Incorruptible Mass

2. State Politics: Why YOU should get involved in the forgotten level of government.

May 04, 2021 Anna Callahan Season 4 Episode 2
Incorruptible Mass
2. State Politics: Why YOU should get involved in the forgotten level of government.
Show Notes Transcript

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts.  Our goal is to help people understand state politics: investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

In this episode, we  share our paths to working in state politics and make a case for why you should get involved at the state level.   

Want to pass legislation nationally?  Women's suffrage, the fight against slavery, and universal health care in Canada all won first at the state level.  And of course, your dollars and volunteer hours go so much further than in national campaigns...okay, you gotta just listen.

Check out the video of this episode on YouTube.
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Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program and will contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. This transcript was last edited on May 16, 2021. Thanks to AH.]

Anna Callahan  0:00  
Hi there, this is Anna Callahan. You are listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help you understand state politics. So we're investigating why it is so broken, imagining what we can have here in Massachusetts, if we fix it, and helping you get involved. So today I am, of course, as always joined by the incredible, amazing Jonathan Cohn and Jordan Berg Powers. Jonathan, would you like to introduce yourself?

Jonathan Cohn  0:25  
Yeah, my name is Jonathan Cohn. I've been active in issue and electoral advocacy here in Massachusetts since I moved here back in 2013. Am in a number of organizations and I'm happy, I'm happy to be here. This is this will be a fun discussion.

Anna Callahan  0:37  
Aha. Jordan?

Jordan Berg Powers  0:39  
My name is Jordan Berg Powers. I use he/him and I have been active in Massachusetts  politics for 11 years.

Anna Callahan  0:45  
Fabulous! Such a pleasure. So today, we're going to talk about why should we be involved in state politics? Like why don't we just focus on national politics? Why don't we just focus on local politics? Why does state politics matter? What, what's what's the point of being involved there?

I know I call state politics, the "forgotten level of politics," because I feel like people a tons of people are involved in national, volunteering at the national level, donating at the national level. And then there are you know, the next thing phase, when you get really involved, as you get involved in local politics, you start electing your city councillors, you start canvassing and doing those things like it's super exciting. And then that's it! It kind of ends there! And so there's this whole level of government, which is your state government, the State House, the State Senate, and the governorship that just doesn't get any attention. 

And so the question is, why should people care? And why should they become involved. And the one thing that I did say last week, is that, you know, almost any policy that you want to pass at the national level, you can pass at the state level, like, unless you're talking about war and peace, unless you're talking about sending the army sending the military, you can pass it right here for seven million people, which would be amazing. Um, and so I know that Jordan has some personal history with this particular question, and I'm gonna pass it off to you.

Jordan Berg Powers  2:18  
Yeah. So I embarrassingly, was really focused on national politics when I first got into politics. So I even remember, I had done a campaign when I was 14. And then again, when I was 16, and somebody had noticed, and they said, Hey, do you want to run? I was 18 years old. And they said, you want to run a state rep, state senate, state rep campaign in Pennsylvania? And I was like, "No!" I mean, well, who cares about state politics? I was working on these congressional senate campaigns. And I feel so naive and silly. 

But one of the things that I learned as I studied the progressive movement, and the history of progressive successes throughout the years, that actually things happen at the state level, right? Suffrage happened when states started to allow women suffrage, and that made the push for national politics.

The fight for civil-- for-- against slavery was literally a state-by-state fight. You know, when you look at all of our fights, the ability for, you know, the ability for Canada to get universal health care was their version of a state by state, right going so. 

It is that level, it is the states that always lead on these things. 

And it's something that, you know, I think the right wing gets really well. But I myself started in national politics. And I learned very quickly working on national politics that America is big, it is noisy, and our national politics will always fall behind. Because we're representational democracy to some extent, you know, but it will always fall behind the regular people where regular people are at. But states have the ability to lead in ways where the national politics is about consensus of what's possible, based on this loud, ginormous country. And so that's why it's state politics is so important, and why past histories have shown us that success has been in the states.

Anna Callahan  4:07  
Yeah, I have my own personal story, which is kind of the opposite, which is that I've been focused on local politics for like four plus years now, almost exclusively. You know, I started this group, co-founded with some other friends, this organization called the Incorruptibles, and you know, just spent years traveling around the country training people in this kind of different model of like how to elect slates of candidates at the local level, with this idea that, at the local level, you can win, right, you can win just by canvassing. So you really can win with a grassroots People Powered campaign, and then you're getting people in at the local level. And part of that was just when I looked at politicians who I felt were like really fantastic national politicians, they had started at the local level, and it allowed them to slowly build a base of constituents, and that they didn't have to rely on these giant donors and ended up taking money from the wrong people and all that, which I think if you leap in at the, you know, national level, that it's hard to avoid that.

So for me, it really was this, this thing that I was is so important to be of like, we must elect people at the local level, this is the place that you start. Anything else seemed kind of grandiose. And, you know, I felt like it was really important that people sort of take their local community very seriously. 

And that whole model was based out of California. Right. And so when I, after a couple of years of training people around the country, when I was living in California briefly, right, I lived there for two and a half years, I came back to Massachusetts. 

Anna Callahan  6:01  
And I started, you know, training people here, watching what happened in places like Somerville and in Cambridge and in Medford and and these other cities that had started electing people locally, and was rather shocked to find out that in Massachusetts, you can't pass rent control at the local level. You cannot pass a lot of housing policy at the local level. You cannot pass a lot of workers rights at the local level. Like they're simply things at the local level that we are either constitutionally barred from doing, or they're they're just state laws that don't allow that. And so I was like, wow, we're handing these laws that we try to pass at the local level to the State House. And then they're just saying no. And I was like, Okay, so well, hang on here. Maybe we need to focus on what's happening at the state at the state level and at the State House, specifically. So I'm also learning that our state house districts are of a size where you can actually win with a grassroots canvassing campaign was something eye opening to me, because in California, that is not the case. They are frickin gigantic. And and so that's my personal story about sort of the Forgotten level of government and how I ended up there. And I know you'd have to went to Jonathan 

Jonathan Cohn  7:31  
Yeah, Anna, your point is a great segue into what I was going to talk about. And I'll just riff on your your comments just then really quickly, is how whenever there are some Republican state legislature passing laws to prevent the deep blue capital city, from like, prevent from passing its own laws, whether around like, raising the minimum wage or something about like, acknowledging the humanity of trans people, I often think there's this, oh, like the states blocking municipalities from passing their own laws? Massachusetts did that decades ago! Like how much-- And then we often like forget about that mentioned in Massachusetts about like, some of the things that even when when you see voting rights being rolled back in other states to a point still stronger than what we have here. It's just often embarrassing. 

Jonathan Cohn  8:22  
But what first actually got me, got me engaged in national politics was actually through seeing action happening on the state level, because although I've been I had been somebody who would follow what goes on in national politics and not really actively following what went on in state politics. It was in that period after 2010 2010 2011 2012, when you saw that, like, when Republicans have taken over state legislatures and governors offices around the country and immediately started passing laws to restrict-- to restrict the electorate, 

Sound effects Anna  8:54  
Booooooooo! 

Jonathan Cohn  8:57  
Exactly. And then it was in 2012, when I was back at home back at home in in Philly, and finished grad school applying for jobs. And it was right around the time, like shortly after Pennsylvania had a passed voter ID law in order to especially to reduce turnout in Philadelphia by creating extra hurdles for people. And I thought, if there's going to be a push to restrict the electorate, I should put some time that I have now to help to help expand it by helping registering new voters and engaging people. And that's also kind of maybe think about how when it comes to never voting laws that's heavily on the state level, like the federal government can and should do more on that. But it is wild how much the voting laws change from state to state whether how long the polls are available, whether or not you can register on Election Day, whether you have early voting, whether you can vote by mail. It's something that states do. Federal Government can incentivize it and they can use the leverage of when you're when the elections align with federal election, federal elections. But so much of that is in state control.

Anna Callahan  10:03  
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mentioned it a little bit earlier about how, you know, State House races, you really can win with a canvassing campaign. I want us to bounce a little bit back and forth about the difference between how far your dollars go, your donation dollars go and how far your volunteer hours go, compared to a national campaign. Right. Like, how much does a national campaign for Congress cost?

Jordan Berg Powers  10:29  
It's anywhere from like 3 million to six or $7 million.

Anna Callahan  10:33  
Yeah! I mean, it's insane. 

Jordan Berg Powers  10:37  
You can get cheaper in Massachusetts, but still, it's usually no less than 1,000,002 million, 3 million, four

Anna Callahan  10:43  
Yeah 

Jonathan Cohn  10:43  
Yeah, yeah. Definitely. For any type of congressional race, like, even if it's just like the narrower electorate that's in a primary, you need at least a million dollars for a congressional race. Whereas, like, I don't think I know of a case of somebody spending anywhere approaching that much money on the state level, especially where it's like. I also remember that in 2018, when the most expensive state rep race was the one between former Ways and Means chair, Jeff Sanchez, and state rep. Nika Elugardo, where she raised 100, I believe 130k. And he had about three times that but like, the combination of all of the money spent on that race is less than half of the like, low end of a, of a congressional race. And-- and we're not even talking about the expenses of a Senate race. 

Anna Callahan  11:32  
And that was a highly contested race, right? That was a race that was like, the entire focus of like, Massachusetts was almost focused on that one race. Whereas I think it's fair to say that for 75-- there, there have been people who have won races for 75k or something. I mean, it's just the it's such a tiny, tiny fraction. And so your donation dollars, can go so much farther donating to the race of someone running for the State House, or even the State Senate than they can in going to a race for Congress. 

Anna Callahan  12:08  
And how about volunteer hours? I mean, I one thing that I think about is that I would actually, even though I ran a state rep campaign, I would have no idea how to run a campaign for Congress, because it's an entirely different campaign. Right? You're not just getting enough volunteers to knock on doors to knock on enough doors. That's not what you do. There's an-- there's a whole other thing: you've got to win the media, you've got to be on, you know, digitally and social media and all these places, you've got to get endorsements. And I mean, it's a completely different kind of campaign.

Jonathan Cohn  12:43  
I think when it comes to the volunteer hours, you really see that right? If you have your, let's say, in a place like California, may be different in other states and given how large those districts are, and like a comparable congressional size, but in Massachusetts, given how small state reps seat and even though the state senate seat is four times larger, still not that big, all considered, you have the ability to make multiple passes of a universe of potential voters so that you're talking to people multiple times. And so as a volunteer, you would go talk to more voters of the potential like universe of voters, anytime you go out, than you would do for congressional race, which is going to be like many times larger, so that you're just that time that you give has a greater impact and shape and shape shaping the electorate. 

Anna Callahan  13:28  
Yeah, absolutely. 

Jordan Berg Powers  13:29  
Yeah. And so I mean, you can win a state rep race, you know, we'd like to say with like six dedicated people, you can barely cover a town with six dedicated people running for Congress, right? Like, there's just, it's just not, it's not remotely the same level. And I think the important thing is like impact. Like you can really dive in on issues, you can really have conversations with voters, you know, you're having conversations where you're talking to them more than once or twice or three times. So it's not just the ability of like  volunteers to get to people, but also your impact in terms of having conversations about what we believe and what the future looks like. You can have a real impact at that local level.

Anna Callahan  14:11  
Oh, yeah. And in terms of just voters, right, state rep races, sometimes win by two 3000. A lot of times if there's only two people, it's like 5000. Now because of the mail-in voting, but still, we're talking pretty small numbers needed to win an election. Doable.

Jordan Berg Powers  14:30  
Yeah. Yeah, 

Anna Callahan  14:31  
totally doable. 

Jordan Berg Powers  14:32  
It's absolutely doable. And so your impact can be enormous for a lot less sort of organizing work, all the things that go into it.

Anna Callahan  14:42  
Yes. 

Jonathan Cohn  14:43  
Reminds me of like, when a friend of mine had realized that she had more Facebook friends than her state rep had votes in his win when he was elected.

Anna Callahan  14:55  
Oh, my goodness. Oh, and that's, you know, that's a fair way to put it right.

Jordan Berg Powers  15:02  
And so I think that that, you know, that leads to the idea that like, you know, there's so many things that we could be doing to model for other states, right? The great thing about Massachusetts, is that our state rep and State Senate seats are not huge, they're not super expensive. They're not like Texas millions and millions of dollars, they are in the 10s of 1000s of dollars, they are, you know, doable with the people you know, and so you can have an impact on the policies we want. And then that reverberates out, you know, one of the things I admire about the right wing, and it's not many things, conservatives generally have terrible values. But one of the things they understand is the ability to use their states, as laboratories for their terrible ideas, right, like Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Oklahoma, they use their legislators are pushing radical, terrible ideas. They can't you know, they are thinking of new and creative ways to hurt LGBTQ people to hurt women's access to hurt individuals, right? They are, they are thinking about new ways to make government not work for regular people, new ways to give to give more power to corporations, we are not so bold. In Massachusetts, right? We aren't thinking about all of the different ways we could be making people's lives better pushing policies to focus on people, right, like, here, we could be, you know, we can be raising minimum wages higher one, because our costs are so much more. And two, because that then generates the push upward in other states. If we pass, you know, when we pass paid leave, that pushes other states to do the same thing. Similarly, if we were to lead on universal health care, just like in Canada, if this is a place where we push it, and people see it's working, it will catch on around the country. It's not-

Anna Callahan  16:54  
And in Canada, it happened that way. Is that right?

Jordan Berg Powers  16:57  
That is right, it started. It started with Kiefer Sutherland's father pushing it as the governor of one of one province. And that then cascaded to other provinces, because they saw how good it worked and how popular it is. And so there are so many policies that we could be modeling here for other states. Instead, our legislature is spending its time catching up to other states, which is an unfortunate reality, right? Like we're catching up on driver's licenses, we're catching up on criminal justice reform, we're catching up on voter suppression, right? Like we-- we aspire to be-- to have voting as a press to South Carolina and Florida, let alone pass them and have voter and have voter access that's, you know, that's, that's equal to the other New England states in terms of same day registration, which all other New England states have, and we don't. And so I think that we should be doing "yes and." Right? Like we should be catching up. But we should also be leading, we should be creative. We should be pushing on these policies, universal health care and climate change, as two really important issues where other states should be saying "Massachusetts did it, so we should do it, too."

Anna Callahan  18:05  
Yeah. And I always say that about specifically about Medicare for all style system that like once one state does it, it's over. It is over, because people will have relatives who live in that state people will have friends who live in that state old, you know, folks that went to college or whatever, and people are going to talk and it's that's the end. So imagine Massachusetts being that state. Imagine us being the state that finally puts the nail in the coffin of this horrible, you know, for profit death machine, that is our insure- health insurance industry. And it's us us us volunteers, donors being responsible for helping, you know, 30,000 people every year still be alive in the United States, because they didn't die when they were too poor to have medical care, you know? That's the thing we could make happen.

Jonathan Cohn  19:00  
The The one thing kind of I'm kind of on this issue that I often think of is the line from Louis Brandeis is that the idea of states being laboratories of democracy, which is such a good way of seeing that about what are the things that you can do on the state level that filter outward and up. And going back to the point of voting rights legislation noted earlier, it was fascinating to see a few years ago about how much that like went on after Oregon was the became the first state to have automatic voter registration using people interfaces with state agencies to just kind of kind of enroll them as voters. How that took off with like wildfire in a number of other states because like they apparently had the idea and they showed that it worked well. And then other states were like, oh, why don't we do this? And then and then you started seeing like, within a few years, over a dozen states have already done it, seeing a successful model done by somebody else. And that's the type of impact that like good forward thinking state policy can have. Because you're showing one one like Yes, this is an idea that should be on your radar and Yes, it works. To basically like knock down that kind of creativity hurdle, even getting having the idea to talk those ideas and getting-- knocking down the viability hurdle that people bring up about whether something can actually work, because you can show that it can.

Anna Callahan  20:15  
And speaking of viability, like the place to take over your state is here in Massachusetts, because our voters already were wildly democratic, and, you know, not not unprogressive state, but there's a lot of progressives who live here. So if we're gonna, there's a state that's going to lead, it could be us, right, you take over another state that's in a place that's a little more purple. It's, it's gonna be a little bit of a harder lift, because of the voters. But here we have the voters, the voters want all of these policies, so there's not going to be any pushback. And and just think about the things that we can have for 7 million people. 

Jonathan Cohn  20:58  
As well and to your point, many people probably there are many people who probably think Massachusetts has already passed many of the laws who live here. So you don't even, you won't miss it. The fact that people would be like, Oh, yeah, didn' we do that already. No, they didn't. They all opposed it, but now we can.

Anna Callahan  21:14  
[laughter] Yes, indeed.

Anna Callahan  21:23  
That's my delayed sound effects [laughter] I was trying to catch up. Oh, here's my here's my last delayed sound effect, which is, you know, if you're one of those people, like most of the people that I have talked to about state politics, that, you know, you hear state politics and you think,

Sound effects Anna  21:41  
[...... crickets chirping sound ......]

Anna Callahan  21:46  
you know? It's just not-- it's not interesting. It's not worth diving into, "aren't we're doing well enough", "aren't we all Democrats?", all of those things that people think, you know, when you say, Hey! Like, pay attention, look at what's happening at the state level. 

Anna Callahan  22:02  
Hopefully, the rest of this whole podcast that we're doing together is going to help you understand, like last episode was what we could have here in Massachusetts. Today is why on Earth state politics? And starting next week, we're going to get into what is going on in our state house.

Anna Callahan  22:26  
And I can't wait.

Anna Callahan  22:31  
Jordan, Jonathan, thank you so much. It is such a pleasure to be here with you guys every week.

Jonathan Cohn  22:35  
Always a pleasure.