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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
What Can Progressive Voters Do to Help Fix Our Broken Political System?
00:20:32
What Can Progressive Voters Do to Help Fix Our Broken Political System?
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A
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B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about politics. It's Wednesday, November 27th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker.
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C
I got one. I have one question for you. Do you all like the color blue? I said, do you like the color blue? Because I'm here to officially declare today, November 5, 2019, that Virginia is officially blue. Congratulations.
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B
That's Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. This November, for the first time in more than two decades, we voters in Virginia elected Democratic majorities in both the state Senate and the state House of Delegates. With Northam, a Democrat, in the governor's mansion, Democrats are driving the state's policy agenda toward more progressive ends than in any other part of the South. On election night, newly elected Virginia delegate Nancy Guy, who won her seat by only 18 votes, discussed some of the issues she hoped the legislature would tackle.
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D
I think the new leadership is going to let things get to the floor that have not been in the floor before. Things like ratification of the era, common sense, gun safety rules, minimum wage increases, issues that have been bottled up for.
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E
A long, long time.
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B
State political campaigns often have minuscule budgets and candidates can win with razor thin margins. But state governments wield enormous power over the lives of voters. And as the highly restrictive abortion legislation recently passed in states including Georgia, Alabama and Kentucky demonstrate, in recent decades, Republicans have spent a great deal of time and money on winning state races. But the Democrats successes in Virginia, along with North Carolina and Michigan, where Republicans recently lost their legislative supermajorities, show that progressives are finally starting to catch up. Future Now Fund, one of the progressive organizations focusing on state races, was founded after the 2016 presidential election. In the 2018 midterms, the group helped to flip two state chambers, and it played a major role in the Virginia elections earlier this month. Daniel Squadron, a co founder of FutureNow, joins me to discuss why voters should invest in state and local politics and and the future of the progressive movement whose power may be wielded most effectively outside Washington. Daniel, welcome to the program.
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E
Thank you very much. You just made the case.
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B
We're going to make it in a little bit more detail in the moments ahead. This year there were legislative elections in Mississippi, New Jersey and Louisiana, as well as Virginia, some with quite surprising results. What role did FUTURE NOW play in this past election cycle?
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E
So we were in two of the states that had legislative elections this year. We were in Virginia, as you mentioned, and we're excited to be there. And there were a lot of national groups and focus and dollars there. We were also in Mississippi, which was absolutely different story, Very, very little national attention and focus, scant dollars at all. You know, we still were really excited. This was a big story. Mississippi, I believe this is the first time since the 1960s that Democrats haven't lost a seat in the House in the elections. They have elections every four years. They've lost in every election since, I think 67. And we were able to help stop that, along with some in state partners and some pretty exciting victories. A woman named Hester Jackson McCrae from the Northern part of the state, really the Memphis suburbs won by 14 votes, 13 votes on election night. It became a landslide in the recount to 14 votes. And it was a district where turnout did doubled over four years ago. You know, it's one thing to talk about Virginia suburban voters turning on Trumpism and you know, there's obviously a lot of government employees and military employees in Virginia. In Mississippi, for suburban voters to be starting to turn on Trumpism and starting to look at Democrats differently is in some ways I think, the more dramatic story even than the Kentucky Governor's race.
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B
And, you know, we've talked before on this program, so we won't get into it at length, but Stacey Abrams in Georgia came very, very close to winning. In fact, if it weren't for vot depression, she probably would have won. But these are all, you know, really interesting signs of how rapidly things are changing. I wanted to ask you, though, just to back up a little bit how your group came, to be sure.
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E
And, you know, and I think it's a great point. Things are changing rapidly in terms of the electorate. I'm not sure they're changing nearly as rapidly in terms of the political infrastructure.
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B
Yes.
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E
And that's one of the ways we came to be. I was in the New York State Senate for nine years. I represented lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. I got invited after Trump was elected to a holiday party in someone's home. In my nine years in office, that had never happened before. I don't know how many times you've invited your local state legislator to your holiday party, but it was because people really wanted to know what they could do in that moment. And so I went and I actually said the same thing I had said probably 100 times before. Anytime I could get 50 people in a room, which was the 50 people in this room, if you can raise $100,000, you can change the direction of an entire state government. Now, in the 100 previous times, I had said that zero people had taken me up on it. But this time, in this moment, a woman named Melissa Walker and her colleague came up to me after and said, we think we can do it. And I said, yeah, I'm sure you can, but let's have lunch. I was in office.
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B
What was she doing at the time?
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E
Interestingly, Melissa and her colleague and actually the group of leaders of the first Giving Circle were authors of young adult novels. And they formed a group and they started to do this. And it was the most inspiring thing that I had seen in my time in office, because regular people were willing to take their networks and their time and think about state legislatures. And so one of my co founders, Adam Pritzker, was looking to kind of get involved in civic life. And he said, you know what? I think this is a real organization. The idea of engaging regular people in the project of fixing the states and actually having it focus on improved lives is worth it. And so he convinced me to leave office. And that's how Future now and Future Now Fund were started.
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B
A lot of, as I understand it, a lot of your work revolves around giving circles And I wondered if you could explain to our listeners what they are and how your work differs from other grassroots fundraising efforts, of which there are quite a few by now.
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E
Giving circles are groups of people, actually overwhelmingly women. Over 90% of the leaders of giving circles are women who come together and set a fundraising goal. And when they start getting going on fundraising, what they do is, with our help, they choose which state they want to be impacting, and they commit to go to their networks and spend their time and their dollars to have a big impact. And the reason it's so power is I think a lot of folks are conditioned to see themselves as spectators to the political process. Right. You know, they turn on the radio in the morning and then listen to your podcast in the afternoon, and then go to MSNBC in the evening, and they're watching something really upsetting. They're watching the destruction of their democracy, and they don't know what they can do about it. That will have a material impact.
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B
Well, and this has been one thing that has just been so consistent. People saying, what can I do? What can I do? And just not knowing where to turn.
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E
And that's the incredible thing about giving stress circles. Giving circles actually have a material impact on the outcome in these states. That's because state legislative elections, on Average, cost 1/10 or less what competitive congressional elections cost in Florida. The entire effort to flip the Florida House in 2020, we think will cost less than a single competitive congressional election. And as you pointed out at the beginning, once you have a new majority, you have a new governing structure, right? In Maine, you know, with just over $100,000, became one of the most significant funders of an effort that flipped the Senate. There's now a Democratic trifecta in Maine, and they've passed a ban on conversion therapy. In fact, I was just talking with the president of the Maine Senate. In fact, I wasn't. He was actually talking to our giving circles to give them an update. And, you know, he choked up about how moving the ban on conversion therapy was. They have passed bills to lower prescription drug costs. They've passed paid le. This is all in their first session, their first year. And all of these things are going to be felt in people's lives in Maine. Some people say, well, Maine isn't even a swing state anymore. It's only a little over a million people. Materially impacting a little over a million people's lives positively is pretty powerful. And a state like Maine, rural, largely white, showing that these are possible things to do, that you can take on Big Pharma, that you can enact paid leave programs, that you can improve women's and reproductive health really is a counter narrative to this idea that we're a divided country that doesn't have shared values when it comes to what our government can do.
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F
What the hell is going on right now and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
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E
I want a shark that, that eats.
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F
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
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E
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online.
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F
To the best of my ability, every week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
I wonder if you could talk about the significance of the 2010 election, which to everybody invokes the unbelievably rapid rise of the Tea Party Party, because as you look back, that we now know basically that those elections made possible the presidency of Donald Trump.
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E
I mean, there are two lessons from 2010. One is that it's pretty easy to have a sea change at the state legislative level with a little attention and focus. The Karl Rove Redmap program, you know, sort of famously did that. The second is that doing that can change the policy outcome. So it wasn't actually a period of status quo and, you know, gridlock. It was a little bit indecent. But you actually had real momentum for radical right wing policies at the state level. And then of course, you also had the major big one that's finally getting some attention, which is gerrymandering the redrawing of the congressional districts between 2010 and 2012 to take that Tea Party wave and then build it in as a structural, nearly permanent for a decade majority for Republicans in the House because state legislators draw the congressional districts. We talk about 2010, this effort at the state Legislative level by the radical right didn't start then. It started in the 1970s, 1971. Lewis Powell wrote a famous memo before he was in the Supreme Court and it laid out for the Chamber of Commerce the architecture of fighting back against the civil rights movement, the environmental movement and the consumer protection movement. It basically said, you need to build TV networks. Roger Ailes read that with interest. You need to take over the courts. We see the fruits of that labor. Take over academia and get involved in politics at the state, federal and local level equally. 1973, guy named Paul Weyrich founds the Heritage foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council. Heritage foundation, of course, big national brand. American Legislative Exchange Council. Most important part of American civic life that most people have never heard of. The idea of state power, which was then taken up by the Mellons and the Scaifes and the cores and the Kochs once the Kochs became Republicans, is really the foundation of the politics we have today. Donald Trump didn't descend that golden escalator and build a movement from scratch. He was riding a movement that had been developing in state legislatures for years. We should beat Donald Trump in my view, because I think he's abused his office. He's a danger to humanity. But if we beat him and don't change our politics, we are going to continue to be primed for people like Donald Trump to be elected to the Oval Office. We don't change politics by beating Donald Trump. We change politics by winning state legislatures and starting to improve people's lives with government. We beat Donald Trump because it's a short term imperative.
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B
So you mentioned the American Legislative Exchange Council. As I understand it, one of the things that future now does that makes it different from some of the other progressive groups also focused on retaking power at the state level is that you help draft and passed legislation. But hasn't that been a big source of controversy with ALEC as they call themselves?
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E
Right, well, so alec's history is to do it secretly in what they call task forces, where lawmakers and expensive corporate lobbyists draft bills in secret and then they get distributed secretly. That was alec's history for many years. Its structure. That's a huge problem. The idea though, that part time lawmakers without nearly enough staff support get help seeing what the national trends are, seeing what the best ideas are around the country is actually one that makes a lot of sense. So ALEC has given the idea of model legislation or sharing ideas across states a bad name because it's done it in bad faith. The idea though of in A public way. And it's AmericasGoals.org and everything else about our two organizations can be found at FutureNow.org, the idea of in a transparent way saying to lawmakers, here's a set of values that we want you to publicly stand behind and if you do, we'll help you achieve them, I think is a positive thing and it's important not to fall into the trap. Right, so there's a couple of states in which ALEC has been designed to replace legislative staff and resources in the legislature with their ideological agenda. Now, that shouldn't happen. And I want to say, I think that state lawmakers around the country need more resources than they have. And the more they do, the less they need some of these outside supports. Even with enough resources, the idea of actually being part of a broader movement is a positive thing as long as you're transparent about it.
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B
So how do you balance your commitment to flipping state houses with your commitments to individual candidates? So let's say you're trying to win a legislative seat and the Democratic candidate is pro gun and anti abortion.
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E
So we have a value set. It's called America's goals. We try to be really public about it, unlike a lot of the folks who do this work. So it's actually@amer AmericasGoals.org and there's seven broad good jobs, affordable quality healthcare, investing in children, empowering people over special interests, equal opportunity for all, stronger infrastructure and clean air, water and energy. And we only support candidates who support that agenda and are committed to doing the work to get elected and have other sort of great personal characteristics. So what does the work mean when you're running for state legislature? It's not house of cards, it's knocking on doors, going out and being willing to meet the people who you are asking to have to represent. It's also, though, really important. This is an important thing that we kind of lose in this country. I think parliamentary systems remember it more. Individual candidates can sometimes be really exciting, they can sometimes galvanize. But you know, not everyone's going to be Barack Obama or Stacey Abrams. Both, by the way, former state lawmakers or Chuck Schumer or FDR. All state lawmakers. We could just do that for 20 minutes. But not everyone's going to be that person. A lot of folks are part time. They're living their lives. They're community activists. They're people who small business owners who cared about their state or an issue. And governing majorities are so important. Even if there's someone you don't agree with fully if they're in office, and they are the vote that changes who the leadership is, that changes what other votes, what other bills come up for a vote that is game changing. And that's just so important to remember. When the Koch network tries to take over the country, both for short term profit and because of a long term ideological vision about what the country should and shouldn't be, they think about it in terms of governing power. They don't think of it in terms of the person who's most exciting on Twitter and individuals. The people listening today can have so much more influence in government and politics than they ever thought by working at the state legislative level. But they also have to be willing to think of themselves as having influence.
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B
So There are currently 18 Democratic candidates running for president and they're all persistently asking for money. How can people in state and local races possibly compete for our attention? And do you feel that people should devote their, you know, what resources they have to state elections rather than to the national election?
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E
Well, our research team has done a deep analysis of this and they found that the maximum number of Democrats who can get the nomination is one. And I think that for a lot of people who are asking the question you ask, they're gonna vote for the nominee, whoever it is. Yes, the candidates are raising each quarter about enough to fully fund every competitive state legislative election in America. So there's no question. I think it's great that you have a lot of candidates up there on the stage. I think that folks should go vote whenever their primary or caucus happens, and they shouldn't think about the primary for one second. Beyond that, it takes a little more digging. What Future Now Fund is trying to do is make it easy for folks who want to have an impact that's much greater than they ever count on the presidential race to have it. I think in this moment, this is a crisis every bit as bad as a lot of people think. People are not as helpless in the crisis as sometimes they fear, but people have to take on a little more responsibility for getting past the tweet that's trending or the headline on the cable news to figure out where they can have the impact. And that's where we come in.
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B
Yes. And that's an indictment of the profession I represent here.
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E
I would never criticize the fourth estate.
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B
So I wondered if you happened to see the op ed piece in the Times yesterday by Lee Drutman, who's a senior fellow at New America and he's optimistic about the country's future. He is convinced that we're about to enter a new age of reform and renewal. And he cites earlier there were periods, the Revolutionary War, the age of Andrew Jackson, the Progressive Era, when the old rules of politics fundamentally changed and, you know, reforms of the past were sparked by this mood of impending crisis, blatant inequality, corrupt, dysfunctional national politics. Future now seems completely premised on that idea. Is that right?
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E
Absolutely. And the question is, will that renewal start in the Oval Office and emanate outwards, or will it start in 50 state capitals and emanate upwards? If you want people to believe in the idea of government as a positive force in people's lives, you can wait for 60 votes in the U.S. senate and a trifecta in Congress and then pray that in two years enough can happen. Or you can start impacting lives millions at a time in state capitals and change the direction of the country. That's what the radical right did starting in the 1970s. That's what we have to do now.
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B
Thank you so much, Daniel.
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E
Thank you.
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B
Daniel Squadron is the co founder and executive director of Future Now. This has been the political scene. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. You can subscribe subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Alex Barron and Kylie Warner. For New Yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
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America is changing and so is the world.
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But what's happening in America isn't just the cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
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F
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
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Tristan Redman in London, and this is the Global Story.
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Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
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Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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D
From. PRX.