Glenn Perušek – A Celebration of Life

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On Saturday November 2, the weekend before the big national election, family and friends of Glenn Perusek gathered for his memorial at the Slovenian National House on St Clair Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. I was honored to speak at Glenn’s memorial. Here are my remarks:

Glenn, the first person on the registration line (out of more than 4,200) at the 2022 Labor Notes Conference.. Photo: Dan DiMaggio

“I am very happy that Gail and Dawn, Glenn’s sisters, decided to hold this memorial in the Slovenian National House. I think Glenn had an office and a living space here for a while. I know Glenn was exploring his Slovenian heritage, and I believe a trip to Ljubljana and greater Slovenia was on his agenda. I know that when I met him in 2005 he was using Perusek, but more recently his name became Perušek. (Sek vs Check) I hope I got the accent right. I called his cell phone the other day just to hear him pronounce it. Christina Perez and I were looking forward to meet up with him in Slovenia on one of our trips to Florence, Italy.

Glenn did visit us for a week in Florence in 2017. He met our Italian friends and engaged with them on everything from food to politics to futbol soccer! We make a point of awarding our guests in Florence some recognition based on their stay with us. For instance do they do the dishes or make their beds? His time with us in Florence was great, and he won “Best Male Guest”!!

In his capacity as Director of the Center for Strategic Campaigns at the AFL-CIO, Glenn safeguarded resources for my union, the ILWU. We waged several epic battles organizing a large Rite Aid distribution center in the Antelope Valley north of Los Angeles and battling an employer lockout in the Mojave Desert at a borax mine owned by the giant multi-national Rio Tinto.  Glenn made sure we had the research and staff support to prevail. Because of him, the ILWU, a small but powerful union of 45,000 members, got more support per capita for new organizing than any other affiliate of the national federation.

After I retired from the ILWU in 2013, Glenn brought me on in 2015 to help teach Heat and Frost Insulators how to organize and opened a whole Building Trades instruction world for me. I had no idea what a heat and frost insulator was? We were a great team and made a lot of new friends. Tommy Williams, an accomplished organizer, and at the time Director of Organizing of the Heat and Frost Insulators, who is with us today used to call Glenn “The Professor”, a whimsical term of endearment and reverence.

What made working with Glenn so fruitful was his overall willingness, despite his rigorous traditional academic training, to call “audibles”, sports parlance for employing flexible teaching methods, to draw on the intelligence and experience and creativity of the building trades students. We would engage a student organizer at lunch, and if they had some experience or expertise Glenn would tap that student to be a presenter in the PM session. 

We instituted a regular talent show at the end of the 4-day classes where we invited students beforehand to bring their poetry, musical instruments and rap to the closing session. I will never forget a Canadian Vice President of the Cement Masons, and accomplished blues harp player, stepping up in Ft Lauderdale and serenading us with some Latin tunes that he had played previously at the Buena Vista Social Club in Havana, ninety miles away. A dear friend and co-instructor colleague of Glenn’s who was not able to be with us today; Melissa Shetler is an accomplished jazz singer and closed out one of our sessions with a live performance.

Glenn was a great comrade to me and many in our labor world. He opened new pathways in my life. I think one of Glenn’s biggest recent achievements was putting together the John Womack book, Labor Power and Strategy that is very much in play and being read by young organizers everywhere. It was Glenn’s insight that made the book so unique and powerful. I thought of interviewing the Harvard historian John Womack about labor power in production and logistics systems, but it was Glenn who suggested that we get 10 of labor’s best and brightest organizers and thinkers to respond to Womack’s theses. This has generated a rich dialogical work that provokes thought and discussion and healthy controversy. This was part of Glenn’s commitment to the up and coming generation of new organizers – Ride Share Kevin, Noah Carmichael, Deven Mantz, Carey Dall and Taft Mangas. Oh and don’t forget veteran unionists like Chris Scarl who Glenn helped get elected to the City Council of North Olmstead, Ohio.

This memorial of course coincides with the final push for the national elections. Christina Perez and I are in Orange County, CA working to flip several House seats to the “D” column and I know Glenn would be with us in spirit and curious as to our findings on the “doors.” But the Perusek Memorial takes precedence on our calendar because of our love for Glenn and our deep curiosity to learn more about our dear Brother from his family and friends. Our curiosity abides…

We go back to Orange County for the final push and we dedicate our work to Glenn Perusek. Glenn Perusek Presente!”

The booklet that is presented here on The Forum was designed and produced by Gail Perusek and Dawn Stang, Glenn’s sisters. It was distributed to all the attendees at the memorial.

To view the booklet fullscreen: Click the symbol on the far right of the line below the image

About the author

Peter Olney

Peter Olney is retired Organizing Director of the ILWU. He has been a labor organizer for 50 years working for multiple unions before landing at the ILWU in 1997. For three years he was the Associate Director of the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California. With co-editor Glenn Perušek they have edited Labor Power and Strategy by John Womack Jr and available now from PM Press View all posts by Peter Olney →

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This Rural Political Strategist Says Democrats Need to Learn from Winners

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This piece was originally published in Barn Raiser, an source for rural and small town news

Robin Johnson, 66, started his political career as a freshman in college with Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. Since then, he has advised rural candidates across the country, including his former Democratic congresswoman Cheri Bustos, who represented Illinois 17th congressional district between 2013 and 2023.

Johnson teaches political science part time at Monmouth College and lives outside Monmouth in Warren County, Illinois.

Barn Raiser spoke with him about last week’s election and why the Democrats are having such a hard time connecting to rural voters.

I wasn’t sure Trump could do better as far as the share of the rural vote in 2024 versus 2020. But he did.

In my county, Warren County, Illinois, which is an Obama-Trump county, we had a 15-point swing toward Trump, the largest of any county in the state.

This election in some ways matched what’s happened internationally, where incumbent parties have lost everywhere. It’s a global trend that is partly due to the impact of inflation. I’m older. I remember the last time we had bad inflation was in the 1980s, and it was devastating. Trump was very aggressive in making that case on the economy.

But I put a lot of the blame on Democrats who have not invested in rural America. The Democratic Party is focused on doing things the status quo way, running TV ads and making a lot of consultants rich.

Whenever it comes to rural America, you’ve got big city consultants coming in and saying, “We know what to do.” Yet people out here who live in rural America understand the dynamics better, and they’re being passed over. The Democrats are stuck on this consultant-driven, top-down approach to campaigns that is not working.

I wish I knew. It’s very frustrating to see this happen over and over and over again.

After the 2016 election, I worked with my former Democratic congresswoman Cheri Bustos to visit hundreds of Democrats who had won in rural areas. We asked, “How did you do it?” These were the survivors, and in 2017, we published a 50-page report about their stories.

Cheri Bustos from Department of Agriculture

After I wrote the report, Cheri told me up front, “Robin, one thing I’m not going to do is raise money for PACs off of this.” They wanted her to raise money to give to them to do TV ads appealing to rural voters. It was like flies on shit. (Sorry for the barnyard comparison.) Here were people who had come for the latest trend just to make money.

Right now, a bunch of TV consultants are probably in the Bahamas, drinking tropical drinks from the money they made on the recent round of campaigning. What the Democrats need to do more than anything else is take a long, hard look at this model.

They need to start from the ground up. Sure, you need funders from the big cities. But it’s got to be done by rural folks. It’s been eight years since Trump was first elected, and there’s been no movement to do this the right way.

The term I use is “failing up.” We have a lot of people that lose in rural areas, and then they’re promoted to the DNC’s Rural Council and are talking on TV. There are candidates who have actually won in rural America, but you never hear about them.

Here’s your spokesperson for rural Democrats, and it’s somebody that lost their last race. What the hell? It’s like in football. Instead of going to the Kansas City Chiefs to learn how to win, you’re going to go talk to my Chicago Bears.

He parks his old red truck, a 1999 Dodge Ram, on the side of the road and has a handmade sign that says, “Stop and Talk with Senator Jeff Smith.”

It’s not that hard. Go talk to people who win and ask them how they won. In 2022, I wrote a piece for Washington Monthly with the idea of putting people front and center that won their rural districts.

Take Jeff Smith, for instance. He’s a state senator from rural Wisconsin. He parks his old red truck, a 1999 Dodge Ram, on the side of the road and has a handmade sign that says, “Stop and Talk with Senator Jeff Smith.” There needs to be more examples like that. What Jeff Smith did didn’t cost a lot.

The problem with consultants is they don’t see any way to make money out of this unless it’s a TV ad. So they’ll come in and do your TV ads for you and get their 15% commissions.

What else needs to be done? Going out and training local people to knock doors—that’s a minimal cost. Buying some radio spots year-round. Doing more with social media and weekly newspapers, although there aren’t as many of those, that’s going to cost a little bit.

Instead, the Democrats’ current approach to rural has been, “Well, the election’s over, let’s turn the lights off and lock the door.”

That’s not what the Republicans do. They’re going every day, 365 days a year.

It was a mistake to take it away from Iowa. That sent a message: “We really don’t care about rural states.” I know Iowa’s not necessarily representative of the country, but it’s a rural state, and it prizes retail campaigning, which is what the party needs. With the caucus system, candidates to have to go out and meet people in their homes, in the American Legion Halls and churches and small groups.

Barack Obama won that way. It’s not perfect, but moving it to South Carolina wasn’t the best move. If they switch it to a state like Michigan, or even Illinois, which is more representative of the country, the temptation would be to do more TV ads.

TV has to be part of the equation, but Iowa forces candidates to have a ground game and person-to-person contact, which is ultimately the key to doing better in rural areas.

It varies, but consultants typically get 10% to 15% of the TV buy. If they spend a million dollars on TV, then they get 15%, $150,000. That creates an incentive for consultants to tell you to use TV.

People might not remember Paul Wellstone. He was a Senator from Minnesota with a progressive populist appeal in rural areas. His TV guy was named Bill Hillsman. His theory was that if you do a really creative TV ad, you don’t need to run it a million times because people will remember it.

Nowadays, they run this mind-numbing bullshit on TV that you see 50 times a day. It drives the cost up and the fees up.

Trump had better ads this time, honestly. I don’t remember Kamala’s ads. I don’t remember Hillary’s ads. If you see Bill Hillsman’s work, you don’t need to see it 10 times a day to remember it. But Hillsman was frozen out of the Democratic Party because he represented a threat to the system. And that’s why we have what we have. We’re either about winning elections or making the consultants rich.

The Democrats have basically kicked away a key component of the New Deal coalition.

I live in an area where a lot of factories have gone overseas and we lost jobs. I remember listening to Trump on satellite radio in 2016, and he was talking about trade and the disaster of shipping jobs overseas. And I’m thinking, boy, he’s going to appeal to a lot of people with that message.

But it’s not just economics anymore. It’s culture. It’s our whole attitude and how we talk to people.

Too many Democrats have a condescending attitude and basically call people stupid if they vote for a Republican or a Trump-type candidate. That’s the message that was delivered this time to Black voters. We’ve lost an ability to really listen to people and meet them on their own terms.

Here’s exhibit A of how damaged the Democratic brand is in rural America: look at what just happened in Missouri.

Missouri passes two statewide referendums, one on abortion rights and one raising the minimum wage. And several years ago, Missouri defeated a right-to-work amendment. Now, if you’ve got a candidate in Missouri like Lucas Kunce with those same policies, who is running for the Senate against Josh Hawley, how does Kunce end up with only 42% of the vote?

Don’t tell me voters in rural areas don’t back progressive policies. They do. But look at the numbers. When you put a D next to the name, they vote against it more. Why? Because they don’t like Democrats.

And I think it’s got a lot to do with the attitude of the party and a lot of these cultural issues that we’re forcing down people’s throats. I talked to so many people who said they didn’t really like Trump, but the Democrats have driven them away.

Part of the solution is going to be remaking the face of the party. If the Democrats are going to rise back, it’s going to have to be local. The Democrats are going to have to go out and organize again and find people locally to be the face of the party instead of Nancy Pelosi or Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. That’s where it’s got to start.

One of the keys to people winning in rural areas is nonstop door knocking. In our 2017 report, people that won told me that not only is door knocking the best strategy to get to know people, it also provided inoculation against negative attacks.

When somebody hits you for being the antichrist or whatever in a TV ad, people would say, well, I know this guy. He came to my door. The key is to start from the ground up and make the effort year around.

Former congresswoman Bustos used to do a variety of events. As a member of Congress, it’s hard to go knock doors. And town halls became circuses with the right wing disrupting them. So she came up with new ideas.

One idea was a supermarket Saturday where she would go stand in supermarkets and talk to people. She also did job shadowing where she would go work different jobs and learn about people and how hard they work.

When’s the last time somebody did that?

I admire Jeff Smith up in rural Wisconsin. He’s making sure he stays in touch the old-fashioned way with people, face to face. We’re losing that through social media.

One of the biggest surprises in the last several years is a congressman from Silicon Valley who connected with me.

Ro Khanna, Democrat, representing Silicon Valley

His name’s Ro Khanna. Here he is, an Indian American representing Silicon Valley. He took an interest in what was going on out here and wanted me to set up meetings the last couple of summers in factory towns in the Midwest. He flew out on his own dime. He wanted to hear from these people. And he listened.

This guy really gets it. He gets it better than a lot of Midwestern public officials do.

He came up with an idea of investing in American steel plants and putting them in these towns like Johnstown, Pennsylvania, or Youngstown, Ohio, that have suffered. He calls our trade policies one of the biggest avoidable policy mistakes Democrats have ever made. I agree. And we need to own up to it and try to invest more in these towns, places where people feel left behind. So Ro Khanna is someone I admire.

Believe it or not, someone who is never mentioned is Tammy Baldwin. She did well in rural Wisconsin in both of her elections. That was a shock to me.

In 2012, Tammy Baldwin was elected to the US Senate from Wisconsin Senator Baldwin is the first woman Wisconsin sent to the Senate and the first openly LGBTQ+ Senator in history.

I’m thinking, this woman is gay and you never hear her name. Did anybody ever go to her and ask, “Senator, what did you do? What’s the secret sauce in rural Wisconsin? How did you do so well?”

No. Instead, the media was chasing around Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke and Jaime Harrison. And I’m looking at the numbers. They got killed in rural parts of their states.

But the media portrayed it as if they did really well. They didn’t. Not unless you define 30% of the vote as doing really well.

I don’t look at it that way. I look at who wins. Do you win or lose? I don’t want to hear about somebody who agrees with me on everything but loses. The Democrats need to rise above these ideological battles. If somebody needs to be pro-gun, pro-life and win a rural district, the party should welcome them. The party says it’s a big tent. It’s not. You’re not going to do well in rural areas unless you welcome candidates that may not agree with you on a lot of these issues. Identity politics is killing the party. I know that won’t make me popular in a lot of places, and that’s fine.

If a far-left progressive wins in a rural area, then great. Learn from it, see how it adapts to your local area. If the party can’t welcome diverse views, then you’re looking at semi-permanent minority status. A lot of people don’t want to hear that.

It looks like she’s going to win again. And Jared Golden won in Maine. There are a few Democrats left who represent rural areas. A lot of the ones Bustos and I talked to who won in 2016 have now lost. You can’t build an enduring majority just winning cities, university towns and some progressive suburbs.

Nobody inside the party wants to hear this message.

Osborn works on his car in his home garage in Omaha, Nebraska, on March 4, 2024. (Joseph Saaid, Barn Raiser)

That Senate race in Nebraska was interesting. I can’t wait to get the final numbers. That guy, Dan Osborn, ran without a D behind his name, and he outperformed the other Democrats on the ticket by six or seven points. There’s something to be learned there, if the party’s willing to listen.

Last year, I was listening to a session with some Democratic group, and they bring on this guy, and he’s trying to coach candidates in rural areas how to talk to voters. Think about that: teaching rural candidates how to talk to rural.

If a candidate came to me for advice and said, “Robin, what should I say to voters?” I’d say, you’re not knocking enough doors. Go knock on some more doors. You’ll be okay. Listen to what people say and how they say it.

The pollsters come in and test language to see if it resonates, and use that language in TV ads and print pieces. “Build Back Better”? Are you kidding me?

Here’s an idea:Deep canvassing. Why don’t we do more of that?

Bingo. That’s why it won’t happen.

People, not just rural voters, but all voters, have had it with the poll-tested language. That’s part of why Trump was popular—as well as Bernie Sanders. When people heard Bernie Sanders speak, they knew he didn’t have a pollster whispering in his ear. And Dan Osborn in Nebraska—watch him talk. That’s not a guy talking with poll-tested language. He came across as authentic, and that’s what people are wanting.

When I hear Kamala talk I didn’t know what she was saying. Hillary, I think, fell victim to that, as well. There’s value in just talking directly to people. As much as I disagree with Bill Clinton on NAFTA, he had that gift of being able to communicate complex policy issues to voters in a way that made sense.

I live out in the country. I have neighbors here who are Trump voters. I listen to them, how they talk. It’s not how the politicians talk.

My next-door neighbor is a Trump voter. He’s very conservative, a gun owner. We get together and have a beer on his porch about once a week and talk. When I go out of town, he comes over, checks my house out, helps himself to a beer. That’s the way it should be, but we’ve gotten away from that.

As a society, we’ve got to try to get that sense of connection back where politics isn’t everything. I remember a time when politics was boring, and I wish we’d get back to that.

Jaime Harrison is a nice guy, but a lot of money was sent down to South Carolina, and he got clobbered. The Democrats, every cycle, have somebody they fall in love with and spend an inordinate amount of money on, and they don’t even come close.

If the DNC is serious about trying to do better in rural America, find somebody who actually won out there. The motto needs to be that of the old Oakland Raiders football teams of the 1970s, when Al Davis ran them. His motto: “Just win, baby.”

About the author

Justin Perkins - Barn Raiser

Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is currently finishing his Master of Divinity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image. View all posts by Justin Perkins - Barn Raiser →

Joel Bleifuss - Barn Raiser

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to Wisconsin and South Dakota in the 19th Century. Bleifuss was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a town on the edge of the Ozarks. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1978 and got his start in journalism in 1983 at his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground. View all posts by Joel Bleifuss - Barn Raiser →

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Oil in them there hills! Signal Hill and Beverly Hills no less!

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Signal Hill, California

When I took up residence at the end of August on Signal Hill to work the Congressional elections in Orange County I had little knowledge of the history of this little city of 2.2 square miles completely surrounded by the City of Long Beach. I had heard of Signal Hill because of the infamous police murder of CSULB football player Ron Settles in 1981. The fight for justice for Ron Settles was ongoing in 1983 when I arrived in California and worked in Long Beach on a battle to keep Long Beach Community Hospital open. Finally in 2022, over 40 years later, the City of Signal Hill issued a public apology to the Settles family for Ron’s death. 

Oil wells on Signal Hill, Ca 1921
Oil Wells, Along Ocean, Southern Calif.. Public Domain

But living on the Hill has pushed me to learn more about the history of the whole LA basin. It is often forgotten amid the glitz of Hollywood that LA is the largest urban oil field in the country. Oil was discovered in the 1890’s and powered the early economy. Oil continues to be pumped in many parts of LA County and the industry recently bristled at Governor Newsom’s support for legislation that would require capping wells near residential areas. 

Pumpjacks amongst residential housing in Signal Hill, California. Photo: Neal Sacharow

Oil was discovered in 1921 in Signal Hill and huge geysers some 300 feet high were not uncommon. The City was incorporated separate from Long Beach in 1924 to protect the oil barons from regulation and taxation. Oil was discovered in Venice, California in the 1930’s and even to this day “pumpjacks” can be seen dotting the LA landscape in often the most unexpected places. Several wells in Beverly Hills are camouflaged by cosmetic tower structures. In the long running 1960’s TV sitcom Beverly Hillbillies Jed Clampett struck oil in the Ozarks in Missouri and moved his family to Beverly Hills. Turns out there is an active oil well next to Beverly Hills High School

Signal Hill features an amazing Promenade Park on its summit that has some of the best panoramas of the LA basin. It is one of the unknown gems of SoCal with views that rival anything from Griffith Park or the Getty It also features some crazy juxtapositions of oil pumps with luxury residential housing and retail businesses. You can eat excellent food at Curley’s Café on Willow and sit outside under a parasol as a silent pumpjack brings up more black gold.

My good friend Neal Sacharow obtained some vintage Signal Hill postcards online and  discovered even more at this link.

Monument to oil field workers. Signal Hill, California. Photo: Neal Sacharow

Now he has staked out his camera on the Hill and captured some current images of this little corner of the Los Angeles basin

About the author

Peter Olney

Peter Olney is retired Organizing Director of the ILWU. He has been a labor organizer for 50 years working for multiple unions before landing at the ILWU in 1997. For three years he was the Associate Director of the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California. With co-editor Glenn Perušek they have edited Labor Power and Strategy by John Womack Jr and available now from PM Press View all posts by Peter Olney →

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The Grassroots Electoral Movement Reshaping Rural Politics

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This story was originally published by Barn Raiser, your independent source for rural and small town news.

Photo: Robert Gumpert

In many rural areas, races go uncontested. That’s changing in 2024 thanks to grassroots efforts to contest every election

Wenda Sheard became a candidate for public office not because she thought she’d win, but because nobody else was willing to run.

The self-described grandma, attorney, former teacher and trained mediator is running for state representative as a Democrat in a rural district near Athens, Ohio. She’s running for an open seat after her representative, Jay Edwards, a Republican, reached his term limit. The district’s partisan tilt—Edwards regularly won by a 60/40 split—scared potential Democratic challengers away. After a trip to Guatemala during which she saw widespread protests against the government’s efforts to overturn the presidential election there, Sheard came back fired up and filed to run for office the Friday before the state deadline in December.

“We have to contest every race,” Sheard says. “Otherwise, instead of elections, we have coronations.”

Sheard is one of a growing number of progressives across the United States whose work is supported by a network of political groups targeting small towns and rural communities. These organizations vary in their structure and tactics, but they all intend to generate enthusiasm and spur engagement from political progressives in areas the Democratic Party given up on since 2000.

Many of these rural places were once an important part of Democrats’ coalition, but they’ve trended Republican over the last generation. That trend was accelerated by a GOP push to fund candidates in state house races ahead of the 2010 Census and midterm elections, which allowed states to redraw district lines for state and federal elections for the next decade. Republicans that year took control of 29 state governorships (a net loss of six for Democrats) and gained more than 690 seats in state legislatures—the largest gain for Republicans since 1928. Such wins allowed the GOP to control redistricting in 17 states.

Meanwhile, Democrats debated how much emphasis to place on rural America. Howard Dean, then-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, argued for a “50-state strategy” to bolster the party’s support in areas where it was losing races. Dean clashed with Senate and House campaign committee heads Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, who wanted to focus on swing districts. Schumer and Emanuel ultimately won out as Democrats saw more success winning suburban areas, and the Party placed less effort into winning more sparsely populated regions.

That began to change again after the 2016 election, when Donald Trump spiked GOP margins in rural America. In the aftermath, a slate of left-leaning organizations formed to organize rural communities through a variety of tactics.

According to Matthew Hildreth, the founder of Rural Organizing, and current rural vote director for the Harris-Walz campaign, the push to organize rural Democrats began years earlier, during the lead-up to Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Hildreth grew up in South Dakota, got into advocacy and politics in 2007, and moved to Iowa in 2011. Hildreth had seen the Obama campaign run a sophisticated rural operation that was built from its 2008 push to win the Iowa Caucuses.

However, the Obama campaign is better remembered for its sophisticated approach to voter contacts. And folks drew the wrong lessons, Hildreth says.

“The problem is we’ve become over-obsessed with predictive analytics,” Hildreth says. “By 2012, digital took over all of our campaigns and told us they know this house will be Democratic, this one Republican. If you live in Raleigh-Durham and move out to a more rural area, the voter file will penalize you for moving. The assumption is a person living in rural North Carolina is more conservative than a person in urban North Carolina. That’s what we’re fighting against. There’s a whole group of people who have been made invisible by analytics. That algorithm has cost us more votes than racism.”

In 2012, Hildreth launched a website, RuralOrganizing.org, to connect rural organizers. He saw its contact list swell to more than 600,000 addresses and by 2018 was able to make it a full-time job. Rural Organizing built out multiple operations that included a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization and a super PAC to spend money on elections.

Rural Organizing’s (c)(3) nonprofit is focused on flipping stereotypes about rural areas.

“So much of what happens in small towns is decided in places other than those small towns, whether it’s state capitals or Washington, D.C.,” Hildreth says. “Rural people solve local problems. Rural folks know what their communities need—the solutions to economic decline, population loss, opioids and all the things should come from rural folks.”

The (c)(4) leverages lobbying and grassroots activism to press for rural-centric policies, including the RECOMPETE (Rebuilding Economies and Creating Opportunities for More People to Excel) Act that authorized more federal funding for economically distressed communities. Other priorities include the Child Tax Credit, health care, child care and lowering the cost of living.

Finally, the super PAC has distributed over 62,000 rural-related yard signs across five battleground states ahead of this year’s presidential election, including non-partisan issue-only signs, Harris/Walz signs, and Senate signs to support Democratic incumbents Jon Tester in Montana and Sherrod Brown in Ohio.

In September, Kamala Harris hired Hidreth as her rural engagement director. Campaign officials said his goal is to trim Republican margins in rural areas, which in highly-contested swing states like Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania could be enough to tip the state in the 2024 election.

Other organizations take a different approach. Contest Every Race recruits candidates in races that otherwise would be uncontested, a feature all too common in rural politics. The group launched in 2018 and has recruited or helped support more than 7,500 down-ballot candidates in 45 states, says executive director Lauren Gepford. Contest Every Race primarily targets candidates at the local level for offices that often prohibit party labels.

“The majority of the candidates we’ve recruited have been in nonpartisan races,” Gepford says. “We start by getting in touch with state and local Democratic parties to get their analysis of which candidates are on the right or wrong side, generally which ones are progressive and they support.”

The group’s working theory is based on the idea of “reverse coattails”—that supporting progressive candidates to contest more county-level, down-ballot races will lead to better margins for Democrats at the top of the ticket.

In recent years, Contest Every Race has turned its attention toward school boards, which have been targeted by conservative activists and so-called “parents’ rights” organizations like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education who want to influence curriculum, restrict books in school libraries and otherwise set school policies. Contest Every Race is also working with candidates for state legislatures across the United States.

“This is the first time I’ve ever run for office,” says Rick Delaney, a Democratic candidate in northwest Arkansas running for the state House of Representatives. “Contest Every Race is what spurred me along. We need someone on the ballot everywhere.”

In Ohio, Victoria Maddox grew increasingly frustrated over increasing costs and the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

“I wondered why our representatives are not doing anything, and then I did some research and realized, ‘Oh, because they’ve been in office for 50 years, and there’s no one running against them,’ ” Maddox says. “If I’m not running, I’m a bit of a hypocrite.”

Contest Every Race also worked with Wenda Sheard, the Ohio State House candidate near Athens.

“I went into the race thinking I’d simply be a name on the ballot,” Sheard says. “Then, I realized people were excited.”

Since entering the campaign in December, Sheard’s been on the go, doing all the things it takes to run a campaign. She knocks on doors, speaks to groups, seeks endorsements, raises money.

Regardless of the outcome, Sheard says, “I’m winning. I am winning because all of my people, everyone who talks about my race and other races — we are providing hope, we are providing a choice, and we are informing voters.”

But she’s also learned some hard lessons about campaigning.

“It’s sad,” Sheard says. “I’ve learned you need money to run, and the people most likely to win are the people who have the rich people supporting them. Most of the people the rich people support are the people continuing making sure they’re rich, who will pass policies that will continue benefits to the wealthy.”

Contest Every Race’s Gepford says that’s a common sentiment.

“We’ve more and more heard, ‘I was excited to run but didn’t receive any support when I was running,’ ” Gepford says.

So far, the group has relied on local and state party committees to fund candidates it helps recruit.

Although many groups offer support in the form of phone banking, canvassing and other in-kind contributions, most don’t offer direct financial contributions for anything other than hotly contested races in seats considered flippable and those in battleground states.

Determining how much financial support rural candidates have received versus those in metro areas is tricky, both because of the lack of clarity in how rural areas are defined and because of variance in cash contributions and in-kind support. Every State Blue has funded 121 Democratic candidates in statewide races in Missouri, Ohio and Tennessee through mid-October, beginning with those who have the least resources, according to Executive Director Michele Hornish.

One of Every State Blue’s affiliate organizations is Blue Missouri, which concentrates on financially supporting rural candidates regardless of competitiveness.

“Just last Friday I was on phone calls all day long, we gave away $173,000 to 43 down-ballot candidates in Missouri,” says Blue Missouri Executive Director Jess Piper. “We fund the neediest first. We call it the bathtub method: we start from the bottom and fill it up. Because we did that, there’s no Democrat running in any state or state senate race with less than $6,500. It’s a massive shot in the arm to the reddest, the most rural, the most difficult districts in Missouri.”

Piper joined Blue Missouri after her own experience as a candidate in 2022, when she left her job as a teacher to challenge an otherwise uncontested state representative Jeff Farnan. Although Piper lost the election, she raised $275,000. “It made a light click on for me,” she said. “I know money can’t buy a race, but it sure does help a message get out.”

Today, Blue Missouri has built a network of nearly 900 donors who make monthly donations. The organization holds monthly meetings with candidates and party nominees, and builds them up with campaign contributions—more than $550,000 in Missouri since the organization was founded in 2017.

Importantly, Blue Missouri does not base its contributions on a race’s competitiveness. “The way we do things just flips everything on its head,” Piper says. “We focus on nominees who are in really tough places to get them to run and hopefully build a bench.”

It will take Democrats longer than a single election cycle—much longer in some cases—to start winning back rural districts they’ve ceded for the last decade-plus. Building a bench of candidates and providing them sustained support is a key part of that, Piper argues.

“It’s knocking on doors, it’s having conversations with people who haven’t heard the Democratic message in a decade or better,” Piper says. “The only we get that message out is to have someone on the ground, and the only way we get someone on the ground is to fund them.”

Rural mason GroundGame operates mostly in Virginia, where elections are held every year. The organization supports individual candidates as well as helping Democrats maintain a visible presence year-round through billboards, newspaper ads and barn signs.

“We’re in this moment now, for rural organizing in particular, where you have to hold so many things in your hands at once,” says Lynlee Thorne, Rural GroundGame’s political director. “What is it we can reasonably accomplish to be part of larger rural push, to move margins that can ultimately win states?”

For People’s Action rural organizer Kellon Patey, making a difference on the ground requires long-term organizing and campaign plans.

Patey coordinates a network of rural partner organizations across the country, including Iowa CCI (Citizens for Community Improvement), Down Home North Carolina, the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, Pennsylvania United, Pennsylvania Stands Up, VOCAL-KY (Voices of Community Activists and Leaders), Citizen Action of Wisconsin and the Maine People’s Alliance.

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI) is organizing around the political fight against a controversial carbon-capture pipeline that’s galvanized opponents. The group opposes the pipeline, calling it a greenwashing effort by corporate backers who claim they are helping counter climate change but in reality only exacerbating it. Iowa CCI is also working with allies fighting the pipeline for a variety of other reasons, ranging from support for property rights against eminent domain to worry about water quality.

Opposition to the pipeline has emerged as a bipartisan issue in the state, with 14 Republican members of the Iowa legislature joining Democrats in supporting a lawsuit that alleges state regulators violated the state constitution by approving the project.

By participating in the anti-pipeline community push Iowa CCI is helping build a political movement that may yield future candidates for office. Iowa CCI supports the candidates it endorses through phone banks and canvassing. Organizer Katie Biechler says that making real change in rural communities depends on following the lead of people in those communities.

“Change only ever comes from the bottom up and not the top down,” Biechler says. “That’s how we approach everything, is with the sense that folks in their own communities know what they need for their communities. Politics is the way to get that change—but through people, not through expecting politicians to do the right thing or what we ask of them.”

Building those coalitions, even with people who may have different values, is a key part of organizing rural areas, says Ava Auen-Ryan, Iowa CCI’s farm and environment project director.

“The CO2 pipeline is a simple, everyday people versus corporate power story,” Auen-Ryan says. “This issue cuts across the political divide. There are people who outside of this fight have very different values than us as an organization. Maybe you’d assume two or three years ago when this started, they only cared about eminent domain, but now when they’re up there, they talk about safety and water.”

That sort of experience is why rural organizers hold out hope.

“Rural people are worth organizing,” Patey says. “We shouldn’t give up on rural turf, on rural people in red states. Yes, we absolutely need to boost major metro turnout. Organizing in cities is crucial. It’s essential to winning. But cutting margins in rural communities is also essential to winning. The winning strategy for progressives includes the one-two punch of major metro turnout and rural persuasion.”

About the author

Mason Adams - Barn Raiser

Mason has covered Appalachian communities since 2001 for zines, alt-weeklies, community and metro newspapers, magazines, digital media and public radio. He hosts West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and writes the weekday Southeast Energy News for Energy News Network. Mason's work has appeared in Southerly, Daily Yonder, Mother Jones, In These Times, New Republic, Vice and elsewhere. Mason lives with his family in Floyd County, Virginia. View all posts by Mason Adams - Barn Raiser →

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One More Rally – Harris at Homestead

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I wanted a day off from driving. But Kamala Harris’s rally in Pittsburgh was too close to miss. Her campaign had moved the event from the center of Pittsburgh to Carrie Blast Furnace National Historic Landmark to prevent confrontations with MAGA followers who were rallying at PPG Paints Arena. Thousands of attendees, including many first-time voters, parked in the lot of famed Kennywood Amusement Park and then took shuttles to the location, walking a healthy distance on a gravel path to the furnaces. 

The location was deeply moving. The blast furnace, illuminated by lights on cranes, was once part of the Homestead Works of U.S. Steel where, in 1892, brave strikers, organizing against Carnegie’s wage cuts, battled the company’s Pinkertons and the National Guard. The militant legacy of USW Local 1397 in Homestead continued into the 1970s.  

I was honored to meet and know some of the leaders there. After the mill’s shutdown, they helped push for the national landmark where I now stood. The hallowed venue made Vice President Kamala Harris’s call to protect freedom and democracy ever more powerful. Here, workers sacrificed their lives for the right to organize. Here, steel was made to support the war against fascism in Europe. Would the workers of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania defend this birthright tomorrow? Would the hopes and aspirations of the young folks, waving our nation’s flag before this furnace be temporarily (or permanently) dashed? Or will they be encouraged and reinforced? Amidst the joy and hard work that brought folks there, these hovering questions carried solemnity and purpose.

After the Vice President’s speech, our exit was delayed by police as her motorcade departed. I watched the black limousines move out. And I tried to weigh the acute personal sacrifice it takes for one to accept a challenge of this magnitude. Whatever the election results this momentous evening, Thank You, VP Harris and Gov. Walz for working so hard to define today’s choices.

About the author

Len Shindel

Len Shindel is a retired United Steelworker local leader, who formerly worked at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point, Md. plant. After Bethlehem's bankruptcy, he went to work in the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, retiring in 2015 as a media specialist. Shindel lives in Garrett County in Western Maryland and is working on a book about the Garrett County Roads Workers Strike of 1970 (www.garrettroadstrike.com). View all posts by Len Shindel →

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“What’s at Stake in the 2024 Elections”

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LA Examiner front page from 1977, 8 August. State Threatened by Alien Horde. The Examiner had both a morning and evening edition – the second edition on this days was: “250,000 Aliens Mass at the Border”

Anti immigrant positions are low hanging fruit historically.  Politicians, political candidates, newspaper or media moguls, have whipped up anti-immigrant sentiment in this country as part of right-wing populist tactics for a very long time, particularly during economic downturns.  The consequences have been real:  total exclusion and mass deportations.  The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law the US government passed to exclude a whole group of people—after their labor power was no longer needed to build the railroad, for example.  But the Japanese were excluded, too, through a “Gentleman’s Agreement” the US government imposed upon Japan in 1908, after the San Francisco Chronicle campaigned for it, in a wave of anti-Japanese sentiment that included the legal segregation of Japanese and Korean kids in schools away from white children. 

The idea that the Republicans are marketing this election of mass deportations of immigrants also have precedents.  During the Great Depression, the US government rounded up and deported almost 1 million Mexicans, plus almost another million of their children, who were born in the US and thus were US citizens.  Imagine, just for a minute, the pain and anguish the deportation of nearly 2 million people caused to those families and those communities.  Of course, as soon as the US entered WWII, American capitalists pressured the US government to bring back Mexican workers and the US government complied, inaugurating the Bracero Program which went to little Mexican villages to convince Mexicans to come back to the US to work temporarily because American men were at war in Europe (that’s when my grandfather first came to the US, by the way.  Not because he was looking to immigrate, or chasing “the American dream,” but because the US government recruited him on behalf of American agribusiness).  The Bracero program lasted from 1942 to 1964.  Here we see again that capitalist need for immigrant labor trumped all other concerns.  

Calexico, CA. USA. Between 2-5 am agricultural workers with work permits cross the border from Mexicali. They wait in parking lots and street corners to board labor contractor’s buses for agriculural work in the Imperial Valley, CA and as far east as Yuma, AR. Places on the buses are first come so workers often sit for several hours on the buses of contractors and crops paying the highest wage.. Workers are paid only for the time in the field. Photo: Robert Gumpert 2000.

Anti-immigrant sentiment, then, is a spigot that American capital and American governments turn on and off, depending on economic needs and political expediency at any given moment.  It works because it is much easier for Republicans to blame immigrants for the lack of jobs, inflation, lack of housing, or crime than to explain neoliberal economics and the recessions and depressions that are part and parcel of capitalism.  So there are no jobs because corporate America sent them all abroad since Reagan was elected because labor was cheaper elsewhere in the world, unions were banned in other countries, and foreign governments promised no environmental protections, no regulations, no labor protections, no taxes.  All that as a prelude to then doing the same within the United States too.  But that’s too complex for a sound bite, when you can just claim that immigrants are eating your pets. 

Blaming immigrants is also easier than telling the truth about why immigrants or refugees come in the first place.  There were no mass waves of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, or Nicaraguans coming to the US until the US government promoted, financed, and sponsored wars against the left in all of those countries, destroying those economies and creating refugees in the hundreds of thousands.  Blaming immigrants is also easier than telling the truth about how the US government has fueled, funded, and promoted massive violence in the 70-year old war on drugs, which has been a total failure in stopping drug trafficking, while it has meant millions and millions in profits for the American weapons industry, which provides all the weapons the drug cartels use to terrorize people.  Thus, the US government and private industry, again, have created more refugees searching a safe place to live.  Imagine for a second the desperation that is involved in walking from Central America to the US border.

San Francisco, California: One of dozens of immigrant rights marches held around the country in 2006. Photo: Robert Gumpert 2006

These discourses, thus, have serious consequences.  First, they can incite individuals to engage in violence against immigrants or refugees, like we saw with the guy who stabbed the little Palestinian boy 25 times.  We’ve seen that happen in every single anti-immigrant wave in US history (I remember when the US invaded Iraq and my uncle immediately shaved his beard because he was afraid someone would mistake him for a Middle Easterner and beat him up, as some men were doing in Los Angeles).  Second, these discourses announce to us that a Republican White House and Congress have no intention of addressing the real issues at stake:  not only reforming the immigration apparatus (which is truly not broken as even the Democrats say; it is functioning perfectly as it was designed to do, to the detriment of immigrants and refugees, to keep them vulnerable and in fear, a docile workforce for American capital and small businesses alike), but also not dealing with any seriousness with a whole host of issues:  drug consumption and thus drug trafficking, unconditional support for exclusionary governments abroad, unconditional support for rapacious American corporations abroad that leave US workers without work and exploit workers, resources, and ecologies in other countries, for example.  In other words, anti-immigrant rhetoric that blames immigrants for a whole lot of the problems that US society faces today signals that a Republican administration will do nothing about the major problems facing the US and the world today:  climate change, deepening extractivism on land and in the deep sea, unending resource wars.  That is what is at stake. 

Knockin’ Uniontown PA

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We are door knocking in Uniontown, Pa. Two prominent brick homes display 10-foot banners. One says “Harris-Walz.” The other screams, “ULTRA MAGA-VOTE TRUMP!” Rounding the corner, a smaller home’s banner taunts, “Make Liberals Cry-Trump Again in 2024.” We visit a 60-something man in his driveway. He says he hasn’t voted for years and is no longer registered. He lives on Social Security disability. “I don’t care what the politicians do,” he says. “What will happen will happen. I have my hole picked out.” We gently suggest that what politician is elected could determine what happens to the government program under which he survives. We thank him for his time. A while later, we knock on the door of a registered Democrat across the street. The man’s brother walks down the driveway toward us. He tells us the woman that lived there is now in a nursing home. She was being cared for by a niece in her 50s who tragically died of cancer. He says he used to cut their lawn before it became too hard for him. We recount the discussion with his brother. The brother has had brain aneurisms and other health problems. “I take care of him,” says the man, likely in his 60s. We talk about life and jobs. He’s a retired construction worker and a member of the Teamsters. “We did pretty well because we stuck together,” he said. “I think Kamala Harris is smart and would be a good president because she cares about middle-class people like us.” He says many of his fellow Teamsters agree, even though their international union has voted “no endorsement.” Banners and signs don’t vote. Between the prevalent Trump signs in this welcoming Western Pennsylvania neighborhood are enthusiastic Democrats, independents and some Republicans, too, young and old, who are more quietly voting for Kamala Harris. They and their families are struggling, cooperating and sticking together like the Teamster who warmed our day. This area was once a Democratic stronghold. That dominance is gone in this corner of Steeler Nation, whose flags will be here after most of the others come down. The presidential race? It’s everyone’s guess, the angst and hope of millions. Back to work.

About the author

Len Shindel

Len Shindel is a retired United Steelworker local leader, who formerly worked at Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point, Md. plant. After Bethlehem's bankruptcy, he went to work in the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, retiring in 2015 as a media specialist. Shindel lives in Garrett County in Western Maryland and is working on a book about the Garrett County Roads Workers Strike of 1970 (www.garrettroadstrike.com). View all posts by Len Shindel →

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ISRAEL, MY ISRAEL?    A POEM-ESSAY

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ISRAEL, MY ISRAEL?
A POEM-ESSAY

ISRAEL 

Will never be the same

Its viciousness untamed

Universally shamed

Appropriately blamed

Zionist mythology unframed

And forever stained

People’s souls chained

Hitler’s atrocities

Excusing current monstrosities 

At an unimaginable velocity

Never again

Comes again

And again, and again

The victims of the past

Inundated by the echoing pageantry of the government’s traumatizing machine

Become the victimizers of the present

Creating new victims

Whose survivors will turn against them

And create more victims

This is certain among much uncertainty

Young soldiers as monsters

Instagraming their crimes 

To a cheering population

Kill them all

Cry the people

Free our precious sons

BACK AT THE RANCH

The tail wags the dog

US leaders smile sternly

Taciturnly 

Change the subject

Muttering

Mealy-mouthed 

Peace now

Bombs on the way

Rules based disorder

Respect no borders

As our 250th year nears

All the world can see

Our deceitful moral pose

The Empire has no clothes

BACK AT THE RANCH

Our president is of half a mind 

To only use half a mind

His bones soaked by 50 years of Zionism

Willing his legacy to the devil

Endangering a nation, disheveled

Ignoring the uproar

From shore to shore

Risking fascism at home 

Begging his insidious nemesis abroad

To throw him a bone

Instead, he is humiliated from afar

By this murderer with a Jewish star

Barely exposed beneath his bloody cloak

As he mouths empty shibboleths of 

Self-defense, a moral army

While our President humbly bows

Till death do him part

THE SPOILS OF WAR AND EMPIRE

ISRAEL MY ISRAEL

A nation created to replace another people

Herr Balfour

British Lord

Closing the Arab door

Putting in European types

Even Jews that he abhors 

The oil is coming

The oil is coming

Spare no cost

Set the impossible in motion

Then exit self righteously

With the damage done

Never to be undone

But alas, today, the Arabs are tamed

While the region is enflamed

All are willing to play the US game

Even the Saudi’s

In their luxury Audis 

 With so much money to be made

Their greed precedes them

Israel actually impedes them

With endless expanding wars

And yet it goes on

The Palestinians as the permanent pawn

BACK AT THE RANCH

After more than a century of progress

Against the scourge of home-grown antisemitism

Jews shockingly choose

Netanyahu

Who believes in everything they hate

Except the Jewish state

Whose friends are too ugly to contemplate

Breaking from their historic allies against white supremacy

Stoking the fires of antisemitism once again

Hugging Jew-hating Christian nationalist Zionists

Who are waiting for the Second Coming 

To wave goodbye while Jews burn in hell

And they go to heaven

With the Z word tattooed in Henna on their Ak47

But the Jewish light survives

With the idealist youth

Who daily defy

Refusing to lie

Valuing all lives

Upholding our great tradition

Tikkun Olum

They are the keepers of the Faith 

With odd initials

JVP

INN

NIMN

My generation celebrates

The future leaders of our Jewish community

Welcome my Jewish comrades

Welcome

Hope and Heroes – Stewart Acuff’s Poems from the Frontlines of the Class Struggle

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One of dozens of immigrant rights marches held around the country, this one in San Francisco, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 2006

For four years Stewart Acuff lived in a small Appalachian village called Shepherdstown in West Virginia above the Potomac. There he wrote a poem a day from 2020 to 2022. Many of these short works are collected together in Love is Solidarity in Action. The poems reflect not only on the natural beauty of the town and the region, but the deep and rich experience of Brother Stewart’s organizing trajectory:

Aftter shiftr change . Hymies Bar across from the Edgar Thompson Steel Works. in Braddock, PA. Photo: Robert Gumpert 1986

“Yeah I stayed pissed off.

Sitting on a hotel room bed in Center, Texas home of Lightning Hopkins listening to women wonder which would be fired first cause we lost the union election

I drank a couple barrels of bourbon getting over that night and I still get pissed off 

when I remember

Seeing and smelling the insides of county jails across South Georgia fighting for

Jobs and a life beyond working like a mule

Getting out and getting drunk

Fighting the Ku Klux Klan in East Texas on a picket line of Black women scared

But overcoming with courage ready to fight every night

And I still get pissed off”

May 12, 2020

The collection is best read at the pace of a poem or two a day, which means the 130 pages, may take a while. But read, pause and reflect on the richness of Acuff’s experience reflected in these short works. He has certainly personally been on the front lines of the class struggle in America and particularly the effort to rebuild a vibrant labor movement by organizing millions of new workers. He is retired now, but I first met him when he was head of the central Labor Council in Fulton County Georgia (Atlanta). He was leading an effort to make sure the 1996 Atlanta Olympics meant justice for workers. He also was a force within the movement to reform the AFL-CIO with the election of John Sweeney as President. In 2001, a few years after the the New Voice movement took over the AFL, Acuff was appointed Organizing Director, and I collaborated with him as Organizing Director of the West Coast Longshore Union. We have been friends ever since.

I also have discovered that Acuff is not alone in the aspiration of writing a poem a day. This appears to be a tradition in the form. Anita Barrows has written a poem a day since the beginning of Israel’s assault on Palestine.  And then there is the poem a day website

Acuff’s poems resonate with outrage over man made climate change, racism and the treatment of working people. He also teaches history by referencing one simple historical fact or often-unsung heroes of our movement in each poem. Reverend James Orange is a particular comrade favorite of Stewart’s. He is a man brought up in the civil rights movement who worked later with Stewart for the AFL-CIO. Stewart pays tribute to him often in a manner that suggests that Orange gets too little credit for his role in the civil rights movement and labor. 

“A night of six of us in Dekalb County custody won medicines for poor, homeless and weak

Reverend Orange leading our sit in at the commissioner’s office winning safe staffing

There is power only known to those confronting wrong with our own bodies”

February 15, 2021

Acuff’s poems send you running to the Wikipedia search engine to unearth the history of heroes and particularly unknown heroines of the movement:

“Sing this weekend for the unsung

Who sang freedom with their actions

Like Carrie Williams in East Texas

Leading her co-workers to justice

Etra Mae and Mae Nell in small towns like Palestine

All the folks across Georgia standing against plantation thinking.”

September 4, 2021

Acuff has great pride in his two children, Sam and Sidney,s and visiting or communing with them is the subject of many poems. 

Harbor City, CA. 13 August 08. View of the Wilmington Refinery from park. Photo: Robert Gumpert 2008

“Hurricane Ida in the magic city of our culture

And fires where son Sam labors

With thousands of others to save our Earth

From human destruction

We did it

Now time to fix it.”

September 9, 2021

Poetry has never been my thing and certainly the free form that Acuff writes in is an acquired taste. But that taste I have indeed acquired out of respect for a comrade brother. I promise to dig deeper into the art form, maybe even read a poem a day! This collection is easy to order and is a great bedtime companion. Acuff reflects on the stakes in the election of 2020 in a poem that resonates again in 2024

One of dozens of immigrant rights marches held around the country, thhis one in San Francisco, California. Photo: Robert Gumpert 2006

“Folks fight for justice and democracy

Folks fight for Hitlerism and white supremacy

Everything good about America at risk

The promises of freedom, democracy, justice

I feel the shift somewhere inside

If we hold up love, that’s what America will decide.”

June 11, 2020

Take Stuart’s collection for evening reading and inspiration as you knock on doors in battleground districts and states!


 

About the author

Peter Olney

Peter Olney is retired Organizing Director of the ILWU. He has been a labor organizer for 50 years working for multiple unions before landing at the ILWU in 1997. For three years he was the Associate Director of the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California. With co-editor Glenn Perušek they have edited Labor Power and Strategy by John Womack Jr and available now from PM Press View all posts by Peter Olney →

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Desert Conversations

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The author, right, and canvass partner Maureen, dressed for success in 90 degree desert heat, examining the voter list he just downloaded to his phone before canvassing. Photo credit: Candy Meyers

I spent three days last week in Reno, Nevada under the auspices of Seed the Vote, volunteering as a canvasser for the Harris-Walz campaign. Having canvassed in many campaigns over many years my expectations were low. I imagined I’d mostly knock on the doors of empty houses and apartments. That expectation was fulfilled.

Since our lists were of low-propensity voters, I also guessed when I did find people home I’d encounter large gaps where political knowledge should be. This too proved true.  My personal goal was modest:  stop 2024 in the United States from becoming 1933 in Germany (see my earlier Jumping Off Place article).  I am less enthusiastic about the people I’m urging everyone to vote for than the historical function they will perform if elected: stopping the ascent of fascism.

Over seventy-two hours I had about ten actual conversations, including a couple potentially meaningful ones, and one honest-to-god conversion moment.  I’m reporting here on three of the more interesting interactions, which occurred on the first day while trudging in ninety-degree desert heat from place to place in a working class suburb.

You remember during the first years of the Trump administration when pundits and shellshocked naifs urged us all to reach out to uncles and nieces and former friends on the other side and “just talk” and then we’d find out how much we all really had in common? I found one in a trailer park rental complex, a tall, gaunt white seventy-nine-year-old named John.

When I told him I was a volunteer for the Harris campaign he asked if we could “just talk”, and told me he’s going to vote for Trump no matter what, but he wanted to hear what I had to say, because he doesn’t know what’s happened to this country that people can’t just talk with one another, and is that OK? I agreed to his terms. With each point I made (protection of the American Care Act, which Trump tried to repeal; Trump’s tax cuts for the rich, which meant less money in the federal budget for the needs of everyone else; his declaration that on Day One he’d be a dictator, etc.) John had a ready answer, none of which corresponded with any known reality, and a bottom line—“I trust him to do the right thing.”

When I left he said we’d given each other something to think about and politely thanked me for the discussion. This reception sharply contrasted with ones I received from other Trump supporters, the most civil of which was another old white guy who told me to leave so that he wouldn’t have to insult me. (On the opposite extreme, one of my canvassing partners was told through a smart doorbell to “get the fuck off my property and take your sacks of shit with you.”)

In front of many homes in this neighborhood motorcycle, bicycle and car parts decorated the dusty yard; this was no exception.  When I told Aurora, a thirty something Latina, I was there to ask for her vote for Harris she stepped out from behind the screen door onto the wooden porch and engaged. She said she couldn’t vote for Harris because she hadn’t distinguished her policy from Biden’s on Palestine, where United States bombs have been involved in an ongoing genocide. I surprised her by agreeing with the need for a ceasefire and withdrawing US military aid to Israel until that happens. But, I said, Trump would be no better on the issue and probably worse. Just as she was expanding her voting prohibition from Harris to all Democrats a voice said, “Behind you.”

A man about the same age as Aurora walked up with a machine part in his hand. We introduced ourselves and continued the conversation. Trevor repeated what Aurora had said, adding that he could no longer vote for Democrats after the way the party had treated Bernie; they’re as corrupt as the Republicans. I said while that’s true of the neoliberal half of the Democratic Party, the other half is made up of labor, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights and environmental groups and sometimes it’s possible to get some progressive things done; meanwhile that’s completely impossible with the Republicans.

I said that what we’ve been talking about is only part of the picture; every US president is imperialist-in-chief internationally and it’s a mistake to think they can easily be persuaded to act differently. But there’s also the national side of the job, which involves important functions like appointments—to the courts and lesser-known agencies like the National Labor Relations Board, which can have an enormous impact on the working class, our rights, and daily life in the country. They listened but seemed unmoved.

I pulled out my trump card (sorry); under a Democratic administration there’s at least the room to move to protest destructive policies like Israel and Gaza. If Trump gets into office along with a Republican Congress, it’s going to be a police state this time around; things could look like Nazi Germany and much harder to mount any resistance. Aurora and Trevor nodded, like they had thought about this before, but didn’t comment on it.

Then Trevor said, “This is off to the side from what we’re talking about, but what do you think about no parties? Parties are how we have these problems.” Putting on my labor history hat, I said, “That’s what the Industrial Workers of the World wanted over a hundred years ago. Society would be run by workers’ committees, elected in each workplace. Their representatives would go to assemblies where decisions would be made.” He nodded.  I said, “But unless you can tell me how we do that before November fifth….” He laughed.

Then he said that he knew of things that were going on that might “take Trump out” before Election Day. I asked what he meant. He said he couldn’t talk about it, but when that happened he hoped Kennedy could get back into the race and win. At this point I decided the conversation had achieved all its potential. We parted on friendly if inconclusive terms.

When I reported on this event with one of my canvassing partners she said, “Hunh, that’s different. Usually they kill the Kennedy and then someone else gets elected.”

There’s no telling beforehand what issue might resonate with someone. Social Security typically works best for older people. But not always.  At first, the twenty-seven year old man who came out to the porch after my canvassing partner Ralph and I knocked told us he had no intention to vote; politics didn’t matter; it’s all the same no matter who’s elected.

I said, “I assume you work for a living?” He said yes. What do you do? I’m a truck driver. You pay into Social Security? He nodded. I said, I’m retired, and I’m on Social Security. You’ve heard that they say Social Security might run out of money at some point down the road? He nodded again. I’m guessing you’d like to collect that money back that you’ve been putting into it?  I had his attention.

I spoke about how Social Security is funded:  payroll taxes. Workers pay in on their wages, and employers pay in a matching amount. But only up to $170,000 a year; anything over that is no longer subject to Social Security taxes. This is what puts Social Security in danger down the road: the many ways rich people have to get around paying their fair share of taxes, including this one. All we have to do is raise the cap so that rich people continue to pay in after $170,000 on all the money they make and Social Security will continue to be here for you, I said.

So who is better on this, and does it make a difference? We know that Trump won’t do that. In his first term he didn’t raise, he cut taxes for the rich. Kamala Harris wants to return taxes on the rich and corporations to higher levels. If you want to keep Social Security vote for Harris. So what do you think?, asked my partner Ralph. Juan smiled slightly: “You convinced me,” he said, and I could tell he meant it.

The three days in the hot sun were exhausting, but we were well-supported by our Seed the Vote organizers, who met with us each morning, gave us our lists, supplied us with water, phone batteries and snacks, and met again at the end of the day to debrief. One recurrent story gave some anecdotal hope for a victory margin in one cohort against Trump—and that’s what it was, less a vote for Harris and more an anti-Trump vote.

We heard this from people on the second day. One, a flight attendant in a more middle class suburb, told me she and her husband had been lifelong Republicans. But the craziness of MAGA plus persuasion from their two daughters, who had gone off to universities and come home politically transformed, put them over the edge. Now she was going to canvass for Harris, despite “some disagreements” that we didn’t get into.

The other, a retired architect in a very upscale neighborhood, spoke with my wife about his disenchantment with the Republican Party under Trump. He was an educated and cultured man, and couldn’t stand the lies and the vulgarities. He was going to vote the straight Democratic ticket.  The seven people in our pod of canvassers had a number of similar stories from anti-MAGA ex-Republicans.

I haven’t seen any polling numbers among the old country club Republican ruling class set. Historically, ascendent fascism initially repels, and then reels in this demographic. It seems, however, from these encounters, and the growing number of Cheney types opposed to Trump, that the historic pattern might be abrogated here. We can hope.

*All the names are changed.