Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Hi friends. Dick Flacks here another episode of Talking Strategy, Making History. And this is a special one I think, because our guest is Michael Podhorser, longtime political director for the AFL cio, retired recently.
He couples his leadership within the labor movement around electoral activity to a extremely sophisticated and insightful use of electoral data and of survey data and in ways that I think contradict a lot of the mainstream uses of the same data.
And that's what a lot of what we're going to be talking about in our conversation because the ways that he looks at these data and the experiences that we've had in the last few elections is important for us in trying to figure out how to transform the Democratic Party.
And our conversation concludes with reference to that goal and that vision, which is one of the visions that drives Talking Strategy Making History as a podcast.
My partner in crime, Daraka, couldn't be with us in the conversation.
His 20 month old baby childcare fell apart just before he he was able to join us.
So he's there in spirit, as you will hear, but not in person this time.
I really encourage you to listen to this and I'd love to hear from you. We would love to hear from you with thoughts, reflections and of course with your help as a subscriber, going to patreon.comtsMHtsMH to become a subscriber. So let's tune in to our conversation with Michael Podhorser.
Michael Podhorser, welcome. I'm so glad that you had a chance to chat with us here. Actually, Daraka had to be away. He's got an 18 month old child. Some of you have been aware if you've been listening to the podcast that sometimes ADA voice can be heard. But the child care failed for him today and so he had to beg off from this conversation.
But I've been eager to talk to Michael, as I just told him off offline, because I think the analyses he's been doing about the electoral situation, particularly our interest in how the Democratic Party debates over the over strategy and its nature can be affected by our actual empirical understanding of what's going on in the electoral process.
And he's been the political director for a long time of the AFL cio, retired from that, but continues to be very actively in the analytic mode. So welcome Michael, and why don't we get right into a particular thing and I I will give give listeners a link to this piece that you did called why Trump Won in Quotes. Basically that was the title of it and the quotes are important.
I'LL give you a brief simple minded summary of what I understand the argument to be. You can then respond to that and take off from that, which is that it wasn't that Trump improved his following, didn't expand his support base. He got pretty much the same vote that he got in 2020. The big story which has not been fully reported is the failure of millions of people who voted for Biden to vote for Harris basically did not show up at the polls.
And if you don't take that into account in your analysis of the meaning of the vote, you are looking at wrong end of the telescope, basically. Is that the basic argument?
[00:04:36] Speaker B: That's close and I really appreciate the opportunity to be on with you to have this conversation.
I think if I expand to what you were saying, and it's the point I was trying to get across, is that there's a whole suite of evidence that people were not voting for what Trump was offering, but either had been alarmed by the prospect of a second Trump term in 2020 and came out to vote, but this time stayed home because they just weren't as alarmed or they actually, especially if they were younger and didn't experience Trump one were really not believing we call the credulity chasm that what he was saying would actually be our future.
And so those two components that were played out, one people staying home, the other people voting for him, but really out of protest or rejection.
And it's in the context, an important context of understanding that in the last is the fourth presidential election where it's flipped party.
Since 2016 it's been DRDR. And that's only happened once before in American history, more than a century ago. Right. What the American public is saying is that they really a majority of Americans don't want either Trump or Harris.
And each election we install an office, not someone who has the consent of the governed, but who is the not loser in a two party system.
Uh huh.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: Yes. It's a lot of disillusionment or alienation from the political parties that's not exactly brand new. But I guess you're arguing that actually exacerbated in the last what? 20. 20. 20. Yeah, yeah. And so that's part of what accounts for this kind of swing.
But people did turn out in 2020. And so you're basically argument people did turn out to vote against Trump in 2020 and your argument is they were.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: Millions of them stayed home.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: But in 2020, when I wrote the.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: Original piece, based on the evidence that was available then, it looked like it was about 19 million people who had voted for Biden. Now that all the voter files are back, it looks like it was about 17 and a half million.
Either way, it's a huge number.
[00:07:22] Speaker A: Is that the number of people who didn't actually vote or.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: Right, that's the number of people who voted for. But, and when I wrote the piece in January, the evidence we had were the polls done right around the election, which by definition have a lot of potential for error. But when the. Now all of the voter files are there so we can literally know upgraded precision, what that number was.
And instead of being about 19, and I was clear, that was about.
It's about 17 and a half. And either way, that. Remember that Harris lost by about 2 million votes.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Right.
[00:08:05] Speaker B: So that's the main point.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: How did those 17 million people compare with the broader Democratic voters there? Something distinctive about who didn't?
[00:08:15] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, they're the people that, like, are in the headlines right now. They're younger voters, they're less. The sort of less engaged voter, the, quote, low information voter, the irregular voter, all of those. Right.
[00:08:31] Speaker A: I mean, my limited contact with student people that age really surprised me. People were saying, she's not speaking to us, she's not responding to us. And of course, more proactive, more actively.
What she's done, refusing to deal with the Gaza situation in an effective way added to their alienation. So I, I did know people who said, I'm just not going to vote for the presidential candidate in California because she'll carry the state anyway. So that's part, you know, one factor in this general pattern that you're talking about.
[00:09:08] Speaker B: Yeah, and, and it's interesting you raised California because, you know, the instant analysis of, you know, was about how the country had moved far to the right by this outcome.
It's, as I said, Harris won by about 2.3 million votes.
She got 1.8 million fewer votes than Biden did in California.
Given the really serious and tragic events going on in California right now, I don't think it's much of a leap to think if people in California had understood that electing Trump would lead to a military invasion, that she would have gotten 1.8 million fewer votes than Biden did. But it's that credulity chasm that people, I'm sure your students weren't thinking that that was true. I'm sure that people in California didn't believe that was true. People in a lot of those blue states felt that nothing really horrible had happened to them and Trump won. What's the worst that could happen.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: So part of it was active political refusal to support based on being alienated and feeling. Combination of that with what you're saying, a feeling, well, we saw what Trump could do and he's, you know, we're not that afraid of, of it this time or he might not even get elected or, you know, a variety of those kinds of things. I want to get finish this little piece of it to get back to other things about that election that weren't in your article. Sure. But, but before we do that, I think let's be this, make this pretty sharp. The New York Times keeps running these reports and maps about how movement in the electorate of key elements of the Democratic base to the right to Trump. And they have these maps that show with, with red arrows all over the place.
And, and your, that's one of the reasons I wanted to get your form of analysis because.
Well, I'll let you say it. How do you respond when you see those maps, Frank?
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Well, there are, there's a sort of first take and then a deeper take. The first take is just to remember that it is the New York Times decision and their graphic artists to make those red arrows pointing towards Republicans rather than blue arrows pointing away from Democrats.
Right. But the visual impact and the headlines are to make you think that there's a groundswell of movement towards the things that MAGA and Trump are for. And that's without substantiation.
[00:12:00] Speaker A: Well, the main substantiation is that the percent of people who voted for Trump who were, let's say, male, Latino workers or, you know, things like that, the percentage of that group move more toward Trump in 24 than in 20. But I feel your analysis, but I.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: Think even there, if I can interrupt for a second, is that when we talk about a group moving towards Trump, say just like your group, Latino men, as a way to make this vivid. Right.
When we hear that, we think of individual Latino men who voted for Harris, who this time voted for Trump.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:46] Speaker B: And what that misses is the Latino men who had voted for Biden and stayed home.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: Exactly right.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: And I hope people will read the piece you're linked to. But like one of those sort of at the beginning of time decisions about how to report on elections has us listening to the results in what I call Flatland, where the only votes that count in the denominator, the only people who count in the denominator are the people who actually cast votes.
Right. So every election is, you know, sums to 100%. And so that means that it's hard in your head to imagine any change from one party to the other being accomplished by anything other than individual Americans changing their preference.
But so like, this election was about 49, 47.
But if instead we only listened to the results of elections with the percentage that each candidate got of people who could have voted, this election would have been about 3231.
Right, right. And at that point, it would be easy to see that this isn't just about individual Latino men switching sides, but the number of people who showed up and who they were.
Right.
And then it would. Your mental image would easily take in the idea that elections change because individuals who vote in both change their mind and because of people who do vote in one election and not the other.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Maybe we'll get back to the particular point about the Democrats and turnout issues. I'd like to.
So let's push this further. So would you argue that in fact the whole question of working class voters of color moving away from the Democrats or moving toward Trump has been exaggerated or that that's. Or how do you evaluate.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: I mean, I think that, and this is where I like, really like, because everything is in this zero sum Democrat, Republican framework.
Often when I talk about this, people jump to the conclusion that I'm saying something along the lines of Democrats really aren't as bad shape as you think.
Right. Or like making excuses for that. But that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that the increasing hostility to Democratic governance, that's what capital, Democratic governance is the key factor here.
Right. I think that, I think it's pretty clear that is someone else had gotten the Republican nomination this time around, they would have won a pretty convincing victory.
It was only the fact that so many people don't want Trump to be president. That was even close.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: All right, so now, and that's not to say there aren't maybe pockets. There's this particular emphasis of the story of border, border in Texas counties, predominantly Latino counties, or elect districts which have shifted strongly toward Republicans.
[00:16:37] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely.
[00:16:38] Speaker A: In the last couple of weeks.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: That's a very specific.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Is that, is that about turnout or something else?
[00:16:43] Speaker B: It's about both. But that's a place where there has been, you know, more positive engagement with Republicans than in the rest of the country.
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Or maybe I'm hearing underneath that a failure of the party, the Democratic Party, to really effectively organize in that area.
What you're saying. Okay, so here's the thing that I've been surprised that hasn't been commented on and I wanted to really ask you about.
Let us take Nebraska and the situation there where the independent candidate for Senate Osborne came out of virtually nowhere and made a very close race for Senate. He is a labor leader, president of a local and he ran on a pro worker platform.
And at the same ballot in Nebraska was a minimum wage bill that passed, which indicated to me there's like at least 20% of those who voted for Trump. I'm just making up that number. But something in that neighborhood who voted for pro working class liberal, if you might call liberal measures. And a candidate like Osborne.
But there's also similar results with minimum wage kind of initiatives in Missouri and Alaska, but both red states where those kind of minimum wage measures passed as well.
Along with that is a fact that has been more commented on, which is down ballot races in that 24 election were won by Democrats like in certain senatorial races.
So how would you put those things together with your overall analysis on the presidential. On a level?
[00:18:40] Speaker B: Sure. No, I think it just again puts the lie to the idea that the outcome was a support for the things Trump actually everything Trump wants to do. Right.
[00:18:55] Speaker A: Well, was there something specific about the labor orientation of.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: Oh yeah, the. Of course.
With Osborne, I think that he had to escaped the lack of credibility of the Democratic Party and also had the credibility of being a working person, natural working person, which is something that fewer and fewer people who can run for office are. And I think that resonated with a lot of voters across the ideological spectrum.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: So some would say that. So the real strength that he had was that he was not identified with the Democratic Party.
I would rather believe it was more the class people that he had.
[00:19:41] Speaker B: Yeah, it was both things. But you can't separate them because part the perception people in Nebraska or most of Right. America have of Democrats who run in their state is that they will elect them, but in the end they'll just go along and do whatever those radicals in Washington are going to do.
And Osborne didn't suffer from that because his, his credibility as a labor leader helped convince people that he wouldn't be in that mold. Right. That he was actually running to represent that them as working people, not to just be another vote for the liberals in Washington.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: So there was an anti liberal character to that vote. Is that what you're saying to the.
[00:20:39] Speaker B: Caricature that prevails in those states? Right.
[00:20:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: They're pedophiles. They're going to steal your tax dollars and give it to those other people because they're in media bubbles. Where that's the dominant perception of national Democrats.
[00:20:58] Speaker A: So that leads to another. So by the way, before I get to this, to the next point that I want to raise, I would say if Daraka were here, he, he would be itching to express his dubious, his attitudes of being. Feeling dubious about Osborne because he did not run as a Democrat. Baraka based I think a lot on his experience in Scandinavian social democratic politics, believes strongly that a party, that the battle is in the Democratic Party, that we've got to make it a party that actually speaks for the people and is credibly that and to be independent of that is to undermine that kind of strategic orientation. I wonder.
I think it's sort of uphill sometimes for, for him to get that argument across to, to a lot of people on the left because there's this tendency to generalize. The Democratic Party is this. The Democratic Party is that.
And part of why we're doing this podcast in a way is to give people more.
A more differentiated sense, strategic sense of what we mean by fighting within the Democratic Party. But how do you see that Osborne you're raising really?
[00:22:22] Speaker B: I'm wishing we could have that conversation with them because I think two things are true. I think that for working people to have a party, to have the outcome, the political process, they have to play a central or dominant role inside the Democratic party.
But at this moment, the only way someone can get elected who would actually have those values is someone like Osborne. Because if you do the normal way Democrats get elected, you raise money from Wall street, you raise money from Silicon Valley, you raise money from all the places that make sure that you don't do the things that working class people want.
So the yes, the end state needs to be a majority of the Democratic Party that supports a working class agenda.
But the problem is how do you get from here to there right now?
[00:23:37] Speaker A: Does a working class agenda and your reading of survey data and the electoral data lead you to support the idea that the, the Democrats strategically have to stop supporting trans rights, have, you know, as. As we might put it, throw, throw trans people under the bus, really separate themselves from support for what is caricatured as identity politics rather than class politics. How do you, how do you think about that debate? Because that's a very real major debate going on.
[00:24:16] Speaker B: I think that the, the reason that issues like trans or other, what get called social issues are seen as weak spots for Democrats is because what national Democrats do not really contest the much of the corporate plutocratic economic agenda in the way that would be Necessary for us to be talking about something other than trans.
When labor was a big part of the Democratic party through the 1960s, these were not the issues. People understood that voting, if you're a working person, that Democrats were actually on your side, because they were much more on your side, in fact.
Right. But if, you know, for the many good things you can say about Harris, it sort of, you know, is a blind spot that you can imagine a Democratic Party excited about a candidate whose chief advisor is the general counsel of Uber. Right, right. And that, you know, many of the people have. I mean, there's no cost to being a Democrat and supporting gig workers or, you know, initiatives that go against working people, you know, and.
And that's the problem.
[00:25:59] Speaker A: So that ad that got very famous that the Trumpers ran, she's for them.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: Dave Ellman, he's for us and not.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: For you, and was a brilliant. One of the most brilliant ads maybe in electoral history, don't you think? I don't know how many.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Well, no, I don't think I'd put it quite. I think that ad was obviously pretty effective, but from the evidence I've seen, their most effective ad is where she's on the View and gets tossed a softball of what would you do differently?
And she just stammers.
Right. I think people really want to change, and they ran that ad a lot more. I'm not trying to say that that you're talking about was not effective or that they didn't run it much or it didn't matter, but the even bigger liability that Harris had in those ad wars was not being able to differentiate herself from Biden, who was enormously unpopular.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: And yet people take that the ad, not only was it effective as such, but it proves that the Democrats have to throw trans people under the bus, which is quite the opposite of how you might read it. You might say, couldn't they figure out.
Did it take a work of genius to figure out a way to counter that and, so to speak, trumpet with some other argument? I don't know that they even tried to do that.
And so she neither supported the human rights of all people, including trans people. She neither did that verbally, nor did she actually have an argument that showed she wasn't.
You know what I mean? It was like they just tried to ignore that issue, which was a big, I don't think even retrospectively a big mistake. It just felt that way right at the time especially.
So that leads me to a recent article that's just come out in the. On in print. In the American Prospect by Stan Greenberg, who's another long standing analyst of survey research and relating that to Democratic Party strategy.
And I think there's a lot of overlap in what you're saying and what he's saying. Yet he took some pain to bring you up as someone who was not on his wavelength.
You don't have to get into a dispute with Greenberg but unless you feel like doing it. But more what's that, what's that issue, if any between, between the position that you're advocating and what he advocates in that article which is very much that that she was, she didn't present herself as a. He doesn't, he emphasizes the class thing that, that she walked away from an, an early emphasis on working class interests and went toward the, went toward trying to appeal to moderate Republicans, I guess running around with Liz Cheney and all that. But the emphasis he has is on policy failure in the campaign. I think that's how I recall what he was trying to say. So you want to make any comment about that?
[00:29:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that there's an important way in which if you're deciding that the only way to think about what Democrats should do is what you can learn from your surveys, then you're taking off the table ways in which Democrats could actually win by doing things actually.
And that on top of that the lack of credibility, the underlying problem, say if you compare his original successful experience with Bill Clinton when everyone's saying it's the economy stupid and all of that. And that was in 1992 when Democrats still had credibility as being a party that would look after working people's interests in which politicians credibility was much higher than it is now.
What analysis like the one in that article don't engage with or acknowledge at all is how do you actually get to the voters you need to get to if they don't believe you.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: And like her saying I'm going to do all these great things for you in a populist way like we'll get Democrats to vote for but not but there aren't enough Democrats.
And like that's the problem that they're not people are still thinking we're in the 90s are not seeing how elections are won in the 2000s.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Uh huh. Yeah. And he doesn't really represent that argument that you just made in his article. He doesn't deal with the argument. He just sort of I'm not. We don't have to get in. We don't have to get into details. It's not that important.
But but what you're saying is very important. And I want to get to that credibility issue because I've been thinking a lot about trying myself, trying to decipher how would people vote for Osborne, vote for raising the minimum wage and still at the same time vote for Trump or how would people vote for down ballot Democrats and not vote for Harris?
And I came to the word credibility really touches on the same thing that I'm thinking because the Biden people kept complaining when they were criticized from this point of view. Oh well, look at all that Biden has done for labor. He walked on a picket line. He's done all these great appointments to the nlrb.
He's done a number of things that clearly show that he was pro labor. Plus the policies that he pushed, the infrastructure bill and all the rest of it were pro working class. So why would people doubt his credibility?
And my answer I'll try on you is because he did not attack the oligarchs, did not attack what Bernie calls the billionaire class, did not make it clear if you believe, if you're a working person who believes that the system, economic and political is in the control of the super rich or however they whatever phrase you want to use the ruling class of wealth then, and that the Democrats are in that, in that same framework, that's where the credibility issue arises. Am I reading you right?
[00:33:13] Speaker B: When you mostly there's really an important point though that need to be hold out because of the examples you're talking about in terms of walking the picket line and doing favorable things for unions.
This has been very much underreported because that sort of the story you were just telling is much more Appealing Somehow in 2024, Harris actually won union members by 2 points more than Biden had four years ago because of all the things you listed while the rest of people who were not in unions swung six points plus towards Trump even a bit more for working people. And it gets exactly to the credibility.
People who work in unions are hearing, not from Joe Biden or the Democratic Party or whatever, that the new construction job is because of the IRA or whatever. They're hearing it from their shop steward or from their union who they believe if they tell them that, but with only 10% of America in the union. Right. That, that it's if that doesn't carry the day.
[00:34:34] Speaker A: Right.
So, so that sort of further reinforces the general kind of argument I'm making. I guess my point is more on the, the rhetoric of campaigning which, which.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: I think, but I think on that to your Point, though, in terms of, you know, the, you have to be clear eyed that the Democratic Party has, from the Great Recession on, has had plenty of opportunity to be against the oligarchs and the billionaires and they never have done anything.
[00:35:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: And so, you know, in October to say we're going to take down the oligarchs who've given us most of our campaign funding and is like a little bit thin.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: Well, and you know, I think back though, to FDR and saying I am the enemy of the economic royalists. Consider me their enemy and I welcome their enmity. You know, that kind of rhetoric, that kind of rhetoric.
[00:35:39] Speaker B: And a third of the workforce in the labor movement goes along.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Yes. All right.
So that's an important, you know, and that leads me to another point that we've been over and over again finding in our conversations on this podcast with people who are working in trying to change the party and trying to.
And that is that it's rebuilding stable organizing structures in the grassroots in every part of the country in all 50 states.
It's more important even than specific things that the party says in rhetoric. It's the organizing effort.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: And you buy that 100%. And it also gets back to that American Prospect article, because when you read all these pun bits, right. The only options for the Democratic Party are saying different things, not actually showing up in communities and deliverance people or creating a home for people on the ground.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: And in fact, one of the first conversations we had was with Jane Klebb from Nebraska. And it was, you know, she was, at that point, this was several years ago, was really trying to hope that sitting on the dnc that the, that the parties nationally would invest in that kind of organizing. So I'm going to get your sense. What? Yes. Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:09] Speaker B: I mean, the, the amount of resources that would actually need to go into rebuilding a Democratic party that would get the kind of results that you're talking about on the ground are orders of magnitude bigger than even the most ambitious advocates of that are.
I think one thing that might resonate is the, you know, until sort of the breakup of Democratic structures like war people in Illinois. Right. The in Chicago, when your kid graduated from high school, you went to the war chair or assembly person that you worked for, voted for. They got him a job somewhere and Democrats were delivering jobs, not just like a policy in Washington.
And it's that level of sort of thick engagement at the ground that actually creates the kind of impact that that's necessary.
[00:38:17] Speaker A: Yes. I'm wondering if there are any Examples still in existence or newly in existence about that that you can point to. Do you have any?
[00:38:25] Speaker B: No, because I put part of it is that beginning in the, especially beginning in the 70s, the sort of takeover by the Democratic Party of a like, more like elite non working person faction, like intentionally tried to broke up the power of all those structures.
Right. The, like the, the people in the, in those earlier days didn't require lots of funding by the national Democratic Party.
Right. They functioned with the resources that were in those places.
[00:39:06] Speaker A: Well, my impression is that there are parallel organizations to the Democratic Party at the grassroots in some parts of the country that have been effective right here. And where we are, there's an organization called Cause which is based in the Latino and immigrant communities working class base.
It's built over the last 20, 25 years a very significant number of full time staff people on the ground who work in the Dolores Huerta style of house meetings to build the base and who deal with many kinds of issues, including some degree, not much servicing of people, but that they're certainly available for people especially in the immigrant situation now.
They connect with people's problems as well as educating people on issues.
It's been a very powerful organization in terms of electoral outcomes as well as simply policy things. And I keep feeling here in California we've got more on the ground that people around the country should know about. Not because they're exactly models, but just to maybe make people aware that 30 years ago California was run by Republicans who were anti immigrant. And now we have a very different kind of politics. But it's not only out of alienation from the Republicans, it's because something was built in parts of this state that might have meaning for people elsewhere.
You look at places like Georgia or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania where there's been a lot of grassroots organizing since 2016 with a good electoral results. So I take a lot of heart from that.
But I guess I should raise this, especially given your history with the AFL cio.
You've probably read Theda Skocpol's various works, right?
[00:41:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:20] Speaker A: Well, so she remarkably, because she wasn't this kind of sociologist, embarked on this field research into the grassroots of American politics. And what she basic point is, what you were alluding to the decline of unions in large part of the certainly the Rust Belt.
Those were the avenues of political expression that the Democratic Party could rely on, that is the unions, their loss.
Whereas the right wing has gained by building the base out of the evangelical church kind of structure. That's our basic argument.
And you're with that completely. So has the labor.
[00:42:07] Speaker B: If I can stop you for a second right here, Wisconsin example.
Absolutely. The Ben Wickler others have done a great job at like party organizing in that state.
[00:42:21] Speaker A: Right.
[00:42:21] Speaker B: But remember that union density is less than half of what it was before Scott Walker when Wisconsin was reliably blue and organizing was like the kind of functions that they have. The Wisconsin Democratic Party has to be extraordinary to just basically get to the 50 yard line in each of these big elections. Like Democrats were winning by much more when twice as many people were in unions and you had funding for much more robust political programs and it didn't seem so heroic.
[00:43:01] Speaker A: So what is the hope we might have that from the unions themselves will flow a community organizing connected to electoral organizing? Is that something being activated?
[00:43:12] Speaker B: Well, I think it depends on when people who are not in unions, 14 people who are not in unions recognize that the attacks that are already underway against unions are really attacks on them.
And when you know that working people understand that you have to be organized in unions to be able to have a hope of having a real and sustained voice in the political system as it is constructed now. But almost by definition, unions can't do that themselves.
Even if you go Back to the 30s, the famous sit down strikes, there was a lot of the auto workers in the plant were doing something heroic. But at that point the entire community understood how important unions were and were bringing them food every day. And we're standing outside to make sure that the company goons didn't get in Right. There's no similar cross class solidarity for working people's struggles today.
[00:44:26] Speaker A: Well, I wonder whether some of this ICE attack on workplaces is going to maybe bring some of that into possibility.
[00:44:33] Speaker B: And at each of these points, people like you and others who have platforms need to bring that into the equation.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: We interviewed Eric Blank just a couple of few weeks ago and he deals directly with the point you alluded to, which is we don't have the resources to simply invest in paying organizers to go out there. People have to self organize. But he was, you know, he's not, he's a. He's kind of optimistic about the potential for that in terms of workplace organizing. But presumably the same applies beyond the workplace that that. And I think maybe by the way people, I always warn people, I tend to romanticize and look for any straws we can grasp. But it may well be that the current threats that people are seeing have already begun to build potentials for organizing that were only very.
[00:45:33] Speaker B: Definitely building the potential. But it won't self execute.
[00:45:38] Speaker A: No. Well, but his point, I think is that there are a lot of people out there who already have the organizing understanding. In other words, they, they, they either they, you know, just because of the way the, the way people, what people have learned in college, what people have learned, you know, in various kinds of community situations, people know more about how to organize without professional assistance now than they did when we started with organizing in the 60s. We thought people just didn't even know how to do any of this stuff. Now, I think, and I resonate with what he's saying because I've seen it pretty often out here, is that when there's an issue, a threat for people, suddenly people know how to draw picket signs, how to pass around petitions, how to even raise money and all of that. People, people who wouldn't necessarily, you would necessarily expect them to. I don't, again, don't want to over emphasize this, but I guess I'm feeling right now just looking around where this weekend's protests that are going to happen.
Indivisible is a phenomenon that I don't know too much about how it's been documented in reporting, but it seems to me to be made up of people very often who didn't come out of existing organizing efforts but know what they were doing. They knew what to do from the beginning and they are pretty creative just looking at what's happening locally here. So I need to feel at my age that there are really possible, strong possibilities. I, I, I told my son, please don't let Trump get elected. I don't want to live the rest of my life under Trump. And he said, well, you'll outlive him. So I'm for that.
But anyway, I don't know how you're feeling on this, on the scale of optimism, not, I don't like the word optim, on the scale of hope. Hope is not the same as optimism. Right. It's, it's, it's a method of thinking. Hope is a method, a way of thinking about things, looking for possibility. Right. Yeah.
So where do you come out now after.
[00:48:05] Speaker B: No, I think that, I mean, I think that. Are you familiar with Jane McLevey's work?
[00:48:13] Speaker A: Yes. Yes.
[00:48:14] Speaker B: Yeah. So I think, I mean, when I hear like that, what you're saying, I hear her book no Shortcuts and the difference between advocacy, mobilization and organizing.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:48:28] Speaker B: And Indivisible is fantastic at mobilizing.
[00:48:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true.
[00:48:35] Speaker B: And I'm very, have been connected with Ezra and Leah from the beginning. And they do really important work in this moment. But it is an organizing. Yeah, okay, right.
And it is it that what they're. What mo. What Jane says, which is absolutely true, is that you know, when you mobilize sufficiently, you can do something that's usually. It could be really important, but short lived it doesn't actually change the relationships of power and that. So I think by using organizing as a catch all for everything from advocacy to organize, self organizing institutions that are self sustaining, that's a really problematic generalization, right? Absolutely. With the Internet, with all the experience, people are much better able figure out how to show up at the same time and same place to make a statement.
But I think like the idea of really coming together in a sick organization, we're way behind where we were. I mean it sounds like you're a little bit older than me, but I mean when I was growing up, people belonged to things and people believed in linked fate and as the default rather than like individual agency to solve things. So I think we're actually like more handicapped now.
[00:50:13] Speaker A: Right. Well, I have a somewhat different feeling about that. And so we have a couple more minutes. Let's kick this around for a minute.
And Robert Putnam came out with Bowling Alone and he makes the exact same point that you're making about the decline of stable organizations sort of at the community level and attributing a lot of that to things like mass media and television and all those kinds of ways in which people have been separated from each other face to face. And, and, and all of that seems very true.
So I was asked to by at that time I was to review that book for the LA Times. So I did a lot of thinking because I was realizing that we moved to Santa Barbara in the early 70s at just about the same time period that he's looking at.
And the experience here that the town, the whole community has been transformed in those decades since by grassroots efforts, but not by the kind of organizations that you are referring to or that he's referring to. It's much more, you might say mobilizations. But for example there. This is not a political example, but it's a good example of transformative thing. We have a summer solstice festival every year now. This was started by 10 artists, I don't know, several decades ago who marched in costume down the street, Main street to observe the solstice. And from that now it's an event that draws 100,000 people with vast amount of artistic creativity and so forth. Well, that's not just an immediate thing. It's several months of work that a lot of the people put into building all their floats and all the rest of it.
But it's not structured like a traditional organization or. Another example, next door to me is a children's playground that was built over four days by several thousand people coming together under direction of a very creative designer to make this terrific Kids park with donated labor and donated material goods and money raised all. Again, no organization could have planned well in advance what came together I think over Kids World. And that's just. Those were two examples that occurred to me right away when I was reading Putnam that my experience, and this may be even more so typical of California more than any other place people get together. They're quite eager to get together for social so collective activity but not to sit at meetings.
And there's not many people get a lot of emotional benefit out of belonging to an ongoing organization where you just meeting together and people want, you know, the emphasis culturally is so much now on I want to do what I choose to do other than what I am required to do by some set of obligations.
So I'm just saying we may have to live with the first fact that. And find what the power is in this more. It's something in. It's a combination of some organization based on networks of people that are pre existing but are not formal and then coming together to really accomplish pretty significant collective efforts. But it's a project rather than a ongoing organizational plan. I don't know if I'm making any sense whatsoever.
[00:54:15] Speaker B: But yeah, and I think that though that I think that you're surfacing something but a distinction that's really important and sort of by introducing what you identified properly. So some of the insights that Putnam had that's useful here because the preconditions are not just that people have the habits of acting collectively generically, but it's that they have the habits of acting collectively against power.
Right. Which is a very different kind of collective action.
Right, right. The people and the examples you were talking about, which I think are great. I'm not trying to minimize it at all.
But they weren't risking losing their job.
[00:55:12] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:55:13] Speaker B: They were not like it was all upside for them, which is almost kind of what you were saying.
I mean it was gratifying to go there, which is great. Again, I'm not being negative about that. I'm saying that if the original question you're asking is about optimism about the future, that's not what it takes to constrain capital.
[00:55:39] Speaker A: Okay.
Well, so we come back to unions as the fundamental instrument of that. And so anyway.
[00:55:47] Speaker B: Right. And even actually to pull. Just occurred to me that to pull this further when those groups that are popping up you talked about decide we need to help this group of striking workers.
[00:56:01] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:56:02] Speaker B: That's when it takes off.
[00:56:04] Speaker A: Right.
Well, we've, I've, you know, a lot more about what I'm about to say than I do, but I've noticed here that there, there is some of that happening in the last few years here. The best example maybe is, is the supermarket workers. Locals.
[00:56:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:56:23] Speaker A: We have a big local UFC of the UFCW that spans our, our area and la.
And they have realized that a lot of people identify with the, with the workers in the supermarkets and that that's been increasing. So they really have done some pretty good things that, that I've been part of to build community support when they, when they are ready to take, you know, deal with contract stuff. And it's been quite effective, including the defeat of the very scary merger that supermarkets that was, I think now put on the shelf because of, because of community opposition.
I was a good friend of John Grant, who was the president of that local for a long time, and so I have a particular feeling of connection with that. But, you know, in the UAW now is the United Academic Workers of California. There's thousands and thousands of people who are working for the university, some of them graduate students. So for.
There's a strong sense of community relationship to people in that kind of role in just the academic world, obviously. So.
[00:57:40] Speaker B: Right.
[00:57:40] Speaker A: So, you know, there, all the potential is there, not all, but, but some potential is there for, for the, the battle that has to come if we're going to go anywhere in this country. You know, I mean, I have friends who are pretty pessimistic about everything, not even sure that we're going to have the possibility of an election in 2026. I don't know what you tell the.
[00:58:05] Speaker B: People who are pessimistic about there being an election in 2026 that there almost certainly will be voting on that day.
Right. The question is what will the rules for it be and how will it go? Because it seems pretty remote that they would actually cancel elections or that that wouldn't create a backlash. But if you think about what elections in this country were like in 2008 before Citizens United and what election and before the overturning of Shelby and Ruto and you think about elections in 2024, you're still calling them elections, but they're not the same thing.
[00:58:52] Speaker A: So how again do you.
[00:58:54] Speaker B: All I'm saying is that the debt free and fair, the extent to which elections were free and fair in 24 will be even less so in 2026.
But to catastrophize over that Tuesday in November coming and nobody voting is to set like the goalpost in a place they're going to easily clear.
And that's part of the, that's how authoritarians progress is.
They don't undermine the appearance of democracy, they just undermine it in practice.
[00:59:37] Speaker A: So maybe we can conclude, though, sort of putting that in the horizon.
It does seem that people who might have supported or been complacent about Trump have already, in just a few months, come to see that they are not at all happy with the direction of any of what he's doing.
And therefore the opposition vote that you actually think is really what is mostly what the voting is about these days is going to be very large in 2026, maybe not able to be controlled in the way that you're, that you're pointing to. Yeah, because. Right.
[01:00:20] Speaker B: So, yeah, but I think that, that there's like, definitely a reasonable chance that Republicans will lose control of the house in 2026. Yeah. Because I think the backlash is going to be large enough that it'll be hard to degrade the election sufficiently to prevent that.
But I don't know that that's going to matter much. And I mean, we, obviously it'll matter a lot, but it'll also contribute to a feeling that, you know, hey, democracy won, we beat them.
[01:00:54] Speaker A: So we're coming to a good point to climax.
So I'd ask you, so what are you trying to do with your substack work and any other stuff that people might want to know about to follow what you're, what you're thinking and what you're trying to do?
[01:01:12] Speaker B: Really, what I'm trying to do, it's this podcast I think lays out too, is right now.
I think most people who understand on the one hand, the much of the threat of Trump or the fascism, whatever we're going to call it, still underestimate greatly what it's going to take to actually turn this around and continue to try to think of solutions that are essentially still taking sort of the political rules literally.
Right. And until there's broad enough understanding that it's going to take a lot more and a lot different, that it's going to take real insurgency in many areas of society to change this, that change will never begin.
Right.
[01:02:10] Speaker A: And I guess I'll ask You whether you think fighting for the solo Democratic Party is an important part of the process.
[01:02:18] Speaker B: No, because it depends on being a little bit provocative. Because if it's fighting for the soul of the people who have been elected as Democrats now, that can't happen. That we will never win that. If you mean an insurgency that creates a new Democratic Party, that's the project.
But that's until we realize that's necessary. And I'm given an example that obviously I don't. I'm using for illustration, not for.
Because I think that was a good thing.
But the ultra conservative, the white Christian national faction of the Republican Party for years felt that the establishment Republican Party was just not delivering on their agenda.
The Republican Party, now us.
But it doesn't do that because they convinced Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell, like any of those people, to realize that's the soul of the party. They went in and primaried everything. It's an entirely new Republican Party. 90% of the people in the Republican caucus today were not serving in 2008, which is a faster, bigger turnover than at almost any time in American history.
Right. You don't win a debate about the soul of the party.
You create a different party.
[01:03:52] Speaker A: And it does seem like there's a generation rising now of leaders. I don't know how extensive it is, but it does also, you know, David Hoggs just announced, you know, he's doing this effort that seems to be exactly what you're talking about. Let's challenge complacent individual incumbents and decided that he's not in the best position to just be vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, especially given what they've done to him. He wants to lead a much more insurgent, openly insurgent kind of force, I guess.
So that's what we're trying to do on this podcast, among other things, is to. Is to examine and make people aware of all of this kind of stuff.
And you've been. This has been a great, to me, informative dialogue between you and me. I will continue to follow what you're thinking, Michael, and hope and let our, Our, our audience know how they can do the same and very much appreciate your spending the time.
[01:05:00] Speaker B: Absolutely. I really admire, like you're just. But your project is, you know, I think that's great.
[01:05:08] Speaker A: All right. Take care of yourself.
[01:05:11] Speaker B: All right. Take care.
[01:05:12] Speaker C: Voted for Cornel west, some of us for Jill Stein.
Some of us voted for Chase Oliver on the old Libertarian line.
Some voted for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Some for Claudia De La Cruz.
One third of voters did not vote at all.
I guess they just chose not to choose.
One third of us voted for Kamala Harris.
[01:05:54] Speaker A: One third?
[01:05:55] Speaker C: One third went for Trump.
Sad but true.
One third of voters did not vote at all.
Does this sound like a mandate to you?
Or it could be a mandate for Harris or for Trump as the chief of state.
It could be a mandate for no one at all.
