This piece is published as a part of a weekly series, These Revolutionary Times, in which we focus on a small selection of papers, articles, and essays published in various publicly available sources that reflect important political change occurring happening in the county. To see the original piece, click here

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Part I: Changing the System From the Inside

With the primary elections over it seems like a good time to stop and do a retrospective. The original idea for this week’s article was to review progressive/socialist modes of campaigning and how they have succeeded in pulling the Democratic party left over the last year. But I quickly ran into complications when I realized that there are actually two distinct left wing “movements” currently running parallel to each other, each with very different approaches to campaigning. On the one hand, you have an insurgent left made up of outsider candidates and organizations like the Our Revolution, Justice Democrats and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee which focus most of their energy on winning elections. On the other hand, there are more thorough going socialist activists like those in the Democratic Socialists of America and other groups who tend to eschew electoralism in favor of direct action and alternative forms of organizing.

There are significant overlaps between these two movements, to be sure, but you also have to appreciate their differences. So instead of trying to address these two movements in one go, I’m going to look at them one at a time. This week I’m going to analyse the insurgent left and their approach to elections. Then in the next installment I’ll look at the efforts of socialist activists and others and their attempts to create alternative ways of grassroots organizing. Finally, I’ll look at how the two movements are coming together to change politics in this country.

The Progressive Style of Campaigning

The primary season saw insurgent leftist candidates come out in record numbers. With the help of a collection of emerging progressive groups like Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, Indivisible and Brand New Congress, these candidates were able to score impressive breakthroughs, carving out a sizable share of seats across the country. There were disappointments, of course, but in the end even skeptics were forced to concede they had made a serious impact on the political system.

After each round of primaries where the left claimed a stunning upset, there were always a number of retrospective pieces analyzing how they were able to pull it off. To highlight just a few:

Overall, these paint a pretty consistent picture of the progressive strategy and why it allows insurgent leftist candidates to punch far above their weight relative to their limited resources and institutional support. So lets outline some of the strategies they identify:

Go For the Grass Roots, Get Personal

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First, candidates focused on campaign strategies that ditched expensive television commercials and glossy mailers in favor of direct engagement with voters. This was often a long term project, but it ultimately allowed candidates to build up significant momentum under the radar. It also allowed candidates to leverage the support of local activist networks which shared their goals. As the head of New York Indivisible Heather Stewart put it in the Gotham Magazine article:

““One really important piece of this was just good old-fashioned organizing,” said Heather Stewart, co-founder of Empire State Indivisible, who later went on to work for Liu’s campaign doing communications. Stewart said the coalition began educating voters about the IDC last year through town halls, leafleting, phone banks, and on-the-ground outreach. “So there was a good deal of tracks laid through the education piece. This was over a year ago…it was a coalescence of great candidates, good organizing, people who wanted more than anything from the bottom of their heart to oust the IDC.

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Different groups were assigned to different districts under one umbrella. “We borrowed a strategy from Virginia activists who flipped the House of Delegates,” Stewart said, “which was basically that each group adopted a campaign and a candidate. So then, each group could begin to engage their members in one consistent campaign…It worked very well…There was essentially a captain who captained the grassroots efforts in each campaign that talked with other captains of the grassroots effort.”

The overall effort was bolstered by the likes of the Working Families Party, Make the Road Action, and Citizen Action of New York, some of the organized left’s longer-standing infrastructure, groups that share similar progressive goals and sent hundreds of volunteers into the nine districts, relying on a robust ground game to activate voters.””

As the New York Times further explained, this strategy focused on achieving the greatest mobilization of support possible. No voter was taken for granted.

“For these organizers, many of whom are taking principles from the activism world and applying them to electoral politics, a true grass-roots campaign means leaving no voter ignored — no matter the traditional wisdom. It also means splitting time between voters who are traditionally more likely to turn out in a primary (which trend older and whiter than a general election electorate) and “low-likelihood” voters (particularly minorities and younger voters). It’s a strategy that may rankle even the most supportive establishment consultants, who have often seen television as one benchmark of a candidate’s viability”

When Using Technology To Reach Voters and Donors, Think Small

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By taking advantage of new technologies, candidates were able to bypass more traditional means of fundraising and instead focus on small donors, who continue to make up an increasing large share of political financing. They also tended to forgo massive ad blitzes in favor of smaller forms of digital outreach that allowed for more targeted appeals. This also allowed for more feedback from potential voters, which helped candidates better tailor their messages. As the New York Times article puts it:

““A nimble, grass-roots campaign must also be responsive to voter feedback, the experts said. Whether it’s listening to the advice of on-the-ground organizers, or tailoring digital messages to response patterns, the advantage of a nontraditional campaign should be its ability to quickly adjust.

“The whole point of digital is you can test what messages are working,” said Jessica Alter, the co-founder of Tech for Campaigns, a group of more than 8,000 tech workers who are volunteering to use their digital skills to help elect progressive candidates in November.””

Run the Right Candidates for their Districts

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One important factor that the Gotham Magazine article emphasized was the quality of the candidates who ran. Insurgent leftist candidates tended to possess a mix of energy, charisma and personal experience that made them a refreshing change from the staid establishment candidates they ran against.

“No message is complete without its messenger and the anti-IDC movement was no different. The candidates they backed, most of them young progressives running for the first time, presented an alternative to the calcified establishment to a Democratic primary electorate that showed it was hungry for change.

By and large, the candidates were charismatic, energetic, and able to talk policy — some with youthful exuberance, some with seasoned perspective.

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“We proved through heart and hustle and just organizing that it was possible,” she said in a phone interview. “I worked tirelessly and I’m unrelenting, and also a fighter and I’ve always been that way. And every time that somebody told me ‘no’ I worked double as hard and every time somebody told me ‘yes’ I worked triple as hard.””

This is also where the much discussed importance of candidate identity comes in. Progressive candidates like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Andrew Gillum have never shied away from emphasizing how their backgrounds help them better represent their constituents. As the Washington Post described:

“Pressley, 44, is set to become the first black woman to represent Massachusetts in Congress, as Republicans are running no candidate in the 7th District. Capuano, 66, first won the seat in 1998 but struggled to keep up with Pressley as she argued that a young and majority-nonwhite district needed a fresh voice in Washington.

“I fundamentally believe that the people closest to the pain should be closest to the power,” Pressley said on the trail.””

Present a Progressive Vision

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Above all, candidates ran on progressive policies like Medicare for All, fixing the rigged economy, cleaning up the political system, introducing a green new deal, rebuilding the labor movement, abolishing ICE and criminal justice reform which resonate with base voters. As the New York Times pointed out, this also signaled to voters a commitment to deeply help personal convictions free of cynical triangulation.

““Mr. Mitchell cited the success of down-ballot progressives in the New York Democratic primary this week, even as Ms. Nixon’s gubernatorial campaign failed. Six Democratic insurgents knocked off more centrist Democratic incumbents behind uncompromising leftist messaging

The bold policy proposals gave liberals a progressive version of the Tea Party wave in the Republican Party — the angry, uncompromising conservative surge that consumed the party after President Obama’s election. It is also a rebuttal to the idea that progressive Democrats are simply against President Trump.

Ms. Groh, Ms. Pressley’s campaign manager, came to the campaign without any experience in traditional electoral races, but experience in issue-based grass-roots campaigns.

Ms. Groh said she believed voters craved a “level of authenticity,” and innovative policy solutions, delivered by the right messenger, can check that box.””

Building a Nationwide Network

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In many ways these strategies are basically the same as the ones pioneered by candidates like Howard Dean and Barack Obama more than a decade ago. However there are some big differences this time around. First, advances in technology and changes to the larger political culture means that their potential is much greater today. Furthermore, whereas in the past these techniques were used by candidates to harness voters, the relationship between voters and candidates is starting to reverse. The left is a much more self directed movement than it was in 2004 or 2008. It is putting forward candidates across the country to remake the party, not the other way around.

Indeed, as the article in Jacobin cite earlier pointed out, one of the most important accomplishments of all these campaigns is that they’ve helped construct a progressive self-identity. They’ve allowed previously isolated people to come together, understand their problems in common terms and recognize they have a stake in races nationwide.

“For the democratic socialist movement to grow into a major force in American politics, a critical mass of voters and workers must identify themselves as democratic socialists and have a clear, relatively consistent idea of what that identity means. Without such a collective self-conception, the movement will struggle to root itself in the working class, the vast majority of whom are currently unable or unwilling to spend large amounts of time actively organizing. Such a united self-identity among large segments of the working class is also a prerequisite step to building an independent working-class party in the future.”

By pursuing an aggressive left wing program, candidates were able to make themselves lightning rods for progressive energy from across the country. Progressive outlets and leftists activists on social media raised candidate profiles and amplified their messages, even in the face of media blackouts. Likewise, progressive networks were very effective at channeling funds into crucial races. Interstate donations and volunteering, in particular, have given insurgent leftist candidates like Robert Jackson in New York a crucial advantage:

“Over half of donations to Robert Jackson’s State Senate campaign were given by people who do not live in New York State, a City Limits analysis of the Jackson campaign’s financial filings found. Americans residing in all 50 states and five foreign nations have donated to Robert Jackson’s campaign, making up 52.37 percent of the people who have pitched in to help the insurgent progressive defeat incumbent Marisol Alcantara in the September 13 primary…

But it’s the sheer number of out-of-state Jackson donors—some wielding very small checkbooks—that has stunned both his campaign and independent observers. His alliance with national progressive groups has granted his campaign a more visible platform than most other state-legislative races. And the mechanisms by which Jackson has attracted nationwide grassroots support point to a new progressive blueprint for seizing power from what they call “fake Democrats.””

Using Google searches as a proxy, we can see how this dynamic helped candidates like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Abdul El-Sayed, Andrew Gillum, Zephyr Teachout and others. Initially, all these candidates struggled to gain traction against better funded opponents. However, in the final weeks of the election their campaigns experienced a rapid uptick in public interest. By election day, all of these candidates were generating much more public interest than their better known opponents, allowing them to vastly outperform their polling numbers. It’s particularly worth noting that this trend was most pronounced at the national level, with insurgent leftist candidates’ advantage in public interest being more pronounced out of state than instate.

Even when these high profile progressive campaigns didn’t win, they forced establishment candidates to adopt a harder line on policy than they otherwise would. Furthermore, as many noted after the New York primaries on September 13th, they also helped generate momentum for their allies down ticket. Far from failing, these candidates helped lay the groundwork for greater gains in the future.

Challenges

However, while the wind is at the back of the insurgent left in many ways, these models for progressive campaigning can have certain draw backs.

For one thing, while the left has done a good job creating effective interstate networks to channel energy and small dollar donations towards local insurgent candidates, candidates may still struggle to raise their profile to a point where they can fully take advantage of them. Moreover, candidates may still have trouble translating this national energy into extensive support at the local level. Worse yet, maintaining that level of support is difficult when limited resources need to be spread across multiple races simultaneously. The natural bias towards national races has made this issue particularly daunting for candidates running for state and local government, as Governing Magazine notes.

“The left’s anti-Trump fervor at the federal level is not fully extending itself into state races. While progressive congressional candidates are being generously supported by super PACs and individual donors eager to overturn Republican majorities in Congress, gubernatorial hopefuls aren’t seeing the same type of support.

“A lot of resistance-attention is focused at the Washington level,” says Catherine Vaughan, CEO of Flippable, an independent group supporting Democratic candidates for state legislatures. “We have been trying to get people focused on states. We are trying to show people that it’s even more important that we elect more progressive governors and legislators in the states.”

Another problem that the left has run into is the tendency to get caught up in the political horse race. For the most part people on the left know they’re playing a long game, but It’s easy for activists who have poured their heart and souls into campaigns to see each election as a matter of life and death. When they win its electrifying, but when they lose it can be devastating. The political press has particularly preyed on this, taking every loss as an opportunity to declare the political left dead and buried. All this can be deeply discouraging, and if we’re not careful it may sap the progressive movement of its vitality.

But perhaps the biggest challenge, and opportunity for the left comes from institutions. While many of the strategies we’ve covered above have helped insurgent leftists get around their lack of institutional support, if they want to make their gains permanent they’re still ultimately going need to start converting the institutions that underpin the Democratic party.

And understand, I don’t mean institutions in the sense of large well funded organizations, like think tanks and PACs. I mean institutions as things people are familiar with that they implicitly trust. Not “the church” as in the vast corporate entity, but “the church” as in that place around the corner you go every week with the nice pastor who gives you advice. These are the sort of institutions that always have, and probably always will, form the core of politics.

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When insurgent leftist candidates have the support of those sorts of institutions they’re going to have a much easier time leveraging the energy of the progressive movement at the national level into support on the ground. Andrew Gillum provided a very good example of this in the way he was able to aggressively campaign through the institutions of the African American community in Florida. To be sure, progressive endorsements, fundraising and grassroots campaigning were all crucial for him, but so was the fact that he spent his Sundays going to 7 churches at a time and was the only candidate to bother showing up to an NAACP forum. Similarly, it was a major turning point for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she was endorsed by the Pan-American Democratic Association, and the backing of a few well know politicians went a long way in helping the various insurgent candidates running for the New York Senate bring down the IDC.

But gaining the support of institutions like this takes status and social capital that outsider candidates just don’t have. By contrast, a candidate coming from the party establishment will almost always have institutional support by default, simply by the virtue of their position and association with the party. Indeed, the biggest reasons why party machines are so intractable isn’t their deep pockets, but their ability to abuse these trust networks.

To some extent, winning elections is its own solution to this problem. As progressive candidates take their seats and establish long term working relationships with local institutions, they will generate social capital that they can be passed on to other candidates in a virtuous cycle. But there’s a very high barrier to entry for this sort of tactic, and it may take years for it to really get anywhere. Plus there’s always a risk that as candidates become established they may abandon their reforming impulses in favor of ingratiating themselves to the status quo. Neither of these options are particularly appealing.

Conclusion

So we’ve come to a bit of an impasse. Leftist insurgents need institutional support to get into positions of power, but the easiest way to get institutional support is to be in power. And even if they do get into power and win the support of institutions they may just as easily end up being co-opted by the system as vice versa.

To get around this problem, the left needs to think beyond just elections. It must also engage in a broader project of social transformation. This means addressing social problems through direct action, becoming a permanent and beneficial presence in people’s lives, building relationships within communities, reforming social institutions themselves and creating their own alternatives where possible. These are projects that the other component of the left, the part that operates primarily outside of the electoral system, knows all too well. And in part II we’re going to take a look at some of those efforts.