“An Insurgency to Take Over the Democratic Party”

How the Rhode Island Political Cooperative is Modeling a Different Path to Power

Before we get into this week’s main topic, a quick comment about the leaked Supreme Court decision gutting the right to abortion and threatening as well the right to same-sex marriage and contraception, which broke last night. Organized minorities beat disorganized majorities. While polls show a super-majority of Americans favor keeping abortion legal in all or most cases (just 20% think it should be illegal, something the Republican Court is about to allow), the pro-choice political party, the Democrats, has never prioritized the issue. Don’t take my word, take Rebecca Traister’s words written after the Court heard oral arguments back in December on the case it is deciding now, Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“Democratic leadership chose not to fight vocally the Supreme Court nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, or Amy Coney Barrett as being an assault on legal abortion, even though the president who nominated them had directly promised anti-abortion groups ‘another two or perhaps three justices’ who would ‘automatically, in my opinion’ overturn Roe. This was right out there for everyone on the broadly defined left to see, hear, and fight tooth and nail against. But again and again, those at the top of the party signaled that it was not a fight worth having and have remained quiet even as Republicans cast the ones who were fighting as deranged….Democrats have permitted an inaccurate, dishonest right-wing framework — the notion that abortion is some hot-button issue on which the country is sharply divided, when in fact the protection of the right to legal abortion is one of the most popular planks in a Democratic platform even in most red states — to keep them from making political fights about abortion.”

Now these same national Democrats are decrying the impending ruling and insisting that this time they will fight, though I have yet to see many talking about expanding the Court or eliminating the filibuster in order to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act (HR 3755) to codify Roe as federal law. This hard reality isn’t going to be changed by giving more money or time to national organizations devoted to electing pro-choice Democrats. That’s not because more money or volunteers doesn’t help; it’s because these organizations are largely still relying on an exhausted playbook, running top-down, capital-intensive, data-driven, media-centric and anonymous, atomized mobilization campaigns.

Monday, before yesterday’s leak, Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and EMILY’s List announced plans to raise $150 million to spend on the 2022 elections to ensure the election of pro-choice champions up and down the ballot. On paper, targeted advertising shifts opinions; in practice, effects fade quickly. Phone calls or texts or letters or post-cards from anonymous strangers also have limited value and sometimes produce negative effects. Too much of these kinds of political communication can also backfire and cause people to not vote. The most effective political organizing is done by people talking to their actual neighbors (as this just published New York Times op-ed by Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward about their successful electoral efforts in rural Maine) but national Democrats and national advocacy organizations alike don’t prioritize that. Insisting that every election is the “most important one in our lifetimes” only resonates if you deliver results; when young people are saying “we tried voting and it didn’t work” it’s time to go back to square one and ask why this whole machine is so ineffective. Changing this reality requires a systemic rebooting of how we organize for power. So, let me pivot to a fresh example of how that can be done.

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a friend of mine with long experience in progressive organizing urging me to take a look at Rhode Island, where Matt Brown, a former Democratic secretary of state, is running for governor as part of a “political cooperative” of some fifty candidates for the state legislature, along with his running mate for lieutenant governor, Cynthia Mendes. Brown’s campaign launch video grabbed me as soon as he said, “Rhode Island is run by the most corrupt political machine in America.” Thirty years ago, for The Nation magazine, I had reported on how a massive banking scandal involving tremendous self-dealing and favors to politically connected borrowers hit the state, leading to a bank run and then the freezing one-third of the state’s one million residents out of their accounts (while still requiring them to pay their loans and mortgages). That lead to massive grassroots protests, including one demonstration blocking Interstate 95 that culminated in the arrest of seven depositors, five of them senior citizens, for interfering with traffic.

But while the protests led to better regulation of the state’s banks, anti-politics didn’t lead to new politics, and the Democratic machine that has long dominated the heavily blue state emerged unchanged. In 2002, former Providence mayor Vincent Cianci was convicted and sent to jail for running a corrupt racketeering enterprise and the FBI declared the state’s political culture was changing. But as this 2017 Providence Online article pointed out, in the years since Cianci’s imprisonment, no fewer than 15 elected officials, ranging up to the former speaker of its House of Representatives, were charged with an array of crimes.

The Rhode Island Political Cooperative is thus something new on the scene, a coordinated effort to uproot political incumbents, many of them Democrats, not just for corruption but for failing to serve the public’s needs or address deep-seated problems like the climate crisis or inequality. Brown, who co-founded and ran the anti-nuclear organization Global Zero from 2007-1018 after his stint as Secretary of State, started the cooperative out of Renew US, an organization he founded to recruit and run Black, Indigenous, people of color and working class candidates with the goal of winning multiracial majorities for climate, economic and racial justice. In the 2000 state primaries, the cooperative’s candidates beat several incumbents and won a couple of open seats. Now they have enough people running to win a governing majority in both chambers of the state legislature. Whether they succeed or not, their model ought to be studied by organizers around the country.

I spoke with Brown last week. Our conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Micah Sifry: What is the Rhode Island Political Cooperative and how does it actually function, in terms of your campaign and all the folks you are trying to bring along with you?

Matt Brown: It really means two things. One is we recruit and form a slate of candidates on a shared platform. And they pay dues to the organization just to cover the costs of the services that are provided. Those services are really everything that they need to build and run winning campaigns. And because they pay dues, we can provide direct coordinated services for them. That includes candidate training, writing their campaign plans, helping to recruit volunteers, helping to raise money, policy papers, everything. That’s the first part of it. We are providing support to candidates who wouldn't otherwise have it--often first-time candidates, working-class candidates, BIPOC candidates--so that they can so that they can run winning campaigns. 

The second thing about a political cooperative is that we form a real community among the candidates. So we meet every two weeks, we work out the platform together, we support each other, stand by each other in the battle. And that sense of a political community is really rare. I've actually never seen anything like it in the country, and it’s really important for winning these elections. We piloted the model in 2020 and we won 10 races. Now we're expanding on that and we're going to have a huge number of candidates this time around. The goal is to win a governing majority--a multiracial, progressive, governing majority against the corrupt establishment that's had a hold on power for decades.

Micah Sifry: For a person who decides to run, are the dues staged in some way, in tiers depending on what office you’re running for? The kinds of services you're talking about providing are expensive, and it certainly makes sense to try and amortize those costs. I think that's really interesting. I mean, this goes way beyond what a so-called coordinated campaign, the sort of thing the Democratic Party does in some states near the end of an election cycle, right? So can you get into some more of those details?

Matt Brown: There are three ways we're able to provide these services for way, way cheaper than candidates could get in the market. One is there's no profit making. They just pay the cost of the services. It’s a fee for service. And those dues essentially cover almost all there is to cover: the costs of a small statewide staff that provides the services. The second reason it's just way cheaper than it would be in the marketplace is that, as you said, the economies of scale because we're doing it for all of these candidates. We don't train one candidate at a time, we train them in cohorts. When we write a policy paper, it's for all of them. We recruit a statewide pool of volunteers and train them centrally. And then they all have access to that pool of volunteers. We designed templates for their mailers, and those are the same templates for all of them. So there are huge economies of scale. And then the third reason it's really cheap is because we've got movement energy going here. We have lots of volunteer involvement that helps with all this stuff. In terms of the level it depends on the cycle, but generally there's a level for general assembly candidates and then a level for some municipal candidates. 

Micah Sifry: Okay. How's the coop governed?

Matt Brown: The coop is a nonprofit organization with a volunteer board. There are no shareholders or owners. 

Micah Sifry: And does it have other affiliated organizations? You know, I'm thinking of the Working Families Party, which had the Working Families Organization, which was like a services entity where a lot of its field operation actually lived. Are there other pieces to this or that's the sole piece?

Matt Brown: That is the sole piece. The other thing I'd say about governance is fiduciary governance is carried by a governing board, but in terms of the day-to-day decision making, it's really the members which are all of the candidates. We formed the platform together and we voted on the platform. We vote on inviting any new candidates as we go forward. 

Micah Sifry:  And to what degree are existing community organizations, labor organizations and so on, part of this?

Matt Brown: Well, to a very deep degree in terms of progressive electoral organizations. We're in pretty deep coalition with the local Sunrise chapter, the local Black Lives Matter chapter. Some other local environmental organizations. There's a growing coalition in the state that I think is certainly stronger than it's ever been. 

Micah Sifry: What about labor?

Matt Brown: I think it depends. You know, depends on the race, and it depends on the union. That’s really case by case.

Micah Sifry: How replicable is this model for other states? What would it take to do this somewhere else?

Matt Brown: It's very replicable for sure. Like starting anything else it takes a small group of committed people to get it going.

Micah Sifry: What obstacles did you face in getting it going that you know, you might want to warn other people about?

Matt Brown: The primary lever for starting a political cooperative is the recruitment of candidates. That’s a really big project. There are a lot of reasons not to run for office. You know, life, family, time. It's really hard. And so, we've got a very targeted strategy. The goal is not just to run some campaigns and win them. The goal is to win a governing majority in the state legislature, which means it's very targeted. There are certain districts where you need candidates. So that was also a challenge for recruitment because we're looking for people from certain districts. All that goes to say recruiting is really the key challenge and like starting anything new, it's really especially the challenge at the beginning because people need to kind of link arms and jump together. 

Micah Sifry: The Rhode Island Political Cooperative sounds like a party within a party.

Matt Brown: I would say it is an insurgency to take over the Democratic Party.

Micah Sifry: Right. And the fact that Rhode Island is a small state, it seems to me, makes something like this more plausible. A state as big as California is expensive just to move around in. Progressives have tried to organize statewide, and it's just incredibly expensive to do. I live in New York and I'm imagining, could we do something like this in New York? Immediately the scale of the state is one of the big challenges. The other one is the power of incumbency. You are talking about primarying a lot of people, right? 

Matt Brown: As the model is being developed, and as we've piloted it, we're certainly taking it to scale within Rhode Island. But it's probably easier in small and medium sized states. Very large states, like almost anything, are not where you start with a model like this. But I don't think there's actually anything structurally in the way of getting there. In some ways, this solves the money challenge for organizing at scale because the candidates are paying dues, and so there's a system for financing it. 

Micah Sifry: Can you explain how a nonprofit is allowed to do all these things? Most people think nonprofits can't get engaged in political campaigns. 

Matt Brown: The cooperative is a nonprofit, but it's not a 501c3, it's not a 501 anything. People sometimes assume that when you start nonprofit organizations they have to be 501c3s or 501c4s, and that's not the case. You register your corporation with the state. When you start an organization, nonprofit corporation is one of the options, as opposed to for-profit or workers cooperative or whatever else. And that just literally means that you don't have owners and shareholders or accrue profit. And you're governed by a board, not by shareholders. 

We opted not to seek an IRS tax exempt designation. Tax exempt “public charity” or “social welfare” non-profit organizations (designated as 501c3 or 501c4 organizations) are restricted in their ability to provide campaign services to candidates. Providing those services is essential to the mission of the RI Political Cooperative. It therefore chooses to forgo a tax exemption. 

Micah Sifry: I see. So you're not collecting donations from supporters, you're only charging dues and fees for service. So, the other reason to be tax exempt as a c3, to give your donors a tax benefit, doesn't really come into play here either. And from my cynical standpoint, it also means you're not chasing foundations and big funders, for those lovely checks they send and not being skewed by their priorities. 

Matt Brown: Yes, that's a hugely important point. This model shifts power from the big donors to the candidates. It's their money, they own it. It’s their program. And as I said, they also vote on everything that we do. So it's really shifting power from donors, big donors and foundations to the candidates themselves.

Micah Sifry: Okay, so what happens when the election is over? Let's posit that most of your candidates win, but some of them lose. The ones who lost--are they no longer members of the coop? Do they give up their governing vote? And how do you imagine the coop will try to hold the people who get elected accountable to its platform?

Matt Brown: Great questions. On the first one, the definition of a member is someone who is a current candidate for office. So the question after the election if they lost is whether they're running again. And if they're running again, and we all agree that they're running again, then they're still a member and a voting member. If they won, presumably they're running again, although at some point I suppose they wouldn't. If they lost and they've decided they're not running again, then they're not a member. We are pretty new, so these numbers aren't huge, but we do have what we call an alumni category. For people who've run and lost, we still want them to be part of the community that maybe we gather a couple times a year. We certainly keep them updated, etc.

On the second question about how to hold them to the platform, we actually have developed (not before the last cycle, but for this cycle) a very clear and rigorous process for removal of elected coop members from the coop – including based on violating their commitments to the platform – by a vote of all of the coop members.  The reason there's a vote and it's not automatic is because when you get into legislating these things are not always clear. To take a simple example, we advocate for a $19 per hour minimum wage. If somebody supports a bill for $19 per hour in three years and someone supports a bill for $19 an hour in six years, it can’t be automatic that somebody is kicked out for choosing one option over the other. We’ve realized that you need to consider the specifics. But there's a process for removing people based on a violation of the commitment to the platform.

Micah Sifry: That's really interesting. This is pretty innovative and exciting and something people should pay attention to. 

As noted above, Brown is running for governor of Rhode Island alongside Cynthia Mendes for lieutenant governor, who was one of the candidates who ran in the 2020 pilot of the coop model and won a seat in the Rhode Island State Senate. She beat the powerful chair of the Senate Finance Committee, a longtime incumbent who was slated to become the next Senate President, in a landslide, despite being outspent 4-to-1. To donate to their ticket, which will help lift the entire RI Political Cooperative slate, visit https://www.mattandcynthiaforri.com.

Odds and Ends

—Don’t miss Nancy Scola’s Politico profile of Alondra Nelson, the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has some bold and necessary ideas about using government and science to advance racial equity. And after you’re done with that, tack on Alex Thompson’s deep dive into all the ways former Google chairman Eric Schmidt wired the OSTP under Nelson’s predecessor Eric Lander, who left that post in February after the White House found credible evidence he had bullied its general counsel Rachel Wallace, who had raised questions about conflicts of interest involving Schmidt.

—In New York City, public libraries are doing a much better job of bridging the digital divide than its vaunted LinkNYC program, but despite endemic failures, the city is doubling down on its partnership with CityBridge, the private consortium managing the WiFi kiosks, Gabriel Sandoval and Joshua McWhirter report for The City. Former NYC mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, who helped negotiate the CityBridge LinkNYC deal under then-mayor Bill de Blasio, declined to comment for the story. Yuck.

—The New York State Assembly has passed a moratorium on bitcoin mining in the state, pending an environmental review, James Ledbetter reports for The Observer. I can only assume that this is currently producing a windfall for state senators from the crypto lobby (New York not wanting to lose its standing as the most corrupt state in the union to tiny Rhode Island, after all).

End Times

Here’s a state-by-state list of abortion funds you can donate to.