An
Emergent Progressive Majority: Americans are tired of voting against someone.
It’s time to recruit leaders who’ll speak clearly to people’s real
needs and problems.by Gloria Totten, 10.05.05
Progressives
should be optimistic as we look toward the 2006 midterm elections. A recent CNN/
Gallup Poll shows that a record-high 54 percent of Americans believe that the
United States made a mistake in going to war in Iraq. Surging gas prices in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina and struggles to keep up with the cost of living are
fueling widespread pessimism about President Bush’s handling of the economy.
According to recent Associated Press polls, only 28 percent of voters think the
country is heading in the right direction. An August Harris poll showed that 58
percent of respondents believe Bush is doing an “only fair or poor”
job as president, while several new polls at press time recorded his approval
at barely 40 percent -- the lowest in his presidency. And there’s blame to
spare: Only 37 percent of the public approves of the way the Republican-controlled
Congress is doing its job, the worst grade for lawmakers in eight years.
But
optimism alone won’t regain control of the Congress or the majority of state
legislatures in 2006. It won’t elect a progressive president in 2008. And
it won’t reverse decades of conservative ascent.
Conservatives,
first working outside the Republican Party and ultimately taking it over, have
labored for more than 30 years to get where they are today: in control at all
levels. They built powerful media and message enterprises to hone their ideas
and make those ideas sound reasonable to mainstream Americans. They recruited
“movement conservatives” to run for office, trained them to run effectively
on a party-line agenda, and systematically fielded them in key state and local
races that would nationalize this agenda and mobilize voters up and down the ticket.
In
the late 1970s, when Democrats controlled the majority of elected offices from
state legislatures to the presidency, conservatives created GOPAC, their candidate
and recruitment operation. It was resurgence on the right, the product of new
leadership that was willing to look to the long term to win power. Despite having
been in the minority for decades, this new conservative Republican leadership
knew it must marry the need for short-term victories with a long-term partisan
strategy for taking back power. The leaders developed a 10-year plan. And it worked.
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Progressives have traditionally left candidate
recruitment to the official arms of the Democratic Party. But for the last 15
years, the party has engaged in a deliberate strategy to recruit candidates who
can largely fund their own campaigns or draw corporate financial support thanks
to their conservative fiscal and social positions. The party encouraged candidates
to abandon or avoid popular progressive issues in order to try to increase their
appeal to swing voters. This has proven to be a failed strategy; Democrats have
lost seats in nearly every election. Worse, by trying to moderate their core views
and values, Democrats have come to be perceived as weak and indecisive, with no
bold ideas of their own.
Consider this from
an August Democracy Corps memo by Stan Greenberg and Matt Hogan: “The Democrats
are 7 points ahead in the race for Congress and, indeed, have led by an average
of 6 points over the last 4 months … . But for all that, the Democrats need
to do much more to turn this into a tidal wave. Their own image has not improved
and most of the gain in congressional vote margin has come from the Republicans’
decline.”
Americans are tired of voting
against someone. They are seeking candidates who are willing to stand up for something.
If progressives want to win elections, they need to recruit leaders who will speak
clearly to people’s real needs and problems.
That’s
the challenge my organization and others with similar vision have set out to address.
In 2004, Progressive Majority launched the only exclusive, comprehensive program
to recruit and train a “farm team” of progressive candidates to run
for state and local office. We piloted the program in Washington state, Wisconsin,
and Pennsylvania in 2004, running 100 candidates -- and winning 41 of our races.
Notably, of the 59 candidates who lost, 33 continue in the program and are running
again. Even when we lose, we grow.
Ours is
a strong and successful model for candidate recruitment. First, we identify every
legislative opportunity available in the next election and begin aggressively
recruiting progressive leaders to run in those races. Second, we train our candidates
and their staff on how to run an effective race. Third, we provide each candidate
with myriad political resources, including extensive one-on-one “coaching”
on campaign planning, fund raising, message and communications, and more. Finally,
we map out the state’s political plan through 2008 so the entire progressive
community understands where the political opportunities lie.
Our
results suggest that we’re on to something. In 2004, Progressive Majority
was one of only two organizations to provide early support to Brian Weinstein,
a candidate for the Washington state Senate. Our work in his race, and our advocacy
within the progressive community, encouraged the state’s political players
to coalesce around Weinstein’s candidacy. His victory, along with that of
Craig Pridemore, whom we also supported, flipped control of the Senate in Olympia
to Democrats, who went on to pass a record number of progressive bills this last
legislative session.
In 2005, Progressive Majority
expanded the program to two additional states, Arizona and Colorado. By the end
of July, our farm team boasted 167 candidates, including 64 running in 2005, 63
in 2006, and 40 in 2007 or later. Twenty-eight percent are people of color, 48
percent are women, and 22 percent are rank-and-file union members.
Our
biggest win in this year’s municipal elections occurred in Wisconsin in April
when Mark Harris defeated the conservative eight-year incumbent for Winnebago
County executive. Harris eked out a 51-percent victory in the gop–dominated
Fox Valley, where John Kerry received 46 percent last November. A community leader
who built a political base while chairing the Oshkosh City Council, Harris ran
on a straightforward message of competence and common sense. This was a critical
pickup for progressives and demonstrates that we can win in tough districts when
we groom leaders from the community.
In keeping
with our strategy of identifying true leaders, we recruited Claudia Kauffman,
a member of the Nez Perce tribe, to run for state Senate in Washington -- after
the Democratic Party establishment had advised Kauffman to delay her decision
while encouraging other (read: white) candidates to run. Currently, our staff
is working with her to aggressively raise funds to ward off primary opposition.
If victorious, she would be the only Native American in the Washington Senate
and one of the first ever to serve in that state’s Legislature.
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Our work is being done in collaboration
with other important endeavors necessary to build a progressive political movement
because we understand that, done alone, candidate recruitment and development
will not produce concrete progressive policy advancements. In turn, if every other
function is performed without sufficient numbers of progressive candidates to
carry our messages and engage voters, we will fail to realize genuine and enduring
reform. We have formed advisory councils in each of our states -- led by the local
heads of the labor, women’s, environmental, civil-rights, education, and
health-care organizations -- to advise and guide our candidate-recruitment work,
thereby ensuring that it is serving the broader progressive movement.
The
frustration voters feel is not esoteric. People are struggling to maintain jobs
that pay short of a living wage; small-business owners are straining to keep up
with rising health-insurance costs; mothers and fathers are losing their sons
and daughters in Iraq; those exurban and rural voters that cost Democrats the
last presidential election are suffering at the hands of an administration that
puts corporations and the wealthy above them.
Real
people with real problems -- those are the people whose futures are being sacrificed
by the conservatives in power. Isn’t it time we gave them leaders they can
be proud to support?
Gloria Totten is the
executive director of Progressive
Majority.
The fact that without asking anyone within the Green Party of
the U.S., members of the Republican Party bought full page advertisements in national
periodicals (USA Today) promoting the Green Party without acknowledging who paid
for the ads. This cynical manipulation of America's political process by the Republican's
completely undermines the Green's naive and honorable intentions at party building.
Instead of doing the right thing, the Republican Supreme Court
Justices voted straight down the party line to condone the miscounted votes in
Florida in the 2000 General Election.
