How to Build a Farm Team (Page 5)

Progressive Majority's first Racial Justice Campaign recruiter started this spring in Wisconsin. Ryan Baker, a political science major at the University of Wisconsin, has deep roots on Milwaukee's North Side, which he helped organize after a 7-year-old girl was shot in the forehead. Residents went door to door collecting money for her family. "We ended up raising thousands of dollars, and then the shooter turned himself in," Baker recalls. "It was amazing." Later he was part of a massive demonstration when his friend Frank Jude Jr. was beaten up by Milwaukee police: "We got 6,000 people marching down Wisconsin Avenue to the federal courthouse to demand justice." Now he's trying to harness that grassroots energy to electoral politics.

Progressive Majority helped Sheila Stubbs become the first African-American to serve on the Dane County board in Wisconsin. Stubbs is a former probation officer and community activist. "As an agent I'd visit offenders in prison. Then they'd get released into my neighborhood. I'd take them to the community center to get free clothes and food. I'd make sure they knew the health department nurse, in case they needed TB shots. I'd ask them if they wanted to go to church. I believe people can change," Stubbs says. One of her ambitions is to get the Department of Corrections to give every former prisoner a bus pass. Stubbs believes ex-cons are set up to fail. Stubbs lights up talking about her ambitions for expanding the community center where she volunteers. Her deep commitment to her neighborhood, and her enthusiasm for improving it, shine through. But she wasn't sure how to run for office. "I honestly did not know you had to raise your own money," she says.

A local progressive alderman connected Stubbs with Progressive Majority. "They said, 'Do you know what a PAC is?'" she recalls. "I said no." Once she received Progressive Majority's endorsement, donations began rolling in--from Democracy for America, the municipal employees' union AFSCME and local politicians. "They gave me one-on-one help whenever I needed it," she says of Progressive Majority. "I didn't know 'smart growth' and other terms. I didn't know how to answer some questions--they were always there for me. On election day the entire office came over." She is excited that Progressive Majority is going to fly her to Washington, DC, in June for the group's annual conference. "They get it. I need to see it," she says. Progressive Majority has encouraged her to think about a political future that seemed pie-in-the-sky before she ran.

The power of Progressive Majority's idea is that it can connect motivated, grassroots candidates like Stubbs to interest groups and a political structure that desperately need new blood. Progressive Majority is small, though, and the job of moving national politics in a progressive direction is daunting. "We've doubled in size every year since we started," Totten points out. Still, she acknowledges, it may take more to move the whole country. "We've started to think about how to make it more replicable," she says--so other groups can copy Progressive Majority's vision. As Ron Dellums, the progressive former Congressman from California, who is now running for mayor of Oakland, puts it: "Working at the local level is indispensable because the closer you are to the voters the easier it is to speak to the key issue of public policy: who benefits. And the greater the possibility that grassroots organizing can overcome the power of organized special interests."

Meanwhile, Progressive Majority's staff are intensely loyal to the candidates they've committed to help. Holli Holliday remembers having the opposite experience during many years spent working on Democratic campaigns. The party would pull up stakes in areas that dropped off the national priority list. "I can't count the number of times I've been working on races targeted by the party, and then in May or June--exodus month, we used to call it--they'd pull out," says Holliday. "It's gut-wrenching."

"We're there to the bitter end," she says. That's because, win or lose, for Progressive Majority, each campaign is only the beginning.

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