 Welcome everybody. I am Anne from Stand.Earth. You are in the right place for the webinar Race and the Election. What changes in U.S. demographics could mean for progressive power? We are very honored to have Steve Phillips with us today. He's the best-selling author of Brown is the New White. How the demographic revolution has created a new American majority. He's also senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and the founder of Democracy in Color. Welcome Steve, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. And facilitating today is our Executive Director at Stand.Earth, Todd Paulia. Thank you Todd. Alright, with that I'm going to close out my webcam and let Todd take it away. Thanks Anne. And Steve, thanks again for being here. The new book which has been in New York Times best-seller, Brown is the New White. How the demographic revolution has created a new American majority. For those of you out there who have not read the book yet, it's an incredible book. It's not just about data and demographic changes. It is really rich in the story of America and what's happened over the last 400 plus years to deliver us to this moment. And Steve, just for folks who haven't read this book, can you just start us off with what is the new American progressive majority? What is it? Who are they? And when did you begin focusing on this? Yeah, so thanks for inviting me and everyone else for taking time to be part of the conversation. I'm quite literally a child of civil rights movement. I was born in 1964 in my first memories of seeing Martin Luther King when he came to Cleveland. I was three years old. My family desegregated our neighborhood in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. And we had all the biographies of Martin Luther King in the elementary school library when I was growing up. So I've had that milieu all along. And I was also very interested in politics my whole life. My next door neighbor ran for state legislature when I was like eight years old. It's probably been very drawn to politics and had the civil rights orientation. So, and a lot of that for me began to manifest in the 80s or in the 84 and 88, Jesse Jackson for president campaigns and the rainbow coalition. This concept of the old minorities coming together comprising a new majority. So that's really been, I think, a lot of ways my life's worked to build in the small R rainbow all these years. And so I have always believed that people of color and progressive whites are a strong political force within the country, within the world, frankly. And so when Obama ran in 06 and 07 and began to really put himself out there, it was very drawn to the campaign. It was really very hopeful about it because I had seen what was possible through the rainbow coalition, because when you have a mobilized enthusiastic community of color linked to progressive whites, what that could mean. And so what he won, and then even more importantly what he won in re-election, that said to me and showed me that there was this transformational point within the country's politics in that it was not just a question of a single individual being elected, there was this historic moment in terms of electing the first American president, but was particularly politically significant, is that it marked the transformation and an inflection point in terms of elections and who actually could be elected and what the coalition that could elect people with was. And so particularly around this re-election where he got 5 million fewer white votes and he got in 2008, he had still won re-election by over 4 million votes. So that to me showed politically, mathematically that there is this majority, which is large numbers of people of color, a high percentage of people of color population, plus the meaningful minority of whites who consistently vote progressive. He got 39% in 2012. That's what I call the new American majority. They used the Obama metrics from 2012, so one of our best chances to quantify who that is, how many people it is, and so 80.5% of voters of color, 39% of white vote, that was Obama's winning coalition, and if you take those percentages and you apply them to the entire eligible voter population in the country, that's 51% of the entire country's voting population. So that's what I mean by new American majority, 80% of people of color, 39-ish percent of whites, and historically every presidential election since 1976, they average 40% of whites who vote for the Democrat. That's the majority, and it's a progressive majority. And so it was just part of the much of the impetus for the White Book is both that too many people in political campaigns don't appreciate that this marked an inflection point in terms of the electorate. And they wrote it off as well where the singularly gifted charismatic leader, which we'll never have yet, but no, it's showing that in terms of who actually votes, that if we double down on invest in organized mobilize, the communities of color and progressive whites around a progressive agenda that we can and should be winning elections. So that was the premise and that was the underlying principles put in the book together. And it seems like there's been a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy around this idea that President Obama, as gifted and special as he is, there's a sort of sense of his uniqueness is why he won, and then the sort of forgetting of this progressive majority that lent to the loss of Congress. I mean, it feels like that is sort of cemented in some ways, which are beginning to break open this idea that progressive majority even exists because we keep losing in Congress. So why did that happen? What do you see as the central sort of mistake from a historic win to a series of losses in Congress? Yeah, so that's a very important point. I actually wanted to fit into a big thing on Twitter the other day about it. This political science professor from Michigan sent me a 37-page paper which was intellectually flawed in terms of his presence. So a lot of people assume, and that's what this paper was arguing, and not even just that guy, it really is the conclusion that people, even David Axelrod put it in his book, the instruction we were saying in 2014, the premise is that the electorate was stacked, and that the voters elected Obama, then the Democrats overreached on health care, and then the voters turned on the Democrats and voted them out. And that is the dominant narrative, which persists sadly to this day. Yet it's not mathematically correct, and it's not supported by the actual evidence of what happened. So in any election, any off your election, there's some level of drop-off from the presidential here, so the 2010 drop-off, the Republican drop-off was 7 million votes. Democratic drop-off was 26 million votes. That's why we lost the House, and then there was a similarly dramatic drop-off of 2014. So it wasn't that there was this shift against the voters, against the Democrats by the static electorate, that those people who were against the Democrats kept voting, and those people who were more progressive didn't come out. And so that's the lesson. If we really want to preserve and continue gains in non-presidential years, we've got to work on getting people out to vote to the polls. So it's a lot of that has to do with the organization. A lot of that has to do with reforms in terms of the structurally online voter registration, making it easier for people to participate and get out to the polls, same-day voting, things like that, as well as inspiring candidates and issues. All of that needs to be built into the operation so that we could have more greater participation in those off-years. That's the key lesson, and I think it's a critical lesson heading towards 2018. Yeah, and Steve, you got into a bit of detail in the book, which I thought was very interesting, as far as how healthcare reform and how immigration reform sort of played into what ended up being a kind of abandonment of this progressive majority. So there's online voting, there's voter registration. There's a lot of factors, but even how the administration and Congress played those big ticket legislative battles kind of went in the wrong direction in a lot of ways. Can you talk about that a little bit, and how that impacted turnout in all of those Democrats staying home? Yeah, so the problem I thought was significantly that, again, people didn't come out to vote. And so that was the issue, and that was the challenge, is that why don't our folks turn out? And there was not provided to people... Actually, I'm going to make it a little logistically here. My house is going to get a little bit... I moved my location, but I'm still going to be part of this, but you'll just see me moving around a little bit. Hold on one second. In terms of that piece of the election, people in 2010 and 2014 did not realize and did not appreciate that there were important things taking place in the election that year and that there was a reason to come out. Everybody came out, they supported Obama, they supported what his agenda was, but they didn't realize that in 2010, the things he was fighting for in terms of health care, in terms of immigration reform, the issues that were important to the New American majority were at risk and were going to be rolled back and were going to be attacked in that year. And so that was the problem that we faced in that time period. And so there's this downward spiral, is that if your conclusion is that the reason that we lost, which is what Schumer and Oxford and others were saying, is because we were too liberal and too progressive, then you're just going to get even less progressive. But what actually happened is that we were not making the argument to progressive people around why it was important and why it was worthwhile to come out. And so it's actually the opposite of what the congressional wisdom is from what we should be doing and what we should have been doing at that time. Yeah, and this is a big theme of what you have found in sort of working on and investigating this issue and writing this book, which is fascinating and I think played out in exactly the example we're talking about right now. But this sort of whether you end up calling it soccer moms or white working class or ex-urban, there's a variety of labels that you mentioned for this sort of shrinking white swing voter and how it sounds like this is still an incredible obsession despite the presence of this progressive majority of like focusing in on this increasingly small white swing vote segment. How do you think that happened and why does it keep happening? What's the deal? Yeah, and unfortunately it continues to happen to this day. I think in many ways even the Clinton campaign gets these issues more than some of the folks we've been, I think, ran Obama's campaign but still not sufficiently. And so you hear in recent days that the Clinton campaign is going to contest Arizona, but the monetary expression of that is going to put $2 million in the TV ads. And the point of TV ads is a persuasion to change the mind that the likely voters was tended to be a whiter sector of the pool. Similarly, Priorities USA, the Super PAC is going to go into Georgia and they're going to go into Georgia with TV ads. Whereas those $2 million in Arizona, $1 million in Georgia, that amount of that money could go towards hiring staff, people to do phone banking and door knocking and identifying and getting people to the polls, which after Americans in Georgia and Latinos in Arizona, that's the way to actually win the election. So I think at a certain level it's a combination, which you're asking is the single most common question I've gotten this entire year as I've gone across the country is why does this persist? Part of it I think frankly is just laziness and that it's much easier for a consultant to think up, a seemingly brilliant ad and then put it on the computer and then just shoot it out to lots of people. It's a much easier proposition than to hire dozens or hundreds of people, organize a canvassing operation, track all of that data. It's very labor intensive and frankly less profitable to the consultants. So that I think is a big part of it. And then the other part we were talking about before is I just don't think that people have really come to terms with the electoral significance of the arrival of the Obama coalition as a significant and ongoing force within elections. And they still think that the most important voters are those likely voters who tend to be the swing voters that they persist when they go after. Yeah, well, this thinking does continue to persist, which some of the examples that you gave make it all the more sort of galling that this thinking persists. One of the examples that you provided is California, the launching place of Nixon and Reagan, and that's an example of where the new progressive majority in a lot of ways has taken control. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that's as far as a microcosm and a very large one, how it's already worked. So what's different there and why is some of the thinking that we're seeing persist naturally? What reverses in California? Right, and we've made a lot of progress in California, but there's still ways to go. California is actually now mathematically the majority of all eligible voters are people of color. So technically, you don't need any voters to actually win an election, a white voter to win an election. But fortunately, roughly more than a third are progressive. People still persist in terms of trying to chase the moderate conservative white swing voter. But how we got to this point, it is a model for the country, an example for the country of what we're going for, particularly now with this year with Trump and the whole backlash and the whole resentment of the communities of color. There's a great book called Preserving Privilege by Professor Jule Gibbs, who documented what happened in California in the early 90s, and there were these ballot measures, and Governor Pete Wilson ran on an anti-immigration platform. He was the first border bill to wall person. Then there was the anti-violent litigation ballot measure, anti-affirmative action, anti... The whole three strikes measure came forward. So all of these ballot measures and all of this public policy that was driving politics in the early 90s in California was rooted in a reaction against and fear of the changing demographics of the state. And so what happened is, picked after the anti-immigration measure and people sustained a four piece, Latinos began to register and naturalize in large numbers and became a much bigger portion of the electorate within the state of California. And so from that time period, really since 1998, with the exception of a movie star actor who people thought they were electing a character from a movie rather than an actual person, there's a Schwarzenegger, California has elected no Republicans statewide because the electorate has changed so dramatically over that time period. And what that's enabled in terms of its potential that's opened up is to pass a much more progressive policy agenda. So on the democracy front, we have been able to pass online registration, same day voter registration. After we pass online voter registration, the six weeks after that, 800,000 people registered to vote. And so opening up and expanding into now Secretary of State Padilla is advancing automatic registration. So if you're in the DMV records, then you're automatically put on the voting rolls. And so it upends the notion around you have to do all this work to get somebody on the rolls to vote. And as organizers, it takes out, eliminates that hurdle that's time, labor, and money to be able to have to get folks on the rolls. To be able to do that, in the environmental realm, when we had Kevin De Leon, President of the State Senate, and then groups like Green For All, and Green Lining, Feats on the V-N Trungs, one of the leaders of Green For All now. It's a big advocate for this work. This whole polluter pays notion. And so California has now created legislation which requires polluters to pay money into a fund which then goes to disadvantaged communities. And so we're now moving close to half a billion dollars a year directly into disadvantaged communities. And those funds coming from greenhouse gases and the polluters and that whole sector of the population, that could be a model for the whole country. And so those things became possible as the electorate changed and as the electorate put new people in power. And so I think that's a glimpse of what the power and the potential is in this year as well. So there's the whole fight for 15 minimum wage piece. The governor did not want to embrace that as legislation. But the nurses union and others got it qualified for the ballot. And when they did, he knew that he could count that the electorate would vote for it. And so then they're letting them embrace legislation to move it forward. So a whole progressive era of public policy is now possible because of the political composition of the demographics of the electorate. Yeah. And when we talk about major leading-edge progressive areas, we don't often think of Texas. And that's one of the states that you write about that actually sort of remarkably could follow what's happened in California. Can you talk a little bit about both the numbers and what you think is possible in a state that many of us think is so conservative like Texas, but may not be. It may be one of these assumptions of, you know, that is actually because of demographic shifts, just no longer accurate. Right. Yeah. So it's fascinating that people see Texas as so conservative. It has this reputation and its history in that regard in terms of its actual voting population and the people that they tend to elect. So yes, a lot of conservatives and the Democrats and progressives have had a very hard time at the statewide level. Texas has extraordinarily low voter participation is what the challenge is. Even the white population does not turn out at a very large level at Texas. And so you know a situation like Wendy Davis ran for governor in 2014. She lost by 900,000 votes. 2010 governor raised the Democrats lost by 600,000 votes. There are 4 million eligible non-voting people of color in Texas. 3 million Latino alone. And so those numbers right there represent the complete transformation in terms of the potential of what Texas politics could be and what's fascinating now is that even in this year's election, I think some of it's the backlash and the resistance to Trump. But even the presidential race this year is fairly close in Texas. So it holds showing a three, four point difference in what not. So voter turnout, in maximizing voter turnout, voters of color could flip and transform the state. So that's the one point about Texas. The other point, which I think is a lesson for the whole country, is that there's a lot of potential and opportunity in the progressive areas within what are seen as conservative states. And so statewide, yes, we've not been able to win even the current electorate, but there in the other with the public policy opportunities that these cities have large numbers of people. So Houston, San Antonio, Dallas are areas that have large numbers of people. There are two plus million people in Houston alone. And Houston's elected white lesbian mayor for two or three terms who was then succeeded by an African-American mayor. And they're able to actually look at making some public policy reforms in terms of economic justice, et cetera, within that area. And so it's possible to look at that model and you could say, okay, well, Texas has a state. You're not going to be able to move the entire population yet until we do the political transformation. But you can move a public policy agenda in these more progressive municipal areas. So if you can pass something in Houston and San Antonio and Dallas and a couple other cities, then you can actually reach many of the people in the state. And similarly in California, we can even be more progressive. You can pass Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego. That's like 15 million people in those areas. So if you can make a public policy change, you can start to effectively improve the lives of large numbers of people within those geographic areas without having to actually win statewide. Yeah, absolutely. One of my favorite chapter titles of any book I've read last year is too many smart-ass white boys, which really is about following the money. And the money dictates a lot of what happens with our progressive strategies. Can you talk a little bit about what you saw when you started following the money? Yeah, so the title chapter is fewer smart-ass white boys. And it's drawing from a line that Andy Young, who was one of Martin Luther King's lieutenants, said in 84, became the mayor of Atlanta. And he was trying to get Walter Mondale's campaign to understand the importance of voter mobilization in the 84 presidential. And they wouldn't listen to our frustration. It's like I'm trying to get them to understand, but they're just as much as smart-ass white boys. They think they know everything. And so that's the challenge. And also, let me actually mention as well in this context that this is the people who control Democratic Party politics, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars really every year, and a couple billion dollars in a presidential year, who have an outdated and surprisingly evidence-free and non-data-driven approach to politics. So this is the example I mentioned in terms of the Arizona and the Georgia campaigns. Those states are competitive this year, but the notion around how do you actually win them, whether the best use of two million dollars is to run television ads, and there's very little empirical data about the effectiveness of television ads. All kinds of data are on the effectiveness of getting a voter to the polls. If you have African-American voters who are voting 90% Democratic, and you're running a Democratic campaign, every black person you get out is a vote for you, basically. Whereas if the white swing vote population at best is going to be 50%, but historically Democrats have only gotten 40%. And so are you even going to be effective around getting that grouping to be able to... So the effectiveness of that dollar is not very high, and it's not very supported by data and evidence. And yet, so much of the money is spent, and there's resistance in the arrogance and ignorance. So there's not knowledge around how do you actually engage and effectively mobilize voters of color. And then it's attached to a level of arrogance around why we know how these do these campaigns, and I've got this computer fire power, and so they're not willing to actually hear or listen and understand better. And that's what the challenge is. So that is one of the big campaigns that I'm going to be engaged in right after this election. I'm trying to connect up with national partners, and we're going to roll out a declaration that calling on the Democratic Party to prioritize investing its resources and gearing its strategy towards the new American majority. And then we're going to try to rally people around that and really try to insist that the people who get appointed to be head of the DNC and the Senate committee and the Democratic congressional committee are people who come from this community, who come from this mindset, as well as trying to make sure that there's a diversity of leadership in these positions. Because that's the other kind of dirty secret of Democratic and even progressive politics, is that 46% of our Democratic voters, which I use as the proxy for progressives, are people of color. Yet the overwhelming amount of resources and money is controlled by whites. And so then if you take that and you add that to the level of arrogance around not wanting to understand or thinking you know better when in fact you necessarily don't, but you don't even know what you don't know, that's a big problem. And it's going to be an even bigger problem for progressives after this election, because I believe this, they're going to be a major, it'll be an internal war. It is a internal war and it's in the Republican side and the conservative side, but one side of that war is going to be contesting for people of color's votes. And Democrats are not used to making an argument around why they're better. They can just point to them and say, look how bad they are. But if someone like Marco Rubio is standing up and saying, I come from the immigrant experience, I know what people of color is like, and my views are better for people of color. Democrats have to make a stronger, better argument and they're not equipped yet to do that. And if they do not shift the composition of their leadership and the priority of their agenda, they're going to be quite vulnerable going forward. So a lot of the people on the webinar, Steve, are activists of all different kinds, working on environmental issues, some on electoral issues. That work that you're going to do post-election, is there a place where people can stay tuned or possibly engage in that issue? Yes, so we're going to be, we have an online digital platform, thedemocracyincolor.com and thedemocracyincolor.org integrated. So the campaign will be run out of that in the front, so they can go to Democracy in Color and keep track of it. And I believe there's a sign up there, and if not, people can just reach me at stevesdphilips.com and then we can plug you into that campaign. Great, great. And we're going to turn to a couple of questions from the audience at this point. And our first question is from Scott S. Okay, great. Can you give me a second? I'm going to open up Scott's line here. All right, Scott, let's see if we can hear you. Scott, can you hear us? Okay, I'm going to ask the question on your behalf. Sorry, we couldn't pull you in. Scott's question is, do you have a view on the future prospects of the conservative party in regards to African-American and Hispanics? Yeah, I'm laughing because it's a question that I've actually started to think more, a lot more about in the past few days. I still believe that the intensity and the ferocity of this election, as well as the significance of it, is that many of Trump supporters feel instinctively, and I ought to probably say correctly, that this is the last best chance to hold back the changes from the demographic revolution. In terms of making America great again, getting back to the country they used to know and love, which just happened to have women in the kitchen and blacks not able to vote. But I always felt like, well, if this actually happens, then that's like the last stand. But now I'm wondering, well, is this going to be the last stand? And I also felt like, because I've never believed that Trump was actually in this election to try to get elected president, is that I think he always wanted to become more famous, as we've quoted in an article saying that if he loses, he just goes back to being Trump, only bigger. And so that's why he was able to win, because he was not playing the game to win the general, where you can't be as extreme and racist and misogynistic as he is. But that was fine in the primary. So he only really wanted to do well in the primary to promote his. So where does that energy go? That's one of the big questions, and who are going to be the leaders and which direction are they going to go? So it's clearly going to be a more, I don't know if I would call it moderate, but a sector which wants to connect with and explicitly try to be more respectful and engaging of voters of color. We call it kind of the Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush constellation and or don't sleep on George P. Bush, right, that Jeb's half Mexican son, right? And then there's going to be the conservatives, which is more Ted Cruz in particular, which has been a little bit confusing to me, because I always thought that, you know, kind of the white nationalist part of their coalition was conservative. And so there's conservatives saying, this is not our party. Who did you think were actually your constituents and were voting for you all this time? So that would be an interesting piece. But then there is this explicitly unapologetic white nationalist constituency. And where does that go? And what role is Trump going to play in terms of trying to organize it and lead it and consolidate it? And is there somebody else who can actually come forward and try to capture that, or is it just going to die off? I'm now thinking that it's not just going to die off as quickly as I thought it and hoped it might, but it's very unclear where it'll go. But I think that this level of internal civil war will continue for the next period of time for the Republicans. But on the Democratic side, there's no time for complacency, because it is entirely possible that a rubio could emerge from that battle as the standard bearer and as somebody who looks different than a Democratic leadership does. Yeah, so to a certain extent, because of inaction by the Democrats and progressives, things are up for grabs in a fairly dangerous way. In reading your book, I mean, it was very heartening because the numbers, if we actually move in this direction, the numbers are so positive for a progressive majority to really start flexing its muscle. And as you know in this current election, the idea of a progressive majority feels very far away. What you see is the role of media and how this election has proceeded that leads the sense of there's actually a lot of danger. Not that we're on the brink of victory, but we're on the brink of something possibly terrible. That's the sense of foreboding with the election. Do you think the media has played a major role in creating that, even if the numbers are on Earth's side generally, it sure doesn't feel that way. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I would say that particularly in June, July, August, that was a particular problem. So at some level, the media, you know, there are these quotes. It was at maybe the last Moonves and CBS, somebody like that saying that, you know, this is terrible for democracy, but it's great for ratings in terms of Trump's campaign and the attention he was bringing to it. So at some level, they were drawn to it, almost like a whatever car wreck or whatnot. So there's some level of that. I don't believe that is what created him. I believe that he has quantified the number of people who are driven by racial resentment in terms of their politics. And it's around 30, 35% of the Republican base. And that's enough to win in a 17 candidate field. So I don't believe ultimately it was the media who did that. And it's interesting, one of the lessons from the selection to me is for all the talk of big money and Citizens United and all of that, the real story of the elections, you know, Bernie Sanders raised $200 million and average $28 contributions. Jeff Bush raised $100 million from big donors in Trump on Twitter destroyed him. Right. And so it really wasn't about the money or the resources in that same way. He was just able to directly appeal to, they never had a champion like him, appeal to and draw out that constituency. The role of the media was then in normalizing him and legitimizing this type of behavior. And so it's people to forget that when right after he announced his campaign, that the whole Mexicans are rapist piece, he was condemned. And they were like, Macy's was disassociating themselves from all these corporate actors who were disassociating themselves from him. But the half-life of that was very short. And so very quickly after it's like, oh, well, that's old news. And I was like, well, what is the half-life of racism? You know, somebody was explicitly saying they're going to do that they're appealing to a racist campaign. But then we don't consistently treat them that way. And so what is going on where NBC is inviting him to host Saturday Night Live? Jimmy Fallon's, you know, cosiling his hair in this joking kind of a way. That takes away, that redefines him from being this is the racist candidate who does not represent the values of the American people to always a fun guy, et cetera. So I think the media was very complicit in that. And that was my big fear. I think that's actually why he almost caught up in the polls, because he allowed to get normalized to then, you know, redefine who he actually is. And so then the polls separated again. But there was definitely a very dangerous period in there where he was being treated just as a regular normal person, which had a big impact on the standing of the race. Yeah, absolutely. We have another question first from Wit J. And then Kane and T coming up. All right. Let's see if we can bring in Wit. Hey, Wit, let's see if we can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Great. Thank you very much, Steve. As you know, environmental groups are big players in elections and are spending upwards of $100 million per election cycle. Was curious to your reflections on how good a job we're doing at focusing on the new American majority and what more we could do? Yeah, another great question. So I'll say two things on that. Once I actually wrote a piece on the Democracy in Color website and I've been writing these analyses and I think I actually wrote one. I do the monthly column for The Nation magazine where I first said our voters of color are invisible. I said our African-American voters are invisible to the regressors and Democrats. So the first wave of announced spending from the independent side of the secret packs as well as environmental groups, et cetera, there was actually very little any money for black voter mobilization which is the key pillar, just mathematically, of the winning Democratic coalition. And then I've interacted with, I've raised this to the folks at Next Gen Climate and me on Tom Steyer actually is a friend of ours. But around pushing them around, are there, they want to do a lot of work with millennials, but how do people even, what's the picture of a millennial in your head? Almost the majority of millennials or certainly people under 18 are people of color. If you're just doing college campuses and you're just doing college campuses in states that are not reflective of the diversity of the country, you're kind of structurally locking yourself out from engaging and reaching the new American majority. So having said, so I think that the start was slow and in the wrong direction, although it was some level of progress from 2014 where a lot of the money was just going in towards television ads and the point of these television ads is persuasion around voters of color, well persuasion of the white swing voter. But through the course of this campaign, certainly over the past couple of months, I've seen more progress. So Steyer and Next Gen are actually putting $20 million into a labor super pack that is specifically focused on mobilizing voters of color. And so that's, to me, that is putting one's money where one's mouth fits. And so that's a very encouraging development in that direction. I started an organization called Power Pack that does voter mobilization of voters of color or working with the leaders from the NAACP who did a large mobilization in 2012. Steyer Club is moving some money into that effort to do voter mobilization work in North Carolina. So I think there's an increasing awareness of that, of how that works, it needs to take place, but it still needs to be accelerated. And so part of what I say, and I give my talks, is that when I need a new American majority, when I need my bronze, new white, the voters of color have to go from being an afterthought to the first thought. And it's true, is the environmental movement has a tremendous amount of resources. And I think a candid assessment would be that it's not had a tremendous amount of success with its policy agenda. But the numbers are there to change who it makes this policy. And so those resources could be married with the force that comes from the demographic revolution, hiring staff, people, investing in organizations, strengthening the capacity of institutions and organizations in the community of color. I keep saying, as an example, why isn't there a civic engagement coordinator for almost every faith institution that serves large number of people of color in the country? And so then you get everyone's name, are they registered, how do they list, do they know what the voters are? So that's not an extraordinarily expensive proposition, but it's a way to upvote a participation and a way to provide education around how these issues come together. And I think that's why I really like the example of SB 535 in California, the Pluter Pays Initiative, that that is a way for these movements to come together. And so for the environmental movement to make a tangible policy victory, but to have the benefit of that victory be able to move resources into these disadvantaged communities that actually need resources. And that kind of partnership, I think, is what will be necessary and what can really propel the environmental movement into being a bigger, longer lasting player with real tangible policy wins. Great. Thanks, Steve. And, Anne, I think we have Kainan T. up next, audience question. Yes. All right. Kainan, let's see if we can hear you. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Thanks. So mine is a two-part question. I'm wondering if there is any chance of a third progressive party emerging? Because there is a certain suspicion that the Democratic Party is kind of in the center of the political spectrum and is corporate friendly and for that reason may suffer from some conflict of interest once in power. The second question is with respect to color. How do you see color, people of color falling in the spectrum between the center and the far left? So I'll start with the second question. So I talk in the book about how that my analysis of people of color are actually inherently, not inherently, they are kind of inherently progressive because they face inequality and they face disparate treatment. And so one of the most central issues of the society is the level of inequality that would exist within this country. There's a profound racial wealth gap. The average white family is $150,000 and assets average black family, $10,000 and Latino are $11,000. And even Asians who have come from, is a little more complicated issue because 74% of Asian American adults are immigrants from a higher economic strata of their home country. It's only $75,000 because the Asian American household net worth and so there's half of what whites are. So this economic inequality affects everything, though they have housing and quality education, you know, they're living in a healthy environment. And so to the extent that communities of color are in that situation and they're in that situation because of deliberate historic public policy and ongoing active implicit bias in terms of hiring and investing in different communities. So you have the situation, so communities of color want better conditions. They want better opportunities for their kids. They want better schools. They want, you know, those different types of opportunities which are about equality. And so to get that and to move in that direction, you actually have to have more public policy change. And so that is the definition to me of progressive, you have to have more progressive change. So I put communities of color on the left side of the political spectrum because they face inequality and are driving to change the society and bring about it and make it more equitable. In terms of the third party issue, I get the point around the Democrat Party does not represent the constituencies that it should and does not prioritize those communities. But I'm less pessimistic about the potential to change that. And so I'm much more interested in taking over and transforming the Democratic Party than I am in trying to create a third party. And then we don't have examples in this country of there being successful third parties overall, the structure of even the electorate and even the legal system is that it's a two-party situation. But most significantly, we have the opportunity to take it over. 46% of Obama's voters are people of color. And so we take that plus the progressive whites in terms of the allies and partners, that should be the entity which takes over the party. So that's going to be a lot of the impetus behind this marching color declaration that we're going to be launching right after the election in terms of. And then the chair of the party is an elected position. And so actually people could run or somebody could run for that around a platform that's a more progressive platform. So I would rather us focus our energy and efforts around trying to take control of and hold accountable the Democratic Party. Their budget and their spending are public documents. And so that's something that can be analyzed, downloaded from FEC or these different sites and Open Secrets and ProPublica. And there's all the social media now where you can hold them accountable. We did an audit of Democratic Party spending in 2014, but anybody could actually do that. And so the accessibility and opportunity is there and the moment is here. And so there's going to be a transformation over the next few months of the leadership of the Democratic Party. So this creates a great opportunity for us to really weigh in to get the right people in positions of power and the chairs and executive directors and top staffing positions. And I think we can focus on that. And I do think that there'll be more of a potential allies in that fight. There are some people in the Clinton world who are social justice fighters and social justice advocates who will likely have high level positions in the Clinton administration and the Democratic Party. So we partner with them to bring up the others who can then transform the composition of the party in its direction and priorities. So Steve, a quick follow-up on that. And this may be too optimistic. I'm wondering what your thoughts are. Is there any way that Trump and the misogyny and racism that he's really brought into the forefront in a way that hasn't happened in a long time in a national election? Could that be a strange blessing in disguise as far as motivating this block, this new progressive majority to really start moving and take over the Democratic Party is that a potential? I think there's potential for it. I mean, it's always a balance because when you have people who have enough challenges facing them, just don't have enough transportation options and childcare and working multiple jobs and you're getting treated poorly at work, you have to worry about the police. And you add on to that, then you've got this crazy presidential candidate. At some level it can be galvanizing and motivating, at another level it can kind of be more potentially dispiriting, actually. So that's a little bit of a balance piece in that regard. But part of the work too, I think, is that we have these movements that we have to, I think, try to connect with in both validate and draw in. So you have a Black Lives Matter movement, you've got immigration reform and dreamers movement, can we channel in, tie into those communities in those sectors? And then another realm of this, which I think is something that does seem to me to have marked a cultural turning of the corner, is around this issue, particularly around sexual assault. And that after that videotape came out, the number of women who have been speaking up and telling their stories and being empowered to actually, in talking about their experiences within the progressive movement, progressive organizations, has been startling to me as a man. And I've been, you know, I've learned a lot, and it's been notable that people who I have known for a long time and did not know they had these experiences, are now speaking up and sharing them. So that suggests to me that something has changed in that regard. And so in terms of being able to deal with the empowerment and elevation of women within leadership, that I do have greater hope for. Yes, absolutely. We have another audience question. I think this is going to be our last audience question. Gary C is next. Ann? Ann, are you with us? Sorry, huh. Gary, are we able to hear you? Can you jump in? Gary C? Okay. I'm sorry we can't bring you in. I'll ask on your behalf. Okay, Gary's question is, in the discussion and search for answers to the racial issues Black Lives Matter is bringing to light, how do we avoid the historical trap of a white leadership majority telling minority communities what they need, what is best for them? How do we ensure the right voices are being heard and leading the way to real solutions? I think that one of the lessons and challenges we face is what does allyship look like? And so that's our question. How do we be supportive of efforts in community groupings and communities where driving these types of concerns? So the Black Lives Matter movement has a very politically sophisticated grouping of leaders who are giving, have a long view of how do you build up power, how do you impact an interface with positions of power and institutions? So a big part of the work, fundamentally is the question around resources and how are we, and there's a question around accountability of those who move resources. So what are the foundations doing? Are the funders to what's actually happening in that regard? And so this allyship piece can be challenging, holding accountable. Those who are in positions of authority and have positions over allocating resources, how are they partnering up with these movements? And so I think that's something that we have to both watch and hold accountable. For example, both foundations, a lot of the funders used to talk about this, there's some different progressive donor networks around how are they going to be moving their resources to these types of groups and being accountable to what they want to have. And then new entrepreneurs, so Bernie Sanders' campaign is creating this Group R Revolution. He obviously has a large national donor network. How is he going to be moving resources in this regard? So that I think is one of the key things, is challenging the organizations and institutions and leaders who have some capacity to move resources. They're going to move them into organizations and respect the leadership of those organizations that are trying to advance these struggles. A lot of ways I think that's one of the main challenges and opportunities that we face is the thing, you know, what does it show me the money? We're going to actually commit to investing in these movements in ways that are honorable and respectful and can help them achieve their goals. So, Steve, is there anything that you, we're at the end of our questions, anything that we haven't covered that you really think is important for people to understand going forward? Well, I think that I would, people should don't sell yourself short in terms of what is possible in terms of holding accountable the larger institutions. And so I do think that, first, that's my third party in Democratic Party. There's a lot of cynicism about the Democratic Party in particular in some level of hopelessness about it. But it's a multifaceted entity and we live in an era where there's a lot more potential impact for an individual because of the technological tools that we have now. And so anybody can be watched on and you can be a watchdog by downloading data and analyzing data and doing report cards around your local Democratic party or your local candidate. How did they spend their money? And how does that align? And I, in chapter six of my book, InvestWise, they try to offer questions that can be a guide. So anybody can ask these questions. People who have responsibility for running these campaigns. What is the plan? Do you have a plan? How many, what's the composition of the electorate that you're trying to get you to 50% plus one? Does your budget match that plan? So there are some very specific pieces. And I guess what I'm trying to offer people is the confidence that we're right and that the numbers and the data and the evidence is on our side to then push those who are making decisions often without correct data to be more accountable. So the technological tools provide us the access to get that data and analyze it. And the technological revolution also provides us the ability to share the information. And so social media is a platform to be able to get the word out in ways that can hold entities accountable. So now even like, you know, we see it like with, in customer service and in corporations. So if you have a bad experience with an airline and then you tweet that out and tag the airline, they get right back to you often. So how can I help you? They don't want their name tarnished through social media. And so we have that opportunity and that potential to be able to use the tools to hold groupings accountable and use the tools to spread the word around what is happening. And that is a way that the average person is more empowered now than we did, we would have been 20, 30 years ago, technologically. So I just want people to feel the own that power that we have the ability to make these changes and that to just encourage all of us that at this moment we are at an inflection point. We're gonna, in the final months of the first block president in the history of this country, we're hopefully in the beginning period of both electing the first woman president and in some ways this will be a transition period between what comes next for the party. There will be some few years of internal debate and struggle which will be healthy. And so this is the time to engage this struggle in this battle and I'm fairly optimistic and hopeful that we can make progress because the numbers are actually on our side if we apply ourselves and use all the tools that we have to maximize that. Yes, so in a certain sense we are the ones we've been waiting for as the song goes. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for your work over the last several decades and the book, if you haven't read it yet, is well worth picking up. Brown is the new white. And for your next moves, democracyandcolor.com is where we can keep up with what's next in this fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. Thanks so much, Steve. Great, thank you guys.