Post by Jennifer Tomkins
Kim Foxx in Chicago, Carlos Garcia in Phoenix, and now Chesa Boudin in San Francisco: all three are examples of people of color elected as District Attorney. Their elections signal the growing awareness of the importance of DAs and city councils to a key part of the progressive agenda: reforming the current “criminal injustice system.” It’s also a direct result of the surge in progressive organizing and in funding from folks like Airlift, Way to Win and others since the 2016 election. Now that they’ve been elected by the people, we, the people, have to ensure they can do their jobs.
Criminal “injustice” and the road to progressive DAs
One of the starkest statistics reflective of this injustice is the fact that while the US population is just 4.4 percent of the global population, the US prison population is a shocking 22% of those incarcerated worldwide. The Pew Research Center reported that in 2017 the rate of incarceration for African Americans was nearly six times the imprisonment rate for whites. Meanwhile the fastest growing demographic of those in prison is Black women. As the movie 13th argues, our prison system can be seen as an extension of slavery by other means.
It used to be that DA races happened under the radar and police unions played a prominent role in their election. In the past few years, that began to change in response to growing anger over police violence amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, by the bi-partisan awareness of the need for reform and from progressive political funders investing in down ballot races, such as DAs and city councils.
But, as Foxx pointed out to an audience of progressive women at the recent conference of Women Donors Network in Chicago, getting elected is only the first, and possibly the easiest part. Once elected, these progressive DAs and local legislators face enormous pressure from the “establishment” to “conform” rather than to fulfill their election pledges.
Foxx becomes the new face of justice
Foxx is a savvy, elegant, strong and articulate African American woman who has risen to her current position from the Chicago projects. As she says, she looks like 85% of the people that come through her office. She is determined to continue the policy disruption she has begun, but she is also clear what she needs from those who elected her: she needs them to have her back.
Since being elected Cook County DA, Foxx has nevertheless changed the gender of leadership in her office, increasing women in leadership positions from 25% to 58%; she vacated 80 convictions because of police misconduct and she is in the process of vacating 10,000 more for marijuana possession.
“My job is not to be an extension of the police,” she says. Yet, that is precisely what most DAs have been and it’s how the Chicago police force would like it to continue being. She has been physically threatened by the Fraternal Order of Police and white nationalists who held a rally outside her office and widely criticized for being “soft on crime.”
Justice spreads from the Midwest to the West
On the west coast, newly elected DA Boudin, a former defense attorney, has received the same kind of opposition from the police as Foxx. San Francisco Police Officers Association called Boudin the “#1 choice of criminals and gang members” in the more than $600,000 worth of attack ads it ran against Boudin.
He too has an agenda that centers on the elimination of racist practices. In particular, he plans to target “gang enhancements” (the practice of increasing sentences for crimes in any way associated with gang activities) that affect predominantly people of color and that he views as explicitly racist. In a recent San Francisco Chronicle interview, he explained, “In the cases where we see serious conduct, we can already impose serious punishments without using racially motivated gang enhancements.”
If Boudin’s and Foxx’s elections are a reaction to criminal injustice, so too was that of Carlos Garcia to Phoenix City Council in March this year. A recent article in Politico Magazine by Fernanda Santos explores in depth how Garcia’s election and that of other Hispanics to local office throughout Arizona is mainly thanks to their activist organizing and training, largely in opposition to criminal injustice.
Many organizations, not the Democratic Party, powered activists like Garcia to victory, including Mi Familia Vota, LUCHA (an Airlift funding recipient) and Mijente. As for the reason they transitioned to political office from activism, Garcia explained that after five of his siblings were deported, “I got left with no options. And that’s what has pushed someone like me to actually run for office.” Of their new-found strategy of seeking elected office, Garcia says “brown people are coming out, and now we have the numbers and the organization in place to be able to turn the tables in our favor exactly because we have a seat at the table.”
But, like Foxx and Boudin, Garcia and his cohort are only too aware of the effort it will take to implement the policies on which they ran. As Garcia says, it’s a “very lonely world of running for office and governing.” That’s why it’s so important that we in the progressive funding space need to have all their backs. It’s not just about getting them elected, it’s also about turning out for them as they face both political opposition and physical threats.
Post by Jennifer Tomkins
Winning elections in the US has always involved money. Back in 1757, George Washington, who lost an election two years earlier, bought approximately $195 worth of punch and hard cider for friends, contributing greatly to his subsequent win. Nowadays, it takes much more than $195 to win an election. The focus of campaign spending shifted from the 18th century alcoholic persuasion version to the digital age version in which campaigns employ a range of modern technologies and a vast network of consultants, all of which have become known as “the political industrial complex.”
This era of Trump—an ascendency of social media in politics and exponential growth of political consultancy—ushered in an unprecedented level of dollars in politics, a level progressives struggle to reach.
Fortunately, some new digital players, like Acronym, are widening the playing field, providing opportunities for progressives to compete digitally without compromising its values by prioritizing profit-seeking consultants or corporate interests. But, it’s been a long road to get here.
How we got here
Just as money has proven indispensable to political victory, so—very often—have lying and skullduggery. Theatergoers know how an infidelity scandal was used against Alexander Hamilton by his political opponents. Closer to our own day, Lyndon Johnson supposedly won one Texas election by suggesting his opponent had unsavory relations with a pig. More recently still, lies and innuendo destroyed the presidential hopes of both Michael Dukakis and John Kerry.
Back in 2007, the Obama campaign seized the nomination with a combination of a charismatic candidate and tech-savvy campaign strategies that relied heavily on both a robust ground game and the political industrial complex. No matter the intention through which it’s engaged, that complex is deeply intertwined with the corporate world. The Obama campaign, for instance, employed such firms as Bully Pulpit Interactive whose other clients included Google and Exelon. It also hired GMMB, whose other clients included AT&T and Visa, to produce campaign ads. Even progressive champion and current candidate Bernie Sanders rolls with the same crowd.
After Obama was elected thanks to (in part) his superior use of technology, big political donors like the Koch took note and immediately set countertactics into motion. As Nick Fouriezos accounted recently in Ozy, Obama’s opposition began pouring massive funding into building new campaign ventures such as the analytics group Themis and grassroots canvassing tech i360. Simultaneously, Steve Bannon and GOP mega-donor Robert Mercer backed Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm now infamous for its misuse of facebook data for political purposes.
The moral complexity of The Complex
Politicians’ dependency on the political industrial complex create conflicts of interest for both elected officials and for the consultants themselves: how much do they want to help candidates win versus simply making money. Critics of the DNC pointed out that Democrats continually use the same “insider” political consultants, whether they win elections or not, meaning democratic candidates have been stuck in the same strategic loop without innovation until just recently.
The new “small d”: digital
In this election cycle, Democrats find themselves playing catch-up in both their use of and spending on digital ads and social media, according to a recent CNN article: “The Trump campaign has already spent almost $20 million on Facebook ads since Facebook began publicly disclosing political ad spend in May 2018. These ad-buys eclipse that of all Democratic presidential primary candidates [combined].” Adding more hurdles for Democrats, Facebook recently announced that although it will strengthen its fact-checking of information overall, political ads will not be included in this practice. Now it’s open season for the liar-in-chief as he and his allies accelerate their efforts to lie their way out of impeachment.
So, Democrats are looking to up their game. But, rather than turning to mega-donors, they’re choosing the venture capital model. One such VC, Chicago-based Higher Ground Labs founded by former Obama campaigners, has invested $15 million in 36 startups working to bolster progressive politics. More than 3,000 campaigns have used its tools since the accelerator’s launch in 2017. Another such company, New Media Ventures, based in San Francisco, has invested more than $50 million since its inception in 2010, including $1.5 million in funding for 17 new startups announced in July.
These are the newcomers to the political industrial complex—welcome! Yet, the omnipresent fine line between the influence of money and the mission of winning elections remains. VCs are still profit-driven entities and the removal of mega-donors doesn’t guarantee this funding comes without strings. This is a serious question for progressive candidates and issues-based groups like those supported by Airlift. Both need the latest tools in order to compete, but who can be trusted?
Enter Tara McGowan: the new face of digital democracy come to save us. Founder of the consultancy organization Acronym, she’s bucking the traditional model, and luckily, more concerned with winning than getting rich.
By the end of 2018, Acronym “raised $18 million, registered 60,000 voters, run 105 targeted ad campaigns in 15 states, helped elect 63 progressive candidates and won 61 percent of the races it invested in.” It did this by setting up a structure that consists of a not-for-profit company, Acronym itself, beneath which are nested a group of for-profits: a campaign consulting firm (Lockwood Strategy), a political tech company with a peer-to-peer texting product (Shadow) and a media company investing in local left-leaning outlets (FWIW Media). Acronym raises money for the for-profits and then channels the profits back into Acronym’s mission. This structure contrasts with typical consultancies that have one area of expertise: “Consultants push for more spending in their individual silos, as opposed to McGowan’s strategy to fold everything under one umbrella—making winning her chief incentive.”
McGowan has already attracted a good deal of media attention of her own as well as the attention of two of Airlift’s allies, Way to Win and Women Donors’ Network, who are looking for ways to help the groups and candidates they support get their hands on the campaign tools needed for victory. Better yet, McGowan’s take on how to operate in the world of consultancy offers a way us progressives and our allies can both compete effectively and maintain our values while not feeling beholden to outside interests or donors. In McGowan’s own words, “Too often, in any industry, a drive for profit can lead to greed. And I think that can blur the lines of the real objective here. This could be an election that changes entirely how campaigns are run. It could be a catalyst.”
In other words, we could win, and win in a way that doesn’t compromise our goals of social and political change.
Post by Danny Altman
In 2017, I started Airlift, which serves as a kind of Consumer Reports for political giving. It was sparked by the endless barrage of fundraising emails I was getting that read like hostage notes. I saw the same hyperbolic language and Threat Level RED graphics across a number of campaigns. I had a strong feeling that they were coming from the same boiler room because they all read and looked the same. But I didn’t have any evidence.
Well I just found Exhibit A. In a scathing investigative piece in the Washington Post, Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Anu Narayanswamy find the boiler room and take us inside.
The solicitations piled into voters’ email accounts — sometimes multiple times a day. And they carried alarming messages, often in blaring capital letters.
“We’re on the verge of BANKRUPTCY.”
“Our bank account is ALMOST EMPTY!”
“Trump is INCHES away from firing Robert Mueller.”
The catastrophic language yielded a fundraising bonanza for clients of Mothership Strategies, a little-known and relatively new digital consulting firm that raked in tens of millions of dollars from a tide of small donations that flowed to Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections.
Mothership is now under fire for its “aggressive and misleading tactics.” Their fees, in some cases double the industry average, are built on exaggerating fears and eroding the trust of small donors. According to federal records, Mothership raised a total of $150 million in the 2018 cycle, and kept $35 million of that in fees.
Mothership’s first client was John Ossoff, for whom they raised $31 million. Most of that went to their media pals to spend on television advertising. David Broockman, a professor at Stanford, has reviewed every bit of serious research that’s out there. His conclusion: the effectiveness of political TV advertising is close to zero.
For comparison, Lucy McBath just won that same Georgia Congressional seat from Karen Handel, who beat Ossoff. McBath’s total budget was under $3 million. And she didn’t run as a middle of the road candidate.
Mothership is soaking small donors, wasting a lot of money, and making out like bandits. But who says there’s no honor among thieves? They’re also sharing the spoils with their ex-colleagues and friends, many of whom they met at their previous employer, the DCCC.
About a quarter of the payments that flowed to Mothership during the midterm elections came not from campaigns, but from political entities run by operatives with whom the Mothership founders have personal and professional ties.
Believing that there had to be an alternative to this barrage of misleading and threatening emails, I decided to go down a different path. Working with a team out of my local Indivisible group, we got amazing help from Tides Advocacy and the Movement Voter Project to start our own fundraising site at Airlift.fund. We now work in concert with other donor groups who believe that your money doesn’t have to go through DC to get to Macon or Milwaukee.
Our research showed that giving to effective local grassroots groups is much more powerful than directly funding candidates or party organizations. Airlift funds a seriously vetted collection of groups fighting for issues that motivate young and non-white people. I call these people “natural born Democrats,” because if you can get them to the polls, they will overwhelmingly vote Democratic. These are the people who voted for Obama and stayed home in 2016. These are the people who came back in 2018!
The groups we fund work neighbor-to-neighbor, all year long. So instead of parachuting people into battleground states and districts, we support local feet on the street. In the run up to elections, they already have deep relationships with unlikely voters and know what it takes to get them to the polls. If you would like to get more info on how it works, go to Airlift.fund.
A version of this blog originally appeared on Daily Kos.
Mothership Strategies raises $31 million, loses an election, and proves that scare tactics work on small donors.
