NOTEBOOK

The Politics of Counting

The Trump administration attempted to subvert the census for political ends. How successful were they?

BY MARCIA BROWN

ON DECEMBER 31, 2020, the Census Bureau missed a crucial deadline that caused a huge sigh of relief in Democratic circles. Statutory law dictates the Bureau must report the data that will determine reapportionment of House seats to the president by the end of the year. But a global pandemic and administrative interference combined to make this impossible. It was the first missed census deadline since the December 31 date was established in 1976. As of January 12, bureau officials were telling courts that they were now working toward completing the count by March 6, 2021.

The delayed timeline puts the data out of the reach of Donald Trump. In 2019, his administration pushed to add a citizenship question to the census, but was rebuffed by the Supreme Court because of procedural violations, like failing to notify Congress about the changes. But Trump never gave up trying to exclude immigrant populations from the count that would be used for reapportionment and redistricting, in an effort to rob people of color of representation and to boost states with smaller immigrant populations.

Whether through the Bureau slow-walking the release or merely attempting to ensure an accurate count, the delay means that this attack on undocumented people has, for the moment, failed. “It’s better that it turns out this way. The route that we’re going now is the more cautious,” said Sam Wang, a neuroscience professor at Princeton who runs the Princeton Election Consortium.

Nevertheless, these efforts instilled fear in immigrant communities, and may have deterred them from responding to the census. Indeed, the shortened timeline imposed by Trump required that the Bureau take shortcuts that cannot be undone by the incoming Biden administration. And between this and other Trump administration machinations, an undercount is still very possible—even likely. Especially with the right wing entrenched on the Supreme Court for a generation, we could see significant game-playing with the census data, even in the near future. The near-miss from the departure of Trump, in other words, may still boomerang back to damage democracy.

THE DECENNIAL CENSUS— which is all about counting where people are on April 1 of the enumeration year—was clearly going to be complicated, given the pandemic. Not only was the door-to-door follow-up hampered by fears of contracting COVID, but people had moved unpredictably: Impoverished people struggled to stay housed, college students left dormitories, young Americans moved back in with their parents, and elderly people moved out of nursing homes. The Bureau could no longer count on people being where they usually were, and hard-to-count populations became harder to count, making respondents likely to be whiter and more affluent.

“Folks who were already the easyto-count folks, households in the middle and upper-middle class in wealthy suburbs,” said Robert Santos, vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute. “The folks who were most affected, lost jobs and they had to carry out online school, they also happened to be the folks who were the hardest to count.” Census officials supplement the count with high-quality administrative data like IRS tax forms, Social Security, and government health plan records, to estimate the number of people at a nonresponsive address. But many people who live in the United States, particularly undocumented immigrants, would have none of these forms. “The hard-tocount communities are also the ones that tend to have the worst administrative data available,” Santos said.

Civic organizations worked hard to try to spread the word in these communities, explained Beth Lynk, Census Counts Campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She pointed to tele-town halls, partnerships with food banks and postmasters general to deliver gift bags with census information, and Stop the Knock campaigns that encouraged selfparticipation online for those afraid of contracting COVID or fearful of the government coming to their door. “The infrastructure and the scope and scale of it was unprecedented,” Lynk said. The campaigns saw a marked increase in participation, and the model could be used to support disaster relief and vaccine distribution. “This is infrastructure that can be used for civic engagement,” Lynk explained.

During the “field period,” the Census Bureau attempts to count nonresponsive households. Because of the pandemic, Santos said there was a “general understanding” from Congress and the White House that the Bureau would have an extra 120 days for the field period. Instead, the White House demanded the Bureau meet the statutory deadline of December 31 for apportionment, condensing the time in the field. Not only did the administration shorten the period for door-knocking, but it also pushed the Bureau to rush the data processing, where the Bureau sorts out any anomalies, such as double-counting. “They had to cut corners and they had to find new ways to make the delivery,” Santos said.

In sworn testimony, Howard Hogan, a former demographer at the Bureau, emphasized the problems with a shortened timeline. “[T]he compressed schedule for post data collection processing carries a grave risk of a greatly increased differential undercount,” he wrote.

Furthermore, even after losing the citizenship question effort, the Trump administration continued to devise ways to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count. An executive order in July 2020 directed the Bureau to exclude undocumented

Civic organizations worked hard to spread the word about the census in hard-to-count communities.

people from apportionment of representatives to the states. This appears to be at odds with the plain language of the Constitution, which states that the census must count “the whole number of persons in each State.” But if followed through, a state like California, with a high percentage of undocumented immigrants, would lose votes in the Electoral College and seats in the House of Representatives, while whiter states in the Midwest or the Plains could stand to gain.

A more devious executive order from 2019 asks the Bureau to share citizenship data. That data could be obtained by states to inform their redistricting process, where they set the district lines for seats in the House of Representatives, state legislatures, and other offices. Some experts argue that redistricting may be decided on different principles from apportionment. This could lead to whole populations being discounted in redistricting, leading to lower representation for immigrant-heavy communities.

One problem with this is that the ability to designate undocumented populations is limited, said Justin Levitt, a constitutional scholar at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. “Trump said give me as close to a complete count of the undocumented population that we can,” he explained. “That’s not something we have the data for. That’s impossible and also illegal. We don’t have a database of the undocumented population. We don’t have a database of documented citizens and so there’s no way to actually get an answer that’s a real count.”

But a new president made much of this concern go away. On day one of his administration, Joe Biden signed an executive order reversing Trump’s two actions on the census. The policy reversal requires that all persons, including undocumented people, be included in the state population totals used to determine congressional and Electoral College totals, and that the census makes no effort to collect and share data on undocumented people with states. The same day, Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, who faced criticism for rushing to complete a dataset of undocumented immigrants, resigned rather than wait until his term expired at the end of this year.

Nevertheless, Biden’s actions can’t undo all the harm. Indeed, if conservative states decide to fight to exclude undocumented immigrants in redistricting, using either federal data or data they’ve come up with on their own, Trump’s precedent will live on. As Sam Wang notes, this attempt would certainly get challenged in federal court. “If it came to the Supreme Court—which has moved to the right—I think the likely path is that it will become possible,” he said. Other experts think a state would lose in federal court, but the new makeup of the federal bench makes this unpredictable.

To understand the potential impact, think of a fast-growing area

with a high immigrant population, like Fort Bend County, Texas. The population there has jumped nearly 40 percent since the 2010 census, according to the Bureau’s data, and only 32 percent of the county is now white and non-Latino, with large populations of Black, Latino, and Asian immigrants. If Texas can simply ignore what they believe are undocumented immigrant populations in redistricting, Fort Bend County would probably get packed into a district with whiter outlying areas, making it likely that the seat stays in Republican hands.

Wang says the best way forward is to prevent it from happening in

the first place—before it gets tested in court. But a statute barring states from excluding undocumented immigrants from redistricting would have to pass through the incredibly thin margins in Congress, which isn’t entirely likely. That leaves it up to the courts, which have gotten far more conservative over the past four years.

Even if states are barred from excluding immigrants from redistricting, the Trump administration’s scheming has “already done a fair amount of work to sabotage the accuracy of the census,” said Levitt. “That’s something that can’t be undone by a new administration. At this point, the records are what they are. Just the baseline records of how accurate the census is.”

SINCE ITS INCEPTION, the census has always been about political power and who has it. In the Constitution, the power to conduct the census comes first, before the power to levy taxes or make war. “It comes before each and every thing the federal government is given the power to

do because the conduct of the census determines political power and tells you who the federal government is and later shapes state and local representation,” explained Levitt.

The statistics determine not only who has political representation, but who gets funding. Congress slices up money to states for all sorts of grants, from transportation to community development, based on the census data. The census determines how a representational group is determined for public polling or how a real estate developer determines where to build. Whether a community gets a grocery store depends on how businesses read census data to decide whether their store would be profitable. The American Community Survey, which gathers in-depth information more regularly but from a smaller population, comes from census data. The count of 2020—and the undercount—will be the foundation upon which thousands of other data points are based.

With each census, there are renewed calls to make it more accurate. “Over the last 100 years, there have been big battles over the questions of accuracy and how to improve it,” said Margo Anderson, a historian of the U.S. census. But in 2020, the complications created by COVID-19 and the fear engendered in communities of color by the Trump administration are helping to set up significant undercounting. “It’s setting up for one of the worst undercounts of people of color that we’ve seen in a while,” Santos said. Some political leaders have an interest in an undercount as a means to further entrench their power. The statistical portrait of America that Republicans prefer is simply whiter than reality, because white people vote for Republicans at higher rates. Trump’s interference was at least in part about securing minority rule. Bureaucrats are trying to do their best to get the most accurate count possible. But they can’t make major statistical adjustments in the data, such as weighting to account for undercounting.

“They [the Census Bureau] want to do the right thing,” Santos said. “They’re simply not being allowed to do the right thing.” n

Conservative states may fight to exclude undocumented immigrants in redistricting, with a favorable Supreme Court available to approve the action.

Why Did Obama Forget Who Brought Him to the Dance?

His memoir is strangely silent about the people who organized for him.

BY MICAH L. SIFRY

I’ve recently spent a good chunk of time engrossed in reading A Promised Land, the first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoirs. After four years of the most impulsive and unstable president of my lifetime, hearing Obama’s calm and judicious voice in my head was like having a long, comforting talk with an old friend. His retelling of the challenges of his first two and a half years, from the global financial crisis and the passage of Obamacare to the Democrats’ midterm collapse in 2010 and the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden in May 2011, is full of revealing details and discerning insight.

But there’s a strange lacuna in A Promised Land, a missing thread that I kept looking for but never found. That thread is his popular base. To win his improbable bid for the presidency in 2008, Obama built his own powerful political army to beat Hillary Clinton, who had been building political support with her husband, President Bill Clinton, for decades. At its height, at the end of the 2008 election, Obama’s campaign had 13 million email addresses (20 percent of his vote total). Almost four million people had donated to him. Two million Obama supporters had created an account on My.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s social networking platform, which they used to organize 200,000 local events. Seventy thousand people used MyBO to create their own fundraising pages, which raised $30 million for his campaign.

But as is by now well known, once Obama entered office, he abandoned this army and staked his presidency on the inside-the-Beltway strategies of his first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. It’s never been clear to me that Obama had to drop this ball. After the 2008 election, Obama’s trusted lieutenant and campaign manager, David Plouffe, took a well-earned long leave of absence to enjoy his new role as a father. Plouffe could have followed colleagues like David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs into the White House, but other than wanting to continue to shepherd Obama’s campaign organization, Plouffe needed a break. And as Plouffe recounted in his own campaign memoir, The Audacity to Win, Obama called him the day after his daughter was born in early November with one request, to keep that movement, which was eventually called Organizing for America, going.

“I know you’re disappearing for a while to change diapers and play Mr. Dad,” Plouffe says Obama told him, “but just make sure you find time to help figure out how to keep our supporters involved. I don’t think we can succeed without them. We need to make sure they’re pushing from the grassroots on Washington and helping to spread what we’re trying to do in their local communities. And at the very least, we have to give them the opportunity to stay involved and in touch. They gave their heart and soul to us. This shouldn’t feel like a transactional relationship, because that’s not what it was. I want them along for the ride the next eight years, helping us deliver on all we talked about in the campaign.”

This was very much in tune with how Obama had talked about his grassroots base during the campaign. “Collectively all of you, most of you whom are, I’m not sure, of drinking age, you’ve created the best political organization in America, and probably the best political organization that we’ve seen in the last 30, 40 years. That’s a pretty big deal,” he said in a pep talk to his campaign staff the day after Hillary Clinton had conceded the Democratic nomination to him in June 2008.

Obama made clear then that he knew this organization was going to be critical to winning the battles that would come once he was in office. As he told his staff at that meeting, “We don’t have a choice. Now, if we screw this up, and all those people who really need help, they’re not going to get help. Those of you who care about global warming, I don’t care what John McCain says, he’s not going to push that agenda hard. Those of you who care about Darfur, I guarantee you, they’re not going to spend any political capital on that. Those of you who are concerned about education, there will be a bunch of lip service, and then more of the same. Those of you who are concerned that there’s a sense of fairness in our economy, it will be less fair. So, now everybody’s counting on you, not just me.”

As I’ve written before, however, Plouffe didn’t seem to think of Obama’s base in the same way. The campaign’s 13-million-name email list, for example, was for him a new kind of top-down broadcast system that he understood mainly as a tool for getting around the mainstream media. “We had essentially created our own television network, only better, because we communicated with no filter to what would amount to about 20 percent of the total number of votes we would need to win,” Plouffe wrote in his memoir. And once Obama was in the White House, Plouffe didn’t think much of all the people behind those 13 million email addresses, telling Ari Melber in a 2009 interview for The Nation, “In the White House, obviously you’re not really raising money and you’re not really doing organizing. The main focus is to help deliver message.”

All of this matters a lot, because while Plouffe demobilized the massive army that had gotten Obama to the White House, folding it into the Democratic National Committee and using its giant list mainly to ask supporters to buy Obama mugs and send occasional thank-you notes to members of Congress, the right wing was swiftly building up its own grassroots army to help block all of Obama’s initiatives in government, the Tea Party. In the critical months of the fight for health care reform, for example, Organizing for America was only able to muster about

A PROMISED LAND

BY BARACK OBAMA Crown

300,000 phone calls to members of Congress. Having won the White House by building a dynamic base of millions of volunteers, Obama went into his policy battles with one arm tied behind his back. When he complains in his memoir about unfair press coverage of his efforts or the Republicans’ ability to get away with legislative murder, he’s writing about an unbalanced political landscape that he, wittingly or unwittingly, helped create.

At the very end of his presidency, in late 2016 and early 2017, Obama gave several interviews where he seemed to acknowledge that his failure to keep organizing after winning the 2008 election was a critical mistake. To George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, who asked about the 1,000 seats lost by the Democratic Party at the state level during Obama’s eight years, he said, “I take some responsibility on that,” but he added, “my docket was really full here, so I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as Commanderin-Chief and President of the United States. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.”

To NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Obama admitted, “I think that we haven’t done it as well as we need to. For example, we know that the Republicans, funded through organizations like the Koch brothers, have been very systematic at … building from the ground up and communicating to state legislators and financing school board races and public utility commission races. You know, I am a proud Democrat, but I do think that we have a bias towards national issues and international issues, and as a consequence I think we’ve ceded too much territory.”

So as I read A Promised Land, I kept looking for hindsight about cardinal political error. Obama offers none. The words “Organizing for America” don’t appear anywhere in the book. To be sure, he was fully aware of how his campaign had tapped grassroots enthusiasm for his upstart bid and channeled it effectively, pointing, for example, to a “determined band of volunteers called Idahoans for Obama [who] had organized themselves” and helped him pick up crucial primary delegates from that unlikely state.

By the fall of 2008, he writes with praise of Plouffe for having invested in building up his grassroots army, noting that it had “fanned out across the country, registering hundreds of thousands of new voters and launching unprecedented operations in states that allowed early voting.” He adds, “Our online donations continued to flow, allowing us to play in whatever media markets we chose.”

And as Election Day approaches, Obama writes of his awe at the size of the crowds coming to his rallies and worries about having aroused too much hope, knowing that he might not be able to meet the

expectations that some of his followers were pressing on him.

But after his election as president, the grassroots disappears from Obama’s story. The amnesia starts the night of his inauguration, when he attended ten formal balls with first lady Michelle Obama, but only the first one, where he was serenaded by Beyoncé, and later one for members of the armed forces, make it into his memoir. The Obama for America staff ball, which was attended by 10,000 staff and where Obama reportedly spoke for 17 minutes, is gone from his memory. White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, who managed the White House’s relationships with Democratic advocacy organizations, gets barely a mention for his role in the health care reform fight. The organizers who took him to victory in the Iowa caucus, who he says he “would still do anything for,” are nowhere in the rest of the book, even as one of them, Mitch Stewart, would come to run Organizing for America at the DNC.

I don’t know why Obama forgot his base, though here are some theories. First, he was a captive of the White House bubble, and no one in his intimate circle or among his top advisers spoke for the base. It’s striking to see who Obama refers to by their first names or nicknames in A Promised Land: Joe (Biden), Rahm (Emanuel), Axe (David Axelrod), Valerie (Jarrett), Gibbs (Robert Gibbs, his first press secretary), Favs (Jon Favreau, a top speechwriter), Ben (Rhodes, another key speechwriter), Samantha (Power, a human rights writer who served on Obama’s Senate staff and then went with him to serve as U.N. ambassador), Reggie (Love, one of his body men), Sam (Kass, the first family’s personal cook and Obama’s pool-playing buddy), and a handful of old friends from Chicago. These are the people with the most influence on Obama day to day, it appears. As best as I can tell, none of them other than Power had any experience with or understanding of the power of grassroots organizing, and in her case it was all in the field of international human rights activism.

People who did have organizing DNA didn’t last long in the Obama White House or they kept their profile low. Van Jones, who was a prominent Black activist given a top position on the Council on Environmental Quality to focus on green jobs, lost his job once the Republican right focused on some controversial statements he had made earlier in his career. He resigned in September 2009.

Kate Albright-Hanna, one of the leaders of the new-media team that was the heart of Obama’s online campaign army, lasted just a few months in the Obama White House, growing ever more frustrated as she saw the culture of “yes we can” organizing, which emphasized bottom-up community engagement and the knitting together of a nationwide movement, replaced by a “bloodless” and “technocratic” approach “made of big data.” As she recalled a few years ago with a memorable piece in Civicist, the site I edited when I was at Civic Hall, that new kind of digital-engagement strategy, which became the dominant form of online organizing in Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run, “rolled its eyes at narrative, on the ground feedback, and human political instinct. In place of late nights talking to dairy farmers in their kitchens, there were algorithms.”

A second reason is how Obama seems to have convinced himself of the limits of his own power. He blames the media for much of his inability to move the public, repeatedly citing how poorly it covered politics and frustrated his efforts to connect. He writes, “Whether out of fear of appearing biased, or because conflict sells, or because their editors demanded it, or because it was the easiest way to meet the deadlines of a twenty-fourhour, internet-driven news cycle, their collective approach to reporting on Washington followed a depressingly predictable script: Report what one side says (quick sound bite included). Report what the other side says (opposing sound bite, the more insulting the better). Leave it to an opinion poll to sort out who’s right.”

And yet, when he goes out on the hustings and has to deal with grassroots protests, from either Tea Party types or left-wing activists, Obama grudgingly admits that organizing matters, and also that the mood in the country had shifted, in part by right-wing organizing against him (as well as left-wing dissatisfaction). Writing of his efforts to shore up Democrats before the 2010 midterms, he admits that “even without looking at the polls, I could sense a change in the atmosphere on the campaign trail: an air of doubt hovering over each rally, a forced, almost desperate quality to the cheers and laughter, as if the crowds and I were a couple at the end of a whirlwind romance, trying to muster up feelings that had started to fade. How could I blame them? They had expected my election to transform our country, to make government work for ordinary people, to restore some sense of civility in Washington. Instead, many of their lives had grown harder, and Washington seemed just as broken, distant, and bitterly partisan as ever.”

Well, actually, they had expected to be brought along, to apply “yes we can” organizing to the changes needed too. But in this passage, as elsewhere in his memoir, Obama reveals more of what I think is finally the main reason the base is not in his book: He believed too much in himself. His superpower is also his kryptonite.

Obama was the kind of gifted political communicator who comes around only once in a generation. Buoyed by a savvy circle of operators who built their careers around his campaign, he never saw how much of his original political success was the product of a unique fusion of political celebrity and community organizing.

It’s no wonder that once Obama entered the White House, he and his team obsessed about how much power the media had to shape the narrative of his presidency. He never understood that when enough people are successfully organized to move en masse, they can actually write history themselves. Instead, he thought he was the author of his story. And apparently, he still does. n Micah L. Sifry is the author of The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet). He writes a regular newsletter, The Connector, about democracy, organizing, technology, and social movements.

DIVISIBLE DEMOCRATS

DNC State Parties DCCC DSCC

In 2020, divisions and rivalries among White House the progressive infrastructure were papered over by the urgency of beating Trump. But tensions between reformers and regulars go back a century. Infighting that began in the 1990s between Clinton-era “New Democrats” and progressives reverberates today in the challenges posed by seats to block a Republican veto-proof such groups as Justice Democrats, Sunrise, majority. And in Georgia, a ten-year orga- Data for Progress, and the Movement for nizing and mobilizing effort, led by Stacey Black Lives. Abrams in concert with burgeoning on- The Democratic center, however, has the-ground groups, turned the state blue. shifted to the left. Many young activists But those successes, as role models, are were brought into politics by Bernie Sandmore exception than norm. Two core ques- ers and Elizabeth Warren. Black groups are tions remain: whether the intraparty unity on the march, yet practical about coalition can be built on, and whether the key play- and power. There is no grassroots group ers will draw the right lessons from 2020. urging Democrats to be more centrist For some, it’s all about winning elections on economics or more cautious on racial in the current cycle. But it’s also about justice. Inside the Biden administration, building power and organization for the despite a corporate undertow, progressives long term. have several major power posts. For this article, I interviewed upwards All that said, mapping out this network of 60 people at all levels of the progressive of institutional and grassroots infrastrucIN 2020, DESPITE DOWN-BALLOT ecosystem. Nearly everyone agreed that ture is maddeningly complex. It includes losses, the existential need to defeat Don- the candidate- and donor-driven system the Democratic Party in its various incarald Trump produced more collaboration invests too much money, too chaotically, nations, and closely allied national issue and less infighting than the Democratic too late in the election cycle. “If we had a groups such as Planned Parenthood, the coalition has seen in a long time. Progres- national commitment to year-round orga- ACLU, or the League of Conservation Votsives, notably hostile to Hillary Clinton in nizing,” says Wikler, “we could find a lot of ers. There is also the labor movement; 2016, mustered enthusiasm for an ideologi- needles in a lot of haystacks.” large donors; mass digital groups such as cally similar Joe Biden. And Biden, having If anyone should appreciate that reality, MoveOn; the new wave of post-2016 resiswon the nomination with the weakest field it’s Joe Biden. Defending and increasing the tance groups such as Indivisible and Run for operation of any modern candidate, needed slender Democratic majority in the House Something; established think thanks such to rely on the progressive ground game. His and Senate in 2022 and holding the White as Public Citizen, Common Cause, Center victory was built on a profusion of orga- House in 2024, in a way that builds long- for American Progress, the Economic Polnizing with a scale, breadth, and diversity term strength, will require massive grass- icy Institute, and Demos, which run from unlike any seen since the 1960s. roots efforts, beginning now. center to left; newer and younger groups

In a few states—Wisconsin, Arizona, The new DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, is such as Sunrise; and groups that reflect the and Georgia—it all came together. In Ari- a favorite of the activist state party chairs. new consciousness around racial justice and zona, the anti-immigrant thuggery that Harrison, who was party chair in South remediation such as Color of Change. ran from Sheriff Joe Arpaio to Donald Carolina before running for the Senate In addition, there are voter registraTrump produced more than a decade of in 2020, tells me, “We missed an oppor- tion and mobilization groups such as Voto organizing and coalition building. Demo- tunity during the Obama administration Latino and Black Voters Matter; the pathcrats carried the state for Biden-Harris, to build a long-term effective grassroots breaking small-donor platform ActBlue; picked up a U.S. senator, held their own organization. President Biden could be specialized groups that provide data serin the state House and flipped a seat in the the greatest party builder in a generation.” vices such as Catalist; ones that do training state Senate. In Wisconsin, with a gifted If the stars align, Harrison might bring such the Midwest Academy; and smaller party chair in Ben Wikler, collaborative just the right combination of presidential local groups with names like Tomorrow We organizing won back the state in the pres- loyalty, party-building, and independent Vote, Bay Rising Action, United We Dream, idential race, held or gained legislative grassroots organizing. and literally thousands of others. Networks

with national reach such as People’s Action, Community Change, the Movement Voter Project, and the Center for Popular Democracy combine year-round issue organizing plus election-year mobilization.

These activists are not only heavily Black, brown, and female. They are heavily young. At best, this whole is greater than the sum of its parts. At worst, it invites dissension, schism, and sprawl. Though Trump has fractured his party, the deeper conservative infrastructure is all too resilient. There are no groups demanding the RNC recognize that rural lives matter. The right knows without being asked to make common cause with the NRA and the Fraternal Order of Police.

Efforts to bring coherence to this sprawl use what the cool kids refer to as “tables,” bringing all the players together for regular information exchange and strategizing. There are state and national tables, as well as tables for donors and tables built on ethnicity, race, and issue causes. These have helped build collaborative coordination for a coalition that resists top-down dictation.

The State Voices is the national coordinating organization for 25 state-based tables of 501(c)(3) grassroots groups, providing funding and technical assistance for their voter registration and mobilization work.For example, Pro Georgia operates as one such anchor in the Peach State. Led by veteran organizer Tamieka Atkins, Pro Georgia has more than 30 member organizations, from Atlantans Building Leadership for Empowerment, to the Center for Pan Asian Community Services, to Women Engaged.

America Votes is the national table for large groups that do partisan 501(c)(4) independent-expenditure campaigns, led by unions, progressive organizations, and reproductive rights and climate groups. “When we started in 2003,” says America Votes founding president Cecile Richards, the longtime leader of Planned Parenthood, “the heads of these groups didn’t even know each other. Collectively they raised a lot of money, but had no coherent strategy.”

This year, America Votes not only raised upwards of $100 million for coordinated campaigns in battleground states. It underwrote early recruitment, training, and stipends for organizers for the general elec-

Just below the grim news of Democratic down-ballot losses are gains that confirm the argument for long-term organizing.

tion, even before the primary was settled. These helped jump-start Biden’s campaign against Trump.

DISAPPOINTMENTS AND SILVER LININGS

If all this mobilizing was so impressive, why did Democrats bomb down-ballot on Election Day? Voting data has yet to be analyzed in detail, but we can offer a few hypotheses. For starters, while Democrats abandoned live voter registration, big rallies, and door-knocking (until a panicky last few weeks in October), Trump’s campaign was at the doors and the president was on the hustings, exposing voters to his appeal as well as to COVID. Second, a slice of moderate Republicans, notably suburban women, could not stand Trump and voted for Biden, but then voted Republican down-ticket. Also, the Democratic base of younger, minority, low-propensity voters overperformed in 2018 when Trump was off the ballot, but underperformed relative to Republicans in 2020. There were also some unpleasant surprises, still to be fully analyzed and explained, in the shift of many immigrant areas to Trump, as well as a slightly increased Trump share of the Black vote. (This dramatically reversed itself in the Georgia runoffs, where relentless organizing of Black voters led Democrats to take over the Senate.)

But just below the grim top-line news are results that confirm the argument for long-term organizing. In several states, Democrats held their own or gained state legislative seats—and these were exactly the states where effective parties had organized, long term, in concert with movement groups.

In Washington state, Democrats are seemingly sitting pretty with a trifecta of governor, House, and Senate. “People think of Washington as a blue state. It’s not all that blue,” says the state party chair, Tina Podlodowski. She became chair in 2017 after serving on the Seattle City Council and losing a run for secretary of state. “Out of that experience,” she says, “I realized how broken our infrastructure was.”

Podlodowski, who grew up in a union family and went on to work in the tech sector, set about to change that. When she became chair, Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats held the House by two seats. Now, after intensive party building, the Democrats hold the House by 16 and the Senate by 7. They suffered no losses in 2020.

“I spend about 30 hours a week calling donors to support organizing,” says Podlodowski. “My budget is just under $5 million. I didn’t get a dime from the Biden campaign because I was not in a battleground campaign. He took out $56 million from my state, from my donors. I had to pay $60,000 for Biden yard signs. It took almost an act of God to get a two-minute video from Kamala Harris.”

Podlodowski appreciates that in 2020, battleground states had to get disproportionate money to beat Trump. But going forward, she insists that the funding be spread around. “In 2021, we literally have thousands of local races where we can build a bench for Democrats, test messages, and see how we move the needle,” she says. “The Republicans play the long game.”

The same lessons apply to states dismissed as hopelessly red, where a lot of voters in fact can be moved to vote blue. “State parties are treated as afterthoughts,” says Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska party chair. “They’re seen as bank accounts for national races. We haven’t been taken seriously since Dean was chair.” Even so, Kleeb says, “the Biden team was leaps and bounds ahead of the Clinton team in the way they treated our state party. They ran staff through us, as opposed to around us.”

In this cycle, Kleeb, an unpaid volun-

teer chair with a staff of two, raised some through a voter registration coalition of 23 Democratic Party leadership was of little $700,000, and did a lot of grassroots work in local groups called One Arizona, and its help. “They thought that their only chance concert with progressive organizations like political ally LUCHA. Over a decade, a mil- to win was to move to the right,” says Luis the Heartland Workers Center, which orga- lion new voters were registered. Avila, who helped organize a civil rights nizes heavily Latino workers in Nebraska’s In 2011, organizers waged a successful coalition, Somos America, in 2011. “They meatpacking industry. In a rough year, the recall campaign against state Sen. Presi- were largely irrelevant to our fight.” Over Democrats netted a gain of one seat in the dent Russell Pearce, a key architect of the time, the party caught up with the people; Nebraska legislature, and also picked up a immigrant-bashing strategy and lead spon- or more precisely, the people took over the supermajority on the state board of education. sor of SB 1070. In 2012, the Supreme Court party. By 2020, one movement activist,

Biden carried the competitive Second overturned most of SB 1070. Sheriff Arpaio Regina Romero, had been elected mayor House District (Omaha and suburbs) by was voted out of office in 2016. Latino voter of Tucson. Several others were elected to 6.5 points, but the progressive congressio- turnout increased from 32 percent in 2014 city councils and county offices. nal candidate, Kara Eastman, fell short by to 49 percent in 2018. Felecia Rotellini, the state party chair 4.5 points. She nearly won in 2018, defeat- The coalition was Latino-led but multi- since 2018, worked closely with movement ing a candidate favored by the Democratic ethnic. The Mormon Church was a key ally; leaders to flip the Senate seat now held by Congressional Campaign Committee in a though far from liberal, it was actively recruit- Democrat Mark Kelly and to carry Arizona contested primary. The DCCC retaliated by ing Latino converts. Sen. Pearce, a Mormon, for Biden. Rotellini stepped down after the giving her only token support in the general, was a big embarrassment; after the recall, election success. The new party leader is which she lost by just two points. “The state he was succeeded by a more Latino-friend- expected to be state Rep. Raquel Terán of party could use about $3 million for paid ly Mormon. “That law was not only a moral Phoenix, a leader of the movement against canvassers,” says Kleeb. “If we had that, affront to the Mormons,” says a senior Demo- SB 1070 and the Pearce recall. we’d be able to flip five more legislative seats crat. “It was bad for their business model.” Jaime Harrison, who calls himself “a and win the Second House District.” For most of the decade, the Arizona Howard Dean acolyte,” has said that he

In Arizona, the party lagged well behind its natu- “State parties are treated as ral constituency. Beginning afterthoughts,” says Jane Kleeb, in 2010, Republicans began the Nebraska party chair. sponsoring laws and ballot initiatives to harass immigrants and deny them services. These measures included the notorious SB 1070, allowing law enforcement officials to racially profile people and stop them at will to demand proof of citizenship. The law also criminalized helping the undocumented. Other measures prohibited non-English-language instruction in schools. This was the heyday of the notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who exercised his new policestate rights with relish.

The Latino community responded with mass protests, including a boycott of Arizona as a convention location for businesses. More critically, they engaged in inventive bottom-up organizing, loosely coordinated

would work to a raise more money for the kind of long-term organizing that links party and movement. As a former red-state chair, he shares the frustration of supposedly red states being foolishly written off by the national party apparatus.

THE GRASSROOTS VS. THE WHITE HOUSE

These state successes mark the beginning of a long-overdue rebellion. To a far greater degree than Republicans, Democratic presidents concentrate power and money in the White House, at the expense of the party base and down-ballot candidates. When the president leaves office, the party has to be rebuilt all over again. Barack Obama was the worst offender, squandering a prodigious organizing apparatus, but he was only repeating a pattern.

A consummate outsider, Jimmy Carter built his own political operation under the snarky Hamilton Jordan (“My friends pronounce it Jerdan but you can call me Jordan.”) Carter swept into office on a massive post-Watergate tide that also

“We missed an opportunity during the Obama administration to build a longterm effective grassroots organization,” said Jaime Harrison. elected 295 Democrats to the House. He had little use for the party.

Carter’s first DNC chair, former Gov. Ken Curtis of Maine, proposed an ambitious plan to coordinate voter files and election analysis, and help state and local parties with voter registration and get-out-the-vote. This was killed by Carter’s political team. In his first year, Carter refused even to lend his signature to a DNC direct-mail effort. By the end of the year, Curtis quit in frustration.

After Michael Dukakis’s defeat in 1988, Ron Brown, a Jesse Jackson lieutenant who had previously worked for Ted Kennedy, was elected to chair the DNC. Working with his legendary political director Paul Tully, Brown rebuilt the party grassroots. When Bill Clinton won the 1992 nomination, Brown and Tully became part of the campaign. Brown went on to be Clinton’s secretary of commerce until his tragic death in a plane crash on a trade mission in 1996.

At first, Clinton grasped the importance of party building. His new DNC chair, Don Fowler, even hired Heather Booth, a widely admired organizer with radical credentials, to design and direct organizer training. But after a promising start, Clinton increasingly centralized operations in the White House, using party resources mainly for his 1996 re-election campaign. He got entangled in a morass of fundraising scandals, like providing Lincoln Bedroom stays for donors and raising money illegally from foreign nationals. Steve Grossman, who became DNC chair in 1996, spent much of his time and talent on the thankless task of persuading donors to pay off party debts, and the ambitious plans for party building took a back seat.

After John Kerry’s 2004 presidential loss, Howard Dean’s famous grassroots 50-state strategy developed digital organizing strategies pioneered by the activists in his own presidential run. His tech team, led by Joe Rospars, went on to found Blue State Digital and then worked for Barack Obama. They raised upward of half a billion online and built an email list of 13 million. (In 2010, the BSD crew cashed in, selling their creation to WPP, the world’s largest holding company for ad agencies, for a reported $100 million. So it goes.)

Silicon Valley

Wall Street

The Progressive Movement

Dean built an improbable coalition of anti-establishment progressives and state party chairs. He raised money to give every state party $60,000 a year for technology, plus funds to pay three to five staffers, a minimum of $25,000 a month. No DNC chair had ever done anything like that, and it was still a pittance compared to what the RNC does.

Obama won the 2008 nomination in red states that Hillary Clinton largely ignored, thanks in part to Dean. He created a prodigious volunteer army, Organizing for America (OFA). But after winning the presidency, Obama ousted Dean and folded OFA into the White House. The millions of volunteers who had been mobilized by Obama dissipated. It was one of most self-defeating moves in party history. Democrats paid dearly for the weakened grassroots in the 2010 midterms, when they lost 63 House seats, a modern record.

By 2016, under Obama’s DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also had a day job in Congress, the party machinery was moribund, contributing to Hillary Clinton’s defeat, and setting up an epic clash between the Sanders and Obama/Clinton factions on how to rebuild.

Sanders’s candidate, Keith Ellison, narrowly lost to Tom Perez, the candidate of the party’s Obama/Clinton wing. However, Perez, working closely with Larry Cohen, head of the Sanders group Our Revolution, named Ellison as deputy chair and agreed to many of the reforms demanded by Sanders’s allies. The two factions got behind a unity commission that by Republican-lite in purple districts. Joe Biden In 2018, populist J.D. Scholten, a former minor league baseball star, took on far-right incumbent Steve King in Iowa’s Fourth District. The DCCC considered the race unwinnable and provided no support. Scholten lost by just three points. Two years later, the DCCC belatedly backed Scholten. But King lost the GOP primary to a moderate who handily beat Scholten in the general. The DCCC staffing and strategic advice to Scholten was like oil and water. “They kept sending me people who I ignored,” Scholten told me. “Their comms person came with me in rural Iowa, wearrecommended key changes to make the ing a suit.” party more small-d democratic. Under former chair Rep. Cheri Bus-

The DNC added incentives to induce cau- tos of Illinois, the DCCC even blacklisted cus states to shift to primaries. There were consultants who work for challengers. seven caucus states in 2020, down from 14 The new chair, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloin 2016. “With the shift to more primaries, ney of New York, has ended the blacklist, participation rates went through the roof,” but is not ending the practice of playing says Perez. “You build muscle memory, favorites in primaries. None of this has and you have far more diversity.” So-called intimidated Justice Democrats and a superdelegates (party luminaries and elect- newly energized progressive campaign ed officials) did not get to vote on the first machine, who keep running against cennominating ballot of the 2020 convention. trist incumbents, and winning. Perez also increased the DNC annual grant The DSCC, if anything, has an even worse to state parties. The reforms made the DNC record. Tightly controlled by Chuck Schumchair a full-time job, with a $250,000 salary, er, the DSCC likes centrists with military so that the next chair will not be a part-tim- records, who can be magnets for funding er reliant on an executive director. “In the appeals. A little-known fact is that when end, Perez worked closely with us on party you send money via the DSCC to, say, Amy reform,” says Cohen. “He has supported the McGrath (who was trounced in Kentucky initial steps toward party building, but real by Mitch McConnell), only a fraction of the change must come in the state parties.” money actually goes to McGrath. The exact

But even if Jaime Harrison turns out to split is a matter of negotiation between the be the second coming of Howard Dean, campaign and the DSCC, which uses the relations between local party activists and national appeal of a McGrath to raise funds Washington-based party organs are poi- to be spent elsewhere. soned by the party fundraising commit- In Texas, the DSCC disdained two attractees for House and Senate candidates, the tive progressive candidates, Cristina Democratic Congressional Campaign Com- Tzintzún Ramirez, a Latina labor organizer, mittee and the Democratic Senatorial Cam- and Dallas state Senator Royce West, who paign Committee. is African American, in favor of a former

The DCCC infuriates local party activists by Republican with a military background, taking sides in primaries, and then punishing M.J. Hegar. Tzintzún Ramirez and West candidates who have the effrontery to run got courtesy interviews, but the decision against its favorites. It tends to favor centrists was made in Washington. In the general, over progressives, both because they are often Hegar was clobbered by incumbent John able to raise corporate money or self-fund, Cornyn, by more than a million votes, runand on the theory that voters are attracted ning well behind Biden. In North Caro-

One Arizona VotoLatino

ProGeorgia State Voices

501-C-3s

501-C-4s

lina, the DSCC endorsed the lackluster (and judgment-impaired) Cal Cunningham over two African American contenders.

“You don’t appoint candidates from inside the Beltway, based on who raises the biggest bankroll,” says Howard Dean. “When we do this, we pick the wrong candidate. It takes grassroots.”

THE DONOR DOMAIN

Enlisting large Democratic donors to invest long-term, rather than just in election-year candidates, remains a challenge. Billionaires also tend to have boundless self-confidence, which sometimes leads to impulsive patterns of support.

In 2004, most of George Soros’s political money went to an umbrella group called America Coming Together, whose goal was both to elect Kerry and to build progressive strength for the long term. “We had a grand plan to mobilize, year in and year out,” says Steve Rosenthal, the former AFL-CIO political director and widely admired strategist, who ran ACT. But after Kerry lost, Soros and ACT’s other big funder, Progressive Insurance’s Peter Lewis, pulled the plug and shut ACT down.

Sixteen years later, Michael Bloomberg put $100 million into Florida, with no results and no lasting infrastructure. Meanwhile, Organizing Corps 2020, led

LCV

Black Panthers, Tammany Hall, and the labor movement: blend service with political organizing. Nobody underwrote anything comparable on the Democratic side. In 2003, Rob Stein, a former chief of staff to Ron Brown, created a nowGeorge Soros famous slideshow that anatomized in great detail the right’s disciplined long-term funding and the collective incoherence of the center-left. He enlisted George Soros, Peter Lewis, and Herb and Marion Sandler to found the Democracy Alliance, intending to solve this problem. After a shaky takeoff, marked by a lot of fuss to America Votes fund utterly safe and orthodox groups, the DA added major unions as stakeholders and Planned Parenthood was nudged left and longer-term by its cur rent president Gara LaMarche. ACLU Big DA donors still lavishly support the center-left Center for American Progress and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But since 2014, the list of DA-approved by Rachel Haltom-Irwin and Meg Ansara, outfits now includes more insurgent groups was a multimillion-dollar effort to recruit such as Demos, Americans for Financial and train over 1,000 organizers, with sti- Reform, the Center for Popular Democpends, for the 2020 coordinated campaign racy, and People’s Action. Even so, the DA in battleground states. The project worked approved list is only a menu. Actual donathrough the DNC and state and local par- tions must come from individuals. ties. When the election ended, all cam- Today, nothing is more important than paign staff, including these organizers, were rebuilding the labor movement. But while dropped from the payroll, and are currently billionaires sit at the same DA table with looking for jobs. There was no source of national labor leaders, few welcome labor funds to keep paying them. organizers into their own businesses. In

“The problem with too many donors is an era whose economics and politics are that they think like venture capitalists or defined by grotesque inequality, it’s hard hedge fund managers,” says Rosenthal. for a party reliant on billionaires to be pro“Try something and if you don’t win, cut gressive on pocketbook issues. This straddle your losses. But that’s not how investing in confuses brand, mission, and message. politics works. It needs to be long-term, you Progressives have long viewed small need to develop a relationship with voters.” money as the antidote to big money. ActBlue

By contrast, the right provides massive has created an online small-dollar revolulong-term strategic funding to a relatively tion. In 2020, millions of people engaged small number of core institutions. For years, in phone-banking. Millions would have the Koch brothers have been quietly funding knocked on doors, but for the pandemic. a group called LIBRE, a combination service But for many, activism took the form of organization and indoctrination machine for responding to online appeals and making a Hispanic immigrants. At a LIBRE storefront, digital donation, not quite the same thing as you can take English classes, get help with doing neighbor-to-neighbor politics. navigating the social service bureaucracy, and learn about the evils of socialist Demo- THE CONSULTANTcrats. What LIBRE does is a tactic known INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX to groups as varied as Hamas, the original The progressive infrastructure is heavily

reliant on what LaMarche calls the “consultant-industrial complex.” Most serious people in politics agree that far too much money is spent on TV ads. “All that TV late in the campaign is worse than ineffective. Instead of turning people out, you tune them out,” says Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. But the consultants who advise campaigns typically get 10 percent of all TV ad buys, and no commission if the campaign hires more organizers. So TV rules.

For decades, the issue of who controls voter files has plagued the Democrats. Each campaign controlled its own files, kept them for future use, and was wary about sharing them with others. In some cases, consultants got hold of the files and sold them for profit. Meanwhile, in 2015, after years of planning and negotiation, the RNC joined forces with the Koch brothers to create the Data Trust, where data from all campaigns and major outside conservative groups would be pooled and shared in one master data bank. The Republicans even won a ruling from the Federal Election Commission permitting them to include voter data from hard-money and soft-money sources in the same database, as long as the sources were not disclosed.

Belatedly, it dawned on the Democrats that they could do the same thing. After several years of scratching for funds and haggling about who would participate, the Democrats created the Democratic Data Exchange (DDX), unveiled just in time for the 2020 campaign, and run in partnership with the DNC. The exchange allows campaigns, party affiliates, and independent groups to trade voter files, across the hard/ soft money divide. Participation is voluntary. The head of the DDX is none other than Howard Dean. “I was asked to chair the DDX not because I knew data but because I knew the politics,” Dean told me. “There has been a tremendous amount of distrust between state chairs and the DNC, but 41 of the state parties have now joined.”

Outside vendors who sell these services were mightily upset. Eventually, a deal was struck. Many became DDX partners or clients. DDX provides only data files and leaves the number-crunching to firms such as Catalist, a proven and well-respected source of technical data expertise to progressive groups.

One failed startup, in roughly the same space, was called Alloy, launched in late 2018 by Silicon Valley billionaire and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn (sold to Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion in cash). Hoffman put up half of Alloy’s $35 million, thinking that Alloy could be the master data aggregator and vendor to the Democratic and progressive ecosystem. He hired several of the smartest veterans of the Dean-Obama ventures. But when the DNC decided to create its own data exchange, Alloy was doomed. The venture abruptly folded in late November.

The Democrats’ multiple Silicon Valley connections, coupled with the absence of money for people to be decently compensated as organizers, leads to an unfortunate career path. In late 2019, Jeremy Bird, a key Barack Obama grassroots strategist and former student of organizing master Marshall Ganz, put out the following statement: “I’ve spent my career fighting to change the world for the better … I have always believed in the power of people to make a meaningful impact on the way we all work, vote, and live our lives. That’s why I’m honored to announce today that I am taking on the role of Vice President of Public Engagement at Lyft.” Dozens of senior Obama alums made similar career moves.

THE OTHER SIDE

Compared to its progressive counterpart, the Republican/conservative ecosystem is simple and elegant. Steve Rosenthal uses the metaphor of the TV cooking contest Chopped. In the show, whose set includes a full kitchen, a contestant is handed a box of ingredients and asked to turn them into a meal. “On the Democratic side, we open the basket onstage and we throw it together as well as we can. The Republicans hire an executive chef, who buys all the ingredients he needs.”

Theda Skocpol, the Harvard social scientist who has studied the Democratic Party and citizen activism as much as anyone alive, observes that the Democrats believe in collectivism, but their approach to politics is laissezfaire. The Republicans believe in laissez-faire, but their approach to politics is Leninist.

Though the various Koch-funded entities might have functioned as a parallel and rival to the institutional Republican apparatus, the two now operate nicely in tandem—because the Koch ideology is now the Republican ideology. The Koch network operates as an organizing, training, and candidate-incubating machine. At the state level, the Koch-funded ALEC provides template legislation to gut regulation, tax equity, and social spending. The RNC, meanwhile, showers money on state parties. Even Trump could not destroy a party and movement infrastructure that was nearly half a century in the making.

On the Republican side, there is no scrambling for jobs that compromise principles or mix messages. You can move from the Koch network, to the White House, to the Heritage Foundation, to the Hill, to a corporate job, with no ideological or partisan contradictions whatsoever. On the contrary, these career patterns and linkages only help strengthen the conservative ecosystem.

Skocpol, in her classic work Diminished Democracy, documented the decline of democratically organized, dues-paying, chapter-based liberal and civic groups. Today, those groups are on the right: NRA locals, fundamentalist churches, right-tolifers. The left has mainly Washingtonbased advocacy groups run by professional staff and funded by foundations. The Sierra Club, with dues-paying members and real chapters, is the rare exception.

Two decades ago, when digital organizing and social media were new, the left had a big head start. This was the heyday of MoveOn (founded in 1998), and the early political bloggers, such as Prospect alum Josh Marshall (who started Talking Points Memo in 2000); Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos (2002); “Atrios” (Duncan Black); Jerome Armstrong’s MyDD; and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, among many others, plus Huffington Post (founded in 2005).

The hope was that a mass progressive base connected to the blogosphere, outside the stale structure of party insiders, would both democratize politics and push it left. They promoted Howard Dean, first for president, then for party chair. They refined

online giving and organizing technology, orchestrated live meetups, and nourished the 2007–2008 Obama campaign, which gained digital savvy and organizing genius far superior to that of either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

But the moment was surprisingly brief. While MoveOn endured, blogs as insurgent communities morphed into either celebrity platforms or new media forms that were useful but not exactly radical. Huffington Post was sold to Verizon in 2016, which in turn sold it to BuzzFeed. Prospect alums Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias used Vox to do “explainer” journalism, and then moved on, Klein to The New York Times. The next new thing is Substack, a platform for aspiring media soloists. Neither Vox nor Substack is a movement-building tool. The first-generation bloggers who stayed the course, like Josh Marshall, became players in an increasingly crowded space.

The right has figured out this game, underwritten it handsomely, and cleaned the left’s clock. Today, the right has more cogent media and messaging, as you would expect from an authoritarian movement. It is mostly comprised of businesses like Fox News, Breitbart, and talk radio—which not only rally the base but turn a profit. The right also has an advantage since it traffics in myths and lies, which turn into memes that are repeated and passed along, while the progressive left is largely fact-based and, as good liberals, values disputation for its own sake. The largest platforms are ideologically neutral, yet tailor-made for repetition of big lies. The recent actions of Facebook and Twitter to disable violent users are a temporary setback, but the right is finding other modes of communication.

Progressive funders, who have invested in all manner of infrastructure, have not seen traditional or social media as a priority. The closest thing to a social media operation that tries to engage the right on its own terms, with memes and a mass following, is called Occupy Democrats. It was founded in 2012 by immigrant twin brothers then in their twenties, Rafael and Omar Rivero, as a Facebook group and later a website. With 30 million followers counting partner organizations, Occupy has the largest number of Facebook followers of any site on the left; it and Fox News regularly rank at the top.

In 2020, the Rivero brothers explicitly made their site into a pro-Biden propaganda outlet. The problem, however, is that Occupy Democrats is caught between its desire to engage the right and the need to be at least moderately truthful. Most funders are wary of it. “The right is willing to lie to their followers and their followers like being lied to,” Rafael Rivero told me. “Their followers are impervious to reality. They really are in a cult.” Despite their immense following, he and his brother Omar operate on a shoestring with a small staff. It’s an uneven contest, as is so much of right versus left.

THE LONG VIEW

In the 1970s, you could drive from Washington state to West Virginia by way of Montana, South Dakota, Minnesota, south through Iowa and Missouri, and east through Tennessee. In every one of these states, both senators were progressive Democrats. More precisely, they were labor Democrats. So much for the premise that the “original gerrymander” of equal Senate representation for small states leaves the Senate hopelessly red.

Labor Democrats of that era insisted that Democrats deliver for regular people. That’s why they got elected. The original PAC was the CIO Political Action Committee, created in 1943 to back Democrats after Republicans made major gains in the 1942 midterms.

There is nothing today that plays the core role, institutionally and ideologically, once played by the labor movement. Political scientist Daniel Schlozman observes in his important 2015 book, When Movements Anchor Parties, that on the right the conservative movement took over the Republican Party; while on the left the labor movement that once anchored a progressive Democratic Party got steadily weaker, as Democratic presidents became more centrist.

The practical question is whether a progressive movement as far-flung as the one we have today can play the anchoring role once played by labor. In our idealized conception of small-d democracy, having thousands of new, local groups is great. Sometimes, David really can beat Goliath. But can 10,000 mini-Davids, each with a niche organization and niche funders, beat the strategic Goliath of the modern conservative system? There are also schisms over such issues as affirmative action.

Even with multiple tables providing better communication and coordination, there are deep differences of perception, principle, and strategy. Should Democrats try to win in purple states and metro suburbs as moderates or economic populists? How should race and class come together in Democratic appeals? Is the paramount task to mobilize the base, or convert former Trump voters?

Theda Skocpol, who has extensively studied the successful resistance movements that led to a net pickup of 40 House seats in 2018, cautions that this wave of activists were not all that progressive. They were substantially older, white, and female, and mainly they were appalled by Trump’s plain extremism. Yet 2022 could be different. Georgia demonstrates that a kind of soft populism, built on such basics as pandemic relief and more reliable health coverage, can unite moderates and progressives.

The conventional wisdom is that progressive populists can’t win in the suburbs, or that we must choose between base and swing voters. Yet a gifted leader who motivates volunteers can defy that premise, as demonstrated by Jan Schakowsky of Chicago’s North Shore, Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County, Maryland, or Antonio Delgado of New York’s 19th District, a Working Families Party insurgent who flipped a longtime Republican seat in 2018 in the Hudson Valley suburbs of New York. The recent Senate runoff victories in Georgia, where turnout broke records, were built on gains both in previously neglected communities and in suburbs. They were premised on a multiracial coalition and direct, simple appeals for economic relief in the form of emergency $2,000 payments. And all these wins reflected organizing.

Within the Democratic Party, the struggle between reformers and regulars has echoes as far back as the Progressive Era, and resonances as current as the primary fights picked by Justice Democrats. In his classic

In Georgia, a ten-year organizing and mobilizing effort, led by Stacey Abrams in concert with burgeoning on-the-ground groups, turned the state blue.

work, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, published in 1905, journalist William Riordan quotes George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany boss, dismissing reformers as “morning glories.” According to Plunkitt, “A reformer can’t last in politics … Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the drygoods or the drug business. You’ve got to be trained up to it or you’re sure to fail.”

A few decades later, the Chicago reformer Abner Mikva, as an earnest young law student, showed up at his local Eighth Ward Regular Democratic Club to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson’s 1948 campaign for governor. “Who sent you?” the ward committeeman asked warily. “Nobody,” Mikva replied. Said the boss, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

Regulars, who indeed see politics as a business, are wary of new blood they don’t control. That’s why the DCCC and the DSCC keep trashing insurgents and making sure that newly elected legislators are beholden to them. The practical question is whether today’s insurgents will turn out to be better at the long game than the regulars, or whether they will just be the latest generation of morning glories.

In fact, today’s insurgents are extremely good at politics, and they are in it for the long haul. The Working Families Party has been around since 1998, and it keeps getting stronger. WFP has moved beyond its origins in New York, and this year its affiliates picked up seats at all levels in Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Mexico. Three groups deeply committed to long-term organizing, People’s Action, Community Change, and the Center for Popular Democracy, the successor to ACORN, have been at it since the 1970s. And of course the labor movement dates to the 19th century.

Intriguingly and paradoxically, Joe Biden is the epitome of a party regular— who is very dependent on insurgents. He seems to know that, though the base will need to keep reminding him. “Insurgency is what renews the party,” says Howard Dean. “One generation never steps aside—they have to be pushed.”

Every generation sends its heroes up the pop charts. In the never-ending story of challengers refreshing progressive politics, patterns repeat. Radicals had to play an insider/outsider game to work with—and sometimes against—FDR. The same process ensued as the civil rights movement kept pressuring LBJ to do more. Organizational forms change, but struggles endure. So it will be in the Biden era. n

THAT OLD-TIME

POPULISM

Democratic victory in Georgia, and across the South, combined long-term multiracial organizing and a pitch to directly improve people’s lives.

BY ELI DAY ILLUSTRATION BY ROBERT MEGANCK

ON JANUARY 5TH, SENATE candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won their critically important races as populists. Within 24 hours, the recently defeated president, whom mainstream scribblers had also carelessly once labeled a “populist,” was inciting his followers to storm Congress in a bid to hold onto power as an unelected ruler.

It was a stunning split screen. Less than a full day after Georgians elected only the second Black Southerner to the Senate since the Civil War, along with a young Jewish investigative journalist, Trump loyalists were smashing their way into the Capitol Building, draped in the flag of a vanquished slave empire. And though we’ve spent four years designating Trumpism as the epitome of a 21st-century populist movement, when you look at both of these events in tandem— the arguments made, the villains cast, and the vision laid out for the future—it’s clear who the torchbearers of populism are.

Take a look at Ossoff and Warnock’s closing arguments. They weren’t ballads to restoring civility or returning to the chummy, backslapping days when Republicans and Democrats would come together to destroy welfare or pursue horrific wars of aggression. “Want a $2,000 check? Vote Warnock” was actual ad copy from the Warnock campaign, a raw appeal to people’s material concerns. It linked up nicely with Ossoff’s jugular attacks, casting Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue (both former CEOs) as a pair of self-serving elites, feasting lavishly at a time when millions face starvation. “We’re running against the Bonnie and Clyde of corruption in American politics,” Ossoff hammered. “Who, when they learned about the pandemic that was bearing down on our shores, their first call was to their stockbrokers.”

One side of the screen shows us what can happen when a multiracial movement fights to widen political possibility and improve the lives of ordinary people, forming a new Southern Populism that echoes the original. The other has climaxed in a white supremacist explosion on behalf of a wealthy scam artist turned authoritarian who faithfully serves the rich and built his political fortunes on a very old divide-and-conquer blueprint that was first laid out by populism’s enemies.

As Thomas Frank writes in The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism, “Populism was the first of America’s great economic uprisings, a roar of outrage from people in the lower half of the country’s social order” against “an inequitable system [of] elite failure.” This was Ossoff and Warnock’s closing argument in a nutshell. More importantly, it describes the network of independent progressive groups that powered them to victory, and which show no signs of simply relying on the goodwill of powerful figures, even friendly ones, to deliver the progressive agenda they’ve called for.

Even Joe Biden, who often mimicked the pointless rage of budget warriors as a senator and vice president, felt the populist currents coursing through Georgia. “If you send Jon and the Reverend to Washington,” he said at an election eve rally, “those $2,000 checks will go out the door.”

Black Voters Matter, whose co-founder LaTosha Brown is seen here in 2018, is one of many groups engaged in long-term organizing in Georgia.

History will show this to be important for more reasons than anyone can count. First and most critically, these victories and the populist currents that carried them have big implications for what Democrats can do, now that they control all three branches of government. Second and more subtly, it answers a question that has ricocheted across more than a century of Southern politics: whether a message that links racial unity with progressive economic policy can win in the South.

To state the obvious, Democrats must now actually wield the power they have. It’s true that the phrase “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell” is a tune so sweet you have to play it back a few times. But if Democrats want it to last, they can’t repeat the mistakes that got them wiped out in the 2010 midterm elections. Namely, they must implement measures that improve people’s lives. There is no excuse, including the very abolishable filibuster, for failing to do this. Democrats have the ability to enact an aggressive economic agenda as millions face mass poverty, starvation, and eviction; to address our rapidly frying planet; to protect and expand workers’ bargaining power; and to install a robust voting rights regime. If Congress won’t budge, President Biden can accomplish at least some of these advances by his own authority. And blue states can take it even further.

But like any populism worth its salt, progressives can’t depend on the goodwill of powerful people. It will likely take constant shoves from the party’s left-wing grassroots to achieve anything of lasting significance. After all, their majority was secured on these expectations.

IT WAS A POPULIST VISION of economic relief and a greater say in democracy that inspired organizers and everyday people to sweep across Georgia to rally the troops for the January 5th runoff elections. I hung out with a few of them while reporting there. Shauna “Coco” Swearington of Marietta, Georgia, for instance, knocked doors “every day, six days a week, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.,” she tells me. She let me tag along one afternoon, in one of Atlanta’s working-class Black neighborhoods. Coco was one of nearly 1,000 UNITE HERE canvassers who barely rested between the general election and the Senate runoff races. She told me that when COVID-19 hit, she “was displaced” from her job of 25 years as a server at the Westin hotel in Atlanta. “So now I’m out of health insurance,” she explained. “I’ve got diabetes and heart disease. I need my medications. So it was very important for me to get on this campaign.”

By winning the Senate, Coco hoped to see worker-friendly policies that provide job security for those who have been laid off, increase the minimum wage, and make it easier for workplaces to unionize. She also recognized that working people are uniquely positioned to tag each other into the fight.

“We’re the common people, we’re the people out there in the trenches doing the

Organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket.

work,” she said. “So who better to tell you, ‘This is my story, and this is why you need to go out and vote because this could be your story too.’” Her point is simple: Working people are the most convincing messengers on working-class concerns. And it’s even better if they’re empowered by political campaigns to talk to people about breadand-butter ideas like getting cold hard cash into working people’s hands. In Georgia, where 48 percent of people are reportedly poor or low-income, that turned out to be a winning message.

Biden’s historic victory in the Peach State was different. He eked out a win in Georgia thanks to a one-two punch: Stacey Abrams’s strategy of increasing turnout by tapping into an army of unregistered young people and people of color, and more importantly, suburban nausea with Trump, which gave big margins in the metro Atlanta suburbs to the Biden-Harris ticket. Despite the suburban reversal, Trump still came within inches of victory, and improved his numbers with voters of color. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, that likely had something to do with Republicans being “in power when the government put a lot of money into the hands of a lot of people who didn’t have it before,” and, on the flip side, Democrats’ failure to put forward a compelling economic vision. Indeed, Biden promised during the campaign that “nothing would fundamentally change.” With Trump on the sidelines, many pundits thought Georgia might be at the mercy of big money and Republican entreaties to “stop socialism.” What they largely missed was that an electorally powerful fusion dance had taken place. On one side, organizers did an extraordinary job keeping the state’s diverse electorate engaged. Turnout rates were almost at presidential levels, unheard of in these typically sleepy runoffs. And Black voters, Democrats’ most reliable and most neglected voting bloc, came out at even more impressive rates, decidedly fueling the runoff victories. This should humble anyone who thinks that no amount of organizing will change the reality that only the most obsessive voters show up to off-cycle elections.

On the other side, Ossoff and Warnock started arguing that the government has a duty to ensure everyone’s basic survival, calling for a $15 minimum wage, $2,000 emergency checks, and reopening closed hospitals, because “health care is a human right, not just a privilege for those who can afford it or live in the right ZIP code.” As Anat Shenker-Osorio, a leading researcher and voice on progressive messaging, puts it, “In the waning days they did an incredible job of providing an affirmative narrative: This is what we stand for, this is what we believe in, this is the kind of Georgia and country that we can have … [it was] obviously incredibly effective.”

The combination of organizing and populist messaging turned out liberal voters, Black and white, despite the lack of a Trump bogeyman on the ticket. The Biden win is what can happen when you have a historically unpopular opponent riling up the base. The Ossoff and Warnock wins are more sustainable, less reliant on the opponent. And they signal a winning formula for a new Southern populism, one that braids together the region’s rich diversity with a wildly popular economic message. Until now, Democrats had barely wrapped their hands around the first. But after years of unsuccessfully chasing white moderates across the South, the Georgia runoffs uncorked a model for competing.

It’s one that has been there all along.

GEORGIA’S POPULIST STORY, like the country’s, is nearly 150 years old, and unfolds across a vast ecosystem of independent, grassroots organizing. The message to working people has always been straightforward: The business and political class are concentrating greater and greater amounts of wealth and power. They are numerically tiny and see our unity as a threat to be eliminated. But by recognizing our shared fates, and pooling our enormous numbers, we can whip the “money power” and rearrange our institutions to satisfy the public good.

When Georgia’s first populist wave touched down in the late 1800s, King Cotton had only recently been dethroned. The Civil War had just liberated four million kidnapped humans from unpaid labor, representing an epic expropriation of private property paved with 750,000 dead soldiers. Almost immediately, some of these newly freed people pointed out that their wage labor looked an awful lot like forced labor.

In an 1883 speech, Frederick Douglass argued that “The man who has it in his power to say to a man you must work the land for me, for such wages as I choose to give, has a power of slavery over him as real, if not as complete, as he who compels toil under the lash.”

Douglass was teeing up his main argument. Since every worker was at the mercy of the boss, unity between Black and white workers was the key to overcoming the petty tyrants who ordered them around. Just as importantly, he warned, “it is a great mistake for any class of laborers to isolate itself.” Instead, there should be a strong “bond of brotherhood between those” who shoulder the “hardships of labor.” With unity comes strength, in other words, and if white workers could overcome the myth that they were members of a special “skin aristocracy,” then working people might finally be able “to organize and combine for [their] own protection.” Otherwise, there would be no end in sight to “the sharp contrast of wealth and poverty” in which “the landowner is becoming richer and the laborer poorer.” The Populist Party wouldn’t have its launch party for another decade, but Douglass already had the battle lines clearly drawn.

For a brief and bright moment, there were signs that white laborers wanted in. When the Populist Party formed in 1892, Georgia was

one of its most powerful outposts. Emerging from the ashes of the old Farmers’ Alliance, their assessment was simple: The country’s economic and political systems loyally served the rich at the expense of everyone else. Outraged by the Gilded Age’s runaway inequality, the populists called for an egalitarian alternative, including aid for struggling farmers, expanded voting rights, and public ownership of key industries like railroads.

The connection to Douglass’s argument was clear. And though we don’t have any uplifting multiracial team chants to show for it, many white farmers saw the obvious strategic importance of linking arms with their Black peers in the fight for a fairer world. (Black farmers, who wanted to join the Alliance but were pushed into separate, secondstring groups, did not need to be convinced of the importance of working-class unity.) But it would all be pitifully short-lived.

A monument to Tom Watson, a giant of Georgia populism, sits across the street from the state Capitol in Atlanta. In an 1892 essay titled “The Negro Question in the South,” Watson argued that a union of Black and white workers would have “flung the money power into the dust” years ago. The “crushing burdens which now oppress both races in the South,” he added, will force them to “become political allies” and “on these broad lines of mutual interest … the present will be made the stepping-stone to future peace and prosperity.”

But like its counterparts across the country, Georgia’s populist vessel was partly devoured from the inside. Watson would eventually win a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1920, long after the Populist Party’s official demise and only after swapping out pleas for “interracial cooperation” with “brutal political and social repression of Black Americans,” writes James Cobb, one of Georgia’s leading historians. Where he had once courted Black workers, Watson was now calling for their total disenfranchisement. Where he had once “urged that lynching be made ‘odious’ to whites,” he now argued “lynch law is a good sign … that a sense of justice yet lives among the people.”

Reading it now, it’s almost as if the 1892 essay was a warning letter to his future self. The earlier Watson saw clearly that all workers had a “similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy,” and that “you are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of … financial despotism which enslaves you both.” Future Watson said to hell with all that. By his own standards, racist tirades obviously undermined the actual goals of populism. But they had narrow perks for an ambitious Georgian at the turn of the 20th century.

I want to be careful here. The Populist Party had many powerful archenemies, including the “economic royalists” Franklin Roosevelt would eventually battle. There’s plenty of blame to go around for its demise. That includes the Tom Watsons of the world, who sat on the inside of this promising vehicle for working-class power and started shooting out the tires before it could really take off.

It’s important to note, however, that Watson betrayed populism’s core principles. What made populism distinct was its diagnosis of what caused economic suffering in the country, and the target of its fury. Racism poisons every corner of American political life, and the populists were no exception. But, Frank writes, “populists were not the great villains of the era’s racist system. That dishonor went to the movement’s archenemies in the southern Democratic Party, leaders who were absolutely clear about their commitment to white supremacy.” Populism, with its emphasis on broad working-class unity, “was an attack on these doctrines” and the elites who depended on them. If you undermined that unity, then you undermined the populist mission itself.

Watson’s story is so bizarre. It plays out like a twisted Shakespearian plot twist, except Watson does the double-crossing himself. By his own assessment, he ended up strengthening the hand of the exact group of wealthy landowners the populists furiously opposed, who stood to gain enormously from driving white and Black workers apart. But Watson’s ambition got in the way of his stated goals.

Ossoff (left) and Warnock (right) started arguing that the government has a duty to ensure everyone’s basic survival. OTHERS WOULD FOLLOW. Episodes like the Savannah longshoremen strike of 1891 signaled the staying power of divide-andconquer politics. That fall, nearly 2,500 Black workers walked off their jobs at the docks, demanding higher wages, overtime

Just because attacks appealing to racial disunity are predictable does not make their success inevitable.

pay, and union recognition. According to Temple University’s massive archival “Black Worker” series, “a committee of the Savannah commercial leaders organized” to break the strikers’ will. Since Black workers refused to cross the strike line, “company officials decided to hire white replacements.” What could have been a remarkable example of Black and white workers winning concrete gains only confirmed that “race could be used to divide the working class.”

Just because attacks appealing to racial disunity are predictable does not make their success inevitable. As Nsé Ufot, CEO of the New Georgia Project, one of the many organizing groups working to activate voters of color, says, “There is a long history of radical resistance all across the state of Georgia.” Popular movements like the abolitionist, women’s, civil rights, and labor movements successfully dragged the United States to greater levels of human decency, and all have deep roots in the American South. Labor unions, for example, were arguably at their most dangerous when they teamed up with the civil rights movement, combining calls for racial and workplace justice based on the belief that “economic security and anti-discrimination were joined at the hip,” as Thomas Sugrue, professor of social and cultural analysis and history at New York University, says.

Georgia’s own Dr. King spoke frequently before labor unions and their federations. In a letter to the Amalgamated Laundry Workers in 1962, King wrote: “The coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the Negro and the forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.” King’s final mission before his death was in support of striking Black sanitation workers in Memphis.

King also constantly warned of the dangers of failing to directly address the deadly power of racism to wipe out working-class unity. In his 1965 remarks concluding the Selma-to-Montgomery march, King described a “southern aristocracy” shaken to its core by the “threat” of poor Black and white people coming “together as equals.” To prevent this, “the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow,” which “he ate” when “his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide.” This, he said, perhaps with Tom Watson in mind, “eventually destroyed the Populist Movement.” As Thomas Frank writes, “King was suggesting that the movement of the 1890s had an obvious modern counterpart. Working people of both races could come together once more to build a nation of justice and plenty.”

But the opposition, determined to keep workers segregated by race, in proximity and in consciousness, had modern counterparts too. Before civil rights legislation and working-class solidarity could even get off the ground, they were dusting off the predictable playbook: Flood the zone with enough racist garbage to split the coalition.

You have likely heard of its most infamous update: the Republican Party’s Southern strategy. Launched by Richard Nixon and echoed by fanatical champions across the country, including Georgians like Lester Maddox and Newt Gingrich, conservatives began serving up white resentment like hotcakes, gobbling up the Southern political map in the process. This came to be known as the cultural leg of the Republicans’ “threelegged stool.” The other two were nonstop fist-pumping for war and worship of free markets. But those either don’t reliably move people to vote, in the case of endless war, or actually repulse them, in the case of wildly unpopular conservative ideas like cuts to the social safety net and tax breaks for the rich. The economic and military legs of the stool get you corporate campaign donations; they do not get you votes.

Long before Trump, conservative stars like Nixon, Gingrich, and Ronald Reagan would hammer “elites” for looking down their nose at everyday people. These seeds would eventually blossom into the Tea Party and the Trump campaign, long before being rebranded as “right-wing populism.” All the while, the GOP’s actual agenda has remained slavishly devoted to the country’s increasingly powerful business class. Trump’s signature legislation, remember, was a $1.9 trillion tax cut for the wealthy.

Until recently, the Southern strategy was treated as nearly irreversible. The best Democrats could do was hold onto a few seats and prevent the rest of the country from being swallowed by a sea of red. But the math is changing.

Before Biden’s surprise victory, Democrats had not won a presidential race in Georgia since 1992. For years, they told themselves that winning statewide office required at least 30 percent of the white electorate. This meant becoming a bootleg Republican Party: worshiping markets, dedicating themselves to world domination, and repeating right-wing bullshit about the moral decline of Black and poor people. It was designed to cleave off enough of a slice of the white vote to earn a victory. The typical messenger was a nondescript white man: John Barrow, Roy Barnes, Max Cleland, Zell Miller, Jimmy Carter’s grandson Jason.

Georgia Democrats rarely pushed that boulder uphill. The last Democratic gubernatorial victory was in 1998. By 2006, just three Democrats—Black officeholders Thurbert Baker (attorney general) and Mike Thurmond (labor commissioner), and 42-year agriculture commissioner Tommy Irvin— managed to win statewide. By 2010, the entire suite of statewide officers were Republican, and it stayed that way for a decade.

Stacey Abrams offered an alternative to this losing scenario. After entering the Georgia House of Representatives in 2007, she proposed that the party instead focus on mobilizing young people and people of color, who voice their disgust with politics by finding better things to do with their time.

Though Abrams didn’t win the governor’s seat in 2018, she came within 55,000 votes, closer than any Democrat in recent history. She only won 25 percent of the white vote, supposedly a disqualifying condition. But Abrams put up unparalleled numbers with Black, Latino, and Asian American voters, bringing her within a few disenfranchised votes of victory. As FiveThirtyEight reported, Georgia’s blue turn is unimaginable without Abrams’s years-long project to juice turnout among people of color, even if the greater factor in the Biden victory was genuine suburban horror at Trump’s rotten personality.

With the victories by Ossoff and Warnock, Georgia’s political math has been recalculated. Neither candidate hit 30 percent of the white vote, though they came close. A new and more liberal electorate attracted to the fast-growing Atlanta metro area has made those numbers more reachable. And the runoffs spotlighted the overwhelming power of voters of color, including in Black rural areas, which saw presidential-level turnout. These Democratic voters came to the polls in enough numbers to win because Ossoff and Warnock actually offered them something; populist messaging and multiracial organizing went hand in hand. The old wisdom about what it takes to win in Georgia has been shaken like an Etch A Sketch.

THE QUESTION NOW IS how to make sure it lasts. True to the populist tradition, every Georgia organizer I spoke with stressed the importance of building an independent progressive movement that “haunts the dreams” of politicians across the country to ensure they actually deliver for working people. Not a single organizer talked about how excited they were to go home and hope for the best, now that Democrats have a Senate majority. They see this as a time to apply relentless pressure to ensure a positive progressive agenda is carried out. “The issues that are paramount to Black women’s lives just don’t get the air they deserve. Black women don’t get asked, ‘What’s important to you? What do you need?’” says Malika Redmond, the co-founder and executive director of Women Engaged, an Atlanta-based organization that fights “for social change through voter engagement and

Georgia’s blue turn is unimaginable without Stacey Abrams’s years-long project to juice turnout among people of color.

reproductive justice advocacy.” Redmond’s organization knows that they cannot rely on mainstream institutions or parties to seriously address their priorities without constant activism. Women Engaged works to generate “something that we can hold the powerful accountable for,” Redmond says.

Each organizer was clear about the difficult battles ahead. “Elections are a snapshot of a moment in time,” says Gwen Mills, the secretary-treasurer of UNITE HERE. They tell us “how much organized power there is” and “who you can get elected at a particular time.” After “a short breather,” Mills says, it’s back to organizing in the streets and workplaces. You have to keep the grassroots fire burning, Mills says, because “the power and the money behind the corporate lobby is just staggering.” In other words, elections may clarify where things stand or even modestly improve the battle terrain, but they have very limited firepower beyond that.

Building a strong working-class army requires addressing the weak spots that the opposition exploits and, as we’ve seen, has always exploited. People of color make up about half of Georgia’s population (though still 39 percent of the vote, even in the Senate runoffs). And since racism is also a weapon used to loot the country’s most vulnerable—think housing segregation, income and wealth inequality—workingclass issues are Black and brown issues.

“One thing we know is that if we’re not talking to our members, somebody else is,” says Marlene Patrick-Cooper, president of UNITE HERE Local 23, which covers a large swath of the South. “All over the country, there has always been an employer goal to divide the workers.” This is a lesson from the School of Hard Knocks. For decades, divide-and-conquer tactics have eroded unions, weakening their defenses against demolition efforts like “right to work.” As a result, union membership was pushed off a cliff in recent decades, falling from one-third of workers in the 1950s to barely 10 percent today. That fall tied weights to the ankles of wages, and they haven’t gone anywhere meaningful since.

Instead of running from the problem, UNITE HERE is tackling “the racial history of right to work” head-on, Patrick-Cooper says. The union has established a two-day training session, where members learn how racism created cracks wide enough to ram policies like right to work through countless statehouses. “You cannot be successful as a union if you don’t have solidarity on the shop floor, if workers don’t all stand together,” Mills adds.

This is the kind of key defensive tactic that makes an offense possible. If solidarity isn’t built between elections, and if unions and

The failed strategy of Kelly Loeffler’s loss reveals a conservative movement that has nothing to offer and knows it.

other independent sources of power cannot secure concrete gains for working people between elections, then their coalitions will be repeatedly torn to pieces and forced to scramble frantically once election season rolls around. After all, it was the combination of long-term anti-racist work and Southern progressives’ positive vision for the future that made Georgia competitive in the first place. Consider the split screen again. The conservative movement not only has a wildly unpopular agenda, but cultural resentment, warmongering, and free-market cultism just don’t pack the same electoral punch they once did. As Brooklyn College professor and author of The Reactionary Mind Corey Robin puts it, the reason Republicans under Trump have been turning up the volume on white rage isn’t because its powers are growing. They hope that the noise will compensate for the fact “that conservatism is actually weaker than it has ever been.” White identity pays out thinner and thinner dividends to an increasingly miserable base. As Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton show, “deaths of despair” already had life expectancy for middle-aged white people declining before COVID-19. The same population who fueled the right-wing march that started 40 years ago is poorer than they were at the beginning, and they are arriving at death’s door ahead of schedule. During that time, the right’s agenda has dominated everywhere: privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich and destruction of the country’s already pitiful social welfare state, not to mention violent opposition to civil rights gains like desegregation. Everybody hates this agenda, with the possible exception of overthrowing the gains of the civil rights movement, a truly American pastime beloved by liberals and conservatives alike.

The point is, bigotry is all that’s left for the right. Kelly Loeffler, for instance, spent the runoff election blowing 150-year-old dog whistles in a losing campaign as grotesquely racist as any fire-breathing segregationist’s. She routinely painted her opponent, a Black pastor who preaches where Dr. King once stood, as a “radical liberal” hell-bent on bringing “socialism and Marxism” upon these delicate shores. “Loeffler and Perdue can’t run as themselves. They can’t run promising anything,” Shenker-Osorio tells me. “Because they don’t stand for anything that most people want. So the only thing left to them, and the Republican Party more broadly, is to try to scare people about the other side and to try to trade on and kind of exacerbate people’s feelings of resentment.”

Warnock counterprogrammed with campaign ads of him with puppies, offering a cuddly portrait. But more important, he countered with policy, populist progressive policy, meant to improve people’s lives and fortunes. Loeffler’s flailing race-based appeal fell short.

Her satisfying defeat, of course, does not mean that the right has been defanged. The last decade has provided explosive evidence for Robin’s warning that “weak movements can be dangerous movements,” leading right up to a clumsy but still highly organized insurrection. But the failed and tired strategy of her loss does reveal a movement that has nothing to offer and knows it.

They are now in survival mode. Everyone from Donald Trump to Mike Lee to Lindsey Graham admits that the Republican Party must either snuff out democracy itself or be snuffed out themselves. Mother Jones reporter Ari Berman has been carefully chronicling the entire landscape of modernday poll taxes and booby traps they’ve laid out to mutilate voting rights for Black and brown and poor people. So here’s what we have: an agenda that deposits larger and larger shares of the nation’s wealth into the bank accounts of a tiny few while basically telling everyone else, “Good luck and God bless,” as they face avoidable crises like poverty, starvation, medical bankruptcy, and homelessness. And at the same time, they are working furiously to get the eligible voting pool back down to its 18th-century size because they cannot survive otherwise.

This is the phony populism of the right. The original populist uprising, of course, had its share of hideous blemishes. But in terms of actual principles, today’s conservative movement is basically populism’s evil twin. It may dress itself up in populist clothing sometimes, but when you compare their deeper worldviews and aspirations, they clash furiously.

On the other screen, progressive and leftwing grassroots organizations are trying to fling the doors of democracy open wider to enact a sweeping progressive agenda. Georgia is absolutely bursting with them. The immigrant rights organization Mijente apparently contacted every Latino voter in the state during the runoff election. According to a press release, the New Georgia Project “reached out to Georgians through more than 10 million calls, texts and door knocks.” People’s Action, a network of state and local grassroots organizations, called 1.2 million low-propensity voters: students, Asian Americans, and voters in rural areas. They held over 23,000 in-depth “deep canvass” conversations and got well over half of those voters to turn out for Ossoff and Warnock. Black Voters Matter spent the runoff zigzagging through often-neglected Black corners of the state. And UNITE HERE also passed the one-million-door threshold.

For many observers, the runoffs were a referendum on whether Georgia’s “multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, progressive majority,” as Nsé Ufot put it in a recent Intercept story, was sustainable. Could a genuine populist movement, one built on working-class solidarity across difficult fault lines, have enough punching power to whoop the far right in the Deep South? January 5th provided an answer, though the work goes on. n

Eli Day is a Detroit native and investigative reporter whose work has appeared in Current Affairs, Mother Jones, The New Republic, Vox, and In These Times.