My wife stood aghast as I pounded on the passenger side window of a late model sedan exiting a driveway in Salem, New Hampshire in the fall of 2016. The car stopped, and a woman rolled down her window and listened patiently to my rap on why she should vote for Hillary Clinton for President. She replied that she was planning to vote for Hillary as her husband said “harrumph” and bent over the steering wheel. This was our lot in Rockingham County across the border from Massachusetts. Dueling lawn signs in the same yard: Trump and Hillary – husband and wife. We carried New Hampshire for Hillary and elected Maggie Hassan to the Senate but lost Rockingham County, which was heavily populated by white working class refuges from the Greater Boston area. I had worked passionately for Bernie in the primary and knew that many of those voters supporting Trump had voted for Bernie. No matter, from the moment that Trump launched his campaign announcing his white supremacist anti-immigrant agenda it was clear that he presented a danger to democracy and he was an avatar for all the evils that have plagued our republic since its founding. 2016 was not a moment for equivocation or support for quixotic candidates like Dr. Jill Stein. History has absolved this viewpoint and the reversal of Roe vs. Wade is the most stunning result of a failure to pivot to support for Clinton in the general election as candidate Sanders did in 2016.

Power Concedes Nothing is a consolidated anthem of unions, immigrant rights, civil rights and community groups that have learned the lessons of 2016 and went all out in 2020 to defeat Trump and his minions up and down the ballot. There are 22 individual chapters written by over 40 organizer-authors. They have grasped that as a serious left we do not stand on the sidelines and make excuses for our inaction by critiquing the obvious and enduring campaign and policy defects of corporate Democrats. We enter the fray eyes wide-open understanding that we are in a united front that requires clarity on our enemy and sobriety about the weaknesses and duplicity of our temporary allies. The Trump years have schooled a lot of folks about the necessity of this united front. Many of the groups in this anthology took a pass in 2016, but to their great and enduring credit were on the front lines in 2020. Seed the Vote reflected on the Trump danger the day after the election in 2016: “On November 9^th, a few people got together and started discussing what was to be done. We realized that we needed to pay attention to national work in a way that we had not prioritized before, because Trump and his politics were an existential threat to the communities and issues important to all of us.”

My son, Nelson, and I were on the ground with Seed the Vote (STV) in Maricopa County in 2020 living in a motel yards away from the Scottsdale Stadium spring training home of the San Francisco Giants. In my youth it had been the spring training site of my beloved Boston Red Sox. The splendid splinter Ted Williams used to thrill the spring training Bo Sox fans in that Cactus League park. Maybe that is why his family decided to cryogenically freeze his brain in the Phoenix area after his death. Pretty kooky stuff, but remember that Arizona produced the ultra right 1964 Republican nominee for President, Barry Goldwater. Goldwater carried only his home state and 5 others in 1964 as Johnson got 61% of the popular vote. Goldwater’s slogan was “In your heart you know he is right” and Johnson responded with “In your guts you know he is nuts.” Goldwater was a portrait of civility when compared to today’s MAGA fanatics! Our work in Maricopa County was made possible by the work of community groups like LUCHA who have labored for years to rid Arizona of the anti-immigrant sheriff Joe Arpaio and State Senator Russell Pierce. Power Concedes Nothing presents a whole chapter written by Cesar Fierros Mendoza on this ten-year struggle that electorally transformed Goldwater’s home state from “red” to “blue”. 

The authors of most of the chapters acknowledge that 2022 and 2024 will pose equally dangerous challenges to democracy and that we face an uphill climb given the present configuration of the minority rule structures of the senate, the electoral college and the increasingly rabid state legislatures in red states that may soon benefit from a Supreme Court decision codifying their ability to deny the popular will of the people and send their own electors to the College!

Several excellent chapters detail the mechanics of the “ground” game: knocking on doors and motivating people to vote. This of course was a difficult challenge in the COVID moment and many organizations declined to do the doors – a huge error that probably cost us 1 to 2% points in the vote in many states. Heroically however the UNITE HERE (Hotel Workers Union) union did the doors and their work coupled with that of other forces who write chapters for this collection saved us from 4 more years of Trump. In Maricopa County where my son and I were for the Presidential, the doors were no picnic. Strict COVID protocols dictated that we wear a mask covered by a plastic visor and that we maintain a six foot distance from the doors and our fellow canvassers. Our daily quota for house calls was 80 doors! All of this in 95-degree desert heat! But the Trumpers were certainly on the doors, and we ran into them in gated communities where we faced down often-angry neighbors and rent a cop security. On the critical and razor thin margins of battleground states these door-knocking warriors were key to victory:

Arizona – 10,457 votes!

Georgia – 11,779 votes

Nevada – 17,217 votes

All the contributors of course grapple with the challenge of uniting all who can be united to defeat Trump and fascism but advancing at the same time a positive progressive program to support and fight for. The chapter by Working Families Party Chair Maurice Mitchell does an excellent job of describing his organization’s endorsement process in the primaries, and the controversial decision to support Sen. Elizabeth Warren over Sanders, then the pivot to working for Biden, and at the same time pushing a solid progressive agenda into the planks of the Democratic Party platform.  Mitchell summed up the WFP stance as follows: “Neither of the progressive candidates won the Democratic presidential primary, but we were clear eyed going into the general election. Joe Biden became the standard-bearer and the pick to take on Trump, and progressives knew we had to push the Democratic nominee as far to the left as possible. Donald Trump was an existential threat, a global leader of the far right, and we had to defeat him at all costs.”

The chapters all have a very similar quality in that they attempt to balance their immediate and essential electoral work with long-term power building. This requires deeper examination and would involve a clearer exposition in the future of what constitutes membership in such organizations, how they are funded and what their leadership structures are. We can answer these questions for the labor organizations, UNITE HERE or the Gulf Coast Labor federation, who are funded by membership dues and have leadership structures that reflect internal elections. It is important to note however that HERE lost 90% of their membership because of the pandemic and the crash of the hospitality industry so their fabulous efforts in the field received generous funding from other labor organizations and foundations. Yes indeed we were in a united front moment with Michael Bloomberg! Long time organizer and strategist Deepak Pateriya expresses it clearly in his chapter: “it is “united front” time right now for leftists, progressives and liberals, and will be for a number of years and elections to come. Much of our collective energy and power has to be aligned in the short and medium term toward beating white supremacist authoritarianism and the hegemony of capitalist economics and consciousness (rather than arguing among ourselves over our relatively smaller differences). For the long term we have to organize and grow our power.”

Today there is much hand wringing and doom saying about the coming mid terms. Pundits point to voter suppression, the economy and inflation, Joe Biden’s approval ratings and the historic trend of the party in the White House getting shellacked in the mid terms. But remember that we have factors in our favor: Roe v Wade, the January 6^th hearings masterfully orchestrated by the Dem leadership and Trump himself. We lose if we don’t engage. On July 10, Michael Podhorzer, an AFL-CIO assistant to the President for political affairs, wrote about the midterms and our prospects, “Against the usual headwinds facing presidents’ parties in their first midterm, Democrats have on their side the historic reservoir of voters who joined the electorate in 2018 and 2020 to reject Trump and MAGA. To barely oversimplify – 81 million people voted against Trump less than two years ago. How we Democrats do depends on how many of their supporters who had not been voting in the mid terms come back, and how many of the independents and Republicans who pulled the lever for Trump decide they can’t again.”

Read Power Concedes Nothing. The authors are all combatants who will be out in the field again in the fall. Choose a state, choose some key races, reach out to the organizations in the book and get cracking.

I’ll be on the ground in Orange County, California this October working to elect Jay Chen (D) to Congress against the incumbent Michele Steel (R). This is one of two R seats in the OC that we can flip back into the Democratic column. It is home to more Vietnamese anywhere in the world outside of Vietnam. Democrats out register Republicans by 4%. It will all be determined by the enthusiasm of our voters and our ability to get them to the polls. The population is 33% API, 25% Latinix. Not your John Birch Society Orange County. The midterms are not a foregone conclusion. It is the work of the contributors to Power Concedes Nothing that helped save us from 4 more years of Trump. It is our calling to take inspiration from them and get on the phone, the texts and the doors again. Victory on November 8^th; hold the House! Enlarge the Democratic Senate!

…

Power Concedes Nothing published by OR Books and can be ordered at all the usual places

First published in Washington Spectator