Innovative California Progressives Help Return State to Sanity With Effective Organizing

Continued from previous page

In 2010, this coalition focused on two ballot measures and won: Prop. 25, reversing the two-thirds requirement to pass a budget, and beating Prop. 23, an oil industry effort to suspend environmental laws. “So this gave us the sense that we were onto something, in terms of being able to make a difference in these kinds of elections,” Thigpenn said.

As important, Jerry Brown was elected based on the promise that he’d be a political adult and bring the legislature’s misbehaving partisans together. While Brown tried and failed to do that in 2011—including finding a solution to the red ink -- Thigpenn’s coalition kept meeting with local constituents. “It was important for us to engage them, not just during an election time but in between election times,” he said. “Because one of the things we hear about during the phoning is voters complaining that, ‘We only hear from you in an election; we never hear from you again.’ We took that to heart.”

“We did nine of these statewide engagement programs in the last three years,” he said. “Seven of the nine were not election times. We kept engaging these folks, building these relationships, asking their opinion, testing ideas, and taking that feedback to fine-tune both the framing of the issues and the kinds of public policies that we want to put forth. So that was critical: anchoring in community-based organizations in an ongoing way."

By December 2011, the state budget crisis was still unresolved. California Calls and its partners were determined to put a millionaire’s tax on the ballot to stop more school cuts. A wealthy Silicon Valley heiress was funding a ballot measure with across-the-board tax increases to fund schools. And Brown was preparing his proposal, to raise both sales and income taxes. By then, the research that groups like the California Federation of Teachers and California Calls had done was ahead of Brown. They told Brown his plan wasn’t progressive enough and wouldn’t pass, both Glass and Thigpenn said. Brown replied that he did not have much faith in California Calls’ work among new and occasional voters.

“I remember the first meeting we had with him in December of 2011, first talking about what we were doing and his propositions,” Thigpenn said. “And he kind of told me, ‘Look, I don’t believe in community organizing. It’s too unreliable.’”

But Thigpenn and his coalition partners didn’t back down. They showed Brown polling data that only a tax on the upper-most earners would pass. And they forced Brown to make the proposal that made Prop. 30 more progressive—by raising tax rates on the wealthy and lowering his proposed sales tax increase from one-half to one-quarter percent.

“Once we forced the governor to compromise, that was in a sense, unheard of,” Thigpenn said. “Typically, the way these things happen is a group of power players in Sacramento decide what is to be done, and they come out to us and say, ‘Sign on the dotted line and become the troops to help us win it.’ So this really changed the dynamic. That we didn’t back down. We had ideas of our own. And they were forced to negotiate. When people saw that, they began to get a sense of their power, both individually and collectively.”

Then, during the early summer and fall, the California Calls coalition and its partners launched a new kind of field campaign that was outside of what the Democratic Party was doing. They set up training camps for organizers. PICO California, a coalition of church groups that was part of the coalition, fielded clergy who said that there was a moral dimension to making wealthy people pay more in taxes.