Retaking The House

Grassroots Activists Can Be Key

Affecting national politics may seem far beyond the reach of the ordinary person. But this year, it’s not, thanks to the California Grassroots Alliance. It’s a network founded to answer a very simple question, posed by South Bay Indivisible activist Patti Crane in a video last year, “Could we as grassroots people flip enough districts to take back the House without depending on any other state and just do the work right here in our own home state of California?”

The answer, they decided, is yes — it’s possible. But they started from a place of deep frustration, following the 2022 midterms, when losing a handful of flippable districts in the state was just enough to give the GOP a razor-thin majority in the House.

“There were a couple heart-breakers, 564 votes in CA-13,” Crane told Random Lengths more recently. “To lose an election by only 564 votes is just bone-crushing, that’s just awful.”

They began by analyzing what worked and didn’t, re-interviewing candidates they had worked with. “Those interviews were so eye-opening,” Crane said. Then they looked at 10 potentially flippable districts, analyzed them all, and narrowed their list to six: two (CA-13 & 22) in the Central Valley, one in Northeast LA County (CA-27), two in Orange County (CA-45 and 47) and one in Riverside County (CA-41). Their plan, as laid out on their website is simple:

By attracting volunteers from both blue and red regions, equipping them with potent tools and evidence-based practices, and targeting their efforts toward the winnable seats, the Alliance helps assure the best and highest use of grassroots activists’ time, talent, and funds on the path to victory.

In case it’s not clear, “We made absolutely sure that we were centering the volunteers,” Crane said.

Kicking Things Off

On April 24, the Alliance held their online kickoff event, “Power in the House!” featuring Rep. Katie Porter, Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler, and activist Jess Craven, publisher of “Chop Wood, Carry Water.”

The tone was set with a powerful two and a half minute motivational video, contrasting Californians in general as “people with plans and dreams, always seeking a better life” who “want the freedom to make our own choices for our families and our futures” with “some people [who] want choices only for the few … authoritarians trying to burn down our democracy because they want to take all the power for themselves.” It went on to say, “In 2022, MAGA Republicans grabbed power over the House by a razor-thin margin,” and “If they keep their grip on power, their plans for 2025 and beyond will destroy our democracy,” it warns.

“But we Californians have learned a thing or two about fighting fires. We know what to do to stop this MAGA inferno. We sound the alarm. We alert our neighbors. We draw the line together. We can build a fire break to halt this arson. We can join forces to smother the MAGA flames and we do it with our votes.”

Wisconsin’s Example

Wikler followed, fleshing out that message with a vivid description of how something strikingly similar has been done in Wisconsin, how Democrats fought back against the severe erosion, not just of Democratic Party political power, but of democracy itself that began with the 2010 Tea Party wave.

Among other things, Wisconsin Republicans “started by smashing unions, the counterweight to the power of billionaire mega donors in Wisconsin,” they “rigged the right to vote” in multiple ways, changed campaign finance laws, and had a “near total” lock on electoral power in the state, including a 5-2 majority on the state supreme court.

In 2018, things looked dire. Wisconsin could have gone deep red, as nearby former swing states like Iowa and Ohio had done, but instead, Wisconsin activists “refused to give up, and they started to organize,” going on to win the governor’s race by 1.1%, a “landslide” by Wisconsin standards at the time.

After winning again in 2020, “Republicans decided the problem was, they hadn’t rigged our system enough. What do you call a failed coup? Practice,” he said. They responded with tighter laws, sham investigations, threats to poll workers and election officials, and even threats to jail mayors of Wisconsin’s five largest cities.

Nonetheless, Democrats won again in 2022. “Our organizing beat their cheating,” Wikler summed up. It was the first time Democrats won a governor’s race after a Democratic president had been elected since 1962. And the margin was “a 3.4 percentage point true Wisconsin landslide.”

California’s Turn

But with all that progress made, Wisconsin doesn’t hold the key to winning back the House this year. California does. And so Wikler was there to pass that grassroots fighting spirit on.“In this moment. California, your own democracy can save democracy for this entire country, your votes, your volunteering, your donations to support these candidates for Congress,” he said. “They can turn the tide in this House battle that is central to the question of whether the American experiment will survive.”

And yet, as important as those candidates are, “Your activists, your supporters, your volunteers, they are actually the protagonist in this narrative,” he said. “Wisconsin is counting on you in the California Grassroots Alliance to do this hard work, save the House, and make sure that we are living through a rebirth of American democracy.”

Rep. Katie Porter had a similar message from a different perspective, she won one of the most challenging seat-flipping races in formerly deep red Orange County in 2018 — when Democrats flipped seven seats — and won re-election twice while Republicans retook four of those seats in 2020. She found it “shocking” after what happened in 2018 and 2020 “that so many of these so-called political operatives in D.C. don’t realize that just because you are in a blue state doesn’t mean you don’t have swing seats. Doesn’t mean you don’t have persuadable voters. Doesn’t mean that you don’t need to have a strong field program.”

In 2022, “We outperformed every other Democrat on the ballot from Gov. Newsom to our Orange County Board of Supervisors candidate. So I know that it can be done, but that it’s not easy and the help isn’t gonna come from Washington.” Porter said. “It’s going to come from us, from Californians who decide that they’re willing to work where they’re needed in California.”

Her experience is typical. “I sometimes hear candidates say, ‘Well, I just need the cavalry to come. I could win. But I just need help. I need the cavalry.’ I have news for you. You are the cavalry. If you are waiting for someone to come from Washington, you’re gonna be waiting a long time.” Which is why, she said, “The work that the Alliance does is just so important.”

Jess Craven echoed similar themes, but again from a different perspective — one who’d been working side-by-side with many in attendance, remembering how inexperienced they’d been as part of the wave of resistance activism that formed to take back the House in 2017 — “We came in, you know, energetic and willing and freaked out, but we were green, you know. None of us really knew what we were doing,” she said, in contrast to how “seasoned” they were now, which is why she felt so confident.

California suffers from “taking our own state for granted,” she said. But the activists present “know what we need to do. We just need to chop wood, carry water here in California,” she said, screen out noise and the polls, and focus on the work. “This is tough, but we are tougher.”

“If we flip the House,” she said, “We get to codify abortion rights and stop this nonsense. We get to pass common-sense gun laws. We get to get rid of the filibuster, or at least carve it out. We get to pass voting rights. We get to pass labor, stronger labor laws. There is so much — We get to pass the Pride Act and protect people like my 14-year-old nonbinary child.” Democrats, she said, are “just getting started. So let’s not quit before the miracle. Let’s go forward. Let’s do our work here in California. Let’s flip these seats that we know how to do, and let’s go for the big prize in November.”

Why So Positive? The Story of Why

The positive energy in the meeting was palpable. But was it justified? The history behind it suggests it is, as Crane explained. During the 2022 campaign, Indivisible Sonoma County, “poured their energy elsewhere,” particularly to flippable Central Valley districts. “They were worried, because they weren’t seeing enough action happening,” and took steps to remedy that, including conducting a series of candidate interviews, which they promoted to “grassroots groups all across the state.”

After the heartbreaking near-miss in that election, they reached out again, both to candidates and volunteers, to understand what had worked and what hadn’t. There were problems with the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) beyond local control, but others were closer to home.

“The grassroots volunteers were never deployed pointedly into the right place as they wanted to be,” Crane said. “They’d go to one thing, there’d be too many people, and they’d go look at three other things where nobody showed up because there weren’t good filtering and channeling and pointing systems. It was just non-strategic.”

Once they decided to form the Alliance last summer, fixing this was the highest priority — “that we centered the volunteers,” Crane said, making sure they could be as effective as possible. This required “combining two things: we have what we call a bird’s eye view and we have the on-the-ground insights, and we’re adamant that you have to have both,” she stressed. In interviews, they found that “the people who knew the birds-eye staff about you know all of the districts, and what was going on statewide, and the people who knew what was going on deep on the ground in any individual district, they were not the same people. And didn’t talk to each other,” a recipe for chaos.

“Our understanding was that if we could knit these two views together that a whole lot of the timing mistakes would be ameliorated,” Crane said. “The people up on high, the birds-eye view people knew where there was funding, and knew how the pipeline would work, the people on the ground knew where there was hurt and where there was need, and where voters are deeply under-registered, under-represented,” she explained. “So we said, we’re going to flip that and we’re going to insist that we have both this umbrella view and this tight view.”

One example she cited was a $15,000 contribution from one donor. The Alliance “took that and divided it six ways,” giving $2,500 in each district to the on-the-ground group that experience said would best use it to register and turn out voters. They also coordinate information-gathering, such as gathering endorsement information for down-ballot races, which in turn make the centralized Blue Voter Guide interface all the more useful in areas where organizing resources are thin. And they did candidate interviews — available on their YouTube channel — to help activists and voters get to better know who they’re working to elect.

It’s especially important to pour organizing resources into the Central Valley districts, “which have some of the highest poverty rates in the United States, not just in California, but in the United States,” Crane pointed out. “The people are working two and three jobs to put food on the table, they don’t have the time to get in a car and go canvass for a day, and they don’t have childcare and also the population is young, much younger, so their typical family has much younger children,” she said, so “we have to pour blue energy — through the Alliance and through the Alliance partners — deliver energy into those districts, and not wait for those districts to find it on their own. Because the circumstances in those districts isn’t good enough for that to happen, and we know that’s our responsibility. We know that.”

Central Valley canvassing had already begun, even before the kickoff meeting, with 103 Bay Area activists going to canvass neighborhoods and visit college campuses in CA-13. Closer to home, Alliance volunteers took part in an 80-person canvass in CA -27. “When you have 80 people canvassing the Antelope Valley, you can get some coverage,” she noted. “That’s what has to happen, week after week after week, day after day, after day.”

In addition to the Alliance efforts, at the end of April, the DCCC announced they were making all Alliance target districts their key districts in California. “Technically, that’s slightly outside their portfolio, because these aren’t incumbents,” Crane said. But in terms of “the importance of things, and the fact that we lifted these up as a bundle,” it makes perfect sense. “Yes, they are made up of individual wins that are precious, but without the bundle, we don’t get the ultimate yield,” she said. “It’s sort of like making a match on the NPR. … We can’t unlock the House unless we get the bundle. So we are going for getting the bundle.”

Indivisible San Pedro is part of the Alliance and has been doing similar work since the 2018 cycle — even using Random Lengths’ offices for phone banking. 

“The road to freedom runs through the Harbor Area with activism to win 55% of the vote across the county, the state and the nation,” said Indivisible member Peter Warren. “On so many levels, it is important to make sure the Democrats control Congress and the White House, from cleaning up the ports, to making sure reproductive freedom is secured for California and all people across the USA. We need to do all we can to ensure a Democratic majority in the House.”

Those who want to help ensure that majority can join the Alliance via their website at cagrassrootsalliance.org.