FOLLOWING THE CONVENTION, there were many heartfelt good-byes to comrades in arms who had trudged through Iowa snows and scorching hot southwest deserts. But the work continued to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump.
Bernie kept his promise and campaigned throughout the country for Secretary Clinton. Neither of us was convinced that her election was inevitable. And that made him work all the harder, day after day, in state after state, at rally after rally.
I appeared with some frequency on TV in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and traveled to St. Louis to be a press surrogate for her after the presidential debate. At one point Donna Brazile asked if I would be interested in taking her DNC VP seat. And the Clinton campaign asked me to go on the DNC payroll to be a television surrogate for them. I was honored to receive both offers, but I had to turn them down.
Bernie and Jane had asked me to take the helm at Our Revolution, the fledging nonprofit that was inspired by his race for president. It had been my intention to use the lessons we had learned in the presidential campaign to more directly help candidates in the 2016 cycle, but I had to put that aside. There were some serious start-up issues at Our Rev. The alternative to my coming on board, Bernie and Jane said, was that it would be shut down. I could not allow that to happen so soon after its inception.
Not everyone was happy with Bernie’s decision, and there was some blowback. Having spent over a year in a hotly contested primary campaign, I was used to taking arrows. But not from behind. I am pleased to report that despite a few bumps, Our Revolution is thriving—organizing at the grassroots level around the country and helping down-ballot progressives get elected. And I was able, in the summer of 2017, to finally hand off the reins and focus more squarely on electoral politics.
As everyone knows, Hillary Clinton went on to lose the general election. Given the closeness of the general election, I am sure that there are many dedicated people from the Clinton campaign who would go back and do some things differently if they could. I know there are certainly many on our campaign who would love a do-over.
Hindsight is, after all, 2020.
But we now have to look ahead to 2020.
* * *
Bernie’s hard-fought 2016 campaign for the presidency energized millions of voters and brought into the national mainstream the progressive vision he has articulated his entire political life. In the end, we did not secure the Democratic nomination. But, like his 1986 governor’s race that I worked on, the 2016 race has laid the groundwork for future successes. I feel the same disappointment now that I felt back then. But I know what can come out of an “unsuccessful” campaign.
The genie is out of the bottle. The overwhelming support that Bernie received from young people of all ages (he received more votes from young people in the primary process than did Clinton and Trump combined) tells us that the future can indeed witness a transformation to a more just and equitable American politics and economics. In that sense he truly did win in 2016. But people cannot give up or check out. As Bernie pointed out so often on the campaign trail, real change only comes when people stand up and demand it.
But what does that mean in our representative federalist democracy?
THE IMPETUS FOR CHANGE COMES FROM THE BOTTOM, BUT IT IS ENACTED BY PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY HOLD ELECTED AND APPOINTED OFFICE
Profound change throughout our country’s history has originated with the “people.” This is true of women’s rights, civil rights, labor rights, and all other great movements that have worked to overturn unjust conditions and institutions. In every case, however, change was enacted by people in office. Women who marched in the streets for the right to vote ultimately got that vote because they built the political pressure that forced Congress and state legislatures, almost exclusively controlled by men, to pass the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Saying that does not diminish in any way the tremendous sacrifice, courage, and effectiveness of the activists for women’s suffrage.
So many paid the ultimate price—their very lives—to fight for equal rights for African Americans. The names of many of the martyrs of that era are well known, and there are far, far more who labored for justice whose names we will never know. The outrageous injustice of the situation and the brave sacrifice of the African American community and allied civil rights activists sparked action in Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act.
In the most extreme example, it was President Abraham Lincoln—backed by the Union army of over 2 million men—that finally cut loose the shackles of America’s most shameful institution, slavery. That fact does not and should not detract from the tireless and thankless work done by abolitionists of all races and by those who risked everything to help enslaved African Americans find freedom before emancipation.
The lesson here is twofold. One, through organizing and sacrifice, people can change the debate and transform the popular consciousness to the point that elected leaders are forced to act. Two, at the end of the day, change is put in place by the political leaders.
In 1981, Bernie won the Burlington mayor’s office by a mere ten votes. Under his leadership, Burlington developed a perpetually affordable homeownership program, ensured that the waterfront was developed in a way that created large public spaces, supported programs for youth and the arts, and more—all while keeping property taxes down. If Bernie had not been elected, he certainly would have continued his lifelong work in support of everyday Vermonters. But all the accomplishments of his administration would never have been. His demonstrated vision and, frankly, competence at running Vermont’s largest city would ultimately be the foundation of his successful runs for federal office.
That is why we need not only a movement that pushes elected officials to do the right thing but also to elect political leaders who will do the right thing even when a million people are not in the streets—political leaders whose first impulse is to make life better for the American people in every community rather than perpetuating an inequitable status quo. We are all living through an era where reaching that goal is imperative, where we are witnessing in the starkest of terms what it means to have a government that is antagonistic to the most basic needs of the clear majority of Americans in terms of economics, social justice, or environmental sanity.
This is the challenge that this generation faces. How do we create, as Bernie would call it, “a government that works for all of us”?
WE HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO DO, FOLKS
For those of you who have not tilled the fields of American electoral politics recently, the situation in not good. Having Donald Trump in the White House and a Republican-controlled Congress is bad enough. But it is worse than that. Since 2010, Democrats have lost almost a thousand state legislative seats. Prior to the 2017 elections, Republicans controlled the legislature in thirty-two states. To all of you who vote in presidential years and not in those “inconsequential” off-year state legislative elections, and to those national party leaders and donors who have ceded this arena to the Republicans and their big donors, let me lay out as plainly as possible why we are at the tipping point.
As we approach 2020, there has been increasing discussion of state legislative races in the context of congressional gerrymandering. Republicans now control thirty-three governors’ mansions. Republican legislatures and governors, through their dominance of state government–run reapportionment, have stacked the deck against Democratic congressional candidates for a decade. That’s a critically important point. But here’s one that’s even more troubling.
Republicans almost control enough state legislatures to call a convention to amend the United States Constitution. Let’s look at how close we are to that dystopian nightmare.
Article V of the United States Constitution allows the legislatures of two-thirds of the states to call a constitutional convention. That’s thirty-four states. That puts the Republicans only two away. According to Stephen Wolf’s analysis for Daily Kos after the 2016 election, in addition to thirty-two state legislatures being Republican-controlled, the legislatures in five states are split, with each party controlling one house. Flipping just two legislative houses nationwide gives the Republicans the power to call a constitutional convention. And only thirty-eight states are required to pass any proposed amendments that would come out of the convention. In November 2017, Wisconsin became the twenty-eighth state to call for a constitutional convention.
One can only imagine the litany of horrors that could come out of such a convention. How many millions could be impoverished, with wealth and income inequality made exponentially worse, by the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment, which granted Congress the power to levy the income tax? How many rights would come under attack? How many liberties could be curtailed? How many Supreme Court–articulated protections—Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education, Obergefell v. Hodges—could not only be reversed but permanently barred by the Constitution from ever being considered again?
Is this danger imminent? Maybe not. But should we roll those dice when the stakes are this high? To turn this around, we must have the courage to ask how we got here and how we reverse it.
HOW COME THEY’RE WINNING, AND HOW DO WE START WINNING?
The empirical reality is that the Democratic Party and its candidates are failing to connect with voters in huge swaths of the country and in many communities. The “why” could fill many books all by itself. There is no one answer, but there are many contributing factors. For any readers who might be confused about the point of this section, it’s not to bash the Democratic Party. It’s about how we build a national party than can win at the local, state, and federal level.
THE REPUBLICANS ARE WINNING WITH THE DEMOCRATS’ OLD PLAYBOOK
The role of big money on the Republican side and, since Citizens United, the enhanced role of corporate money, is a major factor. The Koch brothers can deploy nearly a billion dollars in an election cycle. And, as Politico’s Kenneth Vogel has reported, the Koch brothers alone operate a network of organizations that has “an infrastructure that rival[s] that of the Republican National Committee.”
To be clear, it’s not just the money but how you spend it that’s important. According to NPR’s Peter Overby, the Koch brothers network “is emulating what political parties and labor unions used to do.” They are doing this through “a seamless system of grass-roots groups, designed to advance the network’s conservative and libertarian goals year in and year out, while also helping like-minded politicians.” (Emphasis added.)
The Koch brothers understand what the Democratic Party used to understand. They get that you have to be on the ground year in and year out to be successful electorally. The NPR story, which was broadcast on October 12, 2015, quotes the head of one of their front groups: “What makes this network different … is that we’ve been in these communities now for three, four years and we’re going to be in them in 2017, 2018, 2019.”
Those progressives who say we need more grassroots organizing and those who say we need more emphasis on elections are both right. The success of community organizing feeds electoral success, and vice versa. If Democrats and progressives hope to stem the tide of Republican advances over the long term, the national Democratic Party can no longer just be a fund-raising vehicle for presidential aspirants. It must invest in building permanent grassroots infrastructure in communities from coast to coast. This infrastructure is not a substitute for massive investments in actual elections, it is an indispensable part of it. This infrastructure is not just to build strength among red-state constituencies. It is a very common and justified complaint in many minority communities that the Democratic Party shows up at election time looking for votes and then disappears. This infrastructure needs to be everywhere.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY IS FAILING AS A NATIONAL PARTY, BUT IT’S NOT TOO LATE
There has been a lot of focus on our unexpected loss in November 2016. According to top Clinton staff I spoke with as late as the day before the election, Florida was supposed to be a lock, and the now-decimated blue wall in the industrial heartland was holding firm. Needless to say, that was not the real state of play.
In the wake of that disaster, there has been a lot of finger-pointing at data analytics, strategic decision making by the Clinton campaign, and even at Bernie Sanders (I’m not going to dignify that last one with a response). While it’s clear that there were mistakes made by the Clinton campaign (as there were in ours), Monday morning quarterbacking and blaming technical staff misses the much broader and more important point. The Democratic Party has lost the trust of tens of millions of voters in large swaths of the country.
In that sense, the fate of Hillary Clinton’s campaign was the result of the chasm that has developed between the establishment that runs the party and many voters of all races, including young voters, working-class voters, rural voters, and the progressive community both within and outside the Democratic Party. Is it true that a historically consequential political figure of incredible dignity and decency like Barack Obama can overcome that chasm in an election? Of course, Hillary Clinton herself won the popular vote in 2016. But the failure to address the Democratic Party’s disconnect with voters will not win back Congress, or state houses, or even the presidency.
And this is not entirely a case of benign neglect. I cringe when I hear a member of the Democratic establishment elite or progressive activists who have convinced themselves that they don’t even need to reach out to voters who have become disenchanted with the Democratic Party brand. They have all kinds of political theories to justify why they will win without the multiracial middle- and working-class coalition that has always been the foundation of past Democratic successes. There are coastal strategies, theories about the rising electorate, and even those who believe that the future of the party is affluent suburban Republicans. For many of those who control the party apparatus, these theories are comfortable. They do not require them to fundamentally challenge the reality that their adherence to a neoliberal agenda is killing the Democratic Party.
But let’s admit that these theories have some application. Still, they will ultimately fail as a foundation for the Democratic Party because of our federal American political system. One can piece together an Electoral College victory some of the time with some of these approaches. But what about the United States Senate? What about state governments? You cannot create “a government that works for all of us” unless you want to win over much more of “all of us” than the Democratic Party has been able to do, or in some circles wants to do.
Regardless of one’s political views, no one can maintain that the Democratic Party’s current approach to politics has been effective. Look at the White House, Congress, thirty-three governor’s mansions, sixty-eight state legislative houses. If the Democratic Party were a meritocracy, how many of the architects of its current political fortunes would still be gainfully employed in the field of politics?
Will the Democratic Party win back some congressional seats in 2018? The party of the sitting president almost always loses seats, so one would expect so. Even if we win a dozen seats, it will not demonstrate that the party’s problems are behind it.
Given Trump’s betrayal of middle- and working-class voters at every turn and his bigoted attacks against so many communities, a failure to win a significant number of House seats in the 2018 off-year will be further evidence that the Democratic Party needs an abrupt change in course to avoid the fate of the Federalists and the Whigs.
Frankly, it’s time to turn away from the aberrational rightward shift that has been tearing the party apart since the 1990s—time to return the modern Democratic Party to its historical trajectory of greater equality and inclusiveness. In an interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd, I once said that Bernie was trying to reconstitute the FDR coalition. Chuck’s response was that he was not sure that that coalition even existed anymore. He had a point. And that’s exactly the problem.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY NEEDS AN AGENDA BASED ON SHARED ASPIRATIONS WHILE RECOGNIZING THE UNIQUE CHALLENGES THAT DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES FACE IN ACHIEVING THOSE ASPIRATIONS
The question then becomes: If the Democratic Party were to reconnect with its roots and were to commit to building a permanent grassroots infrastructure nationwide, what would it advocate? The answer is really the same. Return to your roots.
Anyone who’s seen a lot of polling and focus groups is struck by the great commonality of aspirations shared by the vast majority of Americans regardless of their zip code. This commonality of the American aspiration is borne out in a February 2017 Harvard-Harris poll: “Voters across generation, gender, race, and political parties agree that job creation should be [the] top priority” for the Trump administration.
Most of what Americans want is found in that 1944 FDR State of the Union from chapter 11. Put succinctly, they want economic security, they want their children to have a brighter future than they had, they want to be as free as possible from the vagaries of illness and unemployment, they want a retirement without poverty, and they want to live a life of dignity and social inclusion. That’s the agenda that the Democratic Party must authentically champion. It is an agenda that lifts all communities. That is the message of common aspirations that fueled Bernie’s campaign.
An agenda of common aspirations—an articulation of the type of life we want for every American—should not be read as a call to ignore the varied challenges that people in different communities face in reaching that goal. Quite the opposite. When we strive to achieve common aspirations—what Bernie calls “an economy and a government that works for all of us”—we necessarily address what Hillary Clinton in her campaign called “every barrier.” But “every barrier” means “every barrier.” That includes barriers rooted in prejudice and bigotry as well as those rooted in economic inequality and political oligarchy.
For too many Americans, systemic racism and other forms of discrimination are a bar to achieving common aspirations. For others, they are not. Many communities have underfunded schools that hinder the advancement of young people. Others do not. Some communities are suffering the effects of economic dislocation due to deindustrialization. Others are not. And so on. It’s not a question of which barrier takes precedence or is most egregious. We must commit to addressing them all if we want to create a broad-based Democratic Party capable of winning in every state.
The person who has had one foot amputated is unlikely to draw a lot of consolation from the fact that the person in the next hospital bed has lost both. The pain of both has to be addressed, and voters understand that. When voters believe that you are standing with their family, they have no objection to your standing with others’ families as well. Americans want a more just and equitable society not just for themselves but for the nation. If I did not believe that, I’d be out of politics in five minutes.
There is a reason that Bernie’s call for an end to police shooting of African Americans and the need for criminal justice reform received the loudest applause at his rallies across the country even, and in many cases especially, when the audience was largely white. Outside of the context of an agenda of common aspirations, too often the justified efforts to address the needs of one community are painted as coming either at the expense of another or as a preference for one over the other. We have let the Republicans cynically define us that way for too long. We cannot fall into their trap, which allows us to be divided.
An example of one policy proposal that reflects the approach I am advocating is Rep. Jim Clyburn’s 10-20-30 federal funding proposal. As described on his website, it would guarantee that 10 percent of funds for federal programs be invested in counties where at least 20 percent of the population has been in poverty for the last thirty years: “These counties mired in persistent poverty are as diverse as our great nation; Appalachian communities in Kentucky and North Carolina, Native American communities in South Dakota and Alaska, Latino communities in Arizona and New Mexico and African American communities in Mississippi and South Carolina. They lack access to quality schools, affordable quality health care and adequate job opportunities.”
Poverty is an enduring blight on our nation in a way that it is not in other industrialized western democracies. As Representative Clyburn notes, it affects people of every race and from all parts of the nation. Would Clyburn’s proposal, if adopted, disproportionately benefit people of certain races? Of course it would. And it should, because people of color disproportionately live in the counties he describes. But it offers help to all similarly situated people and represents a unifying frame in much the same way as raising the minimum wage does. Is this one proposal enough to base a party around? No, of course not. But its logic is.
That is why efforts like the Fight for $15 has been so successful even in red states, and why half the hands went up at one postelection meeting with Trump supporters when they were asked who supported a single-payer health care system. And that is why even with his radically pro-corporate, anti-working-family agenda, President Trump has yet to even suggest laying a finger on such universal, and therefore universally popular, programs as Social Security and Medicare.
THE PARTY’S COMMITMENT MUST BE AUTHENTIC
Voters don’t always get the nuance of every policy proposal. Nor should they. They actually have real lives, unlike us political types. They want to elect people they believe will do right by them (or at least better than the other candidate). That being said, voters are keenly sensitive to what is known in professional political circles as bullshit. In a world increasingly dominated by the virtual, voters more and more are looking for political leadership that is authentic.
Bernie’s appeal to voters across the country in 2016 had a lot to do with people’s accurate assessment that he was an authentic messenger of the vision he articulated. We saw that in our focus groups. Even when people didn’t agree with a position he held or felt it was not achievable, they believed, correctly, that his support for that position was genuine.
As research by the super PAC Priorities USA (which backed Hillary Clinton) and others has shown, many of the voters who supported President Obama and then voted for Trump hold the view that the Democratic Party’s economic policies favor the wealthy. Many party regulars can and do respond indignantly that that’s not true. But that’s not going to win any hearts and minds, let alone elections.
We Democrats need to ask serious questions about why people have that impression. When big banks were being propped up, corporate bonuses were being paid, and no one was held accountable, what message did it send to voters who, because of the Great Recession, lost their jobs, their homes, and their life savings? How about a recent legacy of job-destroying free-trade deals, including NAFTA and the TPP? Washington insiders may not see the lost jobs as any to aspire to, but that type of economic snobbery is symptomatic of the problem. How about all the coddling of wealthy donors that was revealed in the DNC’s leaked emails? The DNC certainly has not spent hours on seating charts to figure out which unemployed coal miner from West Virginia or struggling parent in Baltimore was going to get to sit next to the president.
The typical response to this critique is that, well, the Republicans do it, and they win. But that fundamentally misses the cynical message that Republicans are peddling. The Republicans are the ones trying to convince Americans that government is incompetent, corrupt, and stacked against the average person. Their behavior merely reinforces the entire theme of their messaging.
On the other hand, Democrats, by and large, favor greater government intervention in the economy, a social safety net, and social equality. Democrats, by virtue of who we are, face the greater challenge. We actually want to accomplish something, and we need people to trust that we are doing it in a way that is meant for their benefit.
Lose that trust and we will lose elections. Imagine the choice that voters face in that situation. One party you view as corrupt promises to do nothing, to leave you alone and spend less of your money. The other party you view as corrupt wants to have a more active role in a number of economic and social spheres and may even ask you or someone else for more money. I can tell you already who Americans are going to choose. It’s not even close. Democrats have got to pick a side—the 99 percent or the 1 percent—and then, as Priorities USA recommends, we have “to name names.”
REASSEMBLING THE SHATTERED GRAND DEMOCRATIC COALITION IS THE ONLY ALTERNATIVE
The shattered components of the grand Democratic coalition need to be reassembled if we are again to become a broad-based national party capable of winning in every zip code in America. I’m not going to sugarcoat the problems of the old coalition, in which some segments were not full participants or had their interests sacrificed at times. But we can re-create a grand Democratic coalition around an agenda of common aspirations without re-creating those inequities. In truth, we can only succeed if we pull all the constituent parts of the coalition toward shared prosperity and dignity. We have no alternative if we are to win. There are no other options.
The failed New Democratic experiment of the 1990s showed that neoliberalism, which is antithetical to the economic interests of working people, only succeeded politically when it relied on triangulation policies that resulted in millions being imprisoned, impoverished, or socially ostracized. That course is unacceptable. The other alternative—continued loss to the Republicans—is also unacceptable.
It’s time to really open up the Democratic Party to as many people as we can and let them interact with the party in the way they feel comfortable—even if they want to be part of our nominating process without getting a laminated membership card. It’s time to start supporting down-ballot candidates who don’t necessarily fit Washington’s neoliberal cookie-cutter formula for success. In most parts of the country, no one likes the taste of those cookies anymore, and they haven’t for a long time. It’s time to get back to our modern roots, with a real agenda of broad-based prosperity and a commitment to include every American. It’s time … but time is running out.