If Biden Wins, Then What?
About six weeks ago, it occurred to me that with all the attention on the 2020 election and its possible drawn-out aftermath, we were in danger of missing an equally important question: What happens if Biden wins?
The last time a Democrat took over the White House from a Republican, it was 2009. The decisions that Barack Obama made in his early months—to keep his economic stimulus package to just $800 billion instead of the trillion-plus recommended by many economists, to bail out big banks and not prosecute the bankers, to fight for health care reform by searching for a few Republican co-sponsors of a market-friendly approach that was originally devised by the rightwing Heritage Foundation, and to [demobilize] (https://newrepublic.com/article/140245/obamas-lost-army-inside-fall-grassroots-machine) the grass-roots army that got him elected—were pivotal. It led to a weaker than needed economic recovery, grumpiness on the Democratic Left, and a fired-up populist Right, and arguably cost him the House Democratic majority in the 2010 mid-terms.
How could this have happened? Well, as I argued back in 2009, in a piece I called “The Obama Disconnect” (which led to my book, The Big Disconnect), “Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied. And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn’t happen, in the first year of Obama’s administration. The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests–banks, energy companies, health interests, car makers, the military-industrial complex–sat first at the table and wrote the menu.” Indeed, in the fall of 2008, as the election was coming to a conclusion, the Obama transition team already had a list of top economic officials drafted, chock full of Wall Streeters, while its political staff was snuffing efforts to keep its grassroots movement going as an independent force for change, as I reported for The New Republic three years ago.
Obama may have built the biggest political machine in modern American politics—13 million email addresses, 2 million volunteers on his MyBarackObama campaign platform, 70,000 grassroots fundraisers—but he only shared tasks with those volunteers, he didn’t share power with them. Equally important, though: the vast majority of Obama’s army didn’t hold up their end of the bargain by continuing to organize for change. The cult of personality around him was too strong. People relaxed, thinking the “good guys” were in charge. Most of the leaders of Democratic-leaning interest groups traded access to the White House for independence and dutifully followed its marching orders.
Will Biden make the same choices? And will grassroots Democrats follow the same trajectory of exultation, relaxation, withdrawal and disappointment? I set out to see what I could find out. The result, in somewhat abridged form, is in my latest piece for The New Republic’s November issue, which has just been posted online this morning.
Here’s the good news: Times have changed. The whole Democratic ecosystem is bigger and more capable of independent political action than in 2009. While the Biden-Harris campaign is breaking fundraising records and deploying a very robust get-out-the-vote effort, it is a shadow of Obama’s juggernauts of 2008 and 2012. And while people are voting for Biden, he’s not being treated like a demigod. Democrats are differently organized now, and a lot of us think differently about politics and our own role in it.
You can see these changes in many ways. The so-called “Democratic establishment” in Congress is weakening. As Alexander Sammon reported for The American Prospect in September, the decision by House Democratic leaders to put a ban on any political vendor or consultant who went to work in support of a Democratic candidate primarying an incumbent backfired, helping catalyze a stronger progressive nexus of talent and capacity, which has helped propel several newcomers into upset victories—including my own soon-to-be-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
And the number of groups who have big volunteer bases and email lists of their own has mushroomed since 2016. These include longtime leaders in the world of Big Email, like MoveOn, End Citizens United, and Daily Kos, along with edgier groups like Color of Change, Demand Progress, Justice Democrats and the Sunrise Movement. Brian Young, the founder and CEO of ActionNetwork, the progressive email organizing platform, told me, “The diffusion of lists throughout the left compared to 2008 is huge. Every organization has a robust digital operation now. The presidential campaign just isn’t the center of everything any more.”
Indeed, while we should be impressed by the fact that the Biden campaign tallied a whopping 37 million phone calls to voters this past Saturday and Sunday, there’s no way those calls were all made by volunteers on the campaign’s list. (For comparison, in 2012 the Obama campaign said it made 25 million calls on the last four days of the election.) Former presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s organization in Texas has made three million calls statewide in the last week, for example. In addition to the dozens of national groups with real budgets and organizing capacity, thousands of locally-led volunteer groups have gained a lot of experience in organizing.
Lala Wu, one of the co-founders of Sister District Project, which is an important piece of the post-2016 grassroots infrastructure, shared her thoughts at length with me about the new ecosystem. Let me quote her at length, since there wasn’t room to do so in that piece:
“The progressive grassroots is a multi-headed hydra, and the Biden/Harris campaign is just one of these heads. At least at the moment, I actually don’t think that’s a bad thing. It means there are multiple points of entry for volunteers, whether via strategic priority (e.g., redistricting), affinity group (e.g., Asian-Americans for Biden), issue (e.g., climate crisis), and so on. I’m also encouraged that there are so many opportunities to get involved in state and local races, and that people are starting to understand how important these are not only because of our once-in-a-decade shot at redistricting, but also for advancing progressive policy in general.
“I’ve seen several attempts at creating a comprehensive list of volunteer groups, and I think it’s probably an impossible task. This is not a complete list, but here are some of the categories I see in this vast and heterogeneous landscape:
State-based or local movement organizations (like New Virginia Majority)
National organizations with lists they can use to drive capacity to partners’ efforts (like Daily Kos and Vote Save America)
National organizations with volunteer chapters (like Sister District, Moms Demand, NAACP, Working Families Party)
Local groups operating under national banners (like Sister District teams or Indivisible groups)
Local groups operating independently (like Civic Sundays)
Coalitions that include a mix of types 3-5 from above, which might also include participation or support from party representatives and/or staff from national organizations. These coalitions are usually organized around: a) Where volunteers live (like SoCalBlue.org), or b) Target state (I organize a monthly call with coalition leaders working in GA, MI, PA, TX, VA, WA so they can share best practices)
“One thing to note is that the vast majority of local groups operate rather independently, even if they have a national banner. For example, many groups (and coalitions of groups) that have Indivisible in their name are operating totally independently, and have goals that are separate from the national organization, e.g., flipping their state house chamber.”
What all this means is come January, a future Biden Administration will need to be in a different relationship to grassroots Democrats than the last Democratic one. Even more complicated: if the election isn’t resolved cleanly next week, Biden and grassroots Democrats will need to be fighting shoulder-to-shoulder to convert his likely popular vote majority into victory.
Lara Putnam, another close observer of progressive politics who is focused intently on the changing political landscape of Pennsylvania, where she teaches, told me, “What I see emerging are local-to-regional ecosystems of progressive/Democratic activism (with the degree of overlap between ‘progressive’ and ‘Democratic’ varying from place to place) linked by multiple, substantive, partially overlapping lateral networks and organizations, some statewide, some national. (The increased amount of small- and mid-donor fundraising going on for down ballot candidates and some movement voter outreach initiatives means that this ecosystem is getting “watered” by the resource surge of the moment, though doubtless there is lots of room for improvement there.) Ultimately, I look around and what I see emerging is a pretty resilient socio-organizational terrain from which to move forward post November — actually, no matter what happens in November.”
Let’s hope she’s right!
Odds and Ends
As the last week of the election plays out, I’m increasingly nervous about signs of a surge in Republican voter registrations by white working class men in Pennsylvania, one of the key battleground states. So, if you can, please throw some last-minute money to
Pennsylvania Voice. The money will go for several different things, including election protection and supporting voters in long lines (there are lots of different kinds of needs from paying people to help at the polls to food to music to legal support and ballot help) to post-election legal fights and mobilizations.
Here’s why Facebook’s decision to shut down the one independent research effort tracking how political ads micro-target voters is a really terrible move, courtesy of Mark Scott of Politico.
Feedback Loop
Gaming journalist Ethan Davidson, who is a reader of The Connector, wrote after last Thursday’s issue on “AOC and the Future of Politics,” that “I for one welcome fireside Twitch chats, and AOC’s appearance there just solidified my dinosaur brain’s craving for a politician who is a little bit more like me. She made a huge impact on influential people in the gaming community with this, too—learning she plays League of Legends, watching her competently navigate a complex digital interface and download a new version of the game, seemingly without coaching—these are powerful signifiers that reach far beyond the boundaries of what digitally literate people expect from politicians. Twitch is for sure more like a mob than a town hall, though, and it was great to hear your take.” He also added, “I’m not at all looking forward to the first young right-wing gamer politician.”
Beth Becker, another reader who is one of the progressive movement’s best gurus and trainers on digital strategy, wrote back, “re: the electeds using platforms to engage their constituents more meaningfully …back in march Rep. Hank Johnson built an app to get people’s input on a bill rights for digital privacy.” Thanks for that tip, Beth! It reminds me of other similar efforts, like Senator Richard Durbin’s use of the blog MyDD to crowdsource input for a bill on net neutrality. Maybe someday politicians will institutionalize this practice?