Spreading the Dough (Page 4)

Dean Nielsen, Washington State director of Progressive Majority, found the race frustrating. "Their model worked beautifully. The early money was like yeast," he says. But the upshot was the defeat of a viable progressive. Nielsen also says he doesn't see EMILY's List putting much emphasis on candidate recruitment at the grassroots. "Are they out there every day beating the bushes for candidates? No," he says. "Their contribution is primarily financial." And the group's "bundled" contributions go only to federal candidates.

That criticism is echoed by Mandy Carter, a longtime grassroots organizer and former member of the Democratic National Committee from North Carolina. "EMILY's List is absolutely a model" for their national work, Carter says. But like many progressives fed up with Democratic centrism, Carter counts herself among those who think "it makes more sense to put money into the very local level, where there's a lot of energy and excitement--not so much as you move up."

EMILY's List's achievement, thus far, has been to move one disenfranchised group--women--into power. "We all bow to the feet of EMILY's List in terms of their effectiveness and what they've accomplished for women," says Progressive Majority's executive director, Gloria Totten. "Do they have women in their ranks who we wouldn't consider progressive? Absolutely." Unlike EMILY's List, Progressive Majority supports only candidates who score 100 percent on a forty-question quiz covering issues like economic justice and the environment. But Progressive Majority works only in a handful of states--with candidates for local office, like City Council, that EMILY's List won't touch.

EMILY's List does occasionally partner with progressive groups like Totten's. The candidate training in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, was a joint effort, for instance. More notably, Malcolm co-founded America Coming Together, the progressive coalition that launched a massive voter-outreach effort for Democrats in 2004. She continues to meet weekly with a coalition of more than thirty progressive groups called America Votes to share information, strategy and research.

Those efforts are essential, because when it comes to building a coordinated strategy to take back power in the states, the Democratic Party has left the field wide open. "The lack of infrastructure-building by the party has created a need that we have just moved in to fill," says Malcolm. DNC chair Howard Dean agrees. "When I came in, because of my own experience in the presidential campaign, I believed we needed to do what EMILY's List is doing," he says. Under Dean, the DNC is putting paid organizers in every state to work on party-building. Teaming with EMILY's List and with younger progressive groups, Dean wants to get the Democrats to reconnect with the grassroots.

That means finding more candidates like Gwen Moore, who says of her campaign for Congress, "Whenever I would get discouraged, I'd see the faces of the people who were going to have no voice in government if I weren't elected. A lot of them were female. A lot of them were people of color. And a lot of them were white, and they were poor. And they didn't matter. They just were obscure."

If it's up to her, it won't stay that way.

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