 Hi, good morning, welcome to New America. My name is Mark Schmidt, I'm the director of the political reform program here and I'm pleased to welcome you to this discussion of the new book called State Capture by Alex Hotel Fernandez and we're going to discuss the book and a lot of the issues that it raises about conservative dominance in the states over the last several years and ways of redressing the balance there. I think this is kind of maybe a record, this is the second book event we've had with Alex in I think less than a year, he was here last year for his book called Politics at Work which is about the ways that employers communicate about politics to their employees and encourage them to act in particular ways but this book is on a somewhat different topic which is the organizations and the infrastructure that's led to conservative domination in the states which when you read the book and you think about it, particularly the trifectas of governance that emerged after 2010 when I think 32 states had, exactly what you're not supposed to do. After that period when you think about the consequences of that conservative domination on redistricting, the passage of right to work laws and other laws that weakened the power of organized labor, states not adopting Medicaid or taking up affordable care act exchanges and things like that. In some ways one of the most consequential moments in our political history and has kind of led to the process of real doubt about whether government can do anything effectively which probably feeds into a lot of the world we're living in today. So we're going to have Alex, Alex, I always do this because he writes a lot about Alex, the American Legislative Exchange Council, his name is Alex and I'm going to try to keep them separate but I've been, well let me just quickly introduce Alex and Lydia Bean Alex is an assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia focusing on issues of American political economy, labor, money in politics and so forth. We talked about his previous book and he has a PhD in government and social policy from Harvard and is a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation as well as a friend of our program of ours. And then we're also joined by Lydia Bean who is sort of making her debut here as a fellow in the political reform program. Lydia founded Faith in Texas which is a multiracial movement organizing group, organizing faith communities for social change and has been a senior consultant to faith in action, formerly the Pico National Network. Lydia is a good example of somebody who is a scholar practitioner and she's the author of a book called The Politics of Evangelical Identity which compares, looks at evangelical churches in the United States and Canada and talks about the way that their politics kind of is not top down but is involved from the practices in different congregations. So she'll bring that perspective from the States and then I'm going to talk a little bit from my perspective as somebody who's been a funder and a national kind of observer of some of this work in the States. We'll have a discussion, if you've been here before we'll have a little discussion on stage and we'll open it up to your questions and comments so that we can have the richest discussion possible. So I will just turn it over to Alex and thank you all again for coming. Well thanks for the introduction Mark and thanks to everyone at New America who made this event possible. I'm really excited to share this book with you and to have a discussion about what we can learn from the history of conservative efforts to organize across the States. I just wanted to lay out a couple key themes from the book, spoil the ending if you will, in order to lay out a set of recommendations and lessons that I think we can draw from the book for our discussion here today. And the starting point for this I think comes from a nice example in Iowa in the 2016 election. So I want to take you back to 16, not the national election between Clinton and Trump, but battle for the control of the Iowa state government. The 20 or so years leading up to 16, control of state government in Iowa flipped back and forth between Democrats and Republicans with neither party having outright control. But that changed after November 2016 and Republicans gained full trifecta control. Now in the campaign for that election Republicans were talking about things like lowering taxes, cutting regulations, reducing state spending, sort of a typical conservative agenda. And indeed many people assumed that was what was going to be on the top of the agenda when Republicans went into office in January of 2017. But that's not what happened. The first bill that the Republican leadership pushed through and really made a concerted effort to pass was a bill that reshaped collective bargaining law in that state, modeled on a previous effort from Wisconsin, the IOL legislature aimed to cut back collective bargaining rights for nearly all public sector employees and create a new recertification requirement that would require public sector unions to undergo recertification elections at the end of every contract. In short, really bad news for the public sector labor movement here. And this bill took many people by surprise. It was not something that politicians had campaigned on, nor was it something that they said that they would focus on once they won this election. And I think this raises a real puzzle because voters weren't asking for this either. According to polls that were done right before the bill passed and then right after the bill passed, over 60 percent of Iowans said that they favored retaining collective bargaining rights for public sector employees. And so the puzzle is this. Where did this legislation come from? If not from rank and file Republicans or from voters. And the answer, I think, comes from the bill text. If you look at the legislative text of the Iowa bill, it hues very closely to legislative text from Wisconsin. And both of those bills hues very closely to a model bill proposal produced by an organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALIC, not ALICs. And ALIC, as I'm sure many of you are familiar with, produces model bills just like this and encourages state lawmakers to pass them by providing research support and help, testimony advice in order to shepherd these bills through the legislative process. But that's not the only clue that ALIC might have been involved. A number of the key Republican leaders, in fact, all three of them had longstanding ties to this organization. So the House leader was a national chairwoman of ALIC. The Senate majority leader was a state chairperson. And the governor was an early member and a co-founder of this organization. But ALIC wasn't operating on its own to push through this bill in the Iowa government. Another organization was on the ground as well, making an effort as soon as the election results were announced to put collective bargaining cutbacks at the top of the agenda. And that organization is Americans for Prosperity, a federated organization that's a key part of the Koch Brothers political network. It has local, state, and national offices, grassroots volunteers, and is involved in both elections and policy debates. And here we have a tweet from AFP's president in Iowa, together with Governor Branstad as he's signing the law into effect. And it turns out that AFP's lobbyist was in fact whipping votes for this bill in the midnight session that was required to pass the legislation. But AFP and ALIC were not on their own. A third organization that was on the ground in Iowa laying the groundwork for this legislative push was the Public Interest Institute, which is a think tank in Iowa that's part of the state policy network, a network of conservative right-leaning think tanks across the country. And the Public Interest Institute was producing research reports and media commentary arguing that Iowa should follow the example of Wisconsin in cutting back collective bargaining rights in the states. And so together these three networks that each have national scope in the sense that they're operating across all of the states, but they have a state-based organizational presence, were pushing for this bill. And that is where the bill came from. And in state capture I look at the evolution of these three networks, ALIC, the state policy network, and Americans for Prosperity. And I ask where do these organizations come from? Why have they been successful? Where have they been successful? And are there lessons that we can learn from how they've reshaped policy across the states? If you're interested in building power on the left, for instance, what are the lessons that liberals can draw? And the reason I focus on these three networks is, although they're different, they represent different constituencies, legislators in the case of ALIC, think tanks in the case of the state policy network, and grassroots volunteers in the case of Americans for Prosperity, they work quite closely with one another, working hand in glove in pursuit often of the same policy agenda. Now I'm sure many of you are familiar with other work that covers themes in state capture. I think here about terrific work by Jane Mayer, for instance, in Dark Money. Gordon Laffer writes about some of these same groups and their policy impact in the 1% solution. And there's been really fantastic journalism, investigative journalism work, and research by folks at the Center for Media and Democracy, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. But what I think is new about state capture is sort of three things that I add to this conversation. One is that I focus explicitly on organizations and how organizations interact with one another. I think a lot of these other works focus on individuals, and that's important to understand who's funding these organizations or who's leading them. But we have to think about the organizations themselves and the strategies that they deploy in order to be successful in politics and how they work with one another. The second thing that I think state capture adds to this conversation is a focus on the politics of policy. So while some of this work looks at what happens when a state, for instance, enacts these model bills, I'm focused on why they enact those bills in the first place. And the last thing that I think state capture adds to the conversation is a real focus not just on the successes that organizations like ALEC, the State Policy Network, and Americans for Prosperity have enjoyed, but also thinking through their historical record and places where they had failures where things could have gone the other direction and they could have folded. And I think it's important to focus on these moments of misstep because otherwise we derive an incomplete picture of how these organizations developed over time. In my remaining time, I want to lay out three lessons that I think we can take away from the success of what I'm calling the right-wing Troika of ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, and the State Policy Network for our understanding about politics and if you're on the left, lessons for how the left might respond. The first is taking advantage of under-resourced state legislatures. The second is how to bridge and adjudicate between conflicting preferences amongst different political groups and activists. And the third is thinking about policy not just as a way of solving political and policy problems, but as a way of building power over the long run. So let me go over each of those in turn. So it's hard to overstate just how under-professionalized a lot of American legislatures are. You know, I come from a state like New York that's one of the few ones that offers full-time staffers well-paid positions for lawmakers and has a legislature that meets for most of the year. But across most of the country lawmakers are only paid in in terms of a part-time job and legislative sessions only last for a couple months. And in fact in some states they don't even last for the entire year. They meet every other year. And you're lucky if you have part-time staffers that you share with other lawmakers. And this map comes from the National Conference of State Legislatures and divide states by how many resources they give to their lawmakers. And you can see the darkest states are really just a handful of states like New York and California. And in most of the country lawmakers don't spend that much time on the job, don't earn that much in compensation, and have very few staffers. Under these circumstances lawmakers are very receptive and indeed welcoming of ideas and research and help in order to move legislation through their chamber. You know, they're strapped for ideas. And so if you're an outside group that comes along with, say, a model bill, and then supplements that model bill with the research reports you need with ideas for who should testify on behalf of that bill and talking points you can use, well that person has done a lot of your job for you and you simply just don't have the resources to have done that on your own. And that's exactly what Alec, for instance, managed to do and I think why it's been so successful. In the book I had a number of interviews and surveys of lawmakers that spell this out in more detail but I thought I would just give you one excerpt that shows this logic at work from a state representative in Oregon who describes his reliance on Alec as follows. Alec is a great resource for a part-time lawmaker like him whose staff is comprised of his wife who works half-time and an aide who works three days a week when the legislature is not in session. In his own words he says, we have such limited staff that Alec helps us look at things and consider them. So the second lesson that I think studying the Troika closely over time teaches us is how to bridge disparate and potentially conflicting interests into a coalition that persists over time. I think there's a tendency, especially if you're on the left, to look at the right and say, you know, they must all be on the same page. They want smaller government, lower taxes, less regulation. But when you dig into these organizations you realize that they're comprised of different interests that are actually not on the same page about a lot of issues. So for instance, this is Alec's membership list from the 1980s and we see here a number of large Fortune 500 companies like Monsanto, Shell, UPS, and Walmart. But there are also some libertarian organizations too like the National Tax Limitation Committee, the National Taxpayers Union, and economic focused organizations like the Olin Foundation. And there are some social conservative organizations as well like the National Rifle Association. Now when you think through it, there's not a lot that these organizations necessarily have that's all on the same page with one another. You know, the NRA wants policies that expand gun rights and these other social conservative groups might care intensely about LGBT issues or abortion, and those aren't things that most companies care about. Similarly, libertarians want to reduce the size of government, but often a lot of companies are asking for subsidies from the government. So how did organizations like Alec and AFP and the State Policy Network get all these organizations on the same page? Well a key innovation that I talk about in the book comes from a former football star, a man by the name of Sam Brunelli, who is one of Alec's early heads. There's a picture of him here when he was playing for the Denver Broncos. And Brunelli's innovation at Alec was to come up with an organizational structure that adjudicated between these different interests and helped the organization set a common agenda. He decentralized the policy writing process to issue specific task forces and then within those task forces members that paid more to the organization had the final say on the sort of proposals that got developed. And so this is one way of bridging these interests. It's not to say it's the only way, but it was an important innovation that let Alec adjudicate between these different preferences. Okay let me move on to the last one. So the last lesson that I think we can take away from the right is how to think about policy not just as a tool for solving problems, but as a way of reshaping power dynamics. And nowhere I think is this clearer than in these organizations pursuit of policies to hobble and disadvantage labor unions. It's quite striking that that this is often the first priority that these organizations push Republican legislatures and governors to enact. And I think it's no coincidence when you look at internal documents say for instance from the state policy network that argue that when you enact labor cutbacks first you pave the way for other conservative priorities. And so while a social religious group might not care all that much about cutbacks to labor unions if they can make it harder for Democrats and progressives to win elections well then it makes sense for them to prioritize that as their number one issue for newly Republican governments. And indeed in other work I've done and this is an excerpt from a New York Times op-ed I wrote on this research. I show that when right to work laws championed by these conservative organizations go into effect Democrats do worse at the ballot box in the in the election cycles that follow and it's harder to enact progressive legislation. So this is a way of thinking about policy not just as a way to say solve economic problems but as a way of durably changing the distribution of power. Okay so let me wrap up now here. I think there are three lessons that we can take away that I hope we can dig into in our discussion. The first is that you need sustained attention to the states it's not enough to just focus on the states when you're out of power. It needs to be sustained over time in order to build up the sort of organizations that truly have a national scope. The second lesson I think that comes out of this close look at the right is how you need to focus on both successes and failures. I think there's a tendency to succumb to what Steve Tellis has argued is the myth of diabolical conservative competence the idea that the other side always gets it right and is always successful. And I would add to that I would say the myth of big money that the reason why the right is so successful is they just have a lot of deep pocketed donors. There are elements of truth to both of those things but as I've tried to present in this brief snapshot of the book there are other components to their success as well. And lastly I think the broader lesson for the left is not to carbon copy the models of what conservatives have been doing but to think about the strategies that lead to their successes. And then try and find ways of leveraging those strategies while not giving up the sort of core values and commitments that liberals might have. So for instance if you think about using policy to reshape power maybe you aren't going to make it harder for people who are on the other side to vote but maybe you'll empower labor unions. Maybe that's the way that you see policy as a tool of reshaping power. So thank you and I look forward to our discussion. Thank you Alex. Can you hear me okay? Great. I obviously have some laryngitis. This is a really important book and I urge all of you to read it because this has been an excellent overview but there's more in the book too so please read the whole thing. There will be a test. And to echo what Alice was just saying the greatest takeaway that I got from the state capture was first of all the consistent funding and attention to state power building is a really important difference between progressives and conservatives over the last 40 years. I agree with Alex that you know often the the tendency on the left is to just copy whatever the right does and just say oh if we just had three big large interlocking organizations that had a six million dollar budget you know or you know parallel the budget we could we could do what they did and of course that's not how strategy works. So I I I describe it as studying the right is not that you copy the strategies but it's like looking at yourself in someone else's mirror like when you go to the department store and you see yourself in a different light much harsher angle. It's an exercise in self-awareness for the left to understand and the greatest contrast you see in comparison is just this inconsistent attention sporadic the defunding of organizations when liberals are in power in DC compared to consistent attention and funding on the right. And in an article I just published and on Vox I talk about the damage that that's done to to progressive organizations who have taken state power building seriously. So I'm here to talk about what progressives can learn and what the applications are from a practitioner point of view to a work and as someone who's built up a state-based organizing group I can say the most frustrating part is it's it's not that there haven't been people in the progressive movement who took state power building seriously is that these these leaders and these organizations were only able to get adequate attention and funding when Democrats were completely locked out of power in Washington DC and I mean like things like the 2016 election right where the Congress and the presidency that's how that's how bad it has to get for progressives to send serious money to the states. It's almost like if the it's like a water you know if the water has anywhere else to go it'll go federal but if there's nowhere else for the the water to go it flows to the states and that has to change. From a practitioner point of view working in the states my context is Texas which is often thought of as the reddest of the red states our state policy network affiliate is you know bigger than probably all the progressive organizations put together and that's just one organization. It it's painfully obvious that the challenge for progressives building state power is different from the challenge that faced conservatives when they first started this 40 years ago. So that's another reason why progressives can't just copy the organizational forms of the right because obviously they got their shot in first. They've had 40 years of advanced warning building slowly with not actually that great alarm not a lot of efforts to counter them consistently on the left. Progressives don't have that advantage and they also face the disadvantage that in most states they're not just out of power but many states have passed these right to work laws that are demobilizing labor and also restricting voting and also gerrymandering that makes it hard for democrats to win a majority of legislative seats even when they win a majority of the total votes in the state. So those are three big gerrymandering right to work and voting restrictions yeah that those one two three punch that that conservatives got in across all these states you know the 2010 election you know after that was probably the most catastrophic for us in Texas that started earlier like we had a mid-cycle redistricting halfway through the decade in Texas so we we got an advanced preview as we often do in Texas. We always get an advanced preview of what's to come in all the other states. So given the progressives are have taken this one two three punch they're in a unique situation so one approach one thing we could learn to say okay we're going to create alloc-like organizations that are going to create a plan for what progressives should do when they do gain power right and that's there's been helpful efforts six for example is working in a core set of progressive states to say okay you know Colorado California Minnesota there's a path to gaining power in state legislatures and to thinking carefully about a set of policies that can create policy feedback effects to create lasting power for progressives in a set of states and really model what it means to be progressive state and that's one way forward. I don't know about any of that though because I live in Texas so that doesn't help us. We can we can wave like I'm happy for you my family members still don't have health insurance so my focus in my own work has been on red and purple states where it's not going to help us to have a plan ready because we have to get we've been screwed to be quite frank and the task is to get unscrewed. There's some other more colorful language that has been used by some other books on gerrymandering that I shall not repeat here this is a mixed crowd I don't want to I don't want to under faint. So how do you think about that so I'll tell you you know one example from my work in Texas about how this works in Texas I don't just spoiler alert I don't have a magical solution you know I it's like I have the answer we will fix all the states that are red but in Texas Texas Texas a lot of people don't know this but it's an incredibly urban state so a lot of people you know the cowboy the mess of the world those folks exist I'm related to them but Texas is incredibly urban in the concentration of 70% of the population lives in like a big urban triangle. So what we're facing in Texas is that the cities are for the most part bright blue and most of the progressive infrastructure the community organizing and policy advocacy expertise is located in the seven largest cities but really the three largest cities and in in Texas each of these seven urban areas is the size of Colorado. So think of you know so for a long time progressives thought okay this is fine what we'll do is we will you know just take over Houston and it's it's county Harris County there's over eight million people here we're bigger than Colorado we can have a progressive county commissioner we can run the city council we have the schools we can do some really good stuff and help a lot of people there's a lot of low-income people particularly and people of color and we can have have good progressive governance just in the cities and that that work is still continuing and it's worth doing the problem though is preemption is that states have the power to basically exercise extend their authority over cities and counties on almost any topic they so choose and so obviously when you you ride off to war your opponents aren't just sort of watching from the parapet as you ride down the plane you know chewing gum and waiting for you to get there they will of course try to you know aspire some missiles at you as you travel so obviously the the move came from the right is to basically strip Texas cities of all their power to do pretty much anything include raising property taxes which is the primary source of funding for public schools and this is that this is not just Texas this is happening in a number of states including purple and blue states so the challenge for democrats became and for the progressive in general became you know how do you show off your wares as it were how do you show it progressive governance looks like in a state like Texas in a way that allows voters first of all that energizes your base voters and shows them that their vote counts and also makes the case to those small percentage of persuadable voters which are not very many that that in fact that progressive politics can be trusted to deliver the things they care about how do you show that when you never had any power and you don't have any precedent right there hasn't been a back and forth Texas has been a one-party state for so long first under democrats and then the republicans so we don't have the answer to this but one solution has been what me and a friend and Beeson at the Center for Public Policy Priorities have come to call the blocking and tackling strategy which is basically that it's not enough to just organize and build power in blue progressive cities you have to have a regional strategy that has something to offer small cities in Texas you don't have to go like full on rural unless you want to because the population is so concentrated in large cities but even if you think about cities like Amarillo or Lubbock or you know still very large cities like Arlington where I live or Fort Worth you know Arlington is the the largest city in America that doesn't have public transit for example and this is just one of our you know 400,000 cities still very large cities we have to have something to offer those places as well and we have to find a way to build a broader geographic coalition for progressive politics that's not so limited so that gerry you know gerrymandering is a problem and the geographic concentration of progressive capacity and progressive voters is a problem so the task for us is to build progressive blue power in a core set of seven large cities in Texas which is valuable where you can actually push progressive politics to the max and actually show voters that their vote matters well at the same time having enough power or enough relationship with interests outside of these seven large cities that you can actually block preemption because if the state of Texas just strips cities of all their power then basically you're stuck so how do we how do we go about this how do you get from here to there so our approach was first to get organized to prioritize preemption as a as a key challenge a key threat in the legislative session and as alex mentioned a really important need in progressive politics is this prioritizing and adjudicating between competing interests because the predominant way of resolving the diversity of the progressive coalition often at least in in my state and I suspect in other states is just to create a laundry list of everybody's solutions you create this really long list of demands and you create this really unwieldy coalitions where everybody's represented and everyone's running in a million different directions so the first step was a core set of progressive organizations in Texas got together so we need to prioritize preemption led by the AFL-CIO which has really been holding point against preemption for a long time but we said we're going to be united front and we're all going to make this a priority in the next legislative session and we're going to get organized now so that um we we don't just we're just not not just prepared to do advocacy but we're actually building out um and organizing in advance in a wider geographic footprint that it'll take to to block preemption so we have a a small we have a progressive coalition which is like basically around winning elections but you also have a wider governing coalition which is this people in a bigger geographic footprint which is what it takes to actually someday maybe pass legislation in the Texas legislature but in the short term it's to actually you know protect and prevent preemption against good policies that are happening in the cities so that was kind of our way of solution is treating some of these institutions and these relationships where we're adjudicating and we're negotiating competing interests. The jury on this is still out because the legislative session in Texas is still raging we don't know if we'll be able to block preemption or not but I can tell you that making choices and working together to have a clear um a clear path towards you know policy feedback effects where you you pass policies that actually change the political outcomes the first step to winning is trying so um you know the the jury's still allowed to see what will happen I'll I'll write something when when we're done but so I would say that's just one example and I'm sure there are there are great exemplars of this across across the states and innovative things that progressives are trying to get unboxed or unscrewed in the states. The last thing I'll say is to return to the concern about funding obviously the the main problem to building progressive infrastructure in the states has been this issue of funding and to that end the the other related problem is if organizations if progressive organizations in the states are going to do the kind of strategic work that the right has done about prioritizing and adjudicating against competing interests that would definitely take different funding models than the one we have now. You know one of the strengths of the right is that the members of ALEC are also its funders but on the left often the power relationships work quite differently where the funders in some sense kind of dictate what organizations work on. No one will admit this but we all know it to be true and one of the reasons why organizations struggle to prioritize and actually be strategic about pushing issues that have policy feedbacks actually build power rather than just just achieving specific policy deliverables is because of the very issue driven and program specific nature of funding so you end up sort of creating a rag-tribe repertoire of issues and campaigns rather than having the the freedom to actually sit down with your partners in a room and say okay here's a sequence for actually creating this is the order we're going to do them in and this is how we're going to prioritize this is what we're going to do and not do so that's the final thing I'll say is one of the things that made this preemption campaign work in Texas was that the Ford Foundation had made a state-based set of grants that were general operating that gave a key set of organizations the breathing space to be able to say we choose this campaign and we choose not to do these other things so I'll I think with that I'll transition it to Mark to talk about philanthropy. Thank you Lydia and I think you can see why we're thrilled to have Lydia as part of our program. I just want to like bouncing off that just quickly I want to emphasize that this issue of preemption where a state basically prohibits localities from enacting certain policies is not just the Texas thing it's a very significant dimension of state control and you can kind of think of it as you know control at the state level allowing conservatives to exercise power down and restrict democracy down as well as as well as express power upwards in the way they control for example congressional districting and and so forth so it is it's one of those issues that you know the first few times you think about it's a little bit of an eye roll maybe it's like something you heard about in an administrative law course or something but it's actually you know profoundly significant what I want to do is just take a couple minutes and put on a hat I don't usually wear which is like somebody who's been a funder and I worked at the open society foundations from 1998 to about 2005 or six and from that perspective we tried to do a lot of of this kind of thinking about how to support organizing the states and I came to it having worked on Capitol Hill I did a lot of work on the welfare reform law in the past in 1996 mostly trying to stop it or improve it or make it less bad and when I came out of that and kind of stumbled into a foundation I think there was a lot of there was a lot of concern there were how do we make this less how do we how do we do something that makes this less bad and people were focused on the work requirements and the law and the time limit for how long you can receive welfare and so forth and having been in the middle of it I was like you know the really really significant thing here is we've just dumped this huge responsibility onto states and I'm not you know the question is is there the capacity within states for people to speak up for themselves about how they think the system should work and you know be equal partners at that table so that's that and and an interest in in money and politics which was clearly there was more opportunity at the state level than at the federal level first thinking about reform led me to be thinking about say if you know I'm somebody who unlike Lydia I've never I've not worked at the state level I've worked at the federal level and and and and and then in philanthropy but it was important and we got involved in a lot of projects to try to build state policy capacity we significantly expanded what's now the state priorities partnership which was then called the state fiscal analysis initiative these are you basically organizations similar to the center on budget policy priorities spawned by them coordinated by them working closely with each other Lydia mentioned the center on public policy priorities in texas which is one of the first in alex's book that's a you know clearly a rich seam of capacity which for many years kept itself pretty carefully you know carefully limited to its issues not always working in broad coalitions because they wanted to keep a keep as much influence as they could on a bipartisan basis but but incredibly good at what they did we tried to support broad progressive coalitions we created something called the state strategies fund just getting you know very small amounts of money to state coalitions but made some difference I was on the board of the center for policy alternatives which again appears in the book as one of those but not something that was created as an alternative to alec I think it actually precedes alec but did some similar things had their own model bills and so forth was actually it was was strongly bipartisan actually for some time I remember being on the board there were two wonderful state legislators one from kansas one from kinetica who were republicans and within a single month both of them changed parties so without doing anything your bipartisan organization is not a bipartisan organization anymore but that was a fascinating perspective on what made some of these things some of these things useful or not but all of it felt too small there wasn't a lot of connective tissue between these things and the community organizing groups that were out there also and the community organizing groups often often avoided getting too involved in policy they wanted to work on just like the issues that the communities they represented focused on and often didn't get very involved in electoral so you had very kind of disparate pieces one of the things I did in in thinking about this was remember like okay this is getting my I got some interesting anecdotes but they're getting old and I kind of need to get up to speed on this so I I got on the phone with a few people who've been working on these areas more recently and this is not a scientific survey and I'm not going to footnote it but I but I kind of got myself up to speed on some of the things that are happening and a lot of what I heard was that you know around 2004 was kind of a turning point there's a there was an article I was going to put it up called with the headline devolve this from the nation in 2004 by Joel Rogers as a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and one of the founders of what became six I guess yeah it really started one of the one of the first of these counter-alex and that was you know in the middle of the bush years Iraq war again as as Lydia said you know when when at low points progressives say oh we've discovered the states again and then of course and a lot began in that period but of course I think Obama pulled progressives back to the idea that things happened at the national level as did a major national financial crisis financial economic crisis kind of created a distraction from that but from 2004 and on there was the emergence in states of what are called tables they're often there's well some states have both what they call a c3 table which is organizations that don't do work on elections and a c4 table of elect of organizations that do those are rich some people said to me well you know the thing about those tables is they're transactional they're not really a deep they're not sort of a deep change and talked about some places where he thought there was something more transformational and I thought that that distinction was an interesting one as you see something as you see something develop and people people talked about a few states where particularly you know faith-based organizing groups were at the center of a broad statewide coalition a lot of people talk to me about minnesota where there's an organization called which kind of brings together both the policy organizations and community organizing and and kind of create some continuity so that people people do that the sort of multifaceted organization efforts where some groups do electoral work and when the elections over they move to doing policy work and kind of build their ratchet up power in that way so it feels to me like a story that sounded to me like there's some optimism and and the third part which is really I think an interesting challenge is the is the emergence of groups that haven't come through the normal funder industrial complex you know they didn't get demonstration grants they just appeared and we've seen a lot of that since 2017 a lot of that is reflected in work by people like that that Tita Scotchpole and Lara Putnam have done that's showing that kind of organizing in indivisible or the women's march groups and and and so forth that really just you know they got to a pretty high level before the funding appeared and I think that's a real challenge and in some ways a reproach to the funding world about other things work but in a way it's you know it's actually a lot healthier in a democratic sense than the you know funder arrives and designs something for you so I think that's that's a big change in a challenge and I think that's another thing that led to people's real optimism about developing something different and what's striking about all that when you think about it is it's not in any way an imitation of the network and structure that Alex has talked about here it's something that is you know kind of comes from within the state has energy that comes from bringing together some different kinds of constituencies and it has some potential it has some real potential of course it's also not it's going to be hard to write this book that I mean a lot of this is in chapter seven of Alex's book but overall this this will be a harder story to write because it's going to be a kind of a different story in different states there's only one minnesota and there's only one texas and you know there's there's one south carolina and these these stories are going to be really different but it made me hopeful that in you know five or so years we'll be able to say there's a strong voice at the state level around progressive values and ideas and supporting things like expanding labor union rights and organizing and democracy as well as a strong voice on the right so I was I was actually really cheered by what I learned and felt like the work that I kind of was part of some very nascent exploration of 10 years or so ago 10 or 15 years or so ago as really or maybe a little longer than that we're not going to get too deep into that has has really turned into something promising so without a we'll maybe have a little discussion here and then open it up thank you I'm curious Alex what how important and what role do you think the that I've always been one curious about the role that model bills play you know I remember being on the at the center for policy alternatives they used to produce like model bills about for example if you wanted to allow same-sex marriage here's the model bill and I would sometimes say well I'm not sure that really like that's not the hardest bill to write in the world you know if you have any kind of legislative council you could probably do that and it it seemed to me that was a little bit of an exercise invitation I'm just always been curious what what do you think that does within is it the secret sauce or isn't it because I think one thing has been that's the secret sauce so let's do that you know yeah I think that's exactly right but before I dig in I just wanted to say thanks Mark and Lydia for really terrific and thought-provoking set of comments and thank you especially given your your voice for lending it to this conversation so yeah I think this is a great example of a case where the left latched on to a specific tactic and I differentiate the idea of a tactic from a broader strategy and said that's what the secret sauce is and we're going to replicate it exactly to a T and you saw some organizations just having model bill libraries posted online and sort of expecting that they would fly off the shelves just by posting that bill text but as I try and argue in the book you know the model bills that Alec offers is only one part of the broader suite of support and services that it gives to lawmakers it's not just the model bill it's the research assistance that you might need in order to you know carry that bill to completion it's political talking points it's pulling it's pointing you towards the experts that you can bring in for testimonies and hearings and consultations and it's the social network too I think you can't discount the fact that for instance Alec has regular convenings of lawmakers I've interviewed lawmakers who have attended these and described just how important it is to establish enduring relationships with both the Alec staff and also the other corporate and activist members of the organization so it's hard to think about only taking one piece of that and then expecting it to work and for these bills to fly off the shelves. It feels like if some of it is taking a kind of interest group bargaining outside of the legislative context and kind of doing it outsourcing it in a particular way. Do you want to open it up or do you want to just do you have other questions? I was going to actually ask about I mean one of the things that that you discuss in the book is how it's not just that Alec is larger and better resource than its counterparts in the left recently I mean like massively but also that the the state affiliates like the state policy network affiliates and the state organizations are on average like a half a million dollars less funded than their written counterparts. Obviously that not parity is not maybe most realistic or even even necessary but I'm curious as to you know maybe the stuff that didn't make in the book about the differences in the state-based networks the vitality and funding of the state-based networks on the right and the left. Yeah I know I think Mark alluded to this that the state priorities partnership earlier the state fiscal analysis initiative you know I was really struck by the vibrancy in so many states and the impact that they have on even in very very conservative red states often behind the scenes in working with unusual coalitions that was one of the key you know tactics that they used was putting together business coalitions in support of say retaining the child tax credit or earned income tax credit in some of these red states when those bills were up on the chopping block and mark I know this is something that you've written on as well in this context and then also developing a reputation as a credible source of facts even for very conservative members of these state legislatures so those are two really important ways that they managed to have influence even in republican states but mark I know you've written on this I'd love to say I should have said a little bit I've seen those organizations kind of spread their wings a little bit in the last few years so that they're you know they have a lot of credibility to arrive from like the fact that they do one thing really well and nobody else quite wants to do that thing because it's hard and that's budget analysis and the impact of policies and so forth but the being in that position gave gave them a lot of credibility to be a convener to be a good ally they're not necessarily competing with they're not competing with organizing groups but they can play a really central role so I think in Texas for example and in other places people have talked about you know those they're playing a much broader role than they did even five or so years ago which is a fascinating transformation and I think a challenge there definitely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah sorry so those organizations are the Center for Public Policy Priorities is the Texas affiliate in what's called the state priorities partnership which is a group of 41 I think at this point state organizations coordinated through the center on budget and policy priorities working on on fiscal policy issues started I went to the 20th anniversary several years ago so early 1990s early 90s was the nascent period and then there there is also another group coordinated by the economic policy institute the economic analysis and research network that on the ground often overlaps with that the same think tanks in each state are affiliated with both networks but the two networks provide slightly different supports and research network yeah yeah why don't we open it up and you can have the first question I'll I'll call on people but wait for the wait for the mic hello yeah I guess that is hi my name is Marsha Johnson I am vice chair for voter support for the Arlington Democrats and I had a question I forgive my ignorance again preemption it's a big word so you spoke about a specific target for people doing preemption of property taxes prohibiting cities from raising taxes what is that the only thing what other thing what are the other things that they are trying to do yeah yeah I guess I guess I'm too I'm too far in the weeds I let me just back up so preemption is basically states have broad authority to prohibit cities and counties from from passing ordinances or making making rules that sort of conflict with state level rules so on any policy issue you can imagine so plastic bag bands right a lot of cities this is kind of or smoking bands this is you know states could preempt smoking bands and say everybody everybody can smoke wherever they want they haven't thank goodness but plastic bag bands fracking bands at the at the local level that was one of the big ones paid leave we were paid sick time and minimum wage minimum wage yeah and then what we're also seeing is the growth of these we call them death star preemption bills or basically they pass this big bill that was basically we preempt everything ever all the things you know it's basically the text I think that's exact text and it's basically anything you know the state reserves the right to basically preempt any sort of rule related to economic at all economic issues at all I mean they're very broad like to the fact that it like could make it hard just to do basic business so that like in Texas they tried to pass one of these you know omnibus preemption bills and when that didn't work they broke it up into a series of bills kind of like the shrapnel theory of you know and they're trying to pass those individually to see if they can if they can kind of pick us off one by one but yeah so that's preemption in a nutshell yeah I was just wanting to share this slide it comes from a figure in the book that shows the proportion of the u.s. population that lives in a state that has either preempted local minimum wages or local paid sick and family leave initiatives and you can see here that you know local minimum wage relatively rare early 2000s starts to take off but explodes after 2010 once states start getting these full republican trifectas with model bills being produced by Alec and supported by the state policy network and that's even more striking when you look at paid leave and in the book I sort of walk through the example of how this was developed in in the context of Wisconsin and really became nationalized but nearly six out of ten americans live in a state where a city can't pass a minimum wage that's higher than the state minimum wage and I think it should be an important reminder that you know the fight for 15 movement for instance has had tremendous success but its success is necessarily limited to these blue states. Hi my name is Tarsi Dunlop and I work with local progress which is a network of local progressive elected officials so preemption is something that they're fighting every day including in Texas and Dallas and Austin and we're state is yeah we're having our Texas launch event right now actually yeah we you guys just had a big yeah literally happening right now oh my gosh yeah if I were here yeah and we're here but this is a really so I think one question I have is about sort of the lack of education for state legislators and particularly for state legislators who may actually support the idea of preemption but sort of be like moderate democrats or even maybe a little bit more liberal if they don't fully understand the consequences of what the preemption bill will do to localities I feel like sometimes you get into situations where people are like well we don't want to patch work of law like the the justification for why preemption is that you know we don't want to patch work of local laws where people have to figure out how to navigate that and within the business climate or whatever so I'm just curious if you could say a little bit more about how to talk about preemption in sort of a way that is resonant with state legislators who may be on the fence sounds like a question for you well um yeah and and we actually found that when um when movement progresses went to our to look for our legislators to start talking to them they were um I guess the the that um Democrats and the Texas House in the Senate are so used to just getting pounded every just you know just completely crushed every time that the idea of going on the offense and and holding strong and having a plane is like I think this is the one of the first legislative cycles in a long time where that is kind of thing something they can imagine um but there the danger was definitely that um you know what often happens is um the the the works shatters along which preemption bill it is and like a case by case basis so as you say there was a need to say why do we defend local democracy across the board um you know part of it is substantive like helping or same as with with voters like helping them understand what are some of those specific ordinances that would be blocked um one of the other responses is like okay you don't want to patchwork but um so pass a state level policy and they're like well that's not going to happen like well are we just going to sit around and wait to do all you know all governing all the governing until you know things changed dramatically um so we we actually do that like if you do if you don't want if you don't want to patchwork create a standard the high standard and you know and this will go away um the other thing I'll say about that is um it's really often the the standards like for example paid sick time you know it really depends on but paid sick time it's it's not that hard to administer and like the obvious solution is for if you're a company that's in more than one municipality you just adopt the policy for the most progressive municipality and then you just roll it out in the last protected municipalities and you just you just raise your standards um the another argument I'll just I'll throw in a freebie another counter argument was like will this deter businesses from moving to Texas and it was like really you think Toyota's like not going to move here because there's a paid sick time policy they already have paid sick time I'm pretty sure so that was that was not a real I've had that thrown us by conservative legislators and you're like that is not a real good faith argument no one thinks that you know all these companies that were if they don't offer paid sick time already then why are we you know offering these incentives to bring them to Texas to have terrible job like these are we're bringing them because we think they'll bring good quality jobs that kind of brings up the question of divisions in the corporate community I wonder if it's worth digging into a little bit because it's something I try and tackle in the book you know under what conditions do businesses decide to work through groups like Alec or the state policy network and under what circumstances can they be peeled away for you know progressive legislation and you know in the book I think one example is the Medicaid expansion that you saw the conservative groups that I put up on the screen there they were actually going against the business interests of a lot of health providers hospitals in these states and the more general business community there were a number of states where the Chamber of Commerce is normally a right-wing and pretty conservative organization most states opposing the minimum wage came out in favor of expansion and so that was a case where you could sort of imagine peeling off businesses that that had the right information about what that offered but I wonder if there are other examples I mean businesses peeled off from Alec only on the basis of social issues right I mean they there's there was some exodus on the standard ground laws and I and bathroom bill right and so there hasn't been a voter ID right so there hasn't like those economic issues have not caused splits within Alec so far right yes I should draw a distinction between cases where companies have say left Alec or stopped supporting the state policy network in cases where you know the legislative battle pits Alec against say the Chamber of Commerce or health providers yeah but that's a great point yeah maybe a public education in Texas maybe one of those that's it divided it's still too early to know what's happening but the Republican party is definitely doing like a pivot after the last it was like a wave election for Democrats and they lost a lot of house seats they didn't expect to lose so they're definitely trying to pivot and I think part of that is there's a lot of you know Chamber of Commerce types who are like we do have to fund public education or else our economy is not going to be good like we really you know we're going to have a shortage of workers in these in middle you know middle school jobs and there's going to all this stuff is going to happen and we need to raise the you know overall performance around public schools so that's and previously I mean there was we were kind of on a trajectory of like pushing ever larger vouchers and charters and basically you know ending up like New Orleans where you basically have no public schools I mean that was what it that was the nightmare scenario I was imagining like the kind of mad max apocalyptic scenario from my point of view maybe that's like someone else's utopia but but now it seems like there's there's some internal forces in the business community that are sort of pushing back pretty forcefully and in Kansas is an even more concentrated version of the same story right yeah yeah that's um how are you doing my name is Chad Stinn I work with a color of change I'm from Dallas originally so it's always good to see another Texan and so my question was I wanted to ask about your thoughts around the possibility of direct service organizations serving as sort of that glue that can kind of build together coalitions that people may not think of as working in working together so even in working that color of change we went out to Detroit we organized there and with organizations like the Detroit water project who can help people get what exactly what they need while also helping people to kind of learn around the local elected officials who could be responsible for this and then also looking at it as a model to kind of serve as what people can do in in the face of preemption right so you mentioned Arlington and thinking through if there was a way in order to organize a car pool that allows people who need rides who may not have enough money for ubers and things of that nature to kind of show that there's a need there that may alert business owners in the area that hey we can get more customers if more people are coming through the area and then AFLCR or our labor organizations because hey we can have more people who are actually working in this actual city if we show that you know people people have a need and we can get the city to act in the face of preemption so kind of below the city level yeah I mean so I'm not familiar with the example that you gave in Detroit but it does sound like an interesting way to use that grassroots energy to policy advocacy of electoral work I mean I think that that that ultimately is sort of what the functional equivalent on the left might look like of say Americans for prosperity because ultimately I think you need that grassroots energy and mobilization in addition to the policy work the inside lobbying and the electoral mobilization as well yeah I sometimes think we we often jump to we often neglect what could be done by providing services when we're so focused on like reversing policies an example I always use like I like voter ID laws are generally voter suppression but they exist and they're the legal basis for them now is what it is and I'm really enthusiastic about organizations say okay let's get people IDs because it's actually good to have an ID in the world it's a useful thing their organizations like spread the vote and it's a way of organizing and mobilizing people and keeping them active outside of the election year often requires a fair amount of hand holding to help people find especially older people find the documentation they need but it's a really valuable way of like connecting people to society and so forth so without necessarily supporting voter ID laws in all their forms like there are things that we can do without you know as policy it's it's it's it's a binary game either you have them or you don't but you can actually if you have them there are opportunities I think to create a stronger base of activity that that gets people involved both both help both as the people doing the helping and the people who now have IDs yeah I just put in a plug for a recent report by a colleague Vanessa Williamson at the Brookings Institution so in order to access one of the most effective anti-poverty programs in the United States that earned income tax credit you have to file your taxes and as a low income person that can be quite a burden and you know she worked with counselors who were providing tax help to low income families to file for the EITC and then nudged them to register to vote and she followed up with a rigorous randomized controlled trial experiment that shows that that actually increased voter registration rates and turnout rates not just in say a blue state but in Texas one of her field sites was in Dallas because I think it's another next example yeah that was great uh yeah hi I'm Erin Goldsimer donor advisor Alex can you update us on the progressive attempts to do Alec so it seems to me so the Wisconsin guy originally created Alice and there were a bunch of other things at that time Alice was as you said just this ridiculous like anybody in the world could upload a model bill and it was you know it didn't do anything but then all of that got folded into six and six was supposed to be the answer and it and it seems to me that that's gone through several pivots and kind of hasn't gotten a lot of traction so can you just help us understand kind of what's happened and has it not gotten traction and if so what's the problem is it just funding yeah um so the latest iteration at least of the legislative side is this organization the state innovation exchange which was the product of merging several older organizations including Alice but also progressive states networks and another project that Joel Rogers started on the Center for State Innovation and you know I think the idea of merging those organizations was probably a good one I think that there is a tendency to have a lot of replication and duplication on the left now what six has done in the ensuing years in the book I only go through 2016 2017 but as best as I can tell their initial strategy seemed to be building on states that had strong progressive caucuses or where labor unions were already present so more of a blue state purple state strategy than a red state one like Lydia mentioned and you know I think that that that's a sensible strategy but it's ultimately not one that can build power across the whole country and what was so striking about Alec was in its early years in the 70s and 80s you know I interviewed some of its leaders during that time and you know they mentioned how they were making a concerted effort to attract lawmakers not just in the deep conservative red states but across the across the whole country and trying to be bipartisan by bringing in Democrats in as well to expand their reach within these states and so ultimately I think any strategy that's going to try and counter Alec you know needs to move beyond California and New York and maybe even states like Colorado as well. I've always felt like a lot of states a lot of state legislators historically don't necessarily identify as strong ideologues so if you say this is the thing for you if you're a progressive this is the team for you a lot of people are gonna say I you know I'm focusing on solutions for my community I have my party but I'm not that's not quite it and I always felt Alec presented a pretty you know a pretty light ideological face so there was no reason not to sign up for Alec there were interesting media you learned something you know a lot of the progressive it was like I would thought that was an issue with Progressive States network like it was only for if you really if this was your banner but that's leaving out a lot of people now I think over time there's a there are a lot more ideologues in state legislatures for a lot of different reasons and I think there were more conservative ideologues before there were more progressive ideologues but it's a pretty big difference I think in who serves in state legislative I don't know there may be academic work on that that I don't know but I'm kind of drawing on what people tell me that seems to be yeah that kind of shapes I think how you would structure those things yeah yeah well Alec did present itself as the alternative to say NCSL the National Conference on State Legislatures it was not you know cast as a far right alternative it was a comfortable home for even many conservative Democrats through the 1990s as I have the mic uh hi I'm David Kolker with Campion Legal Center I work on money and politics and in those states that have ballot referendum procedures I was wondering how you think going for a ballot referendum to amend state law rather than going through the state legislature how effective that can be for progressives and in particular whether you think Alec is as organized and effective in defeating ballot initiatives as in getting legislation through yeah you know I think it's an important functional sort of strategy for for progressives where that's available I mean I look to cases like Ohio where they were able to defeat the collective bargaining cutback bill agency fee bill as a result of the availability of a referendum Missouri where a similar thing happened but there are obviously limits to the strategy that conservatives are are testing and as in the case of Florida and Utah where they're taking active steps to undermine the referendum that the referendum that was passed by a majorities of the public so where it's available I think it's worth taking advantage of and I think it's interesting to think through this comparison between Ohio and Wisconsin where similar bills were put up to cut back the power of labor unions in the public sector and you know Ohio succeeded the Wisconsin recall failed pretty spectacularly and I think it was because in Ohio they could focus on the substance of the legislation itself whereas in Wisconsin they had to make it about the person Scott Walker and these other members of the legislature who were still you know pretty popular and people thought that a recall of an individual uh politician um was just beyond the pale in that particular state so I think there are advantage to use to using that strategy where it's available I would just do one that like if you don't you know there there's just so many tools that legislatures and then you know in Texas the AG's off the tenor attorney general and you know they just basically sue all day every day they sue cities they sue when obama was president they sued obama like they just get up every day and sue obama um and they they've weaponized the whole attorney general's office to suing basically it's like a huge almost like a public interest law firm but for conservatives and they but they're doing it with taxpayer dollars it's pretty pretty brilliant I have to admit I'm jealous like I don't want to be a player hater um but you know the the tools that states if they're run by republicans the tools they have to overcome progressive ballot initiatives are pretty extensive both to keep it from getting on the ballot or to change the rules or to sue to get overturned but even there's just there's so many um ways along the way so I would say do it if you got it you know smoke them if you got them and I wouldn't discourage you I mean we we've used that we do in Texas we've used city ballot initiatives um but I would say I what I don't want progressives to do is use that as an excuse not to confront the situation they're in you know I don't want it to turn into like an excuse like oh but ballot initiatives will save the day it's like we really have to like sit in our hole and you know contemplate the mess we have made and and recognize this situation we're in and I worry about anything that could be uh of sort of uh an excuse to engage in magical thinking I think we don't have to confront the underlying problem of of state legislative you know state legislatures being under republican control I agree with that I mean I've thought about this a lot in the campaign finance context and right now we're we're involved in some work with people thinking about rank choice voting at the state level and I think there's often a tendency to say you know just screw those legislators there are bunch of hacks we'll do things by ballot initiative but there really are like in campaign finance for example there were a number of ballot initiatives to enact public financing at the state level and then and people ignored legislatures but then in Connecticut they did it with the legislature and there were a lot of lessons like a ballot initiative is a one-off people do it it can be the outcome can be random you win you lose everybody goes nobody even remembers how they voted so there's no like particular attachment to the thing whereas if you actually work through a legislature and you and you make the bargains that actually are part of politics and you convince people that they can live in this system you have a much more you know you have a much more robust system at the end of the day that's probably different from sort of clear cut that like something like same-sex marriage or cannabis legalization that's a little more cleaner cut it doesn't evolve quite the administrative bargaining that that goes into other things but certainly on on the on political reform issues you've got to have both it like you got to learn both skills i guess at the very least because you're going to need them even when you have the victory from a ballot initiative you're going to need all the others to to make it work yes hi i'm Megan Campbell from feedback labs um i was wondering mark if you could speak a little bit more about the philanthropic funding side um so like Lydia mentioned we work with a lot of funders who are very comfortable funding specific service delivery um you know policy aims or are very comfortable funding sort of lofty ideals like openness and democracy and you know feedback accountability things like that but um or empowerment we worked with a funder last year who was really into the idea of empowering people but really not into the idea of building power for a specific you know progressive agenda and i'm i'm curious whether you see that pattern and if you think there it's changing at all or if so what what does it take to get um philanthropic funders more comfortable with the idea of funding power building well i'm certainly not the only person who can uh in this room generally you can speak to that and certainly not on this trio up here but um i think there there have been a lot of changes i think i have a have a review in the new democracy journal of a couple of books about philanthropy so um i i will i won't repeat all that um i i think there's there's definitely been more willingness to engage in more controversial in in politics per se and in promoting ideas from a more from a service delivery viewpoint there's still always resistance to the idea that you actually need to support adaptable infrastructure you know you need to you there you need organizations and that's actually one of the good things about something like the state priorities partnership that's not about a single it's not about paid family leave for example i mean you can and you can fund something that's about this particular cause but when that cause isn't moving when there's nothing happening there what does that organization do so that's why you need an organization that can both jump on opportunities and deal with challenges and have and have that more infrastructural approach so you know there it's always i mean funders want to be able to say i we set a goal we achieved it we went even though you know there's no they can do what they want like nobody's going to criticize them if they don't you know um but actually making sure that that they can build the underlying infrastructure which might be a set of organizations it might be making sure that an organization has you know enough general support and room to maneuver i talked about this thing we did called the state strategies fund which is getting money to state organizations well we made we could only make grants of like seventy five thousand dollars or hundred twenty five thousand dollars but what are we actually doing and then people would say no you know what that's the only flexible money it's like at least we have something that allows us to just keep the lights on and actually be an organization because everything else is about a campaign we're supposed to do so i think getting people i i think building power is one language infrastructure is another they're sort of slightly different things but it's really it's it's urgent i think for the philanthropic community to recognize that and there are definitely some funders that are that are that are quite good at it and i think you know if the the three organizations that i talked about are any model you know an important activity that they engaged in was convincing their donors and their members that these power building strategies made sense to prioritize even if that wasn't issue number one for say the nr a you know why would attacking labor unions be a number one private priority issue for them you know teaching them that this paves the way for everything else that you care about so you know that's something that organizations can convey to their donors first of all thank you very much for putting on a great event hosting us here at new america really appreciate all the interesting comments so far my question is actually a little bit of a follow-up which is very fortuitous because i had my question before you asked yours so thank you very much for teaming me up but um so i actually wanted to delve a little bit more lily you commented on you know the similarity that she focused on about how funders prioritize one very specific element and then how some organizations on the right as you said their members and their supporters are their funders themselves so if you guys you know lily and mark could kind of give some more texture to that and then you know have you ever thought about you know in this dialogue here where you're trying to learn a little bit more have you thought about uh inviting someone who's from the right to uh one of these organizations you guys have discussed to sit on the panel here with you guys and you know break down some of these differences where you can learn from one another yeah yeah i thought that was a really interesting way of summarizing that in your remarks the idea that the members are the funders in a way that is not often true on the left where you have wealthy individuals or philanthropic foundations that are supporting and that creates its unique problems but i do think that you know you have to come up with ways of getting these funders to support for instance the infrastructural activities that that mark talked about that was an important struggle for alex in its early years you know one of one of the executive directors i interviewed complained about how philanthropic foundations initially only wanted to fund a narrow issue specific topic and you missed out on funding the broader organization and it took the creation of the task forces to to enable that sort of infrastructural support which meant that you know the foundations had to join a task force that they cared about and they'd be contributing to that task force and that money could be used then to also support the entire organization so maybe the model would look different on the left but you should be thinking about ways that you can fund both those issue specific things and as well as the the broader organizations as to dialogues with the right you know i certainly welcome it i interviewed individuals from these organizations i interviewed conservative and liberal state lawmakers i surveyed these lawmakers from all stripes so i i think it's essential to understanding how these organizations operate and to take away lessons from them and i i hope that's something that that gets conveyed in my book that this is not simply a story of diabolical conservative confidence that that steve tell us has referred to yeah i mean we have we have i mean i i'll speak for new america a little bit i mean we we often have events that are quite balanced and in this case we we thought that would be interesting to have an event where we're talking about kind of the balancing of the power the balancing the current power of the right in this way i think the definitely conservative legislators and alex activists have been very generous with their time with with alex and and in things i've done i've had the same i've had the same experience so we definitely don't want to close ourselves off to that perspective there are just different kinds of conversations you have at different times and i think this is going to be the last question okay well that's a lot of pressure thank you my name is larkin global witness we are an investigative organization and so my question is about the value of investigative approaches alex mentioned jane mayer's books and i get that that's not your project but you know at the at the federal level especially there's been a lot of work kind of trying to delegitimize just as an example is caught through it and ron zincie and that worked to push them out so i don't know as much about that at the state level i suspect that there's not as much of that just given the hollowing out of local journalism so i'm wondering whether that would be kind of a valuable complementary technique or strategy to what you are discussing here you know to try to really expose these networks more i know that a lot has already been done but more at the more micro level you know the individual politicians and exactly documenting how they're captured if that's something that you see as valuable would it resonate with voters would it would it be successful thank you yeah i mean i think one of the reasons why as i talk about in the book businesses in particular found these organizations really appealing is because they were able to intervene in a level of politics where you know there's not a lot of scrutiny either from the public or from the media you know even when we had a more robust state how bench of state house reporters covering politics in the states you know people didn't really pay attention to what was happening in state houses and that's even more true today with the nationalization of politics and with the decline of coverage of what's happening in these in these state houses and there's been some really nice political science research that shows that on average there's no relationship between the sort of preferences that people have and the votes that their lawmakers take in the legislature the one exception to that is when you have greater coverage of the state house by by reporters so i think it's an essential part of both ensuring that politicians are accountable to their voters and ensuring that that voters know about what's happening behind the scenes yeah i i do the only thing i'd add is i i do worry if the venue is putting it out through print media that a lot of you know texas is a very young state the average age of a texas born latino is 17 so none of these folks are going to read newspapers so the only thing i'd add is like i the the level of political knowledge for texas is low even for say middle-aged anglo boomers who who vote every day like the still a lot of people don't know who their state house rep or the state senator is um they're voting basically on partisan cues alone and then folks who are not voters know even less so so i think that could be like in places like texas that could be helpful more investigative but on the other hand we've had a lot of big exposes of all manner of corruption shenanigans going on in texas and i don't see any signs that it's born fruit um just by itself because there's you know because of negative polarization there's just a lot of ability to say you know voters say as they do with trump say i don't care what my team did the other team's worse and so so i you know it's not like i'm saying it wouldn't work i'm just saying that's sort of that's like a moment of despair that i have about whether having more information matters apart from changing that that you know extreme polar polarizing let me add one thing to this and and maybe make this the last word which is that you know we don't a lot not not all of this is corruption i mean these are people aggregating power and doing the best they can to advocate the viewpoints that they that they hold and you know when we talk about steve tell us this phrase the myth of diabolical competence there's a myth of competence but there's also a myth of diabolical you know and and i don't think we're talking about things here that are diabolical they're things that are really important to understand and they're help the it's a way a particular set of people in a particular moment in time have aggregated power in an extraordinary level and it's important to understand it it's important to understand how to restore balance for that so there is corruption and there are corners here where there's potentially corruption but that's not i think the main theme here and i'm going to make that the last word but not the last word because the last word is to thank all of you for coming thank shayan polamedio and marisa strano from our political reform team for helping with this with this event and thank alex and lydia for a great presentation