Innovative California Progressives Help Return State to Sanity With Effective Organizing

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“We need more revenue and we need to get it from the most progressive possible sources,” said Fred Glass, communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, which was part of California Calls’ coalition. “Progressive forces in California see it as their job to try and hold Gov. Jerry Brown and the legislature accountable for adequate revenues for public education and services.” 

The Fine Print: How They Did It

California Calls and its partners are breaking new ground in ways that progressives in and outside of California should heed. They will work with Democrats, as they did with Gov. Brown on Prop. 30, but they are not afraid to disagree or drive hard bargains—as they are not dependent on mainstream institutions for their electoral base and crediblity.

Instead, Thigpenn’s team and his partners—some of whom have been organizing among California’s growing immigrant communities and unions for decades—have a fine-tuned strategy. They start with a strong unapologetic economic justice message. They invest in building community organizations with technology and training. They work at cultivating and keeping relationships, by meeting yearround to listen, hear suggestions, explain new agendas and get feedback. And they have learned how to go beyond advocacy on local issues to engaging and shaping the electorate.

Last year, after Thigpenn and partners such as the California Federation of Teachers—the state’s second largest teachers union—forced Brown to make the proposal that became Prop. 30 more progressive by relying less on a sales tax and more on taxing upper income brackets, they sent 5,000 organizers into dozens of communities with the goal that each volunteer would find, engage and motivate 100 or more occasional or new voters.

In a state of 17 million registered voters, an army of 5,000 volunteers is nothing to sneeze at. But it’s also not unprecedented, especially when compared with labor’s biggest efforts or a presidential campaign. The usual center-left field organizing strategy in California is to buy lists of registered voters and then innundate those voters with messages at the last minute. In contrast, California Calls’ strategy was to tap into the multitudes who weren’t voting and engage them in a longer conversation that included voting in 2012.

“We did an analysis of the Obama surge in California in 2008,” Thigpenn said, saying he and his partners found 7 million new voters that year. “We played with the numbers and said, what if we could take just 15 percent of that total number, in 12 key counties where there are high concentrations of targeted voters… This was three years ago. And we thought that if we could do that, that could be the decisive difference.”  

Going into last November’s election, pollsters predicted that Prop. 30 would fail, leading to $6 billion in immediate cuts for schools and services. That’s because pollsters do not consider new voters as reliable—even though voter registrations were surging in October (in part because the state offered online registration). On election night, early returns showed Prop. 30 losing. But Thigpenn and his coalition knew those results didn’t include the communities in a dozen counties where they had been talking to people for two to three years. When the final tally came, not only had Prop. 30 passed but the voters California Calls had cultivated—African Americans, Latinos, Asians, immigrants, young people, union members, and other working-class people—voted at remarkably high rates. (Lower-than-expected turnout has always frustrated voting rights groups.)

“The average voter turnout in November in California was 71 percent. The average voter turnout of our folks, who said, ‘Yes, they’re with us,” was 80 percent. Now these are new and occasional voters, so typically they vote below average. In this case, they voted 9 percent higher, and the number of African Americans, Latinos, young voters, immigrants was just astounding,” Thigpenn said. “Young people voted 7 percent higher in 2012 than ’08. People of color voted 8 percent higher in 2012. So for the first time the electorate wasn’t overwhelmingly white. It’s typically 65 percent white and that was reduced by 8 percent. And probably most interesting, people making less than $50,000 a year voted 12 percent higher in 2012 than they did in ‘08.”