Innovative California Progressives Help Return State to Sanity With Effective Organizing

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“If we vote yes on this proposition, we will be asking the rich to share the money they have gained from the suffering of the poor,” said Father Margarito Martinez, pastor of Los Angeles’ Our Lady of the Rosary of Talpa Church. “Fighting for money does not make us rich, sharing money makes us more human, more like brothers and sisters, and more like children of God.”

“For California to be a land of opportunity, we must provide enough funding for health, education and public safety to protect the state's poorest and most vulnerable residents, while opening the pathways of opportunity to all: a decent education, access to healthcare, and equal justice before the law,” Reverend Amelia Adams, pastor of the Open Door House of Prayer, said at the same press conference.

The messaging was built on anger and hope, which had come from the discussions that had been held during the past three years, Thigpenn said. Also, having younger people reaching out to new and occasional voters by calling them, knocking on their doors, and talking to them throughout the process, was a key to their electoral success.

“We discovered a few things,” Thigpenn said. “In addition to the classic kind of community organizing mantra that you have to tap into people’s anger and outrage, we actually found that an aspirational message about the California dream, about what’s possible, about what people’s hopes are for their families actually resonates a lot, in terms of motivating people to vote. So people are angry and we want to remind people of the consequences of the $20 billion being cut, but anger alone won’t sustain people: they just become cynical or afraid of us.”

This message, strategy and tactics led the coalition to turn out 6.18 percent of the yes vote on Prop. 30, which passed by 5.37 percent. Looking ahead, the coalition plans to keep talking to its grassroots groups with an eye to restoring some of the billions that have been cut from schools and social services. They know Jerry Brown wants to retire $23 billion in still-unpaid state debt in the next four years, but they also know where the billions in needed new revenue can be found: by reforming commercial property taxes, where longtime owners are assessed at 1978 values, which shifts the tax burden to newly bought homes; and by taxing oil and gas drilling, which unlike every other energy-producing state isn’t taxed in California.

The California Calls coalition thinks it can achieve these needed structural reforms. But just because the state’s new demographics favor progressive policies and government services, Thigpenn is quick to point out that “demographics is not destiny.”

Indeed, just as local organizers in California looked to their state capital several years ago and were mortified by reactionary policies and billion-dollar cuts by Republicans, so too are progressives in many states now looking at Congress and its poised cuts—whether the upcoming "sequester" or other entitlement "reforms." Thigpenn hopes what has been accomplished in California can be exported to other states, but he also knows that organizing takes time and every state political culture is different.

“We convened a meeting last May where there were 21 states represented, a mix of red and blue and purple states,” he said. “Everyone is trying to figure out what approaches actually work in building long-lasting and sustained power for social justice movements that in the end could have an impact on the national agenda.”

That work, and that struggle, will continue, in California and nationally. But in the Golden State, progressives have come out after a long dark night and appear poised to reshape state government. And that is no small achievement.