Year-Round, Locally Based Precinct Organizing Is Essential for Moving the Democratic Party (Or Any Other Group) Leftward

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin and his wife Loretta chat with precinct captain Joe Poelsterl

"The most important job I ever had was Precinct Captain." —Harry S Truman

By Meteor Blades
Progressive America Rising via DailyKOS

March 22, 2015 - In the past few months, starting shortly before Christmas, the founder of this blog has several times made comments about future elections that make me grind my molars.

He has said Democrats likely will win the elections of 2016, but we will lose in 2018 because "our voters" turn out for presidential elections but not in the midterms. He has said we will be stuck in this conundrum until we figure out how to change the dynamic.

I hate this message. Because Markos is right. And making him wrong will require lots of what used to be called shoe leather and what my grandfather called "organizational calluses." 

We are stuck in a rinse-repeat cycle in which a relatively large percentage of Democratic and Democrat-leaning voters turn out in presidential election years followed by a steep fall-off in said voters every midterm year. Nobody needs persuading that this has massive and massively damaging consequences for the progressive agenda and the vast number of rank-and-file Americans who would benefit if that agenda were turned into policy.

It's true that the older, whiter, richer, more conservative, more male cohorts in America who turn out big in presidential years also don't vote in as high of percentages in midterm elections. But their fall-off is not as precipitous. This Republican advantage is added to (and helps make possible) other right-wing advantages. Two of those: the impact of gerrymandering, which is analyzed here here by Jeff Singer using a Daily Kos-developed metric premised on the "median district"; and the impact of a move away from split-ticket voting, analyzed here by Steve Singiser.

These aren't the only advantages for a Republican Party that has become increasingly right wing. For instance, young people when they do vote, are more likely to choose candidates who campaign for liberal rather than conservative policies. But young people are the least likely age cohort to be contacted to vote.

As we know all too well, chief among the right wing's advantages is the deluge of money—much of it now delivered from secret sources, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court. While it's not, of course, going to be true in every contest, overall the Democrats will never be able to outspend the Republicans. Plenty of examples show that money—even well-spent money—doesn't always win a race. But it confers a big edge. So, to win more races, we need to engage in an asymmetric electoral approach. In blue states and red ones.

Don't get me wrong. There is no silver bullet. Good candidates at every level of government for every office are a must. And we definitely have too few of those. Good policy ideas are crucial. We've got them, but it's hard to get some elected Democrats to support them. Those are problems to be solved.

But year-round, locally based organizing in each of the nation's 176,000 precincts is a crucial element for the future success of the Democratic Party. Not the party as we now know it, but one that is more progressive and more willing than it has been to fight vigorously for the economic, social, and environmental interests of the working classes that make up the vast majority of Americans. (Continued)

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The 2014 elections and the ‘Second Great Disenfranchisement’

By David Schultz

Progressive America Rising via Twin Cities Daily Planet

Oct. 12, 2014 - Elections are supposed to be the way people select their leaders. Increasingly that is no longer the case. The courts now occupy an enormous role in determining the outcome of elections–even before they start. That is clearly the case this year where too often the goal has become to rig elections by making it harder for some, especially people of color, the poor, and the young, to vote. This especially seems to be the strategy of Republicans who continue to push the Second Great Disenfranchisement in American history.

Consider what is happening across the country right now, with less than a month before the election and early voting already taking place in many states.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Ohio’s curtailment of early voting which was adopted by Republicans, after a federal district court and a court of appeals stayed the law. Republicans in Wisconsin pushed through a strict voter ID law and just in the last few days the Supreme Court has enjoined its enforcement for this election. Suits are challenging limits passed by Republicans in North Carolina limiting on same day voter registration and a ban on counting ballots from incorrect precincts. And in just the last few days a federal judge enjoined a voter ID law in Texas that would have disenfranchised over 600,000 voters, especially impacting African-Americans and Latinos. This law too was pushed by Republicans including the state’s governor Rick Perry.

In all of these cases it is Republicans pushing to shrink the electorate, to make it more difficult for people of color, the poor, and young to vote. If the First Great Disenfranchisement came after Reconstruction ended in the 1870s, we are now witnessing the Second Great Disenfranchisement. The former ushered in the era of Jim Crow, polls taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses as tools to deny African-Americans the right to vote. Today claims of voter fraud and measures such as voter ID, long voting lines, eliminating early voting, and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act are the tools to accomplish the same.

Republicans generally are advocating limits on voting, depressing voter turnout even more during midterms elections when Democrat-leaning voters are less likely to show up. This seems to be part of a national strategy to rig elections in their favor. In some states, such as Wisconsin and North Carolina, these curtailments of voting rights could make a serous difference in who wins as governor or the US Senate, and ultimately which party might control the Senate.

But even beyond legal efforts to disenfranchise, another one is occurring. Nationally, perhaps only around 38-40% of those eligible to vote this year. Young people, people of color, and the poor are especially likely to stay home. Yes it may be true that neither of the major parties offers any alternative or real choice for these people, but still one should vote. Vote even if it means writing in a candidate of your choice. Show up, vote, and use it as a protest vote if needed. Get in the habit of showing up and demonstrating to the two parties that your voice matters and it should be considered.

A lot of blood and energy was spent in the passed to get the young, people of color, and the poor the right to vote. Don’t waste those past efforts. Remember, there are many people who don’t want you to vote and who did not want your ancestors to vote. Voter ID laws and other legal restrictions are bad but it is even worse if you decide not even to bother to show up.

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The South’s Victim Complex: How Right-Wing Paranoia is Driving New Wave of Radicals

(Credit: AP/Dave Martin)

New wingnut neo-Confederates may be laughed at as they enter Washington, D.C. But here's why their anger is deadly serious

By Matthew Pulver

Progressive America Rising via Salon.com

Southern voters will go to the polls in November 150 years, almost to the day, after Gen. Sherman commenced his March to the Sea, breaking the back of the Confederacy and leaving a burnt scar across the South. The wound never fully healed. Humiliation and resentment would smolder for generations. A sense of persecution has always mingled with the rebellious independence and proud notions of the South’s latent power, the promise that it “will rise again!” Congressman Paul Broun Jr., whose Georgia district spans nearly half of Sherman’s calamitous path to Savannah, evoked the “Great War of Yankee Aggression” in a metaphor to decry the Affordable Care Act on the House floor in 2010. The war, in Broun’s formulation, was not a righteous rebellion so much as a foreign invasion whose force still acts upon the South and its ideological diaspora that increasingly forms the foundation of conservatism.

The persecution narrative deployed by Broun, so woven into Southern culture and politics, has gained national currency. Contemporary conservatism is a Southern politics. Ironically, the Southern persecution narrative, born of defeat, has spread nationwide to form the basis of Republican victories since Reagan and the conservative hegemony that moderated President Clinton, establishing through President George W. Bush nearly 40 years of rightward movement at the national level.

It is the South’s principal political export, now a necessary ideological substrate in Republican rhetoric. Lee Atwater, the Karl Rove of the Reagan era, explained the nationalization of Southern politics accomplished with the 1980 campaign and election of President Reagan: “The mainstream issues in [the Reagan] campaign had been, quote, ‘Southern’ issues since way back in the Sixties,” Atwater said in 1981. Likely the foremost representative of that Southern mood was Alabama’s George Wallace, who in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, the infamous “Segregation Forever” speech, invoked Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and raged that “government has become our god.” Just months later, that omnipotent force would defeat Wallace when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and forced desegregation at the University of Alabama. Wallace, though, would be rewarded for his stand, and the governor carried five Deep South states in his 1968 presidential run.

A century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1960s was a sort of second federal invasion, with the White House strong-arming Wallace, Supreme Court decisions finally implementing Brown’s desegregation order, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts radically reshaping Southern politics and culture. “The South went from being behind the times to being the mainstream,” Atwater said. It is helpful to consider the inverse: The mainstream GOP adopted the ’60s-era mood of the South. Atwater does not suggest that the South caught up with a modernized conservatism — i.e., that it ceased to be “behind the times” — but that the larger movement regressed, albeit with rhetorical coding to evade charges of old-school racism.

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‘Third Way’ Faction and the Struggle for the Democratic Party’s Soul

Protesters gathered outside Third Way’s offices in Washington, D.C., in December 2013, asking the group to reveal its funding sources.

By Noah Bierman

Boston Globe Staff   Oct 06, 2014

WASHINGTON — On a summer afternoon amid the frenzy of the Democratic National Convention in Boston 10 years ago, a group of Washington business lobbyists, political operatives, and a smattering of senators gathered at one of the city’s downtown law firms to hear a plan.

Members of the group worried that, with the end of the Bill Clinton era, the Democratic Party’s centrist wing had lost its way. Over sodas, they pitched a new think tank named for Clinton’s political philosophy, Third Way.

Fast forward a decade: The philosophy, sketched out privately at the Boston office of Brown Rudnick,
is now at the center of an intense struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

Third Way, backed by Wall Street titans, corporate money, and congressional allies, is publicly warning against divisive “soak-the-rich” politics voiced by populist Democrats. Its target: Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator whose rise to power two years ago helped galvanize Democratic grass roots against Wall Street and pushed the issue of income inequality to the forefront.

This is more than a grudge match. At stake for the Democratic Party is the support of middle-class, swing voters who decide elections.

Third Way ignited a clash in December when its leaders essentially declared war on Warren in a guest column in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, warning Democrats not to follow Warren and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio “over the populist cliff.”

Many on the left were shocked, and angered. Warren’s allies saw Third Way as a proxy — being used by her enemies on Wall Street to scare off the rest of the party.

“Wall Street is extremely good at pushing anybody that is critical of them as being populist, or know-nothings,” said Ted Kaufman, who temporarily served as an appointed US senator to replace Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., then succeeded Warren in leading a special congressional panel that oversaw the bank bailout.

For their part, Third Way representatives bristle at the idea they are doing the bidding of Wall Street power brokers.

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Thoughts on a Bernie Sanders Run

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Progressive America Rising via Black Commentator

To the Point

I first met Bernie Sanders in the late 1980s. He was contemplating a run for Congress and had chosen to take time to study and teach at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We went out to lunch one afternoon.

Sanders was already a legend. An avowed socialist who had served as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he struck me as someone who was quite thoughtful and prepared to listen to views other than his own. We chatted about a matter that has preoccupied me for much of the last thirty years: How to build a national electoral project that is truly progressive and also focused on the fight for power.

Sanders went on to win election to Congress and, ultimately, the U.S. Senate. He has been outspoken on virtually every issue that matters to working people and is unapologetic in his critique of capitalism. At the same time, he works to build unity among progressives rather than simply staking out his claim and expecting people to rally to his flag.

I don’t live in Vermont, but without question, Bernie Sanders is my Senator.

For the last few months, the word on the street has been that Sanders is contemplating a run for the Presidency. Sanders has hinted at the possibility but has not confirmed or denied that he may take the plunge.

Excitement around a possible Sanders run is palpable. After more than one term of the complicated, neoliberal Presidency of Barack Obama—combined with the relentless assaults by the political right on all that for more than sixty years appeared sacred—there is a deep and clear desire among many for a different direction.

Yet a Sanders run brings its own complications.

One issue is whether Sanders should run as a Democrat or as an independent.

There are many progressives and leftists who will automatically suggest, out of disgust with the Democrats, that Sanders should make a “pure” run as an independent. Yet this raises an even more fundamental question: Why should Sanders run at all?

It only makes sense to run for the Presidency of the United States—as a progressive or leftist—if the person is both running to win and running as part of a broader electoral project. A run just to “show the colors” or make a statement is a waste of time. Running for President is both too expensive and time-consuming for that.

On the other hand, if the candidate has a real mass base, is building a broad progressive front around a clear, transformational program, and sees the candidacy as one step in a multitiered process, then it might be worth going for it.

But in suggesting this, I do so with qualifiers. Too many candidates who suggested that they were interested in building a grassroots movement that would transcend their campaigns only to see such candidates close up shop afterwards. A Sanders run as part of a longer-term effort at movement-building and energizing a progressive front only makes sense if there is a demonstrable commitment by the candidate to do the right thing after the election.

Let’s take an example of what not to do. After Obama’s successful 2008 run, there were many people who assumed he was going to keep his campaign organization together as a sort of independent force. But Obama moved it into the Democratic Party instead.

Then there was the choice that Jesse Jackson made in March 1989 when, following the 1988 elections, he completely reorganized the National Rainbow Coalition into an organization that he totally controlled rather than the mass democratic organization that many of its members had thought that they were building.

If a run makes sense, and I think Sanders might be the candidate who would turn his campaign into something lasting, the question is how to do it. I believe that Sanders needs to make a strategic decision to run within the Democratic primary system for the nomination. Despite the discontent with the electoral system among so many people in the United States of America, it is not likely that an independent candidacy at this moment can win. Should the Republican Party fracture, which is a real possibility over the next few years, all bets would be off. But as long as the Republicans stand firm as a hard, rightwing party, it is unlikely that at the national level an independent candidacy can win.

Quite explicitly, I am suggesting that winning must be a major objective of the campaign. The campaign needs to be organized in such a way that it aims to build an electoral coalition that is interested in gaining power, is committed to winning, and has a plan for governing.

Contrary to the contention of some of my friends on the left, there is no contradiction between running as a socialist and running as a Democrat—with the real intention of taking office. Former Massachusetts state representative and two-time mayoral candidate Mel King was an independent socialist, yet ran for state office as a Democrat. Former Congressman Ron Dellums of California was also a socialist and a Democrat. Sanders could run as a Democrat yet be very clear and open about his socialist politics. Such a candidacy would send a bolt of lightning throughout the Democratic Party and change the discourse within it. An independent candidacy would not have anywhere near that impact.

A Sanders candidacy would need to also take on race. We live in a moment that is reminiscent of the period of the Southern coups in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when white supremacists usurped the franchise from African Americans and poor whites, and when Chicanos (in the Southwest) were treated to de facto segregation and voter exclusion. The political right, fearing the future, is moving to exclude millions of voters and ensure the ongoing supremacy of a quite xenophobic Tea Party-esque Republican Party. This is being orchestrated through the brilliant usage of racial symbols, all at a time when people of color have been suffering from the worst effects of the transformation of U.S. capitalism.

For Sanders to run and to make a real difference, he will need to tap into the African American, Latino, and Asian electorate and inspire them with a vision. This has to be far more than a “rising tide lifts all boats,” but must acknowledge race and class as integrally connected. Sanders would need to speak out on the anti-immigrant hysteria of our times, as well as address the manner in which so many workers, particularly workers of color, are being rendered redundant in today’s economy.

He would also need to be a candidate who denounces the misogyny that has pervaded U.S. politics. This is more than the question of abortion. It really goes to women’s control over their own bodies, expectations of women in today’s economy, who is to blame—and not to blame—for the declining living standard of male workers, and basic issues of equality.

I have no worry that Sanders will speak out on behalf of workers. Yet doing so will be insufficient for a campaign to gain traction. Sanders would need to be a spokesperson for a different path, one that addresses not only the issues mentioned above, but also a non-imperial foreign policy and an environmental policy that brings us back from the cliff of climate change. His voice would need to be the voice of the future—the voice of the progressive bloc that seems to be assembling to prevent a dystopian future.

A primary challenge is worth it, even if he just pushes the victor to the left.

The last thing we need is another symbolic candidacy that, while touching our hearts and minds, brings us no closer to clobbering the political right and winning power for the dispossessed and the disengaged.

It can be done.

This commentary originally appeared in The Progressive

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfricaForum, and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” - And Twenty Other Myths about Unions. He is also the co-author of Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice, which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Other Bill Fletcher, Jr. writing can be found at billfletcherjr.com.

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Vote Rush Holt: Don't Give Wall Street Banksters Another Senate Seat

Defend Social Security! Only a Few Days To Go Before The New Jersey Primary  

This week Blue America and Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) sent a joint letter to all our members asking them to support Rush Holt for the open New Jersey Senate seat.

The August 13 primary has 4 Democrats vying for the nomination-- Rush Holt and Frank Pallone, both progressive congressmen, General Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver, a kind of boss-affiliated garden variety Democrat, and the Wall Street candidate, Newark Mayor Cory Booker. The special election itself will be held October 16. Digby penned the letter:

    Last April, just three months before he passed away, the ailing liberal lion Senator Frank Lautenberg issues a strong statement in opposition to proposed cuts to Social Security. He said: "We can't afford to further balance our books on the backs of middle-class families and seniors. The proposed cuts to Social Security benefits are a major problem that would hurt countless Americans.”

    Sadly, the man considered to be the front runner to succeed him, Newark mayor and media darling Cory Booker, isn't willing to hold that line. He said just this week that he'd consider raising the retirement age for younger people, a patented Republican dodge and a sure sign that he cannot be trusted to protect the Democratic Party's greatest achievement.

    But there is someone in the race who will protect Social Security and his name is Congressman Rush Holt.

    Holt not only opposes all cuts to our most important social insurance program, he is a co-sponsor of the Protecting and Preserving Social Security Act, which would expand Social Security benefits not cut them. Where Mayor Booker has said that he has "not formed an opinion" on a carbon tax, something which 41 Democratic Senators have already voted for, Rush Holt is card carrying scientist who strongly supports it.

    Where Mayor Booker thinks calling for repeal of the Patriot Act is "irresponsible", Rush Holt sponsored a bill in the House just this week to do just that. He said: "The executive branch’s groundless mass surveillance of Americans has turned our conception of liberty on its head. My legislation would restore the proper constitutional balance and ensure our people are treated as citizens first, not suspects.”

    Where Mayor Booker considers Wall Street a strong friend and ally, Rush Holt... doesn't.

    The last thing we need in the US Senate is another Wall Street friendly centrist with a propensity for government secrecy and a willingness to cut our most important social insurance programs. There are plenty of those already.

    In the upcoming primary, New Jersey can choose an establishment celebrity who plays a progressive on TV or it can choose a real progressive. We strongly believe the choice for progressives in this race is obvious and urge you support Congressman Rush Holt for US Senate. Please donate what you can and spread the word among your friends and acquaintances in New Jersey.

- See more at: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2013/08/less-than-two-weeks-to-go-before-new.html#sthash.ZBzLKQ0t.dpuf

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The Right’s War on Democratic Rights

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

With the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington approaching, is the time at hand for mass protest and civil disobedience against the Republican/Tea Party's war against voting rights and immigrant rights?

That's among the immediate questions as the Roberts Court has dropped its hammer on the 1965 Voting Rights Act while a dubious "immigration reform" bill passed the Senate on its likely way to an even worse fate in the Tea Party-controlled House. Together with the Court's Citizens United decisions protecting secret money in campaigns, Republicans are doing everything possible to cement a grip on power as a numerical white minority bloc. Successful Republican efforts to gerrymander House seats to gain ground in the Electoral College, combined with the rising tide of anti-abortion restrictions in southern states, reinforce the drift towards a new civil war - one fought by political means with recurring episodes of mass violence. The Court's narrowing of affirmative action also guarantees a widening of the racial divide in education and economic opportunity.

The Court's composition reveals its underlying partisan character, with the decisive tilt occurring after the 2000 election between Al Gore, Ralph Nader and George Bush, in which the Court usurped the verdict of a majority of voters, thus becoming a de facto branch of the Republican apparatus. The Republican bloc now includes: Roberts [Bush, 2005], Alito [Bush, 2006], Scalia [Reagan, 1986], Kennedy [Reagan, 1988], and Thomas [Bush, sr., 1991]. The Democratic bloc includes Ginsberg [Clinton, 1993], Stephen Breyer [Clinton, 1994], Sonia Sotomayer [Obama, 2009], and Elena Kagan [Obama, 2010]. The Republican tilt is likely to continue indefinitely, with Obama only able to appointment replacements to retiring liberals. The tilt will become a lock if a Republican president is elected in 2016.

Lost in both the partisan spin and rhetorical legalisms is that the scale of political power is being tipped far to the right in spite of progressive majorities which elected and re-elected President Obama.

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From ‘Mississippi Goddam’ to ‘Jackson Hell Yes’!

Chokwe Lumumba is the New Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi

By Bob Wing

Progressive America Rising

June 5, 2013 - Chokwe Lumumba--a founder and leader of the Republic of New Afrika, the New Afrikan People’s Organization and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, defense attorney for Tupac Shakur and others, and a first term city councilman--is the new Mayor of Jackson, Miss.

His June 4 victory is a stirring tribute to the courageous Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers who fifty years ago on June 12, 1963 was gunned down at his Jackson home.

In a stunning turn of events Chokwe defeated Jackson’s three-term incumbent and first African American mayor Harvey Johnson, the white Republican-financed young Black businessman Jonathan Lee, and others to win leadership of the city with the second highest percentage of Black people in the United States.

I was privileged to briefly participate in the victory of one of the most radical mayors in U.S. history, right in the heart of Dixie, and to glimpse a new Black-led progressive coalition that intends to fight for the state.

Nina Simone famously cussed Mississippi white supremacy in her 1964 civil rights anthem “Mississippi Goddam.”  The election of Chokwe Lumumba is now an occasion to say “Jackson Hell Yes!”

 ‘Impressed with the People’

Jackson has a partisan mayoral electoral system that allows all voters regardless of party affiliation to cast ballots in any party’s primary election. With their deep pockets and high turnout bloc voting, this so-called “crossover primary” often enables Mississippi’s ultra-conservative white voters and businessmen to influence the candidates of both parties.

Not this time. In a reversal the near unanimous financial and political support that whites gave Jonathan Lee backfired.

By depriving incumbent Johnson of their support, whites inadvertently helped Lumumba upset Johnson in the primary. And in the Lee/Lumumba runoff the full throated white backing of Lee helped most Black voters come crystal clear who he really represented in stark contrast to the powerful progressive grassroots candidacy of Chokwe Lumumba. 

Lee flaunted his deep pockets by filling the airwaves with dire warnings of Lumumba’s “militancy,” “divisiveness” and “anti-Christianity,” but a large Black majority went for Lumumba in huge percentages.

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