For me, there are two key lessons in moving beyond this year's disastrous midterms. The first is that progressives need to build a permanent grassroots infrastructure, so that they begin treating politics as a year-round endeavor and not merely show up at the last minute to endorse a lesser-of-two-evils candidate.

The second lesson is that when you do have this type of infrastructure in place at the local level and are using it to push forward your own agenda, progressives can prevail even when there is no inspiring leadership coming down from national officials.

Make no mistake, whatever success the Democrats had in holding off a more painful Republican onslaught in these midterm elections was due to the ability of labor and progressive allies to use their field operations to mobilize the base of the party. Over the past fifteen years, these operations have become more sophisticated than ever before -- with national initiatives like the former American Coming Together (ACT) leading the way in using new technologies and massive field campaigns to identify and turn out voters.

However, these national efforts still run on a cyclical basis, gearing up with each new election season and shuttering their operations after election day.

I believe that is a critical mistake. Closing down political organizing offices between election cycles carries a monetary cost, since it is expensive to start from scratch in rebuilding local field operations every two or four years. And it brings less obvious costs as well. It results in a lack of the kind of institutional memory that allows both for true social movement involvement in governance and for real accountability for candidates once they are elected.

Fortunately, in local municipalities, and to some extent in state-level politics, there are a growing number of instances -- spread throughout the country -- in which progressives are doing things differently.

One of the groups that is helping to spur the change is the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC). Ballot Initiative Strategy Center is the progressive community's only research and capacity-building organization focused solely on the ballot measure process.

Shortly before the elections, I spoke with BISC Executive Director Justine Sarver to discuss what progressives need to do moving forward. She pointed to the lull in activity between election cycles as a key issue. "I think the problem is that our activists wonder in between what they are really accomplishing," she said. "I think we have to do a better job explaining why people need to stay involved in between cycles and also motivating them around issues that they care about. Elections create the expectation that once you win things will just be different and then you don't have to do any more work. It's our responsibility to keep people engaged."

Beyond continuity, attention to local concerns is a second aspect of building permanent grassroots infrastructure. Often, policy debates in Washington can seem remote to people's day-to-day concerns. It is incumbent on progressives to articulate how these debates have fallout in actual communities. As Sarver says, "A positive change would be if Democrats talked not about programs such as Social Security or health care -- but about the real impact these things have on people's lives. It would make it easier for people to relate."

Moreover, progressives at the local level should not wait for leadership from Washington to create and push forward an agenda for change. Instead, they must establish a vision for what progressive governance can accomplish in their communities. They should then structure their political efforts around this vision. Candidates should be judged based not on what deals they cut, but on how effectively they expand the capacity of local advocates to enact the movement's agenda.

Some local issues might ultimately have national significance, but the leadership on them comes from below. Sarver explains, "There are some issues that are going to be more easily organized and changed on the local level that progressives care about that don't ever need to bubble up to a national coordinated strategy... In 2006, there were minimum wage increase ballot initiatives across the country, in that midterm election, and it helped Democrats and it helped people."

The South Bay Labor Council (SBLC), which I headed until 2003, has rebuilt its political program around such principles, working year-round to advance an agenda that immediately impacts the lives of those in the community. As a result, San Jose progressives did not experience the "enthusiasm gap" that plagued much of the rest of the country. Instead, the SBLC mounted its largest-ever effort for a midterm season, mobilizing hundreds of volunteers, contacting more than 145,000 voters, and distributing more than 114,000 pieces of literature to voters' doors.

While they, too, faced some disappointments, South Bay unions and their community allies succeeded in electing all three of their labor-backed candidates for City Council and, in the words of a SBLC spokesperson, helped to "make California a bulwark against an anti-labor tide that swept most of the nation."

In these midterms, BISC also demonstrated that impressive gains can be won at the state and local levels, even in difficult election years. As the organization stated after the elections:

With all the attention paid to candidate elections, it's easy to overlook the fact that ballot measure results told a very different story. By and large, voters rejected right-wing ideology, voting down cuts to key public services, restrictions on reproductive freedom, and a major rollback of environmental protections. They rejected right-wing cuts to funding for education, health care and other key public services in Colorado, Washington State, Massachusetts and other states. Even in conservative Arizona, voters refused to cut funding to early child care programs, as the legislature had proposed. And in Montana, voters chose to increase protections for working families by passing an initiative to cap payday loan interest rates at 36%. This shows that even during hard economic times, Americans value keeping our air and water clean, maintaining safety in our communities, support for high-quality public education and reproductive freedom for women.

If election cycles in 2012 and 2014 are going to produce different results from this year's national debacle, we can't wait for Washington Democrats to realize that they can't win without the dedication of the people in their base. Instead, we need to learn from local activists and take our political inspiration from the bottom up.

