The Movement, the Party, and the President

In 2020, despite down-ballot losses, the existential need to defeat Donald Trump produced more collaboration and less infighting than the Democratic coalition has seen in a long time. Progressives, notably hostile to Hillary Clinton in 2016, mustered enthusiasm for an ideologically similar Joe Biden. And Biden, having won the nomination with the weakest field operation of any modern candidate, needed to rely on the progressive ground game. His victory was built on a profusion of organizing with a scale, breadth, and diversity unlike any seen since the 1960s.

In a few states—Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia—it all came together. In Arizona, the anti-immigrant thuggery that ran from Sheriff Joe Arpaio to Donald Trump produced more than a decade of organizing and coalition building. Democrats carried the state for Biden-Harris, picked up a U.S. senator, held their own in the state House and flipped a seat in the state Senate. In Wisconsin, with a gifted party chair in Ben Wikler, collaborative organizing won back the state in the presidential race, held or gained legislative seats to block a Republican veto-proof majority. And in Georgia, a ten-year organizing and mobilizing effort, led by Stacey Abrams in concert with burgeoning on-the-ground groups, turned the state blue.

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But those successes, as role models, are more exception than norm. Two core questions remain: whether the intraparty unity can be built on, and whether the key players will draw the right lessons from 2020. For some, it’s all about winning elections in the current cycle. But it’s also about building power and organization for the long term.

Nearly everyone I interviewed agreed that the candidate- and donor-driven system invests too much money, too chaotically, too late in the election cycle.

For this article, I interviewed upwards of 60 people at all levels of the progressive ecosystem. Nearly everyone agreed that the candidate- and donor-driven system invests too much money, too chaotically, too late in the election cycle. “If we had a national commitment to year-round organizing,” says Wikler, “we could find a lot of needles in a lot of haystacks.”

If anyone should appreciate that reality, it’s Joe Biden. Defending and increasing the slender Democratic majority in the House and Senate in 2022 and holding the White House in 2024, in a way that builds long-term strength, will require massive grassroots efforts, beginning now.

The new DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, is a favorite of the activist state party chairs. Harrison, who was party chair in South Carolina before running for the Senate in 2020, tells me, “We missed an opportunity during the Obama administration to build a long-term effective grassroots organization. President Biden could be the greatest party builder in a generation.” If the stars align, Harrison might bring just the right combination of presidential loyalty, party-building, and independent grassroots organizing.

Divisible Democrats

In 2020, divisions and rivalries among the progressive infrastructure were papered over by the urgency of beating Trump. But tensions between reformers and regulars go back a century. Infighting that began in the 1990s between Clinton-era “New Democrats” and progressives reverberates today in the challenges posed by such groups as Justice Democrats, Sunrise, Data for Progress, and the Movement for Black Lives.

The Democratic center, however, has shifted to the left. Many young activists were brought into politics by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Black groups are on the march, yet practical about coalition and power. There is no grassroots group urging Democrats to be more centrist on economics or more cautious on racial justice. Inside the Biden administration, despite a corporate undertow, progressives have several major power posts.

All that said, mapping out this network of institutional and grassroots infrastructure is maddeningly complex. It includes the Democratic Party in its various incarnations, and closely allied national issue groups such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, or the League of Conservation Voters. There is also the labor movement; large donors; mass digital groups such as MoveOn; the new wave of post-2016 resistance groups such as Indivisible and Run for Something; established think thanks such as Public Citizen, Common Cause, Center for American Progress, the Economic Policy Institute, and Demos, which run from center to left; newer and younger groups such as Sunrise; and groups that reflect the new consciousness around racial justice and remediation such as Color of Change.

At best, the progressive whole is greater than the sum of its parts. At worst, it invites dissension, schism, and sprawl.

In addition, there are voter registration and mobilization groups such as Voto Latino and Black Voters Matter; the pathbreaking small-donor platform ActBlue; specialized groups that provide data services such as Catalist; ones that do training such the Midwest Academy; and smaller local groups with names like Tomorrow We Vote, Bay Rising Action, United We Dream, and literally thousands of others. Networks with national reach such as People’s Action, Community Change, the Movement Voter Project, and the Center for Popular Democracy combine year-round issue organizing plus election-year mobilization.

These activists are not only heavily Black, brown, and female. They are heavily young. At best, this whole is greater than the sum of its parts. At worst, it invites dissension, schism, and sprawl. Though Trump has fractured his party, the deeper conservative infrastructure is all too resilient. There are no groups demanding the RNC recognize that rural lives matter. The right knows without being asked to make common cause with the NRA and the Fraternal Order of Police.

Efforts to bring coherence to this sprawl use what the cool kids refer to as “tables,” bringing all the players together for regular information exchange and strategizing. There are state and national tables, as well as tables for donors and tables built on ethnicity, race, and issue causes. These have helped build collaborative coordination for a coalition that resists top-down dictation.

The State Voices is the national coordinating organization for 25 state-based tables of 501(c)(3) grassroots groups, providing funding and technical assistance for their voter registration and mobilization work. For example, Pro Georgia operates as one such anchor in the Peach State. Led by veteran organizer Tamieka Atkins, Pro Georgia has more than 30 member organizations, from Atlantans Building Leadership for Empowerment, to the Center for Pan Asian Community Services, to Women Engaged.

America Votes is the national table for large groups that do partisan 501(c)(4) independent-expenditure campaigns, led by unions, progressive organizations, and reproductive rights and climate groups. “When we started in 2003,” says America Votes founding president Cecile Richards, the longtime leader of Planned Parenthood, “the heads of these groups didn’t even know each other. Collectively they raised a lot of money, but had no coherent strategy.”

This year, America Votes not only raised upwards of $100 million for coordinated campaigns in battleground states. It underwrote early recruitment, training, and stipends for organizers for the general election, even before the primary was settled. These helped jump-start Biden’s campaign against Trump.

Disappointments and Silver Linings

If all this mobilizing was so impressive, why did Democrats bomb down-ballot on Election Day? Voting data has yet to be analyzed in detail, but we can offer a few hypotheses. For starters, while Democrats abandoned live voter registration, big rallies, and door-knocking (until a panicky last few weeks in October), Trump’s campaign was at the doors and the president was on the hustings, exposing voters to his appeal as well as to COVID. Second, a slice of moderate Republicans, notably suburban women, could not stand Trump and voted for Biden, but then voted Republican down-ticket. Also, the Democratic base of younger, minority, low-propensity voters overperformed in 2018 when Trump was off the ballot, but underperformed relative to Republicans in 2020. There were also some unpleasant surprises, still to be fully analyzed and explained, in the shift of many immigrant areas to Trump, as well as a slightly increased Trump share of the Black vote. (This dramatically reversed itself in the Georgia runoffs, where relentless organizing of Black voters led Democrats to take over the Senate.)

But just below the grim top-line news are results that confirm the argument for long-term organizing. In several states, Democrats held their own or gained state legislative seats—and these were exactly the states where effective parties had organized, long term, in concert with movement groups.

In Washington state, Democrats are seemingly sitting pretty with a trifecta of governor, House, and Senate. “People think of Washington as a blue state. It’s not all that blue,” says the state party chair, Tina Podlodowski. She became chair in 2017 after serving on the Seattle City Council and losing a run for secretary of state. “Out of that experience,” she says, “I realized how broken our infrastructure was.”

Podlodowski, who grew up in a union family and went on to work in the tech sector, set about to change that. When she became chair, Republicans controlled the Senate and Democrats held the House by two seats. Now, after intensive party building, the Democrats hold the House by 16 and the Senate by 7. They suffered no losses in 2020.

“I spend about 30 hours a week calling donors to support organizing,” says Podlodowski. “My budget is just under $5 million. I didn’t get a dime from the Biden campaign because I was not in a battleground campaign. He took out $56 million from my state, from my donors. I had to pay $60,000 for Biden yard signs. It took almost an act of God to get a two-minute video from Kamala Harris.”

Podlodowski appreciates that in 2020, battleground states had to get disproportionate money to beat Trump. But going forward, she insists that the funding be spread around. “In 2021, we literally have thousands of local races where we can build a bench for Democrats, test messages, and see how we move the needle,” she says. “The Republicans play the long game.”

The same lessons apply to states dismissed as hopelessly red, where a lot of voters in fact can be moved to vote blue. “State parties are treated as afterthoughts,” says Jane Kleeb, the Nebraska party chair. “They’re seen as bank accounts for national races. We haven’t been taken seriously since Dean was chair.” Even so, Kleeb says, “the Biden team was leaps and bounds ahead of the Clinton team in the way they treated our state party. They ran staff through us, as opposed to around us.”

In this cycle, Kleeb, an unpaid volunteer chair with a staff of two, raised some $700,000, and did a lot of grassroots work in concert with progressive organizations like the Heartland Workers Center, which organizes heavily Latino workers in Nebraska’s meatpacking industry. In a rough year, the Democrats netted a gain of one seat in the Nebraska legislature, and also picked up a supermajority on the state board of education.

Biden carried the competitive Second House District (Omaha and suburbs) by 6.5 points, but the progressive congressional candidate, Kara Eastman, fell short by 4.5 points. She nearly won in 2018, defeating a candidate favored by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in a contested primary. The DCCC retaliated by giving her only token support in the general, which she lost by just two points. “The state party could use about $3 million for paid canvassers,” says Kleeb. “If we had that, we’d be able to flip five more legislative seats and win the Second House District.”

In Arizona, the party lagged well behind its natural constituency. Beginning in 2010, Republicans began sponsoring laws and ballot initiatives to harass immigrants and deny them services. These measures included the notorious SB 1070, allowing law enforcement officials to racially profile people and stop them at will to demand proof of citizenship. The law also criminalized helping the undocumented. Other measures prohibited non-English-language instruction in schools. This was the heyday of the notorious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who exercised his new police-state rights with relish.

The Latino community responded with mass protests, including a boycott of Arizona as a convention location for businesses. More critically, they engaged in inventive bottom-up organizing, loosely coordinated through a voter registration coalition of 23 local groups called One Arizona, and its political ally LUCHA. Over a decade, a million new voters were registered.

In 2011, organizers waged a successful recall campaign against state Sen. President Russell Pearce, a key architect of the immigrant-bashing strategy and lead sponsor of SB 1070. In 2012, the Supreme Court overturned most of SB 1070. Sheriff Arpaio was voted out of office in 2016. Latino voter turnout increased from 32 percent in 2014 to 49 percent in 2018.

The coalition was Latino-led but multi-ethnic. The Mormon Church was a key ally; though far from liberal, it was actively recruiting Latino converts. Sen. Pearce, a Mormon, was a big embarrassment; after the recall, he was succeeded by a more Latino-friendly Mormon. “That law was not only a moral affront to the Mormons,” says a senior Democrat. “It was bad for their business model.”

For most of the decade, the Arizona Democratic Party leadership was of little help. “They thought that their only chance to win was to move to the right,” says Luis Avila, who helped organize a civil rights coalition, Somos America, in 2011. “They were largely irrelevant to our fight.” Over time, the party caught up with the people; or more precisely, the people took over the party. By 2020, one movement activist, Regina Romero, had been elected mayor of Tucson. Several others were elected to city councils and county offices.

Over time, the Arizona Democratic Party caught up with the people; or more precisely, the people took over the party. 

Felecia Rotellini, the state party chair since 2018, worked closely with movement leaders to flip the Senate seat now held by Democrat Mark Kelly and to carry Arizona for Biden. Rotellini stepped down after the election success. The new party leader is expected to be state Rep. Raquel Terán of Phoenix, a leader of the movement against SB 1070 and the Pearce recall.

Jaime Harrison, who calls himself “a Howard Dean acolyte,” has said that he would work to a raise more money for the kind of long-term organizing that links party and movement. As a former red-state chair, he shares the frustration of supposedly red states being foolishly written off by the national party apparatus.

The Grassroots vs. the White House

These state successes mark the beginning of a long-overdue rebellion. To a far greater degree than Republicans, Democratic presidents concentrate power and money in the White House, at the expense of the party base and down-ballot candidates. When the president leaves office, the party has to be rebuilt all over again. Barack Obama was the worst offender, squandering a prodigious organizing apparatus, but he was only repeating a pattern.

To a far greater degree than Republicans, Democratic presidents have concentrated power and money in the White House, at the expense of the party base and down-ballot candidates.

A consummate outsider, Jimmy Carter built his own political operation under the snarky Hamilton Jordan (“My friends pronounce it Jerdan but you can call me Jordan.”) Carter swept into office on a massive post-Watergate tide that also elected 295 Democrats to the House. He had little use for the party.

Carter’s first DNC chair, former Gov. Ken Curtis of Maine, proposed an ambitious plan to coordinate voter files and election analysis, and help state and local parties with voter registration and get-out-the-vote. This was killed by Carter’s political team. In his first year, Carter refused even to lend his signature to a DNC direct-mail effort. By the end of the year, Curtis quit in frustration.

After Michael Dukakis’s defeat in 1988, Ron Brown, a Jesse Jackson lieutenant who had previously worked for Ted Kennedy, was elected to chair the DNC. Working with his legendary political director Paul Tully, Brown rebuilt the party grassroots. When Bill Clinton won the 1992 nomination, Brown and Tully became part of the campaign. Brown went on to be Clinton’s secretary of commerce until his tragic death in a plane crash on a trade mission in 1996.

At first, Clinton grasped the importance of party building. His new DNC chair, Don Fowler, even hired Heather Booth, a widely admired organizer with radical credentials, to design and direct organizer training. But after a promising start, Clinton increasingly centralized operations in the White House, using party resources mainly for his 1996 re-election campaign. He got entangled in a morass of fundraising scandals, like providing Lincoln Bedroom stays for donors and raising money illegally from foreign nationals. Steve Grossman, who became DNC chair in 1996, spent much of his time and talent on the thankless task of persuading donors to pay off party debts, and the ambitious plans for party building took a back seat.

After John Kerry’s 2004 presidential loss, Howard Dean’s famous grassroots 50-state strategy developed digital organizing strategies pioneered by the activists in his own presidential run. His tech team, led by Joe Rospars, went on to found Blue State Digital and then worked for Barack Obama. They raised upward of half a billion online and built an email list of 13 million. (In 2010, the BSD crew cashed in, selling their creation to WPP, the world’s largest holding company for ad agencies, for a reported $100 million. So it goes.)

Dean built an improbable coalition of anti-establishment progressives and state party chairs. He raised money to give every state party $60,000 a year for technology, plus funds to pay three to five staffers, a minimum of $25,000 a month. No DNC chair had ever done anything like that, and it was still a pittance compared to what the RNC does.

Obama won the 2008 nomination in red states that Hillary Clinton largely ignored, thanks in part to Dean. He created a prodigious volunteer army, Organizing for America (OFA). But after winning the presidency, Obama ousted Dean and folded OFA into the White House. The millions of volunteers who had been mobilized by Obama dissipated. It was one of most self-defeating moves in party history. Democrats paid dearly for the weakened grassroots in the 2010 midterms, when they lost 63 House seats, a modern record.

By 2016, under Obama’s DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who also had a day job in Congress, the party machinery was moribund, contributing to Hillary Clinton’s defeat, and setting up an epic clash between the Sanders and Obama/Clinton factions on how to rebuild.

Sanders’s candidate, Keith Ellison, narrowly lost to Tom Perez, the candidate of the party’s Obama/Clinton wing. However, Perez, working closely with Larry Cohen, head of the Sanders group Our Revolution, named Ellison as deputy chair and agreed to many of the reforms demanded by Sanders’s allies. The two factions got behind a unity commission that recommended key changes to make the party more small-d democratic.

The DNC added incentives to induce caucus states to shift to primaries. There were seven caucus states in 2020, down from 14 in 2016. “With the shift to more primaries, participation rates went through the roof,” says Perez. “You build muscle memory, and you have far more diversity.” So-called superdelegates (party luminaries and elected officials) did not get to vote on the first nominating ballot of the 2020 convention. Perez also increased the DNC annual grant to state parties. The reforms made the DNC chair a full-time job, with a $250,000 salary, so that the next chair will not be a part-timer reliant on an executive director. “In the end, Perez worked closely with us on party reform,” says Cohen. “He has supported the initial steps toward party building, but real change must come in the state parties.”

But even if Jaime Harrison turns out to be the second coming of Howard Dean, relations between local party activists and Washington-based party organs are poisoned by the party fundraising committees for House and Senate candidates, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

The DCCC infuriates local party activists by taking sides in primaries, and then punishing candidates who have the effrontery to run against its favorites. It tends to favor centrists over progressives, both because they are often able to raise corporate money or self-fund, and on the theory that voters are attracted by Republican-lite in purple districts.

In 2018, populist J.D. Scholten, a former minor league baseball star, took on far-right incumbent Steve King in Iowa’s Fourth District. The DCCC considered the race unwinnable and provided no support. Scholten lost by just three points. Two years later, the DCCC belatedly backed Scholten. But King lost the GOP primary to a moderate who handily beat Scholten in the general. The DCCC staffing and strategic advice to Scholten was like oil and water. “They kept sending me people who I ignored,” Scholten told me. “Their comms person came with me in rural Iowa, wearing a suit.”

Under former chair Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, the DCCC even blacklisted consultants who work for challengers. The new chair, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, has ended the blacklist, but is not ending the practice of playing favorites in primaries. None of this has intimidated Justice Democrats and a newly energized progressive campaign machine, who keep running against centrist incumbents, and winning.

“You don’t appoint candidates from inside the Beltway, based on who raises the biggest bankroll,” says Howard Dean. “When we do this, we pick the wrong candidate. It takes grassroots.”

The DSCC, if anything, has an even worse record. Tightly controlled by Chuck Schumer, the DSCC likes centrists with military records, who can be magnets for funding appeals. A little-known fact is that when you send money via the DSCC to, say, Amy McGrath (who was trounced in Kentucky by Mitch McConnell), only a fraction of the money actually goes to McGrath. The exact split is a matter of negotiation between the campaign and the DSCC, which uses the national appeal of a McGrath to raise funds to be spent elsewhere.

In Texas, the DSCC disdained two attractive progressive candidates, Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, a Latina labor organizer, and Dallas state Senator Royce West, who is African American, in favor of a former Republican with a military background, M.J. Hegar. Tzintzún Ramirez and West got courtesy interviews, but the decision was made in Washington. In the general, Hegar was clobbered by incumbent John Cornyn, by more than a million votes, running well behind Biden. In North Carolina, the DSCC endorsed the lackluster (and judgment-impaired) Cal Cunningham over two African American contenders.

“You don’t appoint candidates from inside the Beltway, based on who raises the biggest bankroll,” says Howard Dean. “When we do this, we pick the wrong candidate. It takes grassroots.”

The Donor Domain

Enlisting large Democratic donors to invest long-term, rather than just in election-year candidates, remains a challenge. Billionaires also tend to have boundless self-confidence, which sometimes leads to impulsive patterns of support.

In 2004, most of George Soros’s political money went to an umbrella group called America Coming Together, whose goal was both to elect Kerry and to build progressive strength for the long term. “We had a grand plan to mobilize, year in and year out,” says Steve Rosenthal, the former AFL-CIO political director and widely admired strategist, who ran ACT. But after Kerry lost, Soros and ACT’s other big funder, Progressive Insurance’s Peter Lewis, pulled the plug and shut ACT down.

Sixteen years later, Michael Bloomberg put $100 million into Florida, with no results and no lasting infrastructure. Meanwhile, Organizing Corps 2020, led by Rachel Haltom-Irwin and Meg Ansara, was a multimillion-dollar effort to recruit and train over 1,000 organizers, with stipends, for the 2020 coordinated campaign in battleground states. The project worked through the DNC and state and local parties. When the election ended, all campaign staff, including these organizers, were dropped from the payroll, and are currently looking for jobs. There was no source of funds to keep paying them.

“The problem with too many donors is that they think like venture capitalists or hedge fund managers,” says Rosenthal. “Try something and if you don’t win, cut your losses. But that’s not how investing in politics works. It needs to be long-term, you need to develop a relationship with voters.”

By contrast, the right provides massive long-term strategic funding to a relatively small number of core institutions. For years, the Koch brothers have been quietly funding a group called LIBRE, a combination service organization and indoctrination machine for Hispanic immigrants. At a LIBRE storefront, you can take English classes, get help with navigating the social service bureaucracy, and learn about the evils of socialist Democrats. What LIBRE does is a tactic known to groups as varied as Hamas, the original Black Panthers, Tammany Hall, and the labor movement: blend service with political organizing. Nobody underwrote anything comparable on the Democratic side.

While billionaires sit at the same Democracy Alliance table with national labor leaders, few welcome labor organizers into their own businesses.

In 2003, Rob Stein, a former chief of staff to Ron Brown, created a now-famous slideshow that anatomized in great detail the right’s disciplined long-term funding and the collective incoherence of the center-left. He enlisted George Soros, Peter Lewis, and Herb and Marion Sandler to found the Democracy Alliance, intending to solve this problem. After a shaky takeoff, marked by a lot of fuss to fund utterly safe and orthodox groups, the DA added major unions as stakeholders and was nudged left and longer-term by its current president Gara LaMarche.

Big DA donors still lavishly support the center-left Center for American Progress and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. But since 2014, the list of DA-approved outfits now includes more insurgent groups such as Demos, Americans for Financial Reform, the Center for Popular Democracy, and People’s Action. Even so, the DA approved list is only a menu. Actual donations must come from individuals.

Today, nothing is more important than rebuilding the labor movement. But while billionaires sit at the same DA table with national labor leaders, few welcome labor organizers into their own businesses. In an era whose economics and politics are defined by grotesque inequality, it’s hard for a party reliant on billionaires to be progressive on pocketbook issues. This straddle confuses brand, mission, and message.

Progressives have long viewed small money as the antidote to big money. ActBlue has created an online small-dollar revolution. In 2020, millions of people engaged in phone-banking. Millions would have knocked on doors, but for the pandemic. But for many, activism took the form of responding to online appeals and making a digital donation, not quite the same thing as doing neighbor-to-neighbor politics.

The Consultant-Industrial Complex

The progressive infrastructure is heavily reliant on what LaMarche calls the “consultant-industrial complex.” Most serious people in politics agree that far too much money is spent on TV ads. “All that TV late in the campaign is worse than ineffective. Instead of turning people out, you tune them out,” says Ken Martin, chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. But the consultants who advise campaigns typically get 10 percent of all TV ad buys, and no commission if the campaign hires more organizers. So TV rules.

For decades, the issue of who controls voter files has plagued the Democrats. Each campaign controlled its own files, kept them for future use, and was wary about sharing them with others. In some cases, consultants got hold of the files and sold them for profit. Meanwhile, in 2015, after years of planning and negotiation, the RNC joined forces with the Koch brothers to create the Data Trust, where data from all campaigns and major outside conservative groups would be pooled and shared in one master data bank. The Republicans even won a ruling from the Federal Election Commission permitting them to include voter data from hard-money and soft-money sources in the same database, as long as the sources were not disclosed.

Belatedly, it dawned on the Democrats that they could do the same thing. After several years of scratching for funds and haggling about who would participate, the Democrats created the Democratic Data Exchange (DDX), unveiled just in time for the 2020 campaign, and run in partnership with the DNC. The exchange allows campaigns, party affiliates, and independent groups to trade voter files, across the hard/soft money divide. Participation is voluntary. The head of the DDX is none other than Howard Dean. “I was asked to chair the DDX not because I knew data but because I knew the politics,” Dean told me. “There has been a tremendous amount of distrust between state chairs and the DNC, but 41 of the state parties have now joined.”

Outside vendors who sell these services were mightily upset. Eventually, a deal was struck. Many became DDX partners or clients. DDX provides only data files and leaves the number-crunching to firms such as Catalist, a proven and well-respected source of technical data expertise to progressive groups.

One failed startup, in roughly the same space, was called Alloy, launched in late 2018 by Silicon Valley billionaire and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn (sold to Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion in cash). Hoffman put up half of Alloy’s $35 million, thinking that Alloy could be the master data aggregator and vendor to the Democratic and progressive ecosystem. He hired several of the smartest veterans of the Dean-Obama ventures. But when the DNC decided to create its own data exchange, Alloy was doomed. The venture abruptly folded in late November.

The Democrats’ multiple Silicon Valley connections, coupled with the absence of money for people to be decently compensated as organizers, leads to an unfortunate career path. In late 2019, Jeremy Bird, a key Barack Obama grassroots strategist and former student of organizing master Marshall Ganz, put out the following statement: “I’ve spent my career fighting to change the world for the better … I have always believed in the power of people to make a meaningful impact on the way we all work, vote, and live our lives. That’s why I’m honored to announce today that I am taking on the role of Vice President of Public Engagement at Lyft.” Dozens of senior Obama alums made similar career moves.

The Other Side

Compared to its progressive counterpart, the Republican/conservative ecosystem is simple and elegant. Steve Rosenthal uses the metaphor of the TV cooking contest Chopped. In the show, whose set includes a full kitchen, a contestant is handed a box of ingredients and asked to turn them into a meal. “On the Democratic side, we open the basket onstage and we throw it together as well as we can. The Republicans hire an executive chef, who buys all the ingredients he needs.”

Theda Skocpol, the Harvard social scientist who has studied the Democratic Party and citizen activism as much as anyone alive, observes that the Democrats believe in collectivism, but their approach to politics is laissez-faire. The Republicans believe in laissez-faire, but their approach to politics is Leninist.

Though the various Koch-funded entities might have functioned as a parallel and rival to the institutional Republican apparatus, the two now operate nicely in tandem—because the Koch ideology is now the Republican ideology. The Koch network operates as an organizing, training, and candidate-incubating machine. At the state level, the Koch-funded ALEC provides template legislation to gut regulation, tax equity, and social spending. The RNC, meanwhile, showers money on state parties. Even Trump could not destroy a party and movement infrastructure that was nearly half a century in the making.

On the Republican side, there is no scrambling for jobs that compromise principles or mix messages. You can move from the Koch network, to the White House, to the Heritage Foundation, to the Hill, to a corporate job, with no ideological or partisan contradictions whatsoever. On the contrary, these career patterns and linkages only help strengthen the conservative ecosystem.

Skocpol, in her classic work Diminished Democracy, documented the decline of democratically organized, dues-paying, chapter-based liberal and civic groups. Today, those groups are on the right: NRA locals, fundamentalist churches, right-to-lifers. The left has mainly Washington-based advocacy groups run by professional staff and funded by foundations. The Sierra Club, with dues-paying members and real chapters, is the rare exception.

Two decades ago, when digital organizing and social media were new, the left had a big head start. This was the heyday of MoveOn (founded in 1998), and the early political bloggers, such as Prospect alum Josh Marshall (who started Talking Points Memo in 2000); Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga of Daily Kos (2002); “Atrios” (Duncan Black); Jerome Armstrong’s MyDD; and Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, among many others, plus Huffington Post (founded in 2005).

The hope was that a mass progressive base connected to the blogosphere, outside the stale structure of party insiders, would both democratize politics and push it left. They promoted Howard Dean, first for president, then for party chair. They refined online giving and organizing technology, orchestrated live meetups, and nourished the 2007–2008 Obama campaign, which gained digital savvy and organizing genius far superior to that of either Hillary Clinton or John McCain.

But the moment was surprisingly brief. While MoveOn endured, blogs as insurgent communities morphed into either celebrity platforms or new media forms that were useful but not exactly radical. Huffington Post was sold to Verizon in 2016, which in turn sold it to BuzzFeed. Prospect alums Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias used Vox to do “explainer” journalism, and then moved on, Klein to The New York Times. The next new thing is Substack, a platform for aspiring media soloists. Neither Vox nor Substack is a movement-building tool. The first-generation bloggers who stayed the course, like Josh Marshall, became players in an increasingly crowded space.

The right has figured out this game, underwritten it handsomely, and cleaned the left’s clock. Today, the right has more cogent media and messaging, as you would expect from an authoritarian movement. It is mostly comprised of businesses like Fox News, Breitbart, and talk radio—which not only rally the base but turn a profit. The right also has an advantage since it traffics in myths and lies, which turn into memes that are repeated and passed along, while the progressive left is largely fact-based and, as good liberals, values disputation for its own sake. The largest platforms are ideologically neutral, yet tailor-made for repetition of big lies. The recent actions of Facebook and Twitter to disable violent users are a temporary setback, but the right is finding other modes of communication. 

Progressive funders, who have invested in all manner of infrastructure, have not seen traditional or social media as a priority. The closest thing to a social media operation that tries to engage the right on its own terms, with memes and a mass following, is called Occupy Democrats. It was founded in 2012 by immigrant twin brothers then in their twenties, Rafael and Omar Rivero, as a Facebook group and later a website. With 30 million followers counting partner organizations, Occupy has the largest number of Facebook followers of any site on the left; it and Fox News regularly rank at the top.

In 2020, the Rivero brothers explicitly made their site into a pro-Biden propaganda outlet. The problem, however, is that Occupy Democrats is caught between its desire to engage the right and the need to be at least moderately truthful. Most funders are wary of it. “The right is willing to lie to their followers and their followers like being lied to,” Rafael Rivero told me. “Their followers are impervious to reality. They really are in a cult.” Despite their immense following, he and his brother Omar operate on a shoestring with a small staff. It’s an uneven contest, as is so much of right versus left.

The Long View

In the 1970s, you could drive from Washington state to West Virginia by way of Montana, South Dakota, Minnesota, south through Iowa and Missouri, and east through Tennessee. In every one of these states, both senators were progressive Democrats. More precisely, they were labor Democrats. So much for the premise that the “original gerrymander” of equal Senate representation for small states leaves the Senate hopelessly red.

Labor Democrats of that era insisted that Democrats deliver for regular people. That’s why they got elected. The original PAC was the CIO Political Action Committee, created in 1943 to back Democrats after Republicans made major gains in the 1942 midterms.

There is nothing today that plays the core role, institutionally and ideologically, once played by the labor movement. Political scientist Daniel Schlozman observes in his important 2015 book, When Movements Anchor Parties, that on the right the conservative movement took over the Republican Party; while on the left the labor movement that once anchored a progressive Democratic Party got steadily weaker, as Democratic presidents became more centrist.

The practical question is whether a progressive movement as far-flung as the one we have today can play the anchoring role once played by labor. In our idealized conception of small-d democracy, having thousands of new, local groups is great. Sometimes, David really can beat Goliath. But can 10,000 mini-Davids, each with a niche organization and niche funders, beat the strategic Goliath of the modern conservative system? There are also schisms over such issues as affirmative action.

Joe Biden is the epitome of a party regular—who is very dependent on insurgents. He seems to know that, though the base will need to keep reminding him.

Even with multiple tables providing better communication and coordination, there are deep differences of perception, principle, and strategy. Should Democrats try to win in purple states and metro suburbs as moderates or economic populists? How should race and class come together in Democratic appeals? Is the paramount task to mobilize the base, or convert former Trump voters?

Theda Skocpol, who has extensively studied the successful resistance movements that led to a net pickup of 40 House seats in 2018, cautions that this wave of activists were not all that progressive. They were substantially older, white, and female, and mainly they were appalled by Trump’s plain extremism. Yet 2022 could be different. Georgia demonstrates that a kind of soft populism, built on such basics as pandemic relief and more reliable health coverage, can unite moderates and progressives.

The conventional wisdom is that progressive populists can’t win in the suburbs, or that we must choose between base and swing voters. Yet a gifted leader who motivates volunteers can defy that premise, as demonstrated by Jan Schakowsky of Chicago’s North Shore, Jamie Raskin of Montgomery County, Maryland, or Antonio Delgado of New York’s 19th District, a Working Families Party insurgent who flipped a longtime Republican seat in 2018 in the Hudson Valley suburbs of New York. The recent Senate runoff victories in Georgia, where turnout broke records, were built on gains both in previously neglected communities and in suburbs. They were premised on a multiracial coalition and direct, simple appeals for economic relief in the form of emergency $2,000 payments. And all these wins reflected organizing.

Within the Democratic Party, the struggle between reformers and regulars has echoes as far back as the Progressive Era, and resonances as current as the primary fights picked by Justice Democrats. In his classic work, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, published in 1905, journalist William Riordan quotes George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany boss, dismissing reformers as “morning glories.” According to Plunkitt, “A reformer can’t last in politics … Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business. You’ve got to be trained up to it or you’re sure to fail.”

A few decades later, the Chicago reformer Abner Mikva, as an earnest young law student, showed up at his local Eighth Ward Regular Democratic Club to volunteer for Adlai Stevenson’s 1948 campaign for governor. “Who sent you?” the ward committeeman asked warily. “Nobody,” Mikva replied. Said the boss, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.”

Regulars, who indeed see politics as a business, are wary of new blood they don’t control. That’s why the DCCC and the DSCC keep trashing insurgents and making sure that newly elected legislators are beholden to them. The practical question is whether today’s insurgents will turn out to be better at the long game than the regulars, or whether they will just be the latest generation of morning glories.

In fact, today’s insurgents are extremely good at politics, and they are in it for the long haul. The Working Families Party has been around since 1998, and it keeps getting stronger. WFP has moved beyond its origins in New York, and this year its affiliates picked up seats at all levels in Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Mexico. Three groups deeply committed to long-term organizing, People’s Action, Community Change, and the Center for Popular Democracy, the successor to ACORN, have been at it since the 1970s. And of course the labor movement dates to the 19th century.

Intriguingly and paradoxically, Joe Biden is the epitome of a party regular—who is very dependent on insurgents. He seems to know that, though the base will need to keep reminding him. “Insurgency is what renews the party,” says Howard Dean. “One generation never steps aside—they have to be pushed.”

Every generation sends its heroes up the pop charts. In the never-ending story of challengers refreshing progressive politics, patterns repeat. Radicals had to play an insider/outsider game to work with—and sometimes against—FDR. The same process ensued as the civil rights movement kept pressuring LBJ to do more. Organizational forms change, but struggles endure. So it will be in the Biden era.