[ Progressives write off Republican-leaning counties across
America to their own detriment. With working-class candidates,
populist messaging, and effective organization, we can make major
inroads in “Trump country” that will pay dividends for years to
come.] [[link removed]]

LEFT-WING POPULISM CAN WIN IN TRUMP-VOTING AREAS, TOO  
[[link removed]]


 

Interview with Jonathan Smucker and Allison Troy by Jared Abbott
May 16, 2022
Jacobin
[[link removed]]


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

_ Progressives write off Republican-leaning counties across America
to their own detriment. With working-class candidates, populist
messaging, and effective organization, we can make major inroads in
“Trump country” that will pay dividends for years to come. _

Bernie Sanders at a rally for congressional candidate Jess King on
May 5, 2018., (Jess King for Congress / Facebook)

 

Jonathan Smucker and Allison Troy are organizers who have been
fighting to transform politics in Central Pennsylvania’s
conservative Lancaster County for years. They have important lessons
for socialists and progressives about why we need to reach “beyond
the choir” of our core constituencies in urban and suburban areas to
support organizing in small cities, towns, and rural areas. They also
share key insights about how the Left can employ an inclusive populist
message to win over independents and even some registered Republicans
who many in the Democratic Party instinctively write off.

Smucker and Troy were active in the 2018 Congressional campaign
of Jess King [[link removed](Pennsylvania)],
who ran as a Democrat. King started her race in a district where
Republicans typically enjoyed a six-point advantage over Democrats.
Midway through the race, unexpected court-ordered redistricting left
King with an R+14 district, making it practically impossible to win.
While King didn’t prevail, her working-class political insurgency
generated hundreds of new progressive activists, strengthened the new
formidable political organization, Lancaster Stands Up, that had
encouraged her to run, and pushed people like Allison from activist to
candidate. In 2019, Allison ran and won a seat on the Board of
Commissioners in heavily Republican Manheim Township, bringing in new
voters while persuading many independents and Republicans to win more
votes than any other candidate in the race.

JA

In a lot of your work [[link removed]], Jonathan, you
talk about the importance of populist messaging for reaching
disaffected working-class class voters. If I understand correctly, you
see naming the enemy, naming the corporate class, naming the elites of
different kinds in our political rhetoric as being central to a theory
of progressive change. Could you talk a little bit more about what you
mean by populism and how it fits into your broader approach to
progressive politics?

JS

I think there’s a lot of paralysis and confusion within the
Democratic Party establishment right now. They see coming out too
strong on supporting Amazon workers or on health care or naming Wall
Street or specific corporations or billionaires as culprits all as
“far left.” They see all these things through a narrative that’s
been defined by the Right, on a Left-versus-Right axis. They’re
equating everything together from Medicare for All to defund the
police. They’re just putting it all in the same box.

And they’re like, “Oh, anything that’s bold and that’s
assertive is going to lose us these imagined moderates,” which are
more and more an imaginary constituency. There are actually fewer and
fewer people who fit this box that they think a lot of people are in.

So there’s an imprecision of analysis where they’re seeing
everything on this Left-versus-Right axis, and they imagine most
people are in the middle, and they’re not understanding the
bottom-versus-top axis that has become more and more salient over the
past two decades, especially since the financial collapse in 2008 and
onward.

Populism is partly a rhetorical structure that frames the many versus
the few, the people versus the corrupt elites or the corrupt
establishment. Now Donald Trump tapped into that by invoking popular
resentment against the concentrated economic power at the top but then
quickly obfuscating it. He invokes people’s fears and anxieties
about their own economic prospects and precarity. But he doesn’t
stay on it. Instead he just invokes people’s anti-elitist feelings
and fears and anxieties and anger, and then he quickly channels that
into anger at cultural elites.

His favorite targets are Hollywood, academia, media, and Democratic
politicians. And so it looks like he’s punching up, but he’s not
targeting the 1 percent or the 0.1 percent. He’s targeting the
cultural elite in roughly the top 10 percent. And it works because
when you’re in the bottom, say, 80 percent, that kind of looks like
the top to you.

And then he also channels that anger at racialized scapegoats.
Immigrants and Muslims have been his favorite targets. So that’s the
kind of toxic cocktail of right-wing authoritarian populism: invoke
anger at the very top, then focus on the cultural elite and the
powerless scapegoats, the marginalized people; and invoke a solidarity
that’s exclusionary — a “We the People” that is exclusionary
— and Trump did that masterfully.

But there’s a lot of evidence that his articulation of populism is
not as persuasive as the one we on the Left have available to us. The
problem is that Trump is indeed naming culprits, while the Democratic
Party has this recurring problem of hesitating to name culprits. So
he’s filling a void that the Democratic Party is failing to fill.
People are ready for culprits, so Trump gets traction.

Our version of populism actually names and stays focused on the
economic culprits: the billionaires, Wall Street, and the big
corporations that have rigged the political system, especially over
the past forty years, that have continued to try to dismantle the
gains of working people through the New Deal. We have to name those
culprits.

Then we have to pick a fight with the Democratic politicians who have
been doing the bidding of those economic culprits; who have helped
pass trade deals like NAFTA and deregulation; who have gone along
hook, line, and sinker with “tough on crime” legislation, the
expansion of the criminal justice system, and the prison-industrial
complex.

We have to go after these people on substantive issues. And then we
have to articulate a “We the People” that’s inclusive of
everyone. That’s our version of populism: the people versus the
elites at the top.

JA

You said that there’s a lot of evidence that our version of populism
can win, but if we look at the most high-profile recent example of
left-wing populism in the United States — the 2016 and 2020
presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders — I’m not so sure
[[link removed]] the
evidence is there. Sanders had high expectations about the capacity
for his campaign to reach disaffected and low-engagement voters, but
he didn’t have much success. There were a couple of exceptions like
Nevada, for instance. But in general, Sanders did not reach many new
voters. Most people in his coalition, especially in 2020, were
high-frequency voters on the left of the Democratic Party.

What makes you think that the brand of inclusive populism you champion
can be more effective, given that we haven’t really seen a lot of
evidence to that effect in the United States? Nor do we have a lot of
great examples from other countries, where you’ve seen inspiring but
only modestly successful left-wing insurgencies from Spain to the UK
and elsewhere. We haven’t really seen this sort of rhetoric really
take hold the way that right-wing populism has in a lot of places,
unless you include, say, South America in the early 2000s.

JS

I don’t think it’s as simple as populism wins or left populism
beats right populism. I think you have to look at the historical
reality. In the case of Sanders, for instance, I think some of it was
very particular failures of his campaign.

Actually, I think Sanders’s 2016 campaign is evidence of what
you’re saying. It was a done deal in the Democratic Party that
Hillary Clinton would be the nominee, and then suddenly Sanders came
within the range of possibly of winning the nomination. The vote share
that he got in 2016 is incredible for how much of an insurgent
candidate he was. He did incredibly well. Everybody wrote him off, and
then look how well he did. Obviously, he didn’t win, but his run was
impressive.

In 2020, I think the biggest thing, and I really haven’t seen much
analysis on this, but it was clear to me that the biggest concern of
Democratic primary voters, even including a lot of disaffected
working-class Democratic primary voters, was defeating Donald Trump.
And that is reasonable.

As a leftist, I shared that as my top priority for the 2020 election.
However, my assumption with the 2020 election . . . or not assumption,
but my theory is that Sanders was the best candidate to beat Trump,
because of his ability to attract voters outside of the reliable
Democratic voting base.

I don’t think the Sanders campaign successfully articulated that
Bernie was the person best positioned to beat Trump. Yes, they said
“Bernie beats Trump,” right? But a slogan isn’t enough to do
that because that slogan just highlights how everyone had these doubts
of “Can Bernie beat Trump?” Everyone has these frameworks of like,

Okay, Trump is so scary. This isn’t the cycle to go “further
left.” I might want the Democratic Party to do better. They might
suck, and I hate how they haven’t delivered for working people. And
they passed NAFTA, and they haven’t been fighting for labor unions
and this, that, and the other thing. But Trump is a real threat, and
this isn’t the election cycle where we should go bold. We should
just get rid of Trump.

To be fair, I think a lot of people in the campaign understood this,
and they made efforts to change the narrative, including releasing
polling that showed Bernie’s relative strength head-to-head against
Trump. But given that nearly every pundit in America was saying on
repeat that Bernie can’t win, I think a lot more was needed in terms
of message focus and discipline. I think Bernie had to go for the
jugular in a way that maybe he wasn’t willing to do. He had to say
things like:

Look, according to the pundits, the “safe bet” in 2000 was Al
Gore. The “safe bet” in 2004 was John Kerry. The safe bet” in
2016 was Hillary Clinton. The one exception to Democrats not losing in
the past 20 years is Barack Obama, who was not the “safe bet.”

And highlight how the pundits have been wrong and wrong again about
what it takes to win, and how Bernie was bringing in more disaffected
voters than any of the other candidates. He had to go for that.

My experience knocking doors in Iowa, over and over again, especially
with older voters, I think would be surprising to a lot of people.
They were torn between two candidates. Those two candidates were not
Biden and Amy Klobuchar, and they weren’t Bernie and Elizabeth
Warren. The candidates were Bernie and Biden that they were torn
between — a lot of folks I talked to.

They liked Bernie. They wanted to vote for him. They were afraid that
he would be the weaker candidate against Trump. And when we said
things at the door like “Actually, Bernie is bringing in the
working-class base that the Democratic Party’s been bleeding out,
because they haven’t been fighting for working people,” it
convinced people.

But once South Carolina happened — and South Carolina, I think, is
its own ball of wax that I don’t have enough information to be able
to fully critique. . . . But once South Carolina happened and
everybody got behind Biden, the base did too. And it makes sense
because a lot of primary voters were eager to settle on a nominee and
focus on beating Trump.

JA

Let’s shift gears to talk about the work the two of you are doing to
transform Central Pennsylvania politics. Lancaster County,
Pennsylvania, is far from the profile of a typical progressive
stronghold, with below-median household incomes and below-average
educational attainment, and where only 32 percent of registered voters
are affiliated with the Democratic Party. Places like Lancaster have
often been overlooked by Democrats, but you’ve decided Lancaster —
and places like it in Central Pennsylvania — is where you want to
put all of your political energies.

So why is it that you think it’s so important to be doing the kind
of work that you’re doing among the sorts of voters that you’re
working to build relationships with and build coalitions with in
Central Pennsylvania?

AT

We talk about this a lot. I mean, one big idea here is that you
can’t win in places that you don’t show up and try. And
historically, or at least over the past fifty years, the Democratic
Party has invested a lot of time and energy and money in cities and
affluent suburbs, and then they win there. You win where you invest,
and then you don’t win where you don’t.

So it’s just a reinforcing cycle where people point to communities
like ours and say, “Well, we don’t win there. So we shouldn’t
try.” And our response to that is, “Yeah. We’re not winning
because we’re not trying.” So the big idea is to try as much as
you can. And the more you try, the more you’ll win. And I think you
can’t know what’s possible without trying.

So it was a really big deal to have a candidate like Jess King, a
working-class insurgent populist candidate, who ran a big
congressional campaign here in our congressional district. Very tough
race, very tough district.

King ultimately lost, but this work is not just about winning in a
single election cycle. Just having someone in a community like ours
run a serious race . . . Jess’s race activated hundreds of
volunteers, many of them new volunteers like me who had never been
involved in anything like that before. Between the King campaign and
Lancaster Stands Up [a progressive activist coalition in Lancaster
County], we knocked a quarter million doors — a huge voter outreach
effort. And even though Jess didn’t win, there have been all kinds
of downstream positive effects of her race that have outlived her
campaign that are still going even years later.

So hundreds of new volunteers were activated, and many of those
people, including myself, are still activated. They’ve just gone on
to volunteer for other campaigns and organizations locally. People
have gone on to run for office, including me, that wouldn’t have
done that.

You’ve got all these people that live here now that know how to do
that stuff, that know how to knock on a door and talk to a neighbor.
It’s just part of their routine to make small contributions to
campaigns at the local level. People didn’t do that before.

So there’s all kinds of really important lasting benefits that
happen just when you have a good candidate like that show up in a
community and run a really impressive race, even if they lose.

JA

Of course you’re more likely to succeed in a +14-Republican area if
you compete versus if you don’t, but why put in the effort at all if
there are other places where it’s just +10, +5, or less? Can you
elaborate more on the strategic value of doing the work you’re doing
in such a conservative area?

AT

We definitely don’t think we should blindly throw resources into
serious contests of every which congressional district everywhere. It
is important to be strategic here. But when we give up on winning or
even trying in rural areas (or any R+ districts), we cede those places
completely to the other side. Our vision here would be to have a “no
place left behind” strategy — along the lines of Howard Dean’s
fifty-state strategy — where the Democratic Party provides at least
some low-level scaled support to organic leaders who live in these
areas (who are starving for support) and then invests more heavily
into flagship races that may be uphill but are winnable.

To be clear, we never intended to run a major congressional campaign
in a R+14 district. When Jess King first started running, our district
was R+6. It was clearly an uphill battle and not a sure bet, but with
such a strong and inspiring candidate and a highly organized
grassroots campaign, it seemed possible. In fact, if our district had
stayed at R+6, it looks very likely that Jess King would have won —
that’s what our numbers show. Jess King winning an R+6 district,
running the kind of progressive populist campaign that she ran, would
have been a huge game changer — not just for our community but
nationally. It’s hard to overstate this. Every time we gain a new
“Squad” member in Congress, establishment Dems and pundits say,
“Sure, in Queens (or wherever), but that loses in the heartland.”
We set out to create a proof-of-concept race by winning in an area
where they thought we couldn’t. We still think that is a centrally
important thing to do, as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, our congressional maps got redrawn in the middle of the
campaign, and our district shifted from R+6 to R+14, which was,
frankly, devastating. To be clear, the folks who encouraged Jess to
run would have chosen other races to invest in had we started with a
R+14 district. And Jess would have almost certainly not have decided
to run. But after the maps changed, she made the hard decision to keep
running anyway because there was so much grassroots momentum in the
race.

So we have this really unique case here where we can see these
unexpected and happy accidents that happen when you have a really
strong progressive populist candidate at the top of the ticket, even
in a tough district like ours. Jess lost her race at the level of the
congressional district, but she did better in every single precinct
than any Democratic candidate had ever done. And she won strong
pockets of support, including crossover support from Republicans and
independents in some surprising places that we might not have
anticipated ahead of time, including the township where I live that
had a two-to-one Republican registration advantage. We were able to
have a much better idea of what was possible in different areas of our
district, and this set the stage for folks like me to be able to run
and win in down-ballot races in subsequent elections.

None of this would have happened if Jess hadn’t contested that
congressional race in the first place. In retrospect, if we had aimed
to build progressive organization and power in 2017 and 2018, this was
clearly the most effective way of achieving that: running a
congressional campaign, even though it lost.

I also want to speak to what happens in places like ours when there
aren’t contested races, when no one steps up to run against the
(often incumbent) Republican candidate. This is common in our area,
especially in local races, and it is so demoralizing. To go into a
polling place on election day and to just see line after line of
uncontested Republican candidates with no alternative, it’s just a
recipe for disaffection. When people don’t have a meaningful choice
on Election Day, it’s really easy to feel like there’s no point in
voting — what difference does your vote matter at that point?
Disaffection, disinterest, and despair all seem like really rational
responses to that kind of situation. In cases like this, people tune
out, and they don’t show up to vote in local races, and then they
get out of the habit of voting over time, because they don’t see the
point. And over multiple election cycles, you’re now hemorrhaging
voters who used to be there.

And that can have devastating consequences for statewide and national
races where people have just decided to stay home. People often talk
about coattail effects from the top of ticket in national elections,
but there also seem to be really important examples of “reverse
coattails,” where local races create enthusiasm that can then
bolster support in higher-up races too. It is our assessment that the
work of organizations like Lancaster Stands Up and Pennsylvania Stands
Up in long-neglected areas like Lancaster County, Berks, Lehigh
Valley, York, and so on were important for stopping, and even
reversing, the bleed of disaffected voters in these areas, which was
key to winning Pennsylvania in the 2020 presidential election.
That’s also very likely to be important in the Pennsylvania governor
and Senate races in 2022.

I know that a common frame is that it’s too costly to invest in
heavily conservative areas that are a long shot to win, but in the
long term, I think the more useful frame here is that it’s much more
costly to completely abandon these areas altogether. You’ll lose
voters who won’t come back, and this is happening as we speak.
Especially in states like PA, we can still win important statewide and
national races, but we can only do this by activating a broad
coalition of voters outside of just the big cities and suburbs, and
you don’t do that by completely ignoring people everywhere else.

JA

Right. But if I were more of a social movement–oriented person and a
skeptic of electoralism, I might ask you, “Well, couldn’t you have
just focused your work all those years on some really important
campaign issue in your community or in Pennsylvania — activated a
lot of new folks like that to build community?“

JS

Well, we did build an organizational apparatus that’s still
here: Lancaster Stands Up
[[link removed]] and Pennsylvania Stands Up
[[link removed]]. But as someone who has spent my whole adult
life up until the past six years organizing issue campaigns and
outsider social movements, in all my years of organizing here, there
was nothing like the Jess King campaign that allowed us to scale up
our involvement of volunteers. We then moved that energy into
organizations. So the issue versus electoral debate is a false
dichotomy.

AT

Yeah. You don’t have to choose. It’s both. And I think that’s
actually something special that we have here in Lancaster. We’ve had
some exciting electoral races that really activated people. It turned
people out, it got people involved.

But then of course, campaigns are short-lived. They end, win or lose,
and then in between, we have this base of issue-based work that
continues like a bridge between elections. So they’re
interconnected. They’re not separate. You don’t have to pick just
one or the other.

The issue-based work like what Lancaster Stands Up is doing, for
example, keeps people paying attention and keeps people involved in
some way between election cycles, but it also can help reinforce
things. So when there’s a good candidate, a progressive candidate,
who comes along who is speaking to the issues that people have been
talking about for years, that candidate is going to get much more
support.

JS

And I think there’s this scarcity mentality that people have on the
Left where they’re like, “Well, we only have this little bit of
energy. Why would we invest here? Why would we invest in elections? Or
why would we invest in this rural area?”

The thing is tons of people live in these rural areas. There’s all
this latent untapped energy that just has to be unleashed. And there
are tons of people who will get involved in an electoral campaign that
won’t get involved with an issue campaign. So we have to get into
more of an abundance mindset of “We can unleash massive
potential.”

One last thing to add to what Allison said: Jess King, a week after
she lost, came to a mass meeting of five hundred people of Lancaster
Stands Up and said, “Get involved with Lancaster Stands Up. This is
the next step.”

JA

Allison, let’s hear about your personal experience a bit more.
You’ve done something that is quite uncommon, which is that you ran
as a strong progressive for commissioner in the very Republican town
of Manheim and won! To make this happen, you needed to bring in new
voters and persuade voters — Republicans, independents — to come
to your side.

How did this happen? How did you congeal some of the broader lessons
that we’ve been talking about in terms of employing populist
language, in terms of recognizing the issues that working folks really
care about? How did you translate some of that into strategies for
persuading independents and even Republicans and then bringing in new
voters to join your coalition?

AT

Well, part of it that I should say is that we had just learned a lot
in 2018 that we used. . . . So Jess King lost at the level of our
congressional district, but when we drilled into the numbers
afterwards, there were pockets of places in the congressional district
where she won and would not have been expected to win, and my township
was one of them. Jess King won Manheim Township, even though there was
this huge Republican registration advantage.

So there was this glaring signal to me there. . . . The way that Jess
spoke and the issues that she spoke to clearly resonated in parts of
our community. And I lived in one of those places, and there was this
open seat. And so I basically took a lot of what I learned on her
campaign about how to speak to working-class issues in ways that
appealed to both parties and just applied it directly.

It applies differently at the local level. So it’s a township
commissioner race. We’re not talking about national issues; Medicare
for All is not on the table here. It’s much more localized, but
there was a very obvious, for me, way to talk to people about what was
going on, because people were really mad locally about what was going
on.

I live in an area right outside the city that’s suburban
technically, but it’s a new suburb. Just a few decades ago, it was
primarily farmland. So it’s a pretty recently developed place, and
that’s happened very quickly. And the people in the community
perceive this development as very haphazard, pretty irresponsible, a
lot of big-box stores and huge parking lots, but not really stuff that
people want; new houses, but huge houses on huge lots that are hard to
afford, not things that working people can actually afford to live in.
So the cost of living is high and getting higher.

So people were really mad about this development and how it was going
in our community. And so we used a lot of messaging around how
development should serve the people. Development should make a
community better, not worse.

There was also this existing perception in the community that the
incumbent commissioners who were rerunning for their seats — they
were Republicans — and the perception in the public was that they
were corrupt, that they didn’t seem to pay close attention to
development proposals; they seemed to be rubber-stamping things, that
maybe something was going on.

And lo and behold, the press reported that they were taking campaign
contributions from developers who had active proposals on their desks.
And then they would approve those proposals. So, the definition of
corruption . . . not illegal, but clearly unethical. There was clearly
a conflict of interest.

So I just called it out explicitly, again and again. I named their
names as sitting commissioners who were bought and paid for, that this
was not the way that the process should go. We talked about how it was
not fair to people, that we need to be able to trust our elected
officials to fully vet development proposals; that we need to be able
to trust our electeds. And I called out the fact that when you have
officials taking campaign contributions from developers, the
developers are calling the shots, basically. And that’s why things
probably look so bad in our community, that we have this lack of
leadership. Developers are simply doing what’s most profitable for
them, and there’s no one standing up for the people in the
community.

We knocked a ton of doors. We did a lot of messaging on social media
and mailers. And this was basically the message. “People, not
developers. We need elected officials who will stand up for the
people.” And it resonated a lot with people in the community.

It surprised even me when we would go to the doors, how much people
were fired up. People just didn’t like what was going on. And so for
me to show up and say, “I’m running for office. I don’t like how
things are going either. It could be a different way,” that really
resonated with people. Because of the registration advantage,
Republicans and independents outnumbered Democrats two to one. So we
had to talk to a ton of Republicans at the door to try to peel away
Republican votes.

We found that about a third of Republicans that we talked to would
basically slam the door in our faces as soon as they learned I was a
Democrat, just not interested.

But that left two-thirds of Republicans who answered their doors who
were at least willing to talk to me and listen. And about a third
would commit at the door and say things like, “Yeah. This
shouldn’t be so corrupt like this.” A line we used a lot was,
“We complain a lot about corruption in Washington and how
politicians in Washington are corrupt, but that’s how it is here at
home, too. And we deserve better.”

That really resonated with people. Corruption, or really
anti-corruption, is not a partisan issue. And so it really resonated
even with many Republicans at the door.

The most partisan dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, the first question
they asked was, “Well, what party are you? What party are you?”
And I knew that the conversation wasn’t going to go well from there.

But there were so many other people who I talked to where I didn’t
lead with what my party was. We let the conversation go further, and I
could convince them. And then eventually we got to the part that I was
running as a Democrat.

But I think the other the thing is at the local level, these issues
that we’re talking about haven’t been polarized in the same way,
by party. Development is not owned by one party. Traffic was a huge
issue that everybody loved to talk about because things have been
developed so haphazardly here.

Everybody hates traffic, right? And no one party owns traffic. So I
think, unlike at the national level where sometimes these issues have
been claimed by one party or the other, and there’s no effort made
to reclaim those by the other party. At the local level, there’s a
lot more room to move around here, you know?

JA

What were the key attacks you faced on the campaign trail, and how did
you deal with them?

AT

Most of the attacks against me were private and not public, and they
all came from the Democrats. They made my life really hard actually. I
wasn’t prepared for that at all ahead of time. I hadn’t been
involved in party politics going in. I was not part of the party
structure in my community, in part because I don’t like it.

So that might have been part of it; they didn’t see me as one of
them. But they really criticized a lot about what I did. They did not
like that I was explicitly naming culprits by name; that I was going
after the incumbent politicians, that I was calling out the corruption
explicitly. They were saying that it was really risky, that the
Republicans were going to come back and attack me and make life
miserable for me.

And my response to that was like, “Well, I’m running a race. I
assumed that the Republicans were going to come after me. That’s how
it works.”

And then funny enough, the Republicans didn’t think that I had a
chance of winning. So they mostly ignored me and didn’t take me
seriously, so it was a gift. But it was the Democrats who really piled
onto me at times and were like, “You’re going to lose. You
shouldn’t do what you’re doing.”

Their wisdom about how to do things and how they had done things in
the past was to run very moderate, kind-of-quiet campaigns that
didn’t gather a lot of attention.

And they lost a lot. So yeah, it was this strange thing where it was
actually my own party that made it really, really difficult for me.
And they did. They told me, repeatedly, things like, “You’re going
to lose. You’re going to lose some of the base. They’re not going
to like what you’re doing.” And then that’s not what happened at
all.

JS

She won by more votes than anybody has ever won the seat.

AT

And mathematically, the only way that I could get to my win number was
that I would’ve had essentially all of the Democratic voters that
turned out. And then there also had to be hundreds of votes from
independents and Republicans to get me to the win number that I got.
So there was a lot of worrying about me turning off the base, and it
just didn’t materialize that way.

JA

An implicit assumption in what you’ve both been saying is that
there’s not as much of a trade-off as you might expect between
appealing to new voters and more conservative voters, on the one hand,
and the Democratic base, on the other. And in other words, while it
might be impossible to message both to the needs of ordinary working
people and also to the needs of sort-of corporate elites, so to speak,
it is not impossible to message simultaneously for independent,
low-engagement voters as well as the most dyed-in-the-wool Democratic
voters.

Is that a fair conclusion? And if so, would you just talk a little bit
more about why you think that might be sort of a false dichotomy?

AT

Great questions. I think what I learned from the Jess King campaign is
that when you have a big campaign with a lot of volunteer capacity,
you don’t have to make the choice between low-engagement and
high-engagement voters. You get to talk to everybody.

And then I had a lot of capacity in my own campaign because a lot of
volunteers from Jess King’s campaign then followed me to my local
campaign. We could knock on a lot of doors. And this was another thing
that I got criticized for by the party because their common wisdom was
just to knock on high-engagement voter doors.

Their strategy was usually to target people who had voted in every
election for the last eight cycles. And my response to that was,
basically, I don’t really need to talk to them. They’ll just come
and vote anyway.

Also, if you voted every election for the past seven or eight election
cycles, you’re going to be older. You’re going to be someone
who’s lived here longer. You’re just missing this huge cross
section of voters. You’re in a lot of ways cutting out a lot of
working-class voters and new voters.

So we targeted both. We talked to consistent Democratic voters, and
then we talked to what we called two-by-four voters: people who had
voted at least twice in the last four cycles, and this was usually
people who voted in presidential races, and then either a primary or a
midterm.

But there were many people who had literally never voted in a
municipal race, ever. And so those conversations were just different
at the door. They were completely different. I would knock on the
door, and they would be happy to talk to me. But they had no idea what
a commissioner was or even if there was a race that year.

And so I was able to respond and say things like, “I didn’t know
what a commissioner was until last year either. You have really good
questions.” And so it was much more about information sharing at the
door.

They were often just really, really grateful and said things like,
“Thank you so much. I’ve been seeing signs around about some
election, but I didn’t even know what it was for or what these
positions even do. This is great.”

I think that really did help to drive a turnout increase from 2017 to
2019. There were definitely other factors at play here too. I think
anti-Trump sentiment was high at the time, which helped with
down-ballot races like mine.

But yeah, I think it was really important that we talked to these
lower-engagement voters, and in general, they were really happy to be
talked to.

JS

And one thing that’s incredible to me in all this is that the local
Democratic Party is not learning a damn thing.

AT

I know. Sadly.

JS

Really the only way to do this is to actually just keep winning until
they’re defeated. Because literally there are people saying now,
like people in positions of power within the Democratic Party, who are
saying Jess King lost because she knocked too many doors. It’s
unbelievable.

AT

It is true. People do say that. It’s crazy.

JS

They don’t learn. They’re not learning the lessons. They still
have this mentality of, at the local level, “Well, if we just say
why we’re qualified and kind of bury our heads in the sand and try
not to get too attacked by Republicans. . . .”

They also have this assumption that everything the Republicans say
works. Like, you say a message, and they attack you. And it’s like,
“Oh, they’re attacking us for this now.” And actually some
attacks don’t work. But they just live in fear of being attacked.

AT

I do think that in our community especially, Democrats who’ve been
here for a long time are just coming from a place of scarcity and fear
because that’s been their experience. But we’re really working
hard to try to break through that mentality because that’s not what
wins, I don’t think.

JA

Let’s talk a bit more about the Democratic Party and progressives’
relationship to it. We found in our Center for Working-Class Politics
[[link removed]] study
that distancing yourself from the Democratic Party doesn’t really do
much to increase progressives’ appeal among many working-class
voters. It didn’t have any effect whatsoever on the way that voters
thought about progressive candidates or Democratic candidates.

And yet I get from reading your work and talking to you, it seems you
feel that’s not really telling the whole story. Could you talk a
little bit more about how you see the relationship between
progressives and the Democratic Party rhetorically fitting into the
strategic picture?

AT

I think a lot of this is really coming directly from our personal
lived experience here.

I mean, I’ve just found at the doors over and over again across
races now, across years, that it goes a long way at the door, often
with people in both parties. It’s not just a Republican thing or a
Democratic thing that someone might be completely fed up with their
party’s establishment. I actually just had a conversation like this.
I was knocking on doors to support a Democrat running for state house.
It’s a primary, and I’m knocking on Democrats’ doors.

This person at the door was like, “I don’t know. I’m just kind
of done with this whole political thing. I don’t know. I’m a
Democrat, but I’m just kind of fed up with everybody.” And my
response to this was basically, “You and me both.”

I often lean into this, to criticize the political establishment. Yes,
I’m a Democrat. Here I am, supporting a Democrat, but it’s not
because I love the party or that my loyalty is to the party above all
else.

And that keeps the door open and the conversation going. If someone
shows disaffection or frustration with one party or both parties, I
can be like, “Yeah. Me too.” And I mean that completely earnestly.

So I was just at the door recently and I said:

Yeah. I’m really fed up with a lot of the Democrats, too. This
Democrat who’s running in this race is different. She’s a real
one. She’s a working-class mom. She’s going to do these things
that actually help working people here.

It seems that gives me a lot more credibility.

And that happens on the Republican side too, but it plays out
differently. There are a lot of people who will open the doors and
say, “I’m just so tired of the two-party system. It’s like
picking between Coke and Pepsi. There’s so little difference between
the parties.”

And to be able to lean into that and say, “I agree with you. I share
that with you,” really opens the door to conversations. And I think
it puts people in a place where they’re more open to being persuaded
because you’re not explicitly defending this party machinery that
they’re so annoyed by.

This approach gives you more of an opportunity to find values to
connect with, to build coalitions around.

But you cannot do that if you lead with, “Hey, I’m a Democrat, and
I’m supporting this Democrat.” Or like “blue wave” or things
that are actually not tied to shared values, as soon as you use that
kind of partisan stuff.

Again, even with people in your own party, it doesn’t always work.
So I never lead with party stuff. And I don’t lead with an explicit
critique, but when it comes up, a critique of either party, I lean
into it and use that as a way to open and expand the conversation.

JS

Over the past five years, the modal response at the door is some
version of disgust and alienation from politics entirely. And in fact,
you said they might lean conservative, but most of the voters that we
target actually lean Democrat. But it’s both: they’ll hate the
Republican Party, but they hate the Democratic Party almost as much
and just feel like politics has left people like them behind.

JA

My guess is that you’re not seeing a lot of mainstream Democratic
outfits testing messaging about the degree to which candidates should
shit on the Democratic Party in order to win votes for Democrats. Are
they worried about losing core Democratic voters?

JS

It’s nuanced. But if the basic question is: Are we losing Democrats
by doing this? The answer is we’re not, because we’re not
attacking Democratic voters.

We’re critiquing the clubhouse and the establishment leadership over
specific policies. We might lose some Democratic-leaning voters in the
very affluent suburbs, if we really go full-throated pro-labor et
cetera. But we can make even bigger gains in winning back
working-class voters. And very few Democratic voters today are going
to cross over and vote Republican or stay home because a candidate is
critiquing elements of the party.

So, no, we are not seeing a lot of mainstream Democratic outfits
developing or testing messaging that explicitly challenges the
old-guard leadership of the Democratic Party, its cozy relationship
with large donors, and its failure to fight visibly and vocally for
working-class people. We think that such messaging is desperately
needed if we’re going to stop the bleed of working-class voters and
win the majorities needed to actually govern, actually deliver
meaningfully for working people, and also to defeat the threat of
rising authoritarianism. That’s why Allison and I are starting a new
research and communication strategy organization (Popular Comms) to do
exactly that.

* populism [[link removed]]
* Left Strategies [[link removed]]
* Thoughts on a Bernie Sanders Run
[[link removed]]
* Democratic Party [[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]