We keep saying we need more people to engage in politics, and specifically in Massachusetts state politics. But we also said we think lobbying is not that effective. How are we supposed to engage with our state reps if it’s not lobbying?
We have a special guest, Medford City Councillor Nicole Morell, here to talk about how she and other elected officials work directly with the coalition that got them elected to strategize how to pass their policy platform and implement actions together.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. You can also watch this episode on video.
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.
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
We keep saying we need more people to engage in politics, and specifically in Massachusetts state politics. But we also said we think lobbying is not that effective. How are we supposed to engage with our state reps if it’s not lobbying?
We have a special guest, Medford City Councillor Nicole Morell, here to talk about how she and other elected officials work directly with the coalition that got them elected to strategize how to pass their policy platform and implement actions together.
Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. You can also watch this episode on video.
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.
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/
Producer 0:00
[This transcript was produced by a computer program then hand edited. It may still contain inaccuracies. The audio is the authoritative version of this podcast. Includes edits on 6/8/2021 @ 2029ET by FL and 6/9/2021 by AH.]
Anna Callahan 0:00
Hi there! You're listening to Incorruptible Massachusetts. Our goal is to help people understand state politics. So we investigate why it is so broken, we imagine what we could have if we fix it, and we report on how you can get involved.
Anna Callahan 0:14
So last week, we mentioned that lobbying is maybe not as effective as we think it is. And yet, we keep saying over and over that we need an engaged electorate. So what does that mean? How are we supposed to engage with our state reps, if it's not through lobbying? That is the focus of this episode, and we have a special guest who is going to talk about her experiences in doing that. So I'm going to introduce, of course, as always, we have the incredible Jordan Berg Powers and Jonathan Cohn. If you guys want to introduce yourselves, then I'll introduce our special guest as well.
Jordan Berg Powers 0:52
My name is Jordan. I use he/him and I have 11 years experience in progressive politics in Massachusetts.
Jonathan Cohn 1:00
I'm Jonathan Cohn, also he/him, based out of Boston and been working on electoral and issue campaigns here in Boston and across Massachusetts since 2013.
Anna Callahan 1:10
I am Anna Callahan, she/her, here in Medford and very interested in all of this good stuff, Massachusetts politics. We have Medford city councilor Nicole Morell here with us live! And Nicole, if you would give us a little intro on yourself.
Nicole Morell, Medford City Councilor 1:30
Sure, thanks so much for having me. So I'm Nicole Morell. I use she/her. I am a first term city councilor in Medford. I'm rounding out my first term, about a year and a half in, and it's been a wild ride. I'm running for reelection and part of the reason I'm here is I was endorsed and ran with a progressive slate, Our Revolution Medford, that did a lot of work in the campaigning and has continued to be very active. Part of the commitment to the slate is continuing to engage with the group itself and being involved with the group. So, here to talk about that today.
Anna Callahan 2:03
Fantastic. Great. So I want to kick this off by telling a little bit about my work with Gayle McLaughlin from the Richmond Progressive Alliance. So for the last few years, I've trained people around the country in this kind of different model of political organizing, that I learned from the Richmond Progressive Alliance. This is a group in Richmond, California, that essentially took over their city council. The city of Richmond was owned by Chevron for many, many years. They literally had a desk inside City Hall. They paid into the campaign coffers of every single elected official, and they got what they wanted. And the city was very troubled, had terrible police brutality problems, very low wages compared to nearby cities. And you know, every five years there'd be an explosion or a spill from the oil refinery that would send people to hospital and destroy the environment. And many, many other problems. And essentially, in 2003, the Richmond Progressive Alliance put together a coalition, they ran a slate of candidates, and they pretty quickly got a majority and then a super majority on the city council plus the mayor, and they started passing progressive policies like you would not believe. So amazing, amazing policies-- the first rent control bill in the state of California in 30 years, totally turned around their police force. They managed to get $100 million in new taxes from Chevron, the oil refinery. And in many other things, some like wildly deeply progressive issues that they passed.
Anna Callahan 3:52
So one of the things that I did when I started working with them was I asked Gayle, because their their electoral prowess is obvious, but their ability to keep their city councilors and mayors totally aligned and not stepping one toe outside of the platform of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, that to me, was even more impressive than their than their ability to just win elections. So I sat down with Gayle McLaughlin, and I asked her, how this happened and how they did that. And what I was told is that their basic approach is that if you don't support your city councilors, then, and-- if you just walk away, you let them and you walk away, then you have to expect that they're going to get contacted by lobbyists, the other side is going to reach out to them, they're going to provide these beautiful, colorful, researched graphics, and reports and everything. And, of course, they're going to end up going to the other side eventually, because they don't have the support. No one person can know everything about every issue and can provide the support that they need. So the Richmond Progressive Alliance provides a team of people for each city councillor that meets with them before every city council meeting to go over the packet, which can be hundreds of pages, to read through it, to provide input to help that city counselor understand how they should respond, what they should say how they should vote, to reach out to coalition partners, so that they can strategize around what's happening at the City Council, and how they can, together as a coalition, get the policies that they want passed. Super inspiring to me and just changed the way that I think about how constituents interact with elected officials.
Anna Callahan 5:57
Now, I know that in Medford, you guys have really kind of followed this model very closely, and done an amazing job. And I would love to hear, Nicole, from you about the kind of support that you get from OR Medford as well as how you guys work together to get policies passed.
Nicole Morell, Medford City Councilor 6:24
Definitely, and I, of course, have to thank you for sharing this model with us. You are who got it to us in the first place, so thank you. Their support is so needed and so necessary because I think we don't have a majority on the council just yet. So the conversation can be quickly controlled by the other five councillors, which is going to happen and what you're trying to push forward can get lost in the shuffle. So having that support from OR Medford that we can go back to and we can talk about what issues we're really focused on, what issues we can feasibly pass, what issues we want to raise, that really matters because you have those people who are already engaged, who are already following, who are keeping you honest, but also just letting you know you're not alone, because I think in a lot of cities, there tends to be the same people that come out to city council meetings every week, and they speak every week. And that can make you think, "Oh, this is this is how people feel," you know, these five people that come out every week, this must be how everyone feels and I've got to make sure what I'm trying to do matches to what they want. When in reality, there's a lot of people who, they don't have the time to come out to city council meetings, they don't have the bandwidth, they don't have the childcare, anything else. And just having that two way conversation, having that two way street with OR Medford and be able to keep those conversations going is so important to stay on your platform, to stay on the issues that you're elected for and to really work for them, even if the people that are physically at these meetings might disagree with you. There's a much larger group that does agree with you and wants to see what you ran on actually be moved forward.
Anna Callahan 8:12
Jordan, do you see this kind of thing happening in state politics?
Jordan Berg Powers 8:15
Yeah. So there's just-- this isn't just anecdotally true. We know this to be true from some of the data. The University of Michigan a few years ago, I think it was in 2006, started a study where they asked any state rep, any state senator, where do you think your electorate is on any one issue? And then they polled those people on those issues. And they found that Democrats and Republicans overestimated how conservative their districts are, anywhere from double to like a third more in every instance. They've now replicated that model every couple of years. They've moved it down to city councils, they've moved it to the congressional races. And across every level of government, we find that elected officials overestimate how conservative their electorates are to be more conservative.
Jordan Berg Powers 9:09
And so the University of North Carolina again -- I'm piling on top because now other universities have either done their own replicas of this or done their own studies of this -- They want to figure out why is that? Why is it that people are overestimating how conservative their districts are? And what they found was that the people who are likely to contact their elected officials on a regular basis, were much more older than the regular people that they're representing, much whiter, much more affluent, much more likely to hold conservative values. So the fact is that the people who are in contact regularly with their elected governments tend to be those people.
Jordan Berg Powers 9:48
On top of that, you know, not wrongly so, most city councils, most school committees, most local governments are focused on some of the big people in the towns. Who are those people? Those tend to be people with capital, tend to be people with wealth, tend to be people who own big businesses in town, right? They're regularly talking to those people. I'll give you an example here in the city of Worcester where I live.
Jordan Berg Powers 10:10
Our city manager meets with the Chamber of Commerce every week. That's something he proudly says. But there's no-- because he's an unelected position, he's literally never talking to regular people. He's never in communication with those regular people. And even if you're an elected official, you maybe are talking to them every two years, maybe if you have a challenger? But likely not. So who we hear from starts to become a reality, even the best intentioned city councilors-- it's not their fault that you start to feel if you're in awash in one type of language, one type of thought, one type of bent towards your thing, it's hard to hear anything else or see anything else. It starts to warp your sense of reality.
Jonathan Cohn 10:54
Can I quickly chime in here? I do want to hear more from what Nicole is saying, but this actually just reminded me of how, and this isn't as deep as that, but when it comes to the type of community meetings, which do end up being very skewed in who attends, is if you can just get like a few other people who are holding a different opinion than some of them that actually go, it can be valuable in simply representing an issue as contested as opposed to completely on the other-- on that side. It just reminds me of having organized against Boston's Olympic bid back in 2014 2015, one of our goals was just making sure that no community meeting about the bid could ever be discussed as like, the crowd was all in favor of it. And just making sure that you have-- and it's something that you can see that all the time about how people use that dynamic to not great ends locally, in the cases, But you can really shape perception. And then you can see because of how easy that it can be, whether you are in line, and we were in many ways aligned with popular opinion there, or just kind of misaligned with popular opinion. Presence or absence, to me, really can shape politicians, so it does speak to what you were saying, it can start shaping how people think, if there aren't other pressures as well.
Anna Callahan 12:21
Yeah! Nicole, can you give us any examples of ways in which Our Revolution has worked with the city councilors to help things either get passed or help bring out the silent majority of what people in Medford think?
Nicole Morell, Medford City Councilor 12:43
Definitely, I mean, I think just paying close attention to the agendas and reaching out to us councilors as well, just sometimes being "can you let us know what's a hot topic too?" Because some things that may look like a hot topic actually aren't, and some things that look totally nothing burger are going to explode. So letting Our Revolution know these are the issues that we really need people to come out for. And I think sometimes, you know, Medford can be very much a small town where sometimes we might get word that like, okay, a ton of people are going to be coming out for this issue on Tuesday. And letting people know that.
Nicole Morell, Medford City Councilor 13:20
We are in a very strange place right now where people are allowed to come to meetings in person. But it really depends on comfort level. So a lot of our people tend to stay on Zoom. So there's this really weird skewed thing happening where there are people coming in person on one side, and people staying on Zoom on the other side, and I think it goes back to that perception issue of just, you know, people in front of your face yelling at you, though, okay, this is the majority of people when it's actually you know, it may be people on Zoom, it may be people not attending that meeting. So I think now as we transition into that weird space, again, engaging with OR to just be like, if you could hop on Zoom for a little bit to talk about this, if it matters to you.
Nicole Morell, Medford City Councilor 14:00
We're entering budget season, I mean, that tends to bring people out in a way it never used to. So I think people are keenly watching the budget and just letting you know, immediately, as soon as we get the budget, it's public record, it's public information, you know, just getting it out to those lists to say "here's the budget, I'm reading it this weekend. Let's take some time to read it this weekend and see what people are passionate about."
Anna Callahan 14:23
Yeah, and I hear you say that, as a city councilor, it means a lot to you, not just from a policy perspective, but sort of emotionally supportive perspective, that you have a group of people that you can trust with your ideas, how to strategize about how to get policies passed, would you say that that's a helpful part of it?
Nicole Morell, Medford City Councilor 14:46
It really is. I mean, this is an incredibly-- it's a taxing job. I come from a lot of place of privilege and I can do it, but it can-- it's a job that-- you know, local politics is brutal. So just having that support system to come back with. If you have a meeting where the only people who come out in person oppose you, you start to think like maybe it's me, maybe I'm nuts. And then having those conversations after and people saying, "No! Please keep pushing this. I agree with you." That helps tremendously, reinvigorates you, and it keeps you focused on the work that you're there to do.
Anna Callahan 15:22
Yeah, I want to just turn for a moment back to state politics with this particular issue, because we have talked in prior podcasts about the inability of progressive legislators to trust each other in this toxic work environment that there is there. Any thoughts from my regulars about how if we had a trusted outside group of people that legislators could meet with, strategize with, like come up with, and-- if it was more than just one legislator, they could all sort of trust each other, would that make a difference do you think?
Jordan Berg Powers 16:06
I think not only would it make a difference, but I think the other part is the ecosystem that Nicole is describing around it. So that there's both an understanding that there's gonna be somebody there, but also that you're always in contact, you're always in community, you're always working with those folks. One of the things that happens is we do sort of drop them off. But the other side of it is that a lot of times, elected officials aren't coming from our movements, they're not coming from the places where they're embedded, so they don't feel that same allegiance to our people. When they get elected, they sort of just go off, right? They just go there, and then we hope for the best. And so there isn't that same level of commitment to and a part of... You know, it's one of the things I will say, honestly, that I've noticed that the labor movement has started to try to do a better job of, and *has* gotten better at, because they for so long were sending so many people to the statehouse who were then voting against making sure that labor had rights. So you're seeing that that's a move different for them. And, you know, I'd say it's great that labor is doing that. We need that desperately, our state is not as good on labor as it should be. And my goal is to do that "Yes, and!" To have more folks invested that same way that they're growing people who are dedicated to labor, we need to be doing the same thing dedicated to all issues across the progressive left, including, and I would say importantly, labor.
Anna Callahan 17:39
Yeah. So I want to bring in another related topic here, which is this idea of an engaged electorate, like people often think that what that means is that we register people to vote. Having seen what this means in Medford, having talked to Gail, about what that means in Richmond, and even seeing it on my own campaign. What it means to have an engaged electorate is that everyone ups their game. So people who are unregistered register, people who vote maybe only in the presidential general election, they start voting in state and municipal elections. People who vote in all those elections, they start getting engaged in organizations that understand that what we do is not just vote, but we have to take actions. And those people who are already engaged in those organizations, they can become the adjunct staff, almost, of these elected officials who truly are on our side and come from our movements. And when we lift the level, raise the level of everyone's engagement, then some of those people are also dedicated to building up from the bottom. And that's when you you get a truly engaged electorate.
Anna Callahan 19:00
I kind of saw this on my own campaign. After my campaign was over, I had a solid half a dozen to a dozen people who, even though I lost, continued to work together every week in our district, on the stuff that we would have worked on if I had won. And that was when I *lost*. So having these people who were just dedicated to the idea of engaging the electorate, of bringing more people into the process, helping people understand the State House, activating people on the issues, that can really happen both in organizations, as well as for candidates. And Jordan, you've talked about how people get activated on issues.
Jordan Berg Powers 19:51
Yeah, I mean, again, what we know from the research is that people don't-- one of the things we think happens is, we tend to think "oh, I'm inspired by this elected official, so everybody else will be inspired by them." But for most people, they're just another talking head that they just don't trust that much for whatever reason. So I always hope that our electorate is suspicious of politicians. I never want us to treat our elected officials the way, unfortunately, a lot of people treat Donald Trump. I think that there should be a healthy skepticism of people with power, or at least a consistent need for them to have to reaffirm that they're in democratic relationships. I think that that's an important ethos. So I actually am fine with the fact that people are suspicious. But that means that actually politicians are terrible ways to get people who aren't already engaged, engaged in politics. Yes, you will get a few inspiring people here and there who will bring some people at the edges. But by and large, people are activated around *issues*. They're activated around the things that matter to their lives. And they're activated-- and that's how you get people into the political process. It's through the issues, through the things that affect their lives, through somebody saying that we care about you, we want you to be a part of this fight. So you need organizations that are dedicated to those issues, consistently talking to them on a regular basis, and that's how you bring people in. That's what's great about creating a community like this is not referential person, it's referential around the things we want to do to make people's lives better. And it's in constant communication with one another, it does help you sort of bring in more folks. And we know this from the data, that people are-- if you want to get somebody who doesn't currently vote to go vote, you need to engage with them on issues over a long period of time on a consistent basis and let them know that you're going to continue to ask them to be involved, even though they're not currently voting. That's how you get them in to vote.
Anna Callahan 21:51
Yet, Nicole, you want to say a word about the People's Platform?
Nicole Morell, Medford City Councilor 21:56
Definitely. And I think Our Revolution comes out with the People's Platform, for really anyone can sign on to it, but it's also the idea as they are hoping to be endorsed, candidates do sign on to that. And I think that's definitely a way we bring people in, is people just learn about the issues. I think part of it at the local level is just educating people about what the issues are and what is possible at the local level, what we actually have control over. So I think engaging people around those topics is really important, and people are very empowered by those topics. And then it becomes "Okay, and who are the candidates that support this, and I'll support them because I support these ideals." I will say I agree with you Jordan we did have a lot of people come out, not because they were super excited about elected officials, but because they were so mad about certain elected officials that we actually did get, Our Revolution actually did swell this past summer with some behavior by certain elected officials in the area that really drew people to us that they were so mad, they were like, I got to do something about this. So definitely issues and then you know, maybe bad behavior sometimes helps.
Jordan Berg Powers 22:59
Yeah, there's plenty of that to go around.
Anna Callahan 23:05
Yeah, that's for sure. I know. Jonathan, you got some, uh--
Jonathan Cohn 23:09
Yeah I was wondering some time ago because, Nicole, you're talking about budget season, which reminded me as well, when it comes to a relationship of access for constituents and elected officials is that like, if you get to take on a budget document or some long piece of legislation, it takes a lot of time to get through it and figure out all that's in it. And the things are long enough so that even if you read it once you probably miss something just because it's just a lot to digest. And it takes the values of having time their structures where you can have people who have that have that continuing relationship on the outside who are looking at and going to be able to kind of spot if they can spot something that looks like a red flag somewhere in it in case somebody is trying to get something less than great through. Somewhat innocuous legislation that you have people who are able to help to spot that, or help spot things that are worth questioning, etc. Just because it's hard for any one person to do that well without without a structure both within a legislative body and with those on the outside.
Anna Callahan 24:13
And at the State House even worse because they're these incredibly tight timelines where a bill will come out and it's a thousand pages long and they have what, two days to a day? One day?
Jordan Berg Powers 24:25
Two days? Haha! Try the afternoon. No, they'll release it in the morning. So there was a bill on energy that was thousands of pages that they released at 9am and then voted on at noon!
Anna Callahan 24:41
Ughh!!!
Jordan Berg Powers 24:41
And then...
Anna Callahan 24:44
It is crazy!
Jordan Berg Powers 24:45
Legislators were like, Oh, we didn't even, you know... The *advocates* were arguing about whether or not to vote for it. And then the people were arguing about whether or not to vote for it and in fairness because no one knew! You're trying to read...
Anna Callahan 24:55
That's right. We can't even know because we don't even have time to read the bills. So I thank you so much, Nicole. It's been amazing having you here! I just love the work that-- the incredible work that you guys are doing in Medford. And I want us all to imagine what would happen if we had a trusted coalition of partners statewide that ran a slate of candidates in our State House where those candidates felt like they could really trust the organization and strategize together to figure out how to pass our policies that we want. That we all want, need and deserve. Thanks so much. We'll see everybody next week!
Jordan Berg Powers 25:47
Bye.