RFS feel-good update (12/14): Why Congress is so old, a 4-vote margin of victory, & more
You're probably going to have strong feelings about this update...
Hi all -
Only a few more weeks of 2020, people are getting vaccines, and while the next few months are going to be absolutely horrific, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
Here’s what I’ve got for you:
First, keep an eye out this week for our last endorsement class of 2020 (and first class that’s 100% 2021 candidates.) They’re amazing.
Second: There’s been a lot of conversation this week about the generational gap in Congress… You might have seen this chart floating around.
Or perhaps read this piece, which bluntly asks: “why is Congress so old?”
No matter how you slice it, the makeup of Congress is not reflective of the American people, which has direct effects on policy-making.
Part of the reason why Congress is so much older is because the pipeline of folks who run for Congress is also older than the median American — the median state legislator is 56; the median school board member is 59.
There are a ton of reasons why this is the case, many of which Run for Something aims to solve in our specific work with candidates ages 18-40.
But one of the biggies is one out of our organizational control: Legislatures are not built for anyone not independently wealthy. This map might surprise you:
We can’t fix every problem. But we can focus on doing what we can to make it easier for young people to run for office at every level.
As the afore-linked piece says best: “If Democrats want to spend the next few decades actually getting stuff done, they have to develop their party’s next generation of political talent — and that means empowering young candidates and letting them lead the party, and the country, into the future.”
Speaking of the next generation of political talent, here are some RFS candidate & alumni updates…
This is super exciting: after initially losing the tie-breaker “pull a name from a hat” process, the county did a recount of the election for Berrien County Board and Rayonte Bell was declared the winner, by only 4 votes. Rayonte is a 22-year old student at Lake Michigan College and one of the few Democrats to win in his county. He is believed to be the first Black representative for the St. Joseph area.
Indianapolis City-County Councilor Ali Brown is spearheading the Indy Autism Project, which aims to make the city the “safest in the country to live, work, and play for people on the autism spectrum.”
Coloradans struggling to navigate the state’s broken uninsurance system built communities over Facebook, Nextdoor, and more. Rep. Brianna Titone has been singularly helpful.
“Earlier, Schwartz had reached out to 36 state legislators from the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans. Two responded, but only [Rep. Brianna] Titone has been helpful, Schwartz said.
“At first she was like, ‘Hey, send me whoever is in my district,’” Schwartz said. “And I said, ‘Look, the reason why we’re in this position is people only want to help their district.’ I said, ‘Either you want to help or don’t.’ And she said, ‘I want to help.’”
Titone, with the help of her aide Michelle Zajic, has become more of a connector to the labor department.
“I was a volunteer firefighter when I was 16. It was my job to show up and help random people,” said Titone, who has reached out on NextDoor when she spots people struggling with unemployment. “People don’t know we’re doing this work. They think that they have to do it on their own but they don’t have to.”
Similarly, FL Rep. Anna Eskamani has helped more than 30,000 Floridians get uninsurance claims handled; it’s worth looking at this map one of her volunteers made on the dispersion of those claims.
In more RFS-alum-taking-leadership-positions news:
WA State Sen. Emily Randall was elected Majority Whip
NH Rep. Matt Wilhelm will serve as senior democratic advisor to the caucus leadership team.
In Kansas, Rep. Brandon Woodard will be the next House Minority Agenda Chair and will be the first LGBTQ+ member of KS House Democrats leadership. Rep. Rui Xu will be the House Minority Police Chair, and will be the first Asian American member of the leadership team.
Eli Savit is building his Washtenaw prosecutor office with the counsel of local activists and advocates, conducting a listening tour across his county and setting up an agenda that progressives are excited about. This rules.
After two years of work, Boston City Councilor Lydia Edwards has successfully fought to include equity as part of the city zoning process - Boston will be the first major city to do so.
In Dupage County, IL, Ashley Selmon was elected Vice Chair of the county board — the first Democratic woman to hold the position. (Fun fact: Democrats hold the majority of the board for the first time since 1934.)
The 19th ran a great Q&A with Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo on how she’s led through the pandemic, election administration, and more.
Alum Etel Haxhiaj came up short in her campaign in 2018, but she keeps fighting. She’s got a great new op-ed in her local paper about what development Worcester (MA) must do to build forward more equitably and with an eye towards climate.
He lost his campaign earlier this year, but he gets it. Emmett Soldati’s vision for the New Hampshire Democratic Party is spot on: “Too often, the organizing principle of our state party is to ask, “How does this activity help us connect with voters?” when we should be asking “How does this activity help voters connect with each other?””
Mainer News has a long debrief on how Democrats lost against Susan Collins. I can’t say yes or no how accurate it is, but I do want to flag: They specifically point to RFS alum (2x — both in 2018 & 2020!) Chloe Maxmin’s successful race to flip a ME legislative seat:
"Democrat Chloe Maxmin, a progressive state lawmaker from the midcoast town of Nobleboro, challenged Republican Dana Dow, then the Minority Leader of the Maine Senate, and won. Maxmin ran a “100% positive” campaign “grounded in community values, not Party or ideology,” her website declared.Maxmin and her local team created all their ads and adjusted content based on voter feedback. They knocked on over 13,000 doors in her rural, Republican-leaning district. The voters they encountered had no interest in the type of who-took-money-from-who sniping that characterized the U.S. Senate race. “The things I hear from people are, ‘We want good jobs here, we want to live in a rural place and make a good living,’” Maxmin said. “‘We want to know our children will have the same opportunity.’”
One more swearing-in photo, just for good measure — County Commissioner Nida Allam is now the first Muslim woman in elected office in North Carolina.
In related reading: Historian and activist Lara Putnam has a powerful article up on why building locally is the path forward:
Look at what's happened in the wake of November 3, as bad-faith accusations of voter fraud cascaded from the president downward. Every elected judgeship or county commissioner in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Georgia mattered. Every failed opportunity to elect — two or four or six years ago — a representative who'd feel accountable to a broad constituency to uphold the rule of law added risk. Concerned citizens don't have a time machine to go back and change those races, where even a fraction of the attention cascading into Georgia now could have been transformative. What they can do is recognize what a time traveler from the future would tell them: build everywhere.
To anyone who says "there's no local or state politics around me that needs my involvement; it's all Democrats everywhere here," I would say: if you had talked to a Wisconsin Democrat in the summer of 2010, they could have said the same thing. Wisconsin voted Democratic in every presidential election from 1988 through 2012. It wasn't a battleground until it was. The best time to start building capacity and engaging — and learning from — the electorate around you is before the failure to do so creates a four-alarm fire.
The lesson isn't "act locally" because that’s all that matters. It's: act locally because that's where you maximize your capacity to build the knowledge, capacity, connections, and leadership pipelines that will drive regional and state-level developments and, in turn, shift the incentives, constraints, and possibilities for national actors.
If you are looking for some listening material, I talked with the Swing Left podcast about what Run for Something is up to, why I’m hopeful, and got perhaps a litttttle angry about the disconnect between smart strategies and effective resource allocation within the Democratic Party. Listen at your leisure.
You can also pre-emptively subscribe to the Run for Something podcast. In our last episode before the holidays, I talked with Michigan state Reps. Mari Manoogian and Kyra Bolden about friendship, legislating, how they're treated as young women in the state capitol, and how they're surviving this tough year in politics. They're joyful -- you're going to love the conversation. Get it wherever you get your shows.
Good news, I’ll send you one more feel-good email before the year ends! Can’t stop won’t stop the good vibes, even when everything feels so bleak.
Thanks for making all this possible. I hope you’re as proud as I am of what we’re building together.
- Amanda