Challenging Democrats from the left

Since 2010 the tea party has made considerable strides in completing an ideological purification of the Republican Party. By running challengers in party primaries against candidates they perceive as too moderate, far-right activists have helped shape the Republicans into a relatively coherent force. The Democratic Party, on the other hand, is full of underrepresented constituencies who can’t agree on key progressive causes, including workers’ rights, campaign finance reform, environmental protection and the regulation of Wall Street. If anything, the party’s tendency over the past two decades has been to drift rightward.

After years of soul searching, several dissatisfied progressive groups are coming up with more creative approaches that allow them to avoid getting caught up in perpetual debates of “let’s vote for a third party” vs. “we must choose the lesser of two evils.” And they’re taking cues not from third parties, which end up being ineffective, but the tea party, which has managed to engage Republicans and disrupt the way they do business by functioning as a party within the party.

Traditional community organizing groups, using the model pioneered by left-wing grass-roots activism guru Saul Alinsky, made avoidance of electoral politics a point of pride and opted to push for policy changes and community improvements from the outside. National People’s Action (NPA) has long followed this model, engaging in direct action campaigns around issues such as financial reform and housing rights. They have bused their members out to the homes of financial lobbyists and occupied bank branches. In the past the NPA tried to push policy changes by pressuring elected officials from the outside. But now the group wants to participate in electoral politics not as a substitute for its direct action tactics but to supplement them, and it’s throwing its hat into the ring with a newly minted sister organization, the NPA Action Fund. “The Democratic Party isn’t very responsive to social movements,” says Daniel Espinosa-Krehbiel, director of strategic initiatives for the NPA. “The Democratic Party is a field of struggle (where) we want to contest for power. If we do that more often, we are more likely to be in power at least some of the time.”

The NPA’s membership is concentrated a scattershot array of states: Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico and Ohio. The group’s organizers hope to start changing the political conversation in these states before influencing the federal level. They aren’t opposed to running primary challenges against conservative or moderate Democrats, but they operate “mostly in purple and red states, (so) the party lines are where the front lines are,” says Espinosa-Krehbiel. Presumably, this means that the NPA Action Fund will be mostly working against Republicans (except in Illinois and other blue-tilting states, where Democratic primaries will be greater priorities).

The NPA doesn’t want to wait for local or state Democratic Party chapters to announce their candidates or positions before deciding to back them or not. Instead, it wants to recruit its own candidates and give them the support they need to run successful campaigns. With an army of thousands of volunteers, the group can provide a huge boost to candidates’ campaigns, which is appealing to people who are considering a run but may not have the backing of establishment Democrats.

“Instead of just falling behind the party message, we are trying to set the terms of the debate ahead of time,” says Espinosa-Krehbiel. “If they agree to run on it, we’ll help them get them elected by delivering a big portion of their field program through our organizing. We’ve got thousands of highly active members in most states who want to volunteer for our campaigns, and voters are way more responsive to a message that’s delivered to them from one of their neighbors than someone to who has been paid to come in from some other state.”

A second group, Working Families, is taking a similar tack. Over the past decade, the organization has established strongholds in New York, Connecticut and Oregon. These states have fusion voting laws, which allow multiple parties to endorse the same candidate. This allows the Working Families Party (WFP) to be a third party that is not a spoiler, since voters can pull the lever for candidates who are jointly endorsed by the WFP and the Democrats, while giving the WFP leverage over the Democrats: If candidates don’t make policy concessions to Working Families, they won’t get the cross-endorsement or the votes. But in each place, the WFP has scored impressive wins even without that quirk.

The WFP in New York is strongly associated with the mayoral victory of Bill DeBlasio and the equally important if not as well publicized progressive conquest of the City Council. In 2012 the Oregon WFP organized the primary ouster of a 10-year Democratic state lawmaker notorious for siding with Republicans, and in 2013 Connecticut’s WFP successfully fought off a Democratic pro-education-privatization slate in the state’s largest city. “In every situation, having an institutional home outside the Democratic Party is an important thing for progressives to build political power,” says Jon Green, national deputy director for Working Families.

While electoral rules favorable to third parties helped the WFP build power in its core states, its victories have often been won by candidates trained and supported by Working Families, in primaries where fusion voting played no role. Leadership recruiting and a rigorously trained canvassing operation were enough to propel campaigns from the left.

Now Working Families, which is expanding its work in Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., and  plans to emphasize those tactics in states where fusion voting is not a possibility. In these places, Working Families probably will not appear on the ballot,although it will still be a 501(c)(4) organization. Instead the group aims to prevent the Democratic Party from relying on center-right candidates by recruiting progressive candidates in advance. “Lots of progressive organizations say, ‘The election is in three months, let’s see who is running and who we like,’” explains Green. “When we leave candidate recruitment to the Democratic Party regulars, the process produces candidates who the local party thinks are going to raise a lot of money and will put a D next to their name. We need recruitment on a perpetual basis, developing candidates so the folks most aligned with our values are the most viable candidates.”

Working Families’ skilled canvassing operation is concerned not just with elections. The group’s foot soldiers are out year round, persuading voters to call their elected officials about paid-sick-leave bills or minimum-wage increases.

Since midterm elections are coming up this year, Working Families’ focus will be on the ballots. And since most of the group’s operations are in blue jurisdictions, it plans to pick sides in primaries. Races it is considering include the Newark mayoral contest, Washington’s mayoral and council races — both important races because they are in big cities — and elections for the Connecticut, Maryland and Pennsylvania legislatures. “All these candidates are trying to sell something to you,” says Green. “It’s our job to screen who they are and evaluate what they’ve done and see if they are really in line with our values.”

In the past, constituencies that have aligned themselves with the NPA and Working Families — organized labor, people of color and others who routinely vote Democratic — failed to resist a rightward drift in the party because the only other choice was a more conservative Republican. However, the new electoral drives from the left aim to challenge the idea that these groups are what political scientists call captive voters. Members of the tea party, too, were once considered captives with nowhere else to turn: According to an in-depth 2012 study, “almost all are Republicans or conservatives to the right of the GOP.” Yet, galvanized by political trends (and supported by right-wing think tanks and well-heeled funders), they were able to redefine the political options available to them.

There’s no reason frustrated progressive captives of the Democratic Party can’t do the same. While it’s true that they must run on lean budgets and that they lack the media infrastructure provided by Fox News, they have the vision and members to make a difference in places where progressives have seethed but not yet organized. 

This is especially true with regard to state and local politics, where both the NPA and Working Families will focus for the foreseeable future. “It’s impossible to get anything meaningful done” at the federal level, says Green. “The action is at the state level because that’s where we have political power to make a difference. The state level is going to be a laboratory for progressive policy.”