In 2004, Howard Dean, insurgent presidential candidate, vowed to change Democratic politics one state at a time by retooling his campaign into a national organization, with mixed results. President Barack Obama tried to do the same, but Organizing for America struggled to break through.
Now, it’s Sen. Bernie Sanders’ turn: He’s launched Our Revolution, the latest attempt to use a successful presidential campaign to change politics as usual.
“What the political revolution is about is transforming America, is getting millions of people involved in the political process, is understanding it’s not just the president, but it is people coming together and saying, “We need a government that represents all of us and not just the 1 percent,” Sanders a Vermont independent, told host Chuck Todd on Sept. 4 on “Meet the Press.”
But if Sanders and his supporters want a revolution, experts say, they should be ready to exercise some patience — and prepare for at least some disappointment.
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Despite its grandiose name and a goal of electing progressives to the House and Senate, they say, Sanders’ organization is likely to run into the same rough political shoals, strong institutional headwinds and conflicts over direction as its predecessors: Dean’s Democracy for America, formerly the presidential campaign Dean for America, and Obama’s Organizing for America, which used to be Obama for America.
“You have groups that are looking to drastically change things and that’s not how our system works,” says Geoffrey Skelley, an analyst at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “You run into a lot of institutional concrete, and it’s slow going. Sanders understands that, but it’s not clear that a lot of his supporters did.”
And Our Revolution itself stumbled out of the gate, troubled by internal conflicts and perceptions that, despite its name, it would be practicing politics as usual. On Wednesday, board members announced it will reveal the names of all big-dollar donors to quell the discord and emphasize transparency — even though what constitutes a big donation has yet to be defined.
“We know that people really care about transparency and accountability and we’re not going to let people down,” Nina Turner, a former Ohio state senator and high-profile Sanders surrogate, said in a conference call with reporters. “We do take seriously the faith that people have in us as a movement and this organization as a symbol of that movement.”
Despite the mixed results of Democracy for America, which famously tried to implement Dean’s “50-state strategy” of flipping red states blue, and Organizing for America’s attempts to keep Obama’s coalition of young voters and voters of color engaged in off-year elections, it makes sense to try, says Vanessa Williamson, a governance studies fellow at Brookings Institution. Success takes time, she says, and isn’t always easy to measure.
Though Dean’s organization didn’t succeed in getting states like Texas or Oklahoma to vote for Democrats, his campaign caught the attention of young voters, and forced the centrist-drifting Democratic Party to acknowledge its left flank, Williamson says. Obama’s organization may have dashed some high hopes for change, she adds, but it helped some young people get into the habit of voting, and helped lay the groundwork for the Affordable Care Act.
“No one organization is going to be the thing that makes a difference in terms of what would be the legacy of an entire campaign,” she says. “I think it’s too soon to say” whether Our Revolution can break the mold of incremental change, but its goal of electing down-ballot candidates is an important one, she says: That’s where the real action is.
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“There are reasons why this year the presidential campaign has been so eye catching, but in terms of policy outcomes, but it’s not the only race,” she says. Indeed, governors in red states like Kansas implemented tough new restrictions on government spending, while true-blue California just launched a sweeping package of laws to address climate change.
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton versus Republican Donald Trump is important, Williamson says, but “it’s not the only game in town.”
But anyone looking for Our Revolution to smash the political status quo is likely to be sorely disappointed, says Skelley. Almost from its outset, he says, political change has been incremental at best, a complete overhaul of the system is a pipe dream and Obama’s fight for the Affordable Care Act is a prime example.
After entering the White House with a briefcase full of policy ideas, “Obama spent a whole lot of political time and capital trying to pass the affordable care act,” Skelley says. “You get a shot at maybe one or two major things as president. From a major policy program change standpoint, it’s very difficult to do any change of that magnitude.”
And Obama actually won the White House, Skelley says. If the candidate promising change doesn’t win, he adds, the task of transforming politics — or, in Sanders’ case, sustaining a “revolution” along with voters’ attention, when a campaign’s excitement dies — becomes that much harder.
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“He was talking about a movement — not talking about electing a leader,” Skelley says. “If you’re trying to get people engaged, you have to have patience.”
The bar gets higher when there’s turmoil inside the organization. Sanders’ had barely launched Our Revolution before a group of staffers resigned amid a staff revolt over internal policies and leadership — including the group’s status as a social welfare organization, and Sanders’ hiring of Jeff Weaver, his former campaign manager, to run it.
According to campaign law, such groups can accept unlimited funds without disclosing donors, an issue Sanders campaigned against. The staffers who quit complained that Weaver was more focused on raising money and airing ads about issues rather than helping progressive down-ballot candidates win their races.
“We wanted to be working on these down-ballot elections and to be able to coordinate and work together as much as possible with these campaigns,” said Paul Schaeffer, one of the staffers who resigned.
Though it apparently has ironed out the major kinks, Our Revolution probably won’t be able to push the needle as far as his supporters may want.
Skelley says Sanders was the face of the movement. Now that he’s back in the Senate, “you sort of lose the guy who’s the focal point of all this energy.” Sanders’ goal of political revolution, Williamson says, may be overstated but “people respond to big powerful metaphors. The question is, whether they will [join in] the sort of hard daily slog that actually creates change.”
Even Sanders acknowledges that the change he wants won’t happen overnight. But the issues he’s raised during his run — the collapse of the middle class, healthcare for all, wealth inequality — are firmly on the national agenda.
“The top one tenth of 1 percent now owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,” he told Todd on “Meet the Press.” “Those are the issues I believe we need to focus on, politicians and the media. Let the American [voters] get involved in that debate.”
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Progressives Push for Change but Revolution Is Slow to Come originally appeared on usnews.com
