Innovative California Progressives Help Return State to Sanity With Effective Organizing

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Political scientists who track voting in underrepresented communities, such as Melissa Michelson of Menlo College, called the 80 percent turnout rate “astounding,” if, in fact, those were mostly new voters. She said that California Calls did what political parties have always done. “California Calls’ model of identifying supporters and then focusing on getting them to vote is, in a way, pretty traditional,” she said. “It’s also been the case for quite a long time now that low-propensity voters, ethno-racial voters, people of color, have not, in general, been the target of mobilization campaigns by major parties and major candidates.”

Michelson’s comments are flattering because Thigpenn’s coalition is not a political party. It’s an assembly of groups, unions and coalitions that have worked for years on economic and social justice issues, such as on inner-city issues in Los Angeles or Oakland, raising minimum wages in San Jose, or supporting day laborers in San Francisco or the Central Valley, and includes church-based groups.

“There aren’t shortcuts to building progressive power,” said Roxana Tynan, executive director of Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, which worked on the Prop. 30 campaign, but was more focused on a successful 2012 campaign in Long Beach that raised the local minimum wage. Her group, LAANE, was typical of those comprising California Calls; it has worked for years at the local level and grew as Southern California’s immigrant community and union workforce became organized.

“I think this shift in the state has been about 20 years in the making,” she said, citing a dozen labor leaders, immigrant activists, activists-turned-politicians and others who, like Thigpenn, started in community organizing and unions, such as fighting for janitors and hotel workers. “You have to start at the city level and be able to build community organizations with real depth, and build relationships with key progressive unions that have real depth in their membership… and really think about building political power in a smart way.”

Tynan said that LAANE, working with UNITE, the hotel worker’s union, fielded 800 volunteers last summer who contacted 45,000 voters, as part of the campaign to raise the minimum wage in Long Beach and support the state ballot measures pushed by California Calls. “The best long-term organizing is face-to-face. I know it’s very old-school -- but it works,” she said. “And while you bolster that with communication and social media and all the rest of it, there is no substitute for building a deeper base of people who will stay engaged over a long period of time.”

In other words, it wasn’t an accident that Prop. 30 passed, with a push by progressives working independently but alongside the state’s Democratic Party apparatus. Looking backward, Thigpenn and his allies can lay out the steps they have taken since 2009. Indeed, it’s easy after a series of political victories to forget just how entrenched and discouraging California politics were for progressives just a few years ago.

“The main thing is progressives have begun to think more boldly,” said Fred Glass, the California Federation of Teachers communications director. “The way we were doing politics wasn’t working very well.”

From 2008 To Now

As progressives across the country look at the political stalemates surrounding the federal budget, it’s worth remembering that California underwent a version of that dysfunctional dynamic starting in 2008. As Glass said, established political players, like his union, had been relying on the same strategy and tactics for years: giving political action committee funds to like-minded elected officials and candidates, and sponsoring and pushing ballot measures to try to do what what the legislature would not.