The Democratic Party's official stand for one year of this century—2008—was that Democrats should compete everywhere.
Look up what happened!
Since then, Democrats have let negative partisanship and the far right’s devouring of rural America scare them away from competing in too many places. And when that happens, it leads to things like JD Vance in the U.S. Senate.
Michele Hornish, the executive director of Every State Blue, wants to change this.
Her post “Do Not Obey In Advance: How Democrats Have Broken the First Rule” sold me on her mission. And we think everyone needs to know what Blue Ohio is doing and how small donors can make a big difference.
This movement requires a long-term investment. However, it can also have almost immediate payoffs by helping turn out voters who could help send Sherrod Brown back to the Senate. Which really matters. Look it up.
Listen and find out if you have broken the first rule.
Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here.
If you want to be a supporter of this podcast, please join us here at the earlyworm society – free or paid, your support matters.
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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT
Jason Sattler: Michele Hornish. I'm really excited to talk about your piece: "Do not obey in advance: How Democrats have broken the first rule." I guess we should just start off by talking about what the first rule is.
Michele Hornish: So "Do not obey in advance" is the first lesson from a book called "On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century." It was written by Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. Fantastic book. It is a really quick read. It's just over 100 pages, and it has some really actionable, worthwhile advice that Timothy Snyder distills from history. And his very first lesson is "Do not obey in advance."
The point being that authoritarians derive most of their power from power that's freely given. And my point in the most recent essay that I published on Substack is that all too often Democrats obey in advance. We leave red districts and red states uncontested or under supported in far too many places. It has become almost a strategy where we focus a lot of our attention and our time, understandably, on flippable districts and on flippable states, battleground states. That means that we don't spend the time and energy that we need to in the rural districts, in the rural spaces in the red districts that have been gerrymandered and that Republicans are almost certain that they are going to win. They will win those districts if we don't contest them. And so my point is in that piece, and then also just in my work as the executive director of Every State Blue, my point is that we need to be pushing everywhere. We need to be fighting everywhere. We need to be speaking up for Democrats everywhere. I say this all the time, but there is not a single district in the entire United States that has ever gone 100 percent for a Republican. So if we want Democrats to turn out, we need to give them a reason to turn out. We need to give them someone to vote for. We need to motivate them. We need to energize them. And that's part of what we need to do to not obey in advance.
Jason Sattler: And your example in the piece is Tennessee. You could use it either use that as your example or Ohio I'm sure is always top of mind. What's the example of what this looks like in practicality?
Michele Hornish: Sure. Sure. So thanks for having me. I'm just thrilled to be here and to talk about what I think Democrats can do going forward and using that lesson using this in our strategy.
At Every State Blue, we have a number of different projects. Our focus, our intention is to crowdfund for underfunded Democratic nominees running for state legislature in some of the reddest states and some of the reddest districts within those states. And so we have actually, we have projects right now in Ohio, Missouri and Tennessee. And in Tennessee, in 2022, 45 of the 99 state legislative districts were uncontested, completely uncontested by Democrats. So right away, the Tennessee Republicans knew that they were walking into an almost guaranteed majority, and most likely a supermajority, and of course they have a supermajority. So when we're not contesting those races, we're giving them free rein. It's a complete free runway for them. Beyond that, there were 24 districts that were underfunded. And when I say underfunded, I mean that they had less than 36 cents per eligible voter. We calculated that based upon a study that was done back in 2013 of 20 states, state legislative races that found that when you spend 36 cents per eligible voter, when a challenger spends that money, they end up turning out 1 percent more voters. There's a 1 percent voter turnout increase. Which is huge, right? So we should be making sure that every state legislative nominee has at least 36 cents per eligible voter. 24 state legislative seats in Tennessee Democrats who are running in those seats didn't have that much. In fact, 13 Tennessee state legislative races that Democrats were running in, they had less than 5, 000. And that's to run in a district size of over 60, 000 people. That's not enough. That's certainly not enough for them to be able to get out there and get out yard signs and the mailers and get materials out for their door knockers. And there's all kinds of things that people need money for in order to run and state legislative races are traditionally inexpensive, right?
But you need at least 36 cents per eligible voter. So that's our goal in those places. And, Tennessee is a good example of how much we have to go now in Ohio in 2020, there was a very similar story where 13 state legislative races, Democrats had less than $5,000. But because of our efforts with Blue Ohio this year, this cycle our grassroots community raised over $285,000 already and has made sure that no Democratic nominee for Ohio State Legislature has less than $7,285 to run their campaign and we're not done yet. That was just our very first disbursement. So we've already supported 56 Democratic nominees and we'll be supporting even more.
And that's what I mean when I say, "Do not obey in advance." There are things that we can do. Democrats are the party of the people. We need to use that people power and we can use that people power in order to find creative ways for us to work together and support the people who are doing this really tough work.
Something that I think a lot of people don't realize is that the people who are on the front line of messaging in these rural areas are the people who are out there door knocking these nominees, these democratic nominees, they are almost like organizers. They're going out, they're talking to their neighbors, they're hearing about what matters, what doesn't matter, what's landing, what's not landing. These are the folks who are doing all that really tough work. And if we believe that message, that a Democratic message needs to get out to every corner of every state, and I think that we all do, then we need to make sure that we are enabling the people who are out there giving that message. We're enabling them to do that effectively. Let's give them the resources that they need to make some noise. And, with Blue Ohio, Blue Missouri, and Blue Tennessee, we try to make that as easy as possible. Like I said, we crowdfund for Democratic nominees for state legislature, but we do it in a monthly recurring donation way, so that it's an easy lift every month.
$10 a month, could be a burrito or a lunch out or something. Or, it could be your contribution to making sure that, Every state legislative race in Missouri or Tennessee or Ohio is meaningfully contested.
Jason Sattler: And $10 would be, have to be a pretty good burrito, but this is a pretty good burrito. What are the kinds of things that a campaign can do if they have a little bit of money?
Michele Hornish: Chipotle must be cheaper than mine.
Jason Sattler: I have high standards. I don't, I'd want to get in. I'm from California.
What is the difference? What does an underfunded campaign look like? And what does a properly funded campaign look like?
squadcaster-9e6h_2_07-17-2024_133304: I mentioned, in Tennessee, 13 state legislative races, Democrats running in those races had less than $5,000. Five of them actually reported that they had nothing. Now, there are some people who tell the party, who tell the people who are recruiting that they are happy to just put their name on the ballot and be someone who is just going to run and that they're not interested in doing anything else. That certainly happens. But it also happens that people will get on the phone and start calling potential donors and the donors will say, what does your district look like? And they'll say I'm in one of the most conservative districts. And then when that donor hears that there's very little chance of that race flipping, it's much less likely that they're going to donate.
There was one nominee in Ohio that I spoke to when I was calling all of these nominees and giving them the great news that we were going to be sending them a check of $3,000 or $7,000 or however much they qualified for. And she told me that she had been on the phone the day before for two hours per call time. This is someone who would run more than once. She's a great candidate. Really lovely person. She was on the phone for two hours and she was able to raise $25. That is not where we want these people's time spent. We want her to spend those two hours on the doors. We want her out there talking to voters and mobilizing people, registering voters, doing all the things that candidates should be doing and spending their time on, not spending time trying to fundraise when we can do that for her, when we can make sure that she's got those resources already. A funded campaign, at least from our perspective, is a campaign that has enough for yard signs, that has enough for postcards, that has enough for postage for those postcards that has enough for the cold pizza and the warm beer for volunteers that are going to come out and canvas for you, that has enough for the gas money, that, the gas that it takes to reach these huge rural districts. These are big districts usually. And so those are the primary ways that the people that we fund, the nominees that we fund, that's what they spend their money on. When I was calling the nominees in Ohio that we just disbursed funds to again and again, I heard the same thing, "Now I can afford those yard signs. Oh, thank goodness. Now I can tell my campaign manager that we can afford the yard signs. Someone said, Oh, I'm going to call, the printer right now." She knew exactly what she wanted to get. She knew exactly what she needed. And that's the other piece of this is that we trust the nominees to know what they need to know what their neighborhood needs to know what, messages and communication in their district is going to work. We trust them with those things. And I think that's the right way to go. In a lot of ways, they're showing us the way. That messaging should happen in these rural areas in these rural districts, and I think that it's important for us to listen.
Jason Sattler: On Tryanny came out in 2017. People are trying to get used to the idea that Donald Trump was President. Also born around that period was Swing Left and this kind of mentality that Democrats are going to donate like pundits. We're going to follow Steve Kornacki. We're going to follow Nate Silver. We're going to, we're going to, and that kind of has changed over time and there's been so much money raised and we forget ourselves every once in a while. We raise $120 million to lose to Mitch McConnell or Susan Collins or Marjorie Taylor Greene. Weren't we doing the strategic thing? So many people who are motivated. My kind of theory of this now is there's enough money. It's just not going to the right places. And if you just took one or 2 percent of what we spent on Senate races and put them into causes like this, my Trump resistance brain becomes then "This could actually help elect Sherrod Brown in Ohio!"
How many votes are there to win is ultimately the question?
Michele Hornish: When we're leaving these districts completely uncontested and under supported, we're leaving a lot of votes on the table. You're absolutely right. This is low hanging fruit, and this is fruit that is ready and right for the taking. Unfortunately, it's really heartbreaking. But we did an analysis, and if we would have had an every state blue type of project, in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have been the president.
We've been able to determine that there is a significant benefit to running fully funded nominees. In districts where we did a study. We're Democrats. That's how we roll, right? And so in 2017, we started our pilot project in Missouri. So by 2020, we were ready to take a look and see, what is the impact of having Democratic nominees running in districts and what's the impact of funding them? And we found that just having it was a Washington University team that did this analysis for us, and they found that just having a Democratic nominee on the ticket, just having somebody's name on the ballot increased The vote share for the top of the tickets by 1. 5%. That's significant when you're leaving so many districts uncontested.
I said that Tennessee had 45 of 99 uncontested, I'm not mentioning all of the other states, Mississippi left 56 percent of its state legislative races uncontested, Democrats left them uncontested in 2023. Louisiana left 56 percent of their state legislative races un contested. In 2023, Alabama, Democrats left 58 out of 105 uncontested. Arkansas left 52 of 99. This is consistent across a lot of different red states where oftentimes the Democrats in those states are under resourced generally, and they're working really hard to try to keep the blue seats that they have and to flip the purple districts that look like they can flip. They're trying to break super majorities. They are doing the best that they can, absolutely in order to fight back against the authoritarian super majority that they've got in front of them. What we're saying is just what you said, which is, there's a bigger pie. We don't have to all be fighting over slices of pie. We just look around and say, there's a bigger pie here. People recognize and understand the value and the importance of running against Mitch McConnell and Marjorie Taylor Greene and, Matt Gaetz, regardless of the makeup of those districts those and states, they may flip, they may not, but people understand that there's a value in running against those people, in fighting against those people, in having messaging against those people, it's important, it's just as important in all of these state legislative races where when we leave them uncontested, it's good. In Tennessee, with 45 state legislative races uncontested by Democrats, that's 4. 8 million people that live in those districts. So 4. 8 million people never heard a message from Democrats saying, these legislators are acting like authoritarians. This is mob rule. This is not the way that we live in a democracy. They never heard that message.
So we shouldn't be that surprised when they look at us quizzically wondering, what are you talking about? Is they haven't heard it. And they need to hear it, not just from Gloria Johnson, not just from President Biden, but they need to hear it from their neighbors and the people that they see at the grocery store and the folks that they know from the PTA. Like this is retail politics at its best is, the state legislative races and enabling those empowering those. Those folks that are running in these seats, empowering them is our best way to get out a Democratic message.
So 5 percent vote share increase for the top of the ticket is huge, but I also should mention that funding the matters to I already mentioned that 2013 study that found that. Increasing, making sure that a challenger has 36 cents per eligible voter, which is different depending on each district size, right? But making sure that they have at least that much leads to a 1 percent turnout increase. And that is really huge. Anyone who's listening to this understands just how important it is to get as many people to turn out as possible.
Democrats need as many bites at that get out the vote apple as we can get. And so just making sure that these people who are out there doing this work have the resources to do it. That's easy, right? We're talking, in Tennessee, that's $20,000 in Ohio. It's I think $32,000. This is not a million dollar race. These are races that are raising $25,000-40,000 and that's, our Blue Ohio community or Blue Missouri community and Blue Tennessee community. We're going a really far to make sure that they have as much of that as is humanly possible.
Jason Sattler: I think that this is really looking at it the way that Republicans look at it and as a branding exercise.
When you look at a ballot and and the ballot doesn't have Democrats on it, what does it says to your neighbors is this people are too ashamed to even represent the party here.
This party is not only not interested in me, but they can't even show their face around here. And I think the part of that hit me when I read your piece, we're obeying in advance. We're letting them define us. We're letting them do our branding for us.
In all of these places, Ohio for instance, abortion rights was on the ballot, won overwhelmingly. Like it wasn't even close. This was double digits. But people have been trained in these rural areas to not like Democrats. Cause they don't think of them as their neighbors.
Are there any success stories that we can point to at this point?
Michele Hornish: There's a couple of things I think that are really important to understand for folks to understand, especially about, rural districts and rural voters. I live in Missouri, so I have a different perspective. I'm in St. Louis, so I'm actually in a blue city. So I'm a blue dot in a blue city in a red state. So I have a different perspective on this than a lot of people who might live in a blue state. We have a lot of rural progressive voters. They don't realize that their progressive values are actually Democratic values. There was a recent poll that just came out by the Rural Democracy Initiative. They did a poll, a study of 10 different states, and they were able to break down some of the very things that you just talked about where 74 percent of them believe that abortion should be legal in some or all cases. That's not something that you would imagine in rural states. The 10 states that they polled were rural states. Some of them are battleground states, but not all of them, right? People see that and they wonder, wait a second, what's going on? In Missouri, voters overwhelmingly passed Medicaid expansion and recreational marijuana while they also voted in an entire slate of Republican statewide officers.
Part of the problem with obeying in advance and not running and contesting races is that we are. out of the conversation. And when we don't contest those races, it's not just that we're not sending a message. We are sending a message by not contesting those races. We're sending a message that we don't care. We don't want to be at the table. It's not true at all. Democrats care deeply, and I know that we care about what's happening in rural America. We care about making sure that everybody has a shot. But that doesn't convey when we don't go into those districts, talk to those people, have those kinds of conversations, those neighbor to neighbor conversations that need to happen. We had an event a couple of months ago with Trae Crowder, and he was laughing during the event, he said, " I have these, all the time. And there will be someone who comes in and says, I thought that I was the only Democrat here, but I see Cheryl over there, who's also a Democrat."
The same thing that happens all the time when I'm talking to rural candidates, they say that they go to these doors and they talk to someone and that person says, Oh, I think that I'm the only democrat on this street. And they say no. There's two right down the street from you. The problem is that we're not organizing those folks. We're not making sure that they're visible. We're not giving them a reason to get out and to celebrate the fact that they are Democrats. And we're not working on rebuilding the brands. You mentioned that we've got a branding problem and we do. And the only way for us to fix that problem is actually to get out there and talk to people and show them that, we don't, we're not evil. We're not evil people. We want to make sure that the kids have good schools. We want to make sure that people can get health care. We want to make sure that people can get a good job that pays well and that they're treated well. That's just American. And I think that those are things that we all can agree on. When folks go in and they start talking to their neighbors as neighbors, as friends, as colleagues, the conversations go really far. We just need to make sure that we're helping the people who are going to be spreading that message.
Jason Sattler: We're the Medicaid and marijuana people.
What should we focus our energy on? I've been focused a lot of my energy on down, down ballot in Arizona. That's just where I saw it matters a lot. And then I'm realizing there's so much that people want to do. We don't feel like we don't look back and say we wasted this year because I think everybody is terrified of this What's the right thing for us?
I think something like Blue Ohio for the amount of money we're talking about you can be like A minor millionaire in the Republican party. You could be like a car dealer who gets to influence politics a lot. You can really make a difference. Your 25 is much bigger when you're giving it to blue Ohio every month and then if you give it to even Sherrod Brown, which is great. But it helps Sherrod Brown, it's part of the Sherrod Brown campaign. And I think that's a good way to look at it is that you could be targeted. You can say, I'm going to choose to win, try to win the U S Senate and do some rebranding and rebuilding in the rural areas of this country.
I think it's an amazing opportunity. You make a great argument for it.
I wonder how did you end up doing this?
Michele Hornish: So I'm a lawyer by training. But after the 2016 election I started a blog that now is on sub stack. It's called Small Deeds Done and that's based on the Peter Marshall quote that "Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned." And it was just in the early sharp days, right after the 2016 election and there were a lot of people who were out there. Wondering what they should do wondering how they could advocate for things, not even remembering necessarily, what the difference was between the Senate and the House. These were early days. So I started Small Deeds and through that met a lot of people, that was the Wild West of advocacy, right? Swing Left and Indivisible and all those groups were just popping up, Sister District, everything. And it was through that, it was through Small Deeds that I met Jonathan Zucker, who's the second CEO, the first COO and second CEO of ActBlue. And his idea in the same early morning hours after the 2016 election, his thinking was that we need to start now to prepare for 2018 and 2020 elections. And so he started an organization called It Starts Today, which is the precursor to Every State Blue. And It Starts Today was the first sort of crowdfunding effort, and that was for Congress. And so we fundraised and crowdfunded through a huge community for Congress and were able to, send funds to congressional districts, but it was through that work that we had together that we realized that really state legislative races are underappreciated and it's an area where we can have a really outsized impact. And I know that, that through your work with the States Project, which is doing amazing work. I have to say that I love what the States Project is doing because they're focusing their attention so much on these state legislative races. And I think that we have a symbiotic kind of relationship, right? Every State Blue projects are helping to boost the underfunded districts in some of the reddest areas in the country. And we're trying to build those districts up over time, right? So we're trying to rebuild the infrastructure that oftentimes has fallen apart. And hopefully, eventually, we're getting them to the point where we can tee them up to the people in the States Project and the party to be able to ultimately flip them.
So it's we're the beginning piece, the long term strategy where we're hoping we're going to be able to tee some of these up to you all in the coming election cycles. But that's the very specific gap that we fill.
Jason Sattler: Absolutely, and I see this in michigan. I think we are one big city away from being missouri or being Ohio or being Tennessee, we have very similar states in terms of our red areas are so red. We got rid of gerrymandering.
But this is the way that we can fight gerrymandering without having to change the laws. There's a gerrymandering of the mind that happens over time that I realized after reading your piece, which I was deeply touched by I have to say again. I'm just keep raving about is raving before and we're raving after.
Michele Hornish: Something that a lot of people don't think about is that by contesting races, by making sure that races are meaningfully contested, we actually force Republicans to fight in those areas too. A really great example of that is in Northwest Missouri, where Jessica Piper ran in 2022, and for state legislature, the Democrat, and she ran into a district that hadn't been contested by Democrats for quite some time. And she raised quite a bit of money. She was a thorn in the Republican side and continues to be But quite a bit of
Jason Sattler: very funny. And if people seen him on she is awesome.
Michele Hornish: She is delightful. And the Republicans had to stay home in that district. They had to go to candidate forums in that district and they had to raise a hundred thousand dollars. To fight her in that district now, without Jessica in that district, they would have had that $100,000 to push against another Democratic campaign.
And the reason that I know that they would have otherwise budgeted that is because the Ohio Senate president said that part out loud. He actually said in 2022 that the reason that they had a couple hundred of thousand dollars to be able to invest in a state Senate campaign district in Cincinnati, which they were trying to erode the Democratic support in that area,
the reason that Republicans had those funds is because Democrats did not contest two state Senate races in that cycle. So we know that they pool their resources, they consolidate their resources when we leave these districts uncontested. Republicans draw these districts in these red states and they don't draw them to benefit Democrats.
They draw them to benefit themselves. And so the only thing worse than gerrymandering is allowing gerrymandering to get you to give up. So what we're saying is that there's all kinds of great moral and electoral reasons for people to be contesting in these seats. And one of them obviously is making sure that Republicans have to stay home and fight in their own backyard.
Jason Sattler: Is there any kind of change to the calculus with Dobbs? One of the things that I can't stop thinking is that abortion rights are on the ballot everywhere. And if you look at abortion rights, you've mentioned this or something that people wildly agree with Democrats.
Have you heard anything about Dobbs changing the calculus?
Michele Hornish: I think that abortion, that reproductive rights have absolutely become one of the talking points in every race, up and down the ballot. It is that important. This is a life or death situation. This is a medical emergency every single day. And so the candidates, the nominees, the democratic nominees that are speaking to that message, they're hearing back positive things.
People want to have their health care. They want to be able to make decisions for themselves, for their families, for their own bodies. I've said before that, Republicans caught the bus on this and Democrats job right now is to make sure that they taste as much chrome as possible. And so we're getting the resources to the people who are running in those districts to make sure that's the case.
Jason Sattler: I'm really excited about what you're doing in Blue Ohio and Blue Tennessee and Blue M issouri. And there is a senate race there that if things went particularly well, this could be part of the discussion as well, too I want to thank you for your work, Michele Hornish, and thank you for your time.
Michele Hornish: Thank you so much. And if anyone wants to learn more about what we're doing, they can go to every state blue dot org. We would welcome them to any and all of our projects. The nominees. Certainly appreciate the help, and so do we.
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