Lead organizers from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign are taking on the consultant class with a new initiative to train the next generation of progressive organizers and staffers. Movement School, a 10-week professional development program launched by Organize for Justice, the sister organization of Justice Democrats, is teaching fellows how to work as campaign managers, communications directors, and field directors. The Campaign Fellows program is meant to create a pathway for young activists from working-class backgrounds to enter official campaign roles and to preserve the lessons grassroots campaigns have learned throughout the years by passing them down to future staffers — all while setting up an alternative political infrastructure that operates outside of the Democratic Party. Ironically, the progressive movement’s work to build its own political infrastructure may have been inadvertently accelerated by a policy designed to suppress the party’s insurgent wing. In March, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee announced a new policy to blacklist any firms working for primary challengers, effectively protecting the party’s white, male incumbents in safe blue seats. As a result of the DCCC blacklist, several consultants dropped the primary campaign of Marie Newman, the pro-abortion rights progressive who has launched a second challenge to Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski, one of the few anti-abortion Democrats in the House. Despite the blacklist, organizations like EMILY’s List, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, have still rallied behind Newman’s challenge. A Movement School participant even went on to work for Newman after the trainings.

“Too often local and state governments are dominated by big money politics, and the policy preferences of the majority, of working people, aren’t reflected.”

In addition to creating a pipeline for diverse talent, the program is meant to help first-time candidates connect with progressive staffers, Movement School co-founder Gabe Tobias said, circumventing consultants and pollsters who advise against talking about ambitious left-wing policies out of fear it turns off voters “without any evidence to back that up.” The DCCC often discourages first-time candidates from running as progressives, Tobias said, so a critical aspect of the school is that “you’re learning about campaigns but not in a value-neutral space, like, ‘whatever wins votes is a good thing.’” Aspiring candidates “get told, ‘If you wanna run in this race, then you can’t, you know, talk about Medicare for All, you can’t talk about Green New Deal; you have to keep it down, keep the volume down,’” he added. Their program, meanwhile, is meant to show that candidates who stick with their values can actually win elections. The message they’re sending is this: “We’ll surround you with the best staff possible, people who will help make that happen,” he said. “That’s an exciting piece of it, too, for the folks who are a little bit on unsteady legs in the early stage of their political careers.”