Speaker 0 00:00:10 I am confident that the democratic party will reunite on the basis of democratic principles and that together we will March towards a democratic <inaudible>.
Speaker 1 00:00:22 I think the democratic leadership understands that we need to bring those people into the party. We need to transform the party. We need to make the democratic party, a democratic party with a small D
Speaker 0 00:00:35 I'm sure the party is working class. And I think that what I represent and, and perhaps, you know, Senator Sanders also Senator Warren's, there's a lot of working class champions in the democratic party. And I do think that that's the future
Speaker 2 00:00:50 Welcome. Just talking strategy, making history I'm Dick flux activist, retired professor of sociology and a really old
Speaker 3 00:01:02 Hi and I'm, deraco Lera more hall, a slightly less old guy, and also an activist and political strategist. And this season on talking strategy, making history, we're going to be talking about one of the big questions for progressive strategy here in the United States, in what we're calling a Hitchhiker's guide to the democratic party today,
Speaker 2 00:01:25 We've got a real privilege and that is, uh, having a conversation with Jonathan Smucker. Jonathan is a very experienced if still on the young side, uh, organizer. And, uh, it is that work that he's doing particularly now that prompted us to reach out to him and see if we could learn a lot more about this work as we proceed. I, uh, Jonathan, uh, is author of a book that, um, has gotten a lot of attention and a lot of praise from people whose praise you want. If you're a progressive activists, uh, the name of the book is a Gemini, how to, and, uh, it's really a deep going critique and sort of guidebook for radical activists, uh, how to overcome some of the occupational hazards of being in the left wing of America. Uh, and at the same time, uh, become a more functional, effective force in the world that we're living in.
Speaker 2 00:02:32 And I first met Jonathan because he was applying to graduate school in sociology after having done an enormous amount of very productive writing based on his work as an organizer has experienced in the occupy movement. He's applying to graduate school in sociology as if he has something to learn there rather than the other way around. But anyway, he applied to our department here in sociology, came for a visit. We at least I bonded with him and I think a feeling was sort of mutual. We had a lot of things to talk about, and there was several other times while he went to Berkeley rather than Santa Barbara, big mistake from my point of view, but still that's what he did. And yet after several years, uh, in the graduate program at Berkeley moving along productively, Jonathan and his wife, Becca decided to go back to their home ground, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. That's my first question. Why did you leave the wonderful environment of Berkeley and the bay area and the Berkeley sociology department to go back to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 2016?
Speaker 4 00:03:48 Well, I, I didn't mean to leave the, uh, the sociology department that was, uh, that was I w uh, you know, when we first moved, I was in the middle of a, a research project, you know, working with Gian to all at Berkeley, um, interviewing, uh, Bernie supporters and Trump supporters. This was in, in, uh, early 2016, but, you know, intentionally we, we did move back while we were, you know, while I was still enrolled and then kind of, uh, politics, the political situation caught me in a way that I ended up taking what was meant to be a two year professional leave from my sociology program. And now is a four year leave, but is coming to an end now, but I did have the intention of moving back. So to Becca, we're both from Lancaster county, Pennsylvania. I grew up in, in the county and I grew up conservative working class, rural, uh, very religious, very sheltered.
Speaker 4 00:04:47 And Becca grew up in the city, uh, a bit more, more liberal. I, we both grew up Mennonites, a lot of Mennonite and Amish and in the area, but we knew we wanted to move back to organize. Eventually we weren't sure when, um, and when I was done with my coursework and had funding in, through a research program, uh, set up in a way that allowed us to, to move back earlier than we anticipated with the hope of eventually, uh, engaging in organizing there. So I was in my grad program, I was also directing an organization called beyond the choir. We did a lot of strategy partnerships with organizations like working families party, and, uh, we help in 2015 and 2016, we were working with an emerging group called all of us. And we were working with the sunrise movement. It didn't exist yet, but it was information and what they call a DNA process.
Speaker 4 00:05:43 And, uh, you know, we were working basically strategic advising. We were working with them and understanding the unfolding political realignment process that's underway and how political narrative works. So very practical in terms of, uh, framing messaging, but with an understanding of the political real time and processes that are happening, I was doing that. Uh, Becca was actually very involved in the formation of the sunrise movement. She was working for three 50 at the time, uh, national organization. So we're both involved with national organizing, but we moved back home. We didn't really get involved in local stuff, even though we knew we wanted to, at some point, um, we didn't know what that would look like. And, and just, let me say one more word about that before I say, how we got involved in the local work, uh, part of our analysis was, you know, somebody like me who grew up working class, rural, conservative, religious sheltered, uh, I am, you know, statistically unlikely to be, to have spent my life kind of submerged in the American left, but through kind of a series of accidents, I was politicized by racism at my high school.
Speaker 4 00:06:51 And then, uh, relatedly became interested in the global economy. And, you know, by the time I was 16, 17 was fully politicized and I'm going to protest around the death penalty and Mumia Abu Jamal in Philadelphia when I was in high school. Um, and then started organizing at my high school and left home by the time I was 17. And, and, you know, kind of didn't look back. Um, not really though. I did look back a lot and, you know, as I became submerged in and really submerged in the weak and fragmented American left that I found in the mid nineties, I found my home. I found, you know, community belonging. I felt like I had found this beloved community that I longed for when I'd become politicized in Lancaster, but didn't really have peers let alone mentors, but I became really increasingly aware of the insularity and how we were talking to ourselves and critical of that, even though I, I was as guilty as anybody of like, you know, radical signals and, and speaking this rhetoric, but I, I was aware of it too.
Speaker 4 00:07:57 And part of that I think is as somebody who was raised in this rural, conservative working class, but with this vocabulary, I had to translate so much of what I believed. So I overtime, you know, became, uh, critical of that and wanting to figure out how that insularity had emerged and whether it was worse, you know, and in the left that I discovered then at other times, historically. So I began kind of this inquiry into that, and that's what eventually gave me the conviction. Oh, I have to move back home. Um, you know, cause people like me who leave in the middle of Pennsylvania, you know, between not Philadelphia, not Pittsburgh, but the, the area between, um, we usually don't come back and that's part of, I don't like the term, but you know, the brain drain, which is one of the factors with the industrialization, globalization, um, the regular backlash, you know, a number of factors that have taken a state like Pennsylvania, where in these areas in between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, progressive used to really have a foothold and used to, uh, be organized and even a majority, some places, not Lancaster, but other places.
Speaker 4 00:09:06 And there's been a steady breed for decades now, um, not just of the democratic party, but of progressive organizing. And I felt like it was going to take people like me and Becca, my wife, who had acquired these organizing skills to go back and start contesting these areas again. So that, that was the real reason. And then when Trump was elected, suddenly we went into high gear just pretty much overnight.
Speaker 2 00:09:33 And Trump had carried your area.
Speaker 4 00:09:36 Oh yeah. And our area is likely to continue to be carried for some time by Republican candidates, especially our congressional district right now. But we've changed that dramatically over the past four years, we've really made a difference, but yeah, Trump won the area and he won it again this year, but we did gain significant ground significant vote, share
Speaker 2 00:09:57 Focus in the book and in your work is strategic in the same way that we in this podcast are calling ourselves talking strategy. Uh, that's part of our title. It's very much in the same spirit of what we're trying to accomplish in these conversations. So that's, you know, real connection emotionally and intellectually that we have. So you decide you're going to organize locally. But what I think we'd like to do is get into, let's say the nitty gritty of what that meant. What was it that you thought you could be doing and what did you begin to implement?
Speaker 4 00:10:30 Yeah. And also, I meant to say at the beginning of the first question that, uh, thanks for having me on and the affinity was definitely, uh, both ways when I read your book and read your articles. I was so excited to talk with you and was excited at the prospect of studying with you. And so short of, of, of factors that led us to the bay area. Um, I'm really happy to be talking with you again. Um, so what did we think we could accomplish? Well, I had done a little bit of a practice run. I moved back for a couple of years, um, back at the start of the Iraq war and had done organizing and built up, uh, the Lancaster coalition for peace and justice with some other folks. And that wasn't as popular a moment as, as the moment we've been in for the past four years, no work close, but it showed me that a lot more was possible in these areas than what most people thought people really right off these areas, Democrats radicals, like all sorts of people on the left really write off these areas.
Speaker 4 00:11:31 And so I had had a taste of that and I've been organizing in lots of different formations, national moments like occupy wall street and like the global justice movement, but then just the community organizing, um, on lots of issues over the years. And, you know, basically some of us informed you might call it a political tendency over the past few years. And that includes some of the early leadership of the sunrise movement. This all of us, some of which now are senior leaders at justice Democrats. Um, and some other folks where we were just looking at the moment we're in and had an analysis that basically there was a emerging, popular rebellion against the whole political leadership of the country and that we were living in what amounts to a crisis of legitimacy that, uh, or a crisis of authority where political authority had lost credibility with a critical threshold of the population.
Speaker 4 00:12:26 And, you know, in our book that threshold was probably crossed somewhere in the second half of the George W. Bush administration. But a feature of these crises of authority is that the political classes is usually the last to get the memo. Because part of the reason you enter a crisis is because the political class becomes so insular, right? They become because of the crisis of inequality, that is just the underlying crisis in our society. The people at the top are our cutoff increasingly from everyday working people. And that's not just on the right. In fact, the right in some ways has gotten better than the left at this foal populous language that's supposed to connect with everyday working people, right. Even though the substance of it is totally terrible, but the Democrat, you look at the left, not just the democratic party, but also the leadership of a lot of movements and nonprofit organizations has become functionally kind of, not the 1% often.
Speaker 4 00:13:23 Some of it is right, but like the top 10% people with educational privilege in a time where over 40 years, the top 10% has become more and more cut off from the bottom 80 to 90%. So that's kind of the way we saw the world and that in a crisis of authority, what happens is there's room for challengers to emerge and to, you know, basically the populous rhetoric structure of speak, articulate the people and the interests of the people as opposed to the corrupt establishment and the elites. So we saw this coming and saw the tea party, as you know, in some ways, Obama, I think people miss this about Obama, that Obama's campaign in some ways was the first wave of that insurgency in terms of how he campaigned against George W. Bush and particularly with the Iraq war and disillusionment over it. Uh, but then, you know, unfortunately for a lot of the world, Obama then immediately went to govern from the center and to try to kind of ingratiate himself to the power players.
Speaker 4 00:14:28 Um, I think that was the Achilles heel of his administration, right. But then the tea party comms as the movement form on the right and then occupy wall street. And then in 2016, you really have the campaigns of Donald Trump on the one hand and Bernie Sanders on the other hand, as you know, articulating new premises that are diametrically opposed, right. When you're in the political establishment, they look a lot alike. You're like, oh, Bernie and Trump. They're like, you know, they're both these aggressive blah, blah, blah. And it's like, they look a lot alike because both are a challenge to the establishment of different parties, but they mean so much different things. So that is our theoretical background that we had. And we believed that we could, you know, there was a lot of tactical know-how involved in that too. It wasn't just theory. We knew how to organize people.
Speaker 4 00:15:17 We knew how to plug people in. We knew how to do all that stuff. So we kind of had a DNA of how to organize locally, um, ready to go. And when Trump won, we set it into motion. You know, a couple of us who were polished, organizers reached out to other leaders in the community that might not have had political organizing experience, but we're recognized leaders and we build up a leadership team and, and we launched and yeah, I that, sorry, that was probably a little bit more long-winded theory than what you were asking for. Get
Speaker 2 00:15:51 A little more, uh, even nitty gritty or in that you identify leaders, you said they're not necessarily political leaders. How would you summarize what that means?
Speaker 4 00:16:00 Well, we knew the community and like I said, I moved back for a time back in like 2003 to 2005. And so we had some relationships in the community. Um, some were leaders as in people like Jess king, who later then ran for office who, you know, ran a nonprofit to help working class people to start small businesses. Right. Um, there were clergy members that we reached out to, and then there were, there were leaders in the sense of, uh, people that we knew knew how to do tactical stuff back from when we were organizing with the Lancaster coalition for peace and justice, they had experience in that kind of activism. So those are the folks who we reached out to. We called for an emergency community meeting. And my organization beyond the choir actually wrote a guide right after the election for how to do this kind of emergency community meeting.
Speaker 4 00:16:47 We worked with working families party, and then other organizations like move on adopted that model. And it was kind of like a pre indivisible guide where a lot of groups called for these emergency community meetings all over the country. And some of those became the groups later that carried out, uh, ongoing work. And we used kind of that guide too. So we got 300 people at that first meeting, which for Lancaster at that time was like, mind-blowing for people 400 at the next 500 at the next. And as soon we were turning out thousands, literally thousands for one to 3000 was the most we've ever turned out. Um, but if, you know, Lancaster county that's like unheard of numbers. And that was for like the Muslim ban. And, um, and things like that when Charlottesville happened, we turned out a thousand people with 18 hours notice
Speaker 2 00:17:34 What was the message that turned them out? What were they being called to respond to?
Speaker 4 00:17:39 Yeah. You know, this is a mix of tactical decisions, right? And so part of the message is that in addition to sociology, I've studied cognition. And really, you know, that's a lot of my experience in addition to organizing against communications work and movements. And so part of what you have to do is people have all these negative stereotypes around what is activism? What is politics, activism, and politics are scary to people or unfamiliar. Let's say they haven't experienced it. And there's all these stereotypes. And the right has built these stereotypes. That culture has built stereotypes where, you know, an activist is somebody unlike me, I don't people caring about an issue. And then getting involved in that issue in between the person caring about the issue and their involvement is this roadblock. That is a caricature of what an activist is. So some of this was just about communications then and reaching people in language that kind of disarmed them and that they could see themselves in.
Speaker 4 00:18:43 So we called it an emergency community meeting. So it looked to people when they saw the flyer and they saw the Facebook event like, oh, this is people like me, who like me feel really bewildered by this man winning this election. Um, and we knew that people were going to want to come together with people to make sense of what just happened. And so we framed it in terms of a popular community response. Uh, we use familiar language, it wasn't scary. And we said, we're going to have to figure this out together. And we use the familiar space Southern market where, you know, city council, uh, used to meet. And so everything about it projected this familiarity and that combined with, you know, some of the direct movers and shakers that we recruited to recruit for this, I think that got 300 people there. And we've been careful about using that kind of language all throughout.
Speaker 4 00:19:38 And I don't think good comms and good messaging solves all your problems, but I think it's necessary if you don't have it, you've got bigger problems. Right. And so it's kind of like one of those necessary, but insufficient things. It was a big part of it. But then at that meeting at that first meeting, we knew that we had to give people an experience that felt good, um, that they found community with each other and they had some sense of, oh, we can make a difference together. You know, so we've kind of had this formula. We've perfected for these mass meetings where people have time to talk with each other in small groups. But we also recognize that people want to understand the moment. And one role of leadership is to help people make sense of the moment. And so, you know, we had different people stand at the front of the room and say, you know, ask the questions, not purport to have all the answers, wrestle with the things together.
Speaker 4 00:20:31 But I think one difference between us and some of the indivisible chapters, not to be putting anybody down because Indivisibles done amazing things. It's really important, but we right away on day, one said, look, we're committed to figuring this out together to mitigating the damage of a Trump administration. But we also know that we have to ask how somebody like him could have been elected. We have to ask ourselves hard questions. And we told a story about part of that was how everyday people were less and less involved. And that is no coincidence that the same for decades when big money and wall street and corporations consolidated their grip on our political system where the same for decades where everyday people, because of the attacks on unions because of the unionization and just because of the rise of individualism and, and the, the decrease in political involvement, that that was not a coincidence.
Speaker 4 00:21:25 And we also talked specifically about the democratic party. We have to look at how the democratic party has failed to deliver for working people and has, you know, failed to fight visibly and vocally for working people in this period. When you know, it has been bleeding out working class, uh, loaders. We have to look at that and we need better candidates who are visibly and vocally fighting for working people. If we're going to bring back these disaffected voters and attract new younger voters, that's what we need. And we said that from day one and you know, definitely some of the kind of vote blue, no matter who folks didn't like that we said that, but when they saw that we started getting results, they went along with it too.
Speaker 2 00:22:08 What I'm hearing is number one, the people you gathered together with people who in some way were on the liberal side, if you will, of the community and therefore distressed about Trump specifically, that's the emergency. Secondly, it had an electoral purpose, not just a, you know, that was built into the, uh, to the strategy.
Speaker 4 00:22:32 It's a little more complicated than that in that we estimate that probably 80% of the people who came to that first meeting, 80% of the people, and this is not scientific. This is our estimate from our knowledge of, of who was in that room. Uh, there wasn't like a formal survey, but I think it's probably a pretty good estimate. We're not involved politically before they walk in that room before 2016. And some of them did not even vote before that. Right. And so I think even saying that people have liberal dispositions is more complicated than that. There were a number of people who got involved earlier in 2016 through the Bernie campaign. And so there were a lot of people who did have that critique of the democratic party resonated with, and there were people who, um, so both protest and electoral involvement was really unfamiliar to most of the people in the room.
Speaker 4 00:23:29 And so we knew that we were going to have to channel people into both of those things, but we knew that we had to kind of walk them through a pedagogical process as a community to get ready for that and to do that together. Um, and so yes, there were a lot of liberal people there, there were a lot true blue Democrat vote, blue, no matter who people. And there was a real mix of working class and middle-class people. Um, and that's definitely been one of the organizing tensions for us over the past four years.
Speaker 2 00:23:58 So why did you decide to do you'd said find candidates, but what was the day to day that you were embarking on
Speaker 4 00:24:05 The first few months? It was just protest. It was one protest after another. We did the first sit in of a congressman's office, Lloyd Smucker, my cousin or congressmen. Um, we, um, uh, you know, we had mass protests and it was week after week after week. You know, we were turning people out the Muslim ban, uh, stopping the healthcare repeal, um, one thing after another, but we also had a leadership team. And I think this was key that was looking ahead, that was meeting regularly. And that knew that this wave of protest, the cycle of protest would eventually Peter itself out. Right. And so we were looking ahead for what is the next kind of thing that is going to orient people. And it was pretty clear to us that it would be the 2018 midterm elections. And we knew that we needed to do better in our district.
Speaker 4 00:24:56 Then the candidate who had run in 2016. So we recruited someone, we recruited Jess king to run, who was an incredible candidate and ran what may have been the biggest house, race operation in the states, uh, that year, uh, may have been. I, I can't, I can't back that up. It was huge. I mean, it was like millions of gore knocks unheard of for this area. And unfortunately we would have won the district that we started with, which was an R plus six district. You know, people would say impossible to win, but we really got the raw end of the deal when redistricting happened at the middle of the race, you know, March of 2018, you know, well into the race, we got redistricted to an R plus 14 district that was really impossible to win, but nonetheless, you know, just to her credit, stayed in the race and we increased vote, share, you know, huge, huge increase in vote, share places like effort.
Speaker 4 00:25:48 I went from 20% to 40% where that's one from 25 to 50%. And Jess ran as a working class mother who was an outsider and who criticized the democratic party. Uh, but you know, it was also clear about her criticism of the Republican party. You know, it's, it's really too bad about redistricting. Cause she would have been in the past few years, right there with the squad, but in a district that people say, oh, you can win on that politics here. Um, and we really showed, if you look at the numbers, um, you know, which unfortunately winning is everything. So people don't really look at the numbers after a race, uh, that you've lost that many people do. Some people did. I mean the democratic party definitely did. We turned a lot of heads
Speaker 2 00:26:27 And meanwhile, there were other races or other ways you could point to success.
Speaker 4 00:26:31 Yeah. Well the next year we flipped five borough councils in 2019, you know, and that was built upon the momentum and the volunteer apparatus and the leadership that we built up, um, through the king campaign, you know, in a lot of this stick was so different than I thought politics went before this time, because, you know, I was always a bit like you build up slowly partial the outsider social movements instead of electoral campaigns. But in retrospect, even though, you know, if we knew we were starting with an R plus 14 district, we probably wouldn't have recruited just to run. Jess probably would have said no, right. We probably wouldn't have done it. But then after having done it, it was absolutely the right thing to do because it was that level. It's kind of like the all politics is local thing has been inverted in the past few years, all politics is national and we needed a huge focal point race to bring in literally thousands of volunteers.
Speaker 4 00:27:29 Um, and building on that, we built it into an apparatus that then helped to flip five rural councils in conservative Lancaster county. And we've continued to build in that, along those lines. And we also won on some issue fights too, um, at the same time. And that was one of our premises is that this chasm between electoral work and movement work that has kind of been there my whole life. You know, I'm almost 43 years old that that was not serving us. It was not serving working people and that Trump's election and Bernie's candidacy in 2016 kind of really bridge that chasm in a way that is kind of incredible where, you know, it seems like politics has just all cut from the same cloth now issue, work, movement, work electoral. And we really leaned into that here.
Speaker 2 00:28:15 So what would be an example of an issue campaign and how that was organized?
Speaker 4 00:28:19 So, um, here's one, nothing like ones that we won, right. But, uh, geo group, um, tried to privatize the prisoner reentry system here. And it was a, I don't know how much, maybe half a million dollar contract, it was a done deal with the county commissioners and the way that they organize the process, they made it so that, you know, basically only geo group would be eligible for the bid the way that the county commissioners organized the bid. And so the nonprofits that existed that had been doing this work, they were upset about it, but they weren't used to political fights. They, you know, that was outside of their experience. And so we worked with them and some other folks and, you know, organize people into a fight and basically got them to realize that like while the county commissioners were against us on this, it wasn't their most important fight.
Speaker 4 00:29:11 If we could make them look bad, if we could expose them, if we could put some heat on them, in some pressure, we could win this. And we did, we won it. We, we, we stopped the contract and we won so fights like that. Also we've done a lot with, uh, supporting black lives matter and criminal justice reform. There were incidences of police brutality here in Lancaster that we helped to amplify and to mobilize around and that's ongoing. Um, there's like a commission on it. There's a lot of frustration, but it's, you know, where at the very least, right now people have a political voice, a public voice in this in a way that just did not exist four years ago.
Speaker 2 00:29:51 And a lot of the people who turn out for those things were white people.
Speaker 4 00:29:54 Right? Yeah. But it was multi-racial and for sure, I mean the police brutality stuff is usually the majority of people of color or at least 50 50. And so now we have Pennsylvania stands up, which is nine chapters like line cause there stands up across the state and, and growing. Um, and you know, one of the things about these smaller cities is, you know, most of the places where we're organizing Lancaster, Harrisburg, York, uh, Allentown, Coatesville are majority people of color cities. The surrounding counties are a sea of white, not, not entirely, but they're very majority white, but we're, you know, experimenting with a model of how do you organize political power on a county-wide basis where the city's majority of people of color and the county is overwhelmingly white, how do you organize multi-racial power and a base that is a mix of working class and middle-class people. Um, and it's hard. It's not easy, but, uh, I think we've done some things right there. Um, I think we have held some of those basics together in pretty important ways in ways that have, have gotten results both on issues and electorally.
Speaker 2 00:31:01 So one more nitty gritty thing to dig out some more about how this works on the ground. When he's talk about canvassing, is that focused on particular campaigns or, you know, with hearing something about relational organizing or deep canvassing, is that part of your methodology?
Speaker 4 00:31:20 Yeah, we've done a lot of different kinds of canvassing over the past few years, we started with an experiment that was just a pretty open-ended. Um, what's important to you listening canvas back in April, I think is when we started April of 2017 was our first canvas. We did voter registration with that too. Then we did a lot of canvassing for four candidates, and then we've done listening, uh, kind of deep canvassing on issues, you know? So this past, back in, in 2019 and 2020, we did a partnership with people's action where we did the, you know, race class narrative stuff. And, um, that's
Speaker 2 00:32:00 It, what is race, class, narrative stuff referring to?
Speaker 4 00:32:04 Yeah. Um, it it's, so it's a deeper listening canvas, you know, instead of just trying to sell people on a candidate or on a position, on an issue, you're asking them questions about themselves, what they care about. Uh, it kind of takes as a premise that most people don't really have a clear coherent politics. They have different narratives, different values often, which feel in conflict with each other, right? So a lot of people might be sympathetic to a narrative of like immigrants are taking our jobs who might also be sympathetic to a narrative of wall street and big are exploiting us. And they're dividing us over our differences, whether it's our race or our country of origin in order to increase their profits. Right. So the same people can be sympathetic to both of those things. And so we dig in and it's a matter of helping people sort out meaning in those narratives, but it involves listening.
Speaker 4 00:32:58 And so we did that formal canvas, but even from the beginning, that kind of listening element and persuasion and longterm relationship building was really baked into our canvases. Right. Cause we were not the democratic party trying to, and not, I know some places the democratic party does this. Right. But we weren't just trying to sell people on candidates. You know, we realized really early on from our first listening canvas that the modal response at the door was political alienation, disaffection, some version of politics. Isn't for me, some version of, I don't really like either party, maybe they didn't like the Republicans worse. Right. But they didn't like the Democrats either. Um, some version of, you know, that's not me. And so rather than kind of be a cheerleader for a candidate or the democratic party, which wasn't going to land, we learned and we taught our volunteers, meet that energy, reflect back on your own ambivalence.
Speaker 4 00:33:52 You're like, yeah, I hear you. You know, uh, financial crisis happened, no one was prosecuted, you know, uh, no one was held accountable, you know, what's it going to take, but then instead of just staying there, you move into a story of, you know, and then I realized this isn't going to change unless people like you and me get involved and take action. And once we had some wins and some things to show that became more compelling, we could say to people, you know, um, you know, people like us who mobilized 2000 people to stop the Muslim ban, right. Who won against geo group. And you could give people some evidence of like, oh, I could be part of something because they're not going to change unless people like us take action. Um, and then what are you asking people to do? Well, sometimes it's vote this way.
Speaker 4 00:34:39 Um, uh, you know, it's not a majority of people who are going to get involved as volunteers. Right. But we do. I mean, that is how we get a lot of our volunteers too. Right. So you don't need everybody to, so part of it is persuasion. Part of it is moving neutral people into the kind of sympathetic, um, and that could affect, you know, their voting behavior. For sure. That's, that's one of the key things that we want to do. And then some of it is moving the sympathetic people into active, you know, become a dues, paying member, volunteer, et cetera.
Speaker 2 00:35:15 So I want to move to the statewide organization, follow up to this, but we want to jump in on anything. Yeah. I got a couple
Speaker 3 00:35:24 Of questions. Um, and thanks so much, Jonathan, for being here, this is all really rich and fascinating. Um, both your story as an activist, as well as this sort of on the ground snapshot of what's going on in the fight back and Trump country, it's really important and, and underreported. So I just really appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. My pleasure.
Speaker 2 00:35:52 Thanks for listening to our conversation here on talking strategy, making history with Jonathan Smucker, he's an extraordinary organizer. As you might be able to tell he's the author of the widely discussed book called had Gemini, how to, he will be back with us for a second part of this conversation. Not long from now. Meanwhile, if you haven't visited our
[email protected] slash T S M H that's where you can support the podcast as well as link to it. And we're also available on all the usual podcasts outlets. So thanks for now and we'll see you <inaudible>.
