
something that could outlast one election cycle: an institution.

5. MAKE THE MOVEMENT THE BRAND 

Stephen Smith at a Seniors Can’t Wait event. (Facebook/WV Can’t
Wait)

To reinforce the story (and reality) that it will take all of us to
win a people’s government, we named our structures after the
movement, instead of our candidates. Instead of our county teams
incorporating a candidate’s last name —  like Summers County for
Smith or Cabell County for Smith — they were called Summers County
Can’t Wait and Cabell County Can’t Wait. Our constituency teams
were the same. They weren’t Seniors for Smith, but rather Seniors
Can’t Wait or Farmers Can’t Wait or Ex-offenders Can’t Wait. 

We did this across the board. Our website was wvcantwait.com, our
Facebook page was called WV Can’t Wait, and on Twitter and Instagram
our handle was @wvcantwait. Now that our first cycle is over, the
brand of the movement remains. It’s a through line for our current
slate of candidates and field teams, as well as the next ones we’ll
build.

6. DON’T MAKE CANDIDATES BOSSES

I’ve never worked on a traditional political campaign; I have only
seen them from around the edges. And as far as I can tell, it’s
typical for traditional candidates to go around, haphazardly directing
the show between public appearances. 

In our structure, WV Can’t Wait staff and funds were housed inside
of our gubernatorial campaign for the first three years. This might
suggest that our top-of-ticket candidate did just that: acted as
director. But in fact, he didn’t, in part because he wouldn’t have
wanted to, and in part because we wouldn’t have let him. 

To be clear, Stephen was deeply integral to our strategy development.
But decisions about our direction were made by lots of people and in
lots of places: between me and a staff person, by staff as a whole, or
by a volunteer body like our policy team or convention delegates. And
often, these decisions — especially the most consequential ones —
were made with heavy consultation (think: dozens of one-on-ones).
Through all of it, never did Stephen act as a lone decision-maker.

What’s more, he had no role in managing staff. As campaign manager,
I created a rule with him that he wouldn’t talk to staff directly
about their work, apart from specific instances we agreed to. This was
a request from me for three reasons: First, I didn’t want to send
mixed signals to staff by setting them up with two pseudo-managers.
Second, I’d been in lots of working relationships where I’d shared
leadership with men, often where they would disrupt the work a team
was doing by dropping in a big idea or question and then ducking out,
leaving a mess to clean up. I didn’t want to repeat that scenario.
Third, it was a style choice. Stephen is full of ideas, constantly
generating them. It’s an incredible skill and asset to our work. I
like to pare things down, often rooting for focus — which is also an
asset. I worried it would overwhelm staff to be in the position of
constantly triaging ideas that Stephen, this high-ranking person, had
suggested, as opposed to chipping away at the many tasks already on
their plates. 

We also made a choice for our candidate to defer to staff when
volunteers had a question or needed direction related to work that a
staff member was holding. In many cases, staff knew more about a need
or a strategy choice than our candidate did. If a field team had
questions about whether they should canvass a certain neighborhood,
for instance, Stephen would tell that team to ask our field director,
not him: “Sarah is in charge of that.” This meant staff wasn’t
undermined by our candidate’s actions. And if we found our
communications getting jumbled up in mixed messages between our
candidate and staff, staff would be the ones to correct and lead.

These structures and choices were essential to our success. They
strengthened our decision-making, provided role clarity, let our
candidate be the excellent candidate he was, and legitimized and
utilized the expertise and leadership of staff, making our team more
leaderful.

NOW WHAT?

Three years later, we lost the governor’s race — but we won the
infrastructure. We have 11 candidates in office. We have a platform we
call The New Deal for West Virginia that belongs to the thousands of
people who helped write it. We have experienced staff. And strong
county teams sprinkled across the state. 

Plus, we’re growing. 

Last month, we launched our field program for our three city council
candidates in Morgantown. Last week, we made a starter-list of folks
we want to have one-on-ones with, to organize slates in their towns
for 2022. And more than two dozen candidates have already asked to
join our ranks this next cycle, before our recruitment program has
even launched.

Some of these folks will win. Some won’t win now, but will win next
time. Others won’t make it through at all. We’re okay with that.
The thing that guides us — as volunteers, candidates and staff —
is whether what we’re doing this election cycle strengthens our
movement and gets us closer to winning more victories next cycle. 

It’s not an easy orientation to hold. Because folks (including us
organizers!) are so used to the traditional model of electoral
campaigns where the election is the final measure of our success, and
all of our hope is imbued in it (or where the candidate is our hero,
and all of hope is imbued in them). It’s a daily practice to build
an orientation that is contrary to this one — a movement culture
that teaches that an election is a benchmark of our strength, and that
our hope belongs to each other. Creating this culture starts with how
we position our candidates.

I don’t mean to suggest that winning elections doesn’t matter. It
does. Winning elections gives us the power to govern. It also builds
the legitimacy of our institutions (whereas losing can detract from
that). 

But if we want to be able to win in the next election and the next one
after that — and if we want to be able to withstand the losses in
between the victories and learn from them — then the strength of our
institutions matters just as much as any one victory. In fact, if we
want to build a bench, it matters much, much more.

_This article is part of a __series on Rural Organizing that began on
Medium_ [[link removed]]_._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]