What Can I Do to Help?

Embrace Politics: Votes Count … Noise is Just Noise

Political activists, particularly on the left, are tempted to focus their efforts on trying to force elected officials to take action rather than building support for their goals among voters.

Two weeks ago, in response to the surge of support for Kamala Harris, Our Wisconsin Revolution urged, “Progressives MUST take this opportunity to propose, then pressure, then demand …”

It is so much easier to make demands. Than to talk with your neighbors, change their minds, enlist their support for the “true systemic innovations” you want.

You have to demonstrate you can join with others and win elections if you want your policies adopted. Demands usually don’t get listened to if more than half the candidates you endorsed in the recent primary got less than a third of the vote.

The goal of an activist group in another state is to “make the legislature do what they don’t want to do.” By filling up hearing rooms, by being disruptive, by staging large gatherings.

Demands don’t lead to change. If the public isn’t behind you, you can demand all you want, it isn’t going to happen. The vote is where the power is. If you have to force office holders to do what they don’t want to do, you have to do it on every issue. And you can’t maintain that  pressure. Instead, go to the voters and change who is in office. Convince your neighbors. Elect one of your own.

The vote puts people in office. And removes them. Focusing on the vote and electing your own is more difficult, more direct, and more effective than making demands.

Despite his reputation as a trouble maker, Saul Alinsky, the “radical” Chicago community organizer during the 1950s and 1960s, focused his activity on creating community support. “To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that’s the way the game is played—if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’”

He told the youth who protested the Vietnam War at the 1968 national Democratic convention,  “Go home, organize, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.”

Ten years ago this summer, protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, after Michael Brown, a young black man, was shot and killed by a white police officer. The protests, however, didn’t die down as they did in some other places. Those involved channeled their  energy into politics and changing the people in charge.

Rasheed Aldridge, a one-time protester who is now an alderman in St. Louis, told the New York Times for its look back story, “We started to realize that this issue with police brutality and what happened to Mike Brown was a lot bigger … It’s about how people that are in local government have input on the way that people live.”

During the past ten years, protesters and their allies have elected Ferguson’s first Black mayor, St Louis County’s first Black prosecutor, a progressive mayor in St. Louis, one of their own to Congress, and others to more local offices.

Kayla Reed, who changed from “being a spectator to a protester to organizing the protests to starting campaigns to elect progressive candidates”, told the Times, “We could shout … at the people we didn’t vote for and who have no concern about us, or we could change the demographic one seat at a time.”

On a much smaller scale, when efforts to expand frac sand mining accelerated in Buffalo County, where I live, residents organized. In the next election nine new county board members  were elected. Enough for a majority on a 14-member board. They selected one of their own to be chair and passed an ordinance that effectively stopped any new mining. Simple. Direct. Persuade voters. Elect  people you want to make the decisions you want.

When I was in the Illinois legislature the League of Women Voters invited me to speak at their state convention. One of the questions they asked, “How can we be more effective in getting our legislative proposals passed?”

My response. Get involved in campaigns. Support the legislators who agree with you. If I get attacked for voting for your proposals, I want you beside me, speaking for me in the next election. Politics is a team sport. I can’t win by myself. I can’t change policy by myself.  Good legislation doesn’t pass just because it is good. Good legislation passes when there is public support.

At the beginning of the Biden administration everyone had some demand to make. The focus was on the President. “The President has to deliver.” “I want us to make sure that Biden delivers.” “A broad coalition of Democrats plans to begin what it promises will be a noisy and sustained campaign to pressure President Biden …”

The demands covered the spectrum: criminal justice and policing reform, economic inequality, climate change, expansion of Medicare, workplace practices, and voter suppression among others, some very parochial in their scope.

By October of that first year the President’s initiatives were “running into the realities of governing with no votes to spare.”

Joe Manchin said the obvious, “If you want more liberal policies, elect more liberals.”

Even after significant legislation  passed, the story still had to be told. The responsibility for doing that was again placed on the President. “Democrats Say Biden Hasn’t ‘Made the Case’ on Climate Despite Achievement.”

There are some, however, who understand that it is not just the President who has the responsibility. “There is a disconnect between all the Biden-Harris accomplishments and what information is landing on the ground in communities,” the head of the AFL-CIO said. “It’s up to us to connect the dots.”

After a meeting of influential Black male Democrats, the attorney general of Illinois captured the spirit of the discussion. “We collectively have to do a better job communicating.”  

Politics is a team sport. One person, even a President, or a few, can’t get stuff done by themselves. We don’t get to sit in the stands and watch. Politics is not a spectator sport.

If we want to change outcomes, we have to concentrate on changing the minds of our neighbors, not badgering incumbents to change their votes.

It is with both amusement and despair that I read emails from progressive groups urging me to write to Ron Johnson and demand that he “do the right thing”.

Politicians are not dumb. They know where messages come from, and who promotes them. Messages that come from people who will never vote for them are ignored.

Making demands on elected officials is easy. They mean nothing. Talking to a neighbor in a way that changes an attitude is more difficult. But changing your neighbor’s vote changes who is elected, changes policy, and has the power to transform.

It is the long game we have to play if we want to succeed in turning the country around. A game that concentrates on building a broader, stronger, more consistent coalition of voters. It is our neighbors, the people who live in our communities, we have to convince. 

The absence of that stronger coalition has kept us from being able to enact much of our Party’s vision in the 45 years since 1980. In only six of those years have Democrats held the presidency and majorities in both House and Senate: the first two years of the Clinton administration, the first two years of Obama, and the first two years of Biden. If we continue to be one and done after two years, we will never get much past the talking stage of moving the country forward.

Politics is essentially simple. The simplicity sometimes catches us by surprise. During the controversies early in Biden’s administration over what to include in the comprehensive economic and social programs being considered, Sen. Edward Markey said out loud what few wanted to hear. “The only thing that can pass is a package that has the votes.”

In the next 72 days we have the opportunity to add the votes in Congress and the state   legislature that are needed to breathe life into our vision of community. Remember, all the important decisions are made on election day.