You also look across the way and see that the Republican Party in your district has an impressive headquarters in the center of town, and $60,000 or so in the bank, most of it coming directly or indirectly from the Koch brothers. You and your fellow Democrats in the district, however, have no place to meet, virtually no visible presence in the area, and just $500 or so to fund your efforts. How would you rate your chances of succeeding against the Republicans? How long would you go on trying?
These are the kinds of thoughts and questions I started having soon after the 2016 election, when a small group of friends and I living in safely Blue Western Massachusetts founded an organization called Democrats without Borders and began working with Democrats in Cabarrus County North Carolina. Exchanging emails and Skyping with Democratic activists there – many of whom had been Bernie supporters – we began to understand what it’s like to live in an area that the Democratic National Committee has written off as “unwinnable.” We also started to learn the nuts and bolts of how the Democratic Party works, and we quickly grasped why our allies and friends in Cabarrus County were in such desperate straits.
Our journey from the birthplace of Emily Dickinson to the home of NASCAR began around 10 PM on election night, November 2, 2016. The one positive outcome of that debacle was that it made painfully clear to so many of us just how incompetent and arrogant the Democratic Party leadership had become.
Of course, we already knew that our Party professionals were losing ground. Year after year, the Republican Party strategists consistently outmaneuvered and just plain outsmarted them. Karl Rove even announced in the Wall Street Journal his plan to take over state legislatures and seize as many governorships as possible. Did the pros in the Democratic Party take heed and design a counter-strategy? Not that we know of.
On November 3, 2016, though, we beheld the failure that surpassed all previous failures. Overnight, literally, that disaster propelled untold numbers of us into activist politics. All of us realized, suddenly, that we were just as smart and probably more creative than the professional class that had been running the Party all our lives.
The Women’s March was the most dramatic and perhaps the most effective of these efforts to take things into our own hands. It brought tens of thousands of women, including many young women, into politics – as voters, organizers, activists, and candidates. The difference they make will appear in 2018, but more decisively I believe in 2020.
A less visible and rather different effort is now competing actively with the Democratic Party leadership for control of the Democrats’ strategizing efforts, its funding stream, and its communications network.
Perhaps inspired by Barack Obama’s highly successful independent fundraising efforts, a number of newly minted activists in the Bay Area launched Swing Left. Instead of relying on Party professionals to develop a strategy for 2018, it instantly identified the most “flippable” districts across the country and began an independent fundraising effort to support Democratic and progressive candidates in those districts. A recent article in the New York Times reported that they had raised over $9 million. That might not seem like much – the Koch brothers alone donate many times that amount annually – but anyone who has tried to do any fundraising without access to data bases and wealthy donors knows very well what a significant accomplishment that is.
Another such effort came into being soon after, called Sister Districts Project. This group puts Democrats in Blue districts in touch with Democrats in nearby Red districts, whom they assist in all the usual ways: by writing letters, making phone calls, knocking on doors.
Democrats without Borders shares something with each of these projects, though it is also significantly different. Like Swing Left, we raise money for Democrats in Red Districts, but we don’t care if those districts are “winnable” or not. Like Sister Districts, we create ways for Democrats from different areas to work with each other, but those areas need not be near each other – in fact, we like working with Democrats who live far away and in very different cultural and political environments.
This is because our deepest aim is to reweave the frayed socio-political fabric of the left. We want Democrats and progressives to discover the values they share and to discuss those they don’t share. We want to take political activity out of the highly mediated forms that prevail today and restore the personal connections and personal relationships that are indispensable, we believe, to effective and enduring coalition politics.
Working with our friends in the Cabarrus County Democratic Party, we feel – as Democrats living in safely Blue states seldom can – that we are making a difference somewhere. While the fundraising we do looks pretty small-scale compared to the gigantic machine of the national Democratic Party, we are proud that we know exactly how and why every dime of it is spent. We have our hands on a lever that is connected to something on the other end (which is not how I feel when I write a check to the national Democratic Party).
In many ways, in fact, we have been the real gainers in this relationship.
We got an invaluable political education when our Cabarrus allies explained to us why, when we first contacted them, they had had no physical headquarters for years and had just $500 in their bank account. The national Democratic Party does not invest significantly in its local-level party infrastructure. Instead, it gives most of the money it raises to individual candidates and their organizations. If those candidates manage to raise more money than they can spend, they send some of the surplus “downstream” to other Democratic candidates running at the local level. And maybe, just maybe, a tiny bit will eventually find its way into the bank account of the Cabarrus County Democratic Party, or to some of the hundreds of other local Democratic Party organizations across North Carolina.
Maybe in districts that are safely Blue and relatively wealthy, this indifference to local party infrastructure isn’t much of a problem. But in places like Cabarrus County, North Carolina, it’s been a disaster since 2010.
That’s when, having identified North Carolina as the swing state of all swing states, the Koch brothers began donating millions of dollars to both Republican candidates and local Republican Party infrastructure. Soon thereafter, large swaths of the Democratic Party in the state fell into a downward vortex from which they are still trying to emerge.
In places like Cabarrus, it comes down to this: The Republican Party has lots of money and is very visible locally. For years, it has boasted an impressive Party Headquarters. It hosts many public events. It can train hundredS of volunteers to go door-to-door and compile a sophisticated voter data-base using expensive software in handheld computers. And when a Republican candidate running for office at the local level needs help – lawn signs, for example – the funds are there.
Meanwhile, with virtually no funds in hand, the Democratic Party has had no visible, physical presence in Cabarrus for years. Party Chairperson Dawn Larma lamented recently, “Folks down here think Democrats just don’t exist anymore. The Republican message machine has successfully created a public perception that everyone but a few misfits and oddballs is a hardcore rightwing Republican.”
All this creates a downward cycle. You know those names and offices that appear every election on your ballot – those people running for Sheriff, or County Comptroller, and the like – names you don’t recognize, offices you don’t understand? Well, that’s where a political party finds and trains and grooms candidates who will eventually work their way to the top of the ballot and run for the state legislature, Congress, and the Senate.
But would you run as a Democrat in a Red district if the Party itself was practically invisible and had no money to give you for such basics as lawn signs?
And when the local Party committees cannot persuade people to run for many of those low-level positions, the national Party cuts off the stream that would feed it competitive, successful candidates for national office. This is in fact why the national Democratic Party has been struggling to find viable candidates to run against Republicans in 2018.
In Cabarrus, thanks to Dawn Larma and her incredibly talented and hardworking team, all this is changing. They have an attractive new headquarters. They are building a sophisticated voter data base. They have an amazing web site and Facebook page. And for the first time anyone can remember, every local office on the 2018 ballot has a Democrat running for it.
Democrats without Borders is still very small. This kind of organization takes time to grow, because we want it to have deep roots in personal relations formed by Democrats and progressives as they work with each other across vast distances and in very different kinds of settings. A second chapter has started up in Concord, Massachusetts, and they are working with the local Democratic Party in Hoke County, which is close to Cabarrus County in North Carolina’s 8th Congressional District. A third chapter has taken a somewhat different approach: based in Brooklyn, it is reaching out to Democratic and progressive educators across the country to raise funds and support for Aimy Steele, a black woman and high school principal running for a seat in the North Carolina State Assembly.
As we’ve learned from our allies in Cabarrus, the threat to our democracy begins at the local level. It spreads from there to state legislatures that gerrymander a permanent majority and thereby gain control of both the executive and judicial branches of state government. From there, this anti-democratic, one-party system spreads nationally, sending rightwing Republicans to Congress, where they join the ranks of the Freedom Caucus and try to cement permanent Republican majorities in the House and Senate.
To date at least, the national Democratic Party leadership has been manifestly incapable of meeting this crisis. This is why it’s so important for rank-and-file Democrats everywhere to explore alternative vectors for political engagement like Swing Left, Sister Districts, and Democrats without Borders. We need to break up the national Party’s monopoly of fundraising and strategizing. We need to send resources directly to where they are most needed. And we should never, ever consign our fellow Democrats to oblivion by judging their districts to be unwinnable and not worth our time, money, effort, and compassionate solidarity.
Note
I I refer to Larry Pittman, who represents Cabarrus County in the North Carolina General Assembly.