Building a "progressive" political machine

The big gains by Democrats on Nov. 4, capturing the White House and winning big margins in the House and Senate, were due to a historic convergence of forces.

One factor in a number of battleground states was a highly-funded, coordinated effort among wealthy donors, political activists and organizations that have adopted the term "progressive."

A series of articles last month in The Denver Post examined one such coalition, the Colorado Democracy Alliance (CoDA), which the movement considers a model for collaboration in the states. During the week of the Democratic National Convention, held in Denver in August, officials from CoDA, the national Democracy Alliance and others gathered to discuss common goals and plans. The event, which was recorded, reveals a sophisticated, targeted and ambitious agenda.

- Stephen Keating

A transcript follows.

DOUG PHELPS: We’re getting our panelists miked up here. And meanwhile, I’d like to welcome you to this session. It’s going to be a real treat because we have some real experts on building the progressive infrastructure. My name is Doug Phelps. I’ve recently been asked to, and agreed to, chair the Colorado Democracy Alliance. I grew up here in Colorado. I went to Littleton High School, and was student body president at Colorado State University, where Al Yates – one of the founders of CoDA – was the president of the university, as you know, for a number of years. My job is simply to introduce our panelists.

We have Rob Stein, who is the founder of the national Democracy Alliance. We have Kelly Craighead, who is the executive director. We have Laurie Zeller, who is the executive director of the Colorado Democracy Alliance. And we have Frank Smith, who is an all-things executive director to a lot of people who do political work and political giving, both organizations and donors. So I am, without further ado, going to turn over the program to Rob Stein. And thank you again for all coming.

ROB STEIN: Hi everybody. Welcome. Good morning. We’re not going to do the slide presentation, only because the vast majority of people that are here have seen it at one point or another. And rather than go through 25 minutes of slides, we thought we could have a more intimate conversation. So we’re just going to have a conversation. Let me just say a couple things to set the tone. The machinery. Had we been here four years ago at this exact same date, having this conversation, there would have been virtually no credible capabilities that we could talk about that in any way, shape or form could be seen as fairly competitive with the enormous machinery that the right has built.

What is so remarkable about the last four years is what is represented by the three organizations that are going to make brief comments this morning.

We do not have the infrastructure that the right has built - yet. But there has never, in the history of progressive-dom, been a clearer, more strategic, more focused, more disciplined, better-financed group of institutions operating at the state and national level. And that’s what these three organizations represent. Of course it isn't sufficient just to build institutions, you have to build institutions that are promoting a set of values and a set of policies that are coherent.

So while we as Democrats and progressives still are ringing our hands at this very moment, in this very city, that we don't quite have the message down right – and it feels scary, because we don’t have the message down right - we are about to witness the best message that we can possibly muster, that will be delivered Thursday night by our nominee. And over the next 70 days, that message is going to be as compelling as any message we’ve had in a while. And the message that he’s going to deliver is built upon the work that these organizations have been doing. It’s his own words, it’s his own way of crafting it. But it’s built on the work that these organizations are supporting.

So what we need to be unbelievably proud and hopeful about, as we enter these next 70 days, and then we begin governing, is that we are getting it together. We're being more business-like, we’re being more professional, we’re being more strategic, we’re being better financed.

That is the good news. I want to have one moment of a reality-checking, though. The machinery that the right has built: the $400 million a year of policy institutions; the $50 million a year of leadership training organizations; the nearly $1 billion worth of very targeted media; the half-a-billion dollars a year of civic engagement - the NRA, and the Focus on the Family.

This machinery - as depleted as the leadership and the Republican brand is, right this minute, and it is - their officeholders are obviously discredited – as depleted as they are - this machinery is alive and well. And it is going to focus laser-like in the next 70 days on candidates up and down the ballot. And if Barack Obama becomes our next president, when Barack Obama becomes our next president, they are going to do everything they can to frustrate his ability to govern. So, they have not gone away. So win or lose, we can’t stop building. We must continue building what we have started.

So with that, Laurie Zeller is leading the effort here in Colorado at the staff level, there are a wonderful group of wonderful board members here in Colorado. She’ll talk for a few minutes about what’s happening in Colorado.

Frank Smith and I co-manage a quiet little project that is helping 18 other states beyond Colorado try to get up to Colorado’s level of sophistication and organizational development. A project called the Committee on States. And there are a bunch of states where over the next couple of years, a lot of development is going to happen.

And Kelly Craighead, the inimitable Kelly Craighead, is the executive director, the managing director of the Democracy Alliance. And there is no organization in the country that has done more in the past four years to build, to help build, the 30 or so organizations that help form the core of what is happening all around the country. And she’ll talk about that.

Laurie, why don’t you do your thing for a few minutes and then we’re going to open this up.

LAURIE ZELLER: Thank you Rob. At CoDA we're very proud to be the poster child for state-based collaboratives. We embrace the progressive label in our giving and in the strategic role that we play in Colorado politics. Our job is to build a long term progressive infrastructure in Colorado while we're conceding nothing in the short term in terms of progressive goals at the ballot box. We provide services to our members in terms of research, advice on their giving, activating their collective interaction to help make the progressive sectors stronger.

But our role is really to harness the financial resources, as well as the brains and the energy of the progressive sector. And I want to stress that it’s not just individual donors. One of the things that has been crucial in making the work of the Colorado Democracy Alliance effective in Colorado has been our partnership with institutional donors and activist organizations in labor, particularly. That's been a major part of how we get our work done here.

One of the things I wanted to do today is highlight some of the organizations that we support. We have a conceptual map that shows five different areas of activity. One of them is leadership; there is communications; there is research and ideas; there is civic engagement and there is constituency development.

The groups that we nurture and we sustain, and whose interaction we try to enable, fall into those categories generally.

One of the organizations that’s active at the national level and is very effective – and has a presence here - is America Votes, which works to coordinate the work of the advocacy organizations here.

In Colorado, there are 37 member organizations that represents almost a quarter of a million Colorado members and a reach into the activist community that's crucial for achieving both electoral goals and progressive change over time. And most of the organizations that sit at the America Votes table are the same ones that sit in your home states - they are Colorado affiliates.

But one of the homegrown groups I want to focus on was New Era Colorado – they’re youth-vote oriented and focused on really innovative uses of technology, of communications and different ways of activating youth, particularly non-college youth, who are obviously a transitory population. And a lot of party activity and candidate activity hasn’t really figured out how to reach those folks. They’re doing baseline work here that’s very innovative and that we’re going to be tracking and nurturing in the future.

One of the research organizations is The Bell Policy Center. As you may know, we have an arcane constitutional provision [Taxpayers Bill of Rights or TABOR] that requires that voters have to approve any increase in taxes and spending. The Bell has developed an expertise and a communications capacity on those issues that has helped to empower the progressive sector to be able to talk about the funding concerns of the state and really about the role of government that it plays.

There are 19 measures on the ballot here in Colorado. And The Bell is serving as an information conduit for progressive organizations and progressive leaders.

One of our favorite communications organizations is ProgressNow,which is known for its very edgy, punchy, communications capacity.

What is lesser known is its ability to enable the progressive sector, to provide the progressive organizations with online resources,with communications tools, and with training and methods of working together through Roots Camp; through the Big Tent, which if you haven’t been there is down on Wynkoop Street. It’s an amazing structure. And it’s a great, sort of off-site venue for convention activity.

Progressive Majority, is our state-based leadership development entity. Colorado has had a conservative leadership organization here, the Leadership Program of the Rockies, which has been responsible for training and recruiting the conservative leadership here for a generation. The Progressive Majority, the Center for Progressive Leadership, the Colorado Institute for Leadership Training are working together to bring together diffuse leadership resources for the progressive sector.

Finally, the Latina Initiative is a 501©3 that is working specifically through Latina voters to register voters, to provide citizenship training, through conferences, workshops, special events. They're going to be registering 5,000 new Colorado voters, which is a 110 percent increase in that community from previous years.

CoDA works with all these organizations to foster interaction, to make sure that they have not only the financial resources but also access to best practices and to the information they need to do their work better.

We are structured as a taxable non-profit corporation, but we function as a membership organization. We're working to build a donor community here and working to enable their communications with organizations and with political entities. And we do so in a structure that provides privacy for members but also offers us the flexibility to work in relationships with other political entities that gives us some agility and effectiveness.

Our focus is on making our investments meaningful for individual donors both in terms of what they want to achieve individually but also to provide collective, strategic impact, which isn’t available otherwise.

I’ve been struck this as friends from out of town are coming here for the convention are pleased to find a sophisticated modern city here. I think they pictured a frontier town and we were encircling the wagons, surrounded by hostile red, conservative populations. The emphasis that we need to send to progressives around the country is that the tents have been struck and we're building a community here. There's an irrigation system in place that is going to provide a harvest later this fall but that’s also building a community and building an infrastructure for the long-term.

ROB STEIN: And in the absolutely finest form of flattery, The Weekly Standard, which is the most respected conservative-right opinion journal in the country - did a cover story about a month ago, written by Fred Barnes, on the Colorado Model. And it is a warning shot to conservatives in America that if the Colorado Model is replicated elsewhere, conservatives have nothing comparable to possibly compete with it. And they had better watch out. (Audience applause.)

Yay Colorado is exactly right. And it really is the model. You're blessed here with some extraordinary organizations and some significant wealth to support those organizations. And every place doesn’t have all of those assets in place. But as Frank now is going to tell you, there are 18 other states where there are major donors and significant groups that are building – not specifically on the exact model, not building the exact same way because each state’s different – but are building.

FRANK SMITH: Thanks Rob. I'm an attorney. I also work with the Democracy Alliance in the civic engagement front and do some of the political work that’s necessary to do out of there. And work with Rob. For that last two decades, I have traveled the country in election years trying to figure out the best uses of money to elect progressive Democrats and to get progressive policies done both in the states and the federal level. I remember the first time I came to Colorado was in the '86 Senate race. And I wandered around Denver and Boulder trying to find groups that could do some of the work that was necessary to win that Senate race. And [Tim Wirth] ended up winning it very narrowly. But then in a number of ways, the right had a big resurgence here in the late 80s and early 90s that has now been reversed.

As Rob mentioned, building on the Colorado Model, in other states, donors have really started taking ownership, of trying to work in states to build the kind of both, party structure that could have an impact as well as the NGO (Non-governmental organizations) sector that can do both the kind of policy work and the kind of civic engagement work that can help persuade voters and to win elections.

And it’s really heartening, because as you build a local donor network, the donors are able to interact both with the party and with the independent sector. The independent sector can’t interact with the party much, for the most part, but having donors who are willing to organize themselves and also vouch for groups in their states, they’re able to help validate to out-of-state voters that investing in this organization and this state is really a cost-effective short-term investment but also is going to pay off in changing politics and the country in the long term. I could go on and on about…

ROB STEIN: Name some of the states.

FRANK SMITH: New Mexico, Wisconsin, Minnesota. We made some progress in Utah and Wyoming, thanks to Chris, Ohio, we’ve made a little bit of progress in Michigan.

ROB STEIN: North Carolina, Maine. Donors are forming and groups are getting support. And now we have to get it to the next level.

FRANK SMITH: There's some tension, obviously. We had a big meeting in Ohio, with the governor and the state party. And, in some ways you know, money in their view is scarce. So there’s going to be some tension in these states. But in other states, people understand the reason to invest both in the state party and in the independent sector. The law is different in every state. Some states have limits on what you can give them. So, in some states, you’re going to have to build much stronger NGO sectors than the party.

Unfortunately, in many, many states that I’ve been into, the state party structures are just notoriously and historically weak.

ROB STEIN: The three states that are head and shoulders above all the other states, in terms of building a healthy, sustainable progressive infrastructure. They are Colorado, Minnesota and Wisconsin. In all three of those states, they have structured donor alliances; 15 or 20 or 25 individual and institutional donors aggregating their money and putting it out in a strategic and coordinated way.

In about another 10 states, there are very serious donors who have just in the last six or 12 months come to the table. They’ve got political operatives working with them and they are going to begin building in a very serious way in 2009 and beyond.

And as we know, 2010 is redistricting; there are 35 governor’s races; so it’s going to be a critically important year. And we hope that there's going to be a progressive infrastructure that is advanced, modern, more professional in about 12 or 15 states by 2010. Kelly Craighead, Democracy Alliance…

KELLY CRAIGHEAD: Well, I should say, Rob and Frank, and so many people in this room, should take a lot of credit for all of those donor networks that are organizing in each of those different states. It is so much to your foresight and your leadership. And Al Yates. There's so many of the founders of the Democracy Alliance are also the founders of the Committee on States, and the Colorado Democracy Alliance. And so many of you are in this room. So I feel humbled to be up here. All of you know all of this much better than I do. What Committee on States is trying to do, and what the Colorado Democracy Alliance is trying to do and what the Democracy Alliance is trying to do is two-fold: one is to build infrastructure, both at the national level and at the state level. But also to build these sustainable progressive majorities.

And I guess my part of this is to say: why? For the Democracy Alliance, we really struggled. Is it infrastructure, is it about a sustainable majority. And in the end, we’ve decided it’s both. Because we have a vision of America that is progressive, that have progressive values and have progressive policies. And how do you do that?

You know, we failed for 40 years. And in the PowerPoint that we’re not seeing, Rob Stein diagrams why that happened and shows us a path for how we can change that. Part of that is building institutional capacity. But it’s also really about trying to get clear about what we’re trying to do and why we’re doing it. So, like the Colorado Democracy Alliance, we are also a not-for-profit corporation organization. We are organized as a membership organization. We have two parts to that membership. One of the funders who provide the really important patient capital that the movement has not had for a long time, if ever. Because all of this is new. And the other half are our Alliance partner organizations, who really should be up here because they’re the ones that are doing the work. And what we've tried to do for our members is provide an investment framework for how they can think about what we're trying to build. What is the machine? What is this infrastructure? And how are we then going to use it?

And we do it across four sectors also. We recommend organizations that are developing public policy solutions through our ideas sector; training the next generation of leaders through our leadership sector; organizing and mobilizing. I skipped right over media. We have a media sector, where we're trying to do three things. One, we're trying to reform the media, which hopefully if we get to 60 votes this year, we'll be a lot closer to making an impact on some of the things that we care about in terms of a free press and how we really strengthen democracy. Through media monitoring and how do we actually push the right back. And how do we create the space so, in our third area, media content generation, how can we move our messages out?

And so you see we’re starting to build a machine. You know, generating ideas, trying to move those messages out to messengers; having leadership cut across the whole thing; and then ultimately, civic engagement. How do we get people out to the polls, to vote for people who are going to enact the legislation that we think is important to have a real progressive America.

So we're honored to have 30 groups in our portfolio. Our partners are very diverse. They come from every part of the country. We have over 100 members who are participating as financial partners.

Our chairman, Rob McKay, is in the room, who really has provided some terrific leadership that helps us. Then provide services at the national level with each of these different states so there is a synergy level. So, one of the hallmarks of the Democracy Alliance is how do you foster coordination and collaboration amongst the groups. We’re also trying to do that amongst the donors at every level. And we’re having some real success at it. I do agree with you, Rob, I don’t think we could be in this moment in time had we not had the movement leaders doing the work they do and the funders who are in this room doing the work they do. And trying to both build community but also professionalize the movement which will make us more effective and more efficient. So I think we should probably just go to Q&A.

ROB STEIN: We should open it up. Let me make just one more synergistic point, which is this. So the Democracy Alliance for the last 30 months has put about $110 million into 30 groups. I think it’s eight of the groups – I’m not sure exactly, but it’s something like eight – are on the ground here in Colorado and are part of the Colorado system. So, what is being built nationally is really supporting a lot of multi-state organizations that are effecting progressive-majority change at the state level. So this is all connected. What you see up here is all getting connected. Is it perfect, no. Is it infinitely better than we ever had before, yes. Is it hopeful for the future? Yes. Let’s open up for questions.

The "progressive" political machine, part II

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