S5E20: Lifeboats: Chloe Maxim / Canyon Woodward

This is Larry Lessig.

I think the hardest thing for many of us to imagine is a healthier

or maybe just even less hateful politics. It's hard to imagine such a thing because it's hard to see how it would work.

And it's not the politics we see

every day, at least at the federal level.

And it's difficult to imagine building a less hateful politics into anything that we do. At least if you're in a swing district and so flooded with hateful negative advertising every two years, it will be difficult to imagine politics as something different. But in today's conversation, I talked to two people who have helped build something different in Maine. Chloe Maxim and Canyon Woodward were students together at Harvard. After graduating, Chloe returned to her hometown in Maine and decided to run for the state legislature. Chloe's town is among the most rural in America. The district was decidedly red, while Chloe

was definitely not red.

It was a kind of crazy idea, but she called her friend Canyon, and he agreed to come help. And they launched themselves on a campaign to win as a Democrat in a district that had not elected a Democrat in many, many, many years. It's an extraordinary story recounted in her book with Canyon Dirt Road Revival. And more importantly for our purposes, the story Chloe and Canyon tell is a picture about how we could build Democratic politics to be more healthy. Because if necessity is the mother of invention, then the story they tell is the story of an extraordinary invention that came from the necessity of persuading Republicans and independents to vote differently. The invention Kenyon and Chloe made was of a kind of politics that meets people face to face at their door, even their door in an extremely rare rural district, not just once, but an average four or five times across the

course of the election.

And not just with their base with the Democrats, but with everyone. And not with a message of hate or disgust, but with a question. What are you thinking? What are your thoughts? And with an honest effort to listen and understand, and with this technique and a range of strategies that the media consultants and advisors to the Democratic Party rejected, Chloe won her election in 2018 and then went on to win a Senate seat, a state Senate seat in 2020. Necessity forced this kind of campaign. But the lesson I want you to hear in the conversation today is that we might think about constructing this necessity as a way to heal American politics. People like my friend Danielle Allen have argued for increasing the size of the House of Representatives substantially. If we kept the proportion that existed at the founding, we'd have more than 11,000 representatives in Congress rather than the 435 that we have today. I've never opposed the idea, though I've never been much excited about it, at least excited to see it on the top five ideas of reform. Because as I've thought about it so so far, if we don't change the way we fund elections, why is electing more people gonna help anything? But as you'll hear in the conversation today, if we had 11,000 representatives, each one representing just 30,000 people, then the way those representatives would get elected would be very different. The successful campaigns would not be the hate filled campaigns of today. It would be, I suggest, the campaigns that were closest to the campaign. Chloe, with Canyon's help, and actually ran more representatives would make it more likely that politics could be done on a human scale. And at a human scale it's harder for people to be hateful and polarizing. If you're at someone's door, you're going to be polite and listen or you're not going to be successful in that cause. So stay tuned for a story about a different kind of politics. And if you want to build that different politics yourself, be certain to read the book the Dirt Road Revival. And check out Dirt road, dirt road organizing.org, which is the org they've now

started to help politics like this take off everywhere in America. Stay tuned. Chloe and Kenyon, thank you so much for talking to me about your extraordinary book.

And it's a book which was inspired

by a decision Chloe made to run for office in Maine. But it's much more than a story about running for office in Maine. So let's start with the running for office part, because that alone is an incredibly interesting story. And I'll set it up just by saying the decision to run not as a Republican in a very rural, very red District, District 88 for the House of Representatives in Maine was an unlikely decision, especially as a very young non politician in the sense that you've never run for office before. Tell us how you felt when you made that decision about what the project was for. Like what did you think you were trying to accomplish by being a candidate in that context?

Thank you so much for the question, professor, and inviting us onto this podcast. It's really such an honor for us. Yeah, I mean, I grew up in a small town in Maine of 1600 people and the day that I graduated Harvard, I moved back there and I haven't left Maine since, you know, and my background is in community organizing and, you know, done that over the years in various forms. And by the Time I graduated from Harvard, you know, so much due to my experience with Canyon organizing with the Divest Harvard campaign, I. I realized that for me, I saw so much power in social movements and just all this grassroots power building, but that it just seemed like it kind of hit a wall when it was speaking to our political system and more specifically the people that we elect. And so I was like, hold on a second. Grassroots power works, but we have to have people in office who are going to respond to that type of power and really honor their constituents and what they're saying. And that really coincided with Trump winning election in 2016. And watching my hometown House district and my hometown Senate district voted for Trump in 2016. It's my home. They're my people. They're all really good people. And this collision of this home that I love and this love for movement building, and also watching the scary politics kind of infiltrate so many parts of rural America, including both of our hometowns, led to this idea of, what if we run for office, but we do it in a different way, where it's really rooted in community, it's committed to the principles of grassroots organizing and, you know, just see what. See what happens. And so I decided to run. I vividly remember the day I texted Canyon being like, hey, I think I'm going to run for office. Do you want to come manage the campaign? And he was. He was blown away for many reasons, but one of them was I was just with him a week before and hadn't mentioned this at all.

So

brave man. Moved to Maine to manage the campaign.

And so, Ken, you came from, obviously a different state, but a similar kind of context, right?

Yeah, that's right. Grew up in a real small town in western North Carolina.

And when Chloe asked you to do this as campaign manager, the skill you were bringing. So tell me a little bit about why you were qualified to be a campaign manager.

Oh, gosh, that's a good question. I mean, I'd like to call in paraphrase of Michelle Obama when she said something to the effect of, you know, I've been in those rooms and the folks there are not as smart as you think they are. I mean, I think we unfortunately have. Don't have a ton deep bench of, like, really knowledgeable, experienced staff running campaigns, especially at the state level. So I would say overall, I had very, very little as far as a resume for it. But what I did have was a really deep grounding in organizing work from largely from our time on campus, pressuring Harvard to divest from Fossil Fuel companies and getting to work really closely with. With our mentor, Marshall Ganz, who, you know, is just OG organizer and really changed my life trajectory, teaching us how to do that. And Tim McCarthy as well at the Kennedy School. Just some incredible mentors who showed the way of pulling people together to organize effectively. And then I got to work on Bernie's campaign out of college and then a state Senate campaign back in North Carolina. So I did have a little bit of the electoral experience as well.

But what I found great about this story was you would describe challenges or problems or things you were trying to accomplish, and there was an original sort of ground up thinking about how you're going to tackle that problem, as opposed to what a standard playbook would say about how to attack that problem. And one of the most important parts of that distinct way of approaching it was your campaign was focused, Chloe. You as the candidate, were focused on finding a way to speak across rather than speak at. I mean, the standard Democratic campaign, which is the only one I've really been close to ever, is one about targeting messages to the group, you know, who's going to show out, show up. Now, a campaign manager, I mean, a professional campaign manager would say that wasn't going to work in your district because obviously you didn't have a majority of Democrats who were going to show up. So you, of course, needed to try something different. But this felt, in the story you were telling, more than just strategic. This felt like a principle, a philosophy that you should be finding a way to run that was speaking across the district. Is that right? As. Am I reading you correctly there?

Yeah. You know, I think that is a very accurate reading. You know, from the beginning of the campaigns, we had also really vivid memories of taking big pieces of paper and writing down our vision and our goal and our theory of change and trying to come at the work from a really intentional perspective, because we knew we might not win. We were expecting not to win. And, you know, but we were like, you know, as early as 2009, there was. There was no partisan lean amongst rural voters. But in 2016, rural voters were voting Republican by 16 points. So there's been a huge shift in an electorate in America that really defines the makeup of our state legislatures and our Congress, with little or no pushback and investment from the Democratic Party. There are huge caveats to that because they're incredible folks on the ground who have been, you know, holding down the fort for many, many decades. And so I think our democracy rests. Rests in their hands. But from our perspective, we Were like, there's something really deep and powerful going on here, and it's happening really quickly. So let's just take a step back and think about this a little bit more slowly. And I think bringing that organizing perspective to this work is. I mean, that's all about relationships. That's what organizing is. And really valuing other people's experiences and how you can work together, despite your different experiences, to build power for a better community and a better society. And so that's really. That's really what we did. And I think at this point, you can look back and be like, you know, deep canvassing and kind of bringing in some of these frameworks about bridging divides. But when we were doing it, we. We were just like, we gotta. These are our hometowns and these are our people, and we want to invest in these communities.

So deep canvassing or building relationships is something that was possible because the district was so small. I mean, I think one thing that I hadn't really recognized before I read your book was this is a really strong argument for multiplying the number of members in the House of Representatives or in any legislative body. Because if you force districts to be small, you make this strategy sensible. If you were running for Congress and you had 750,000 people in your district and you were trying to connect with 100,000 of them, you weren't going to be able to meet them three or four times over the course of a campaign, which is what you did better than that in the 2018 campaign. Because of the size of the district. The strategy had to be building relationships, which of course had to be edifying and healing in the context of politics, as opposed to the normal way politics works, which is about not healing, it's about dividing and rallying. You heard these very different people or different politically. I mean, your values and your origins are the same.

When you came to hear their stories

and tried to understand why there was this radical shift to the right in rural districts, how would you explain it if you were explaining it? Not to Marshall Ganz, who I think gets everything intuitively, but I mean, to the average person, you know, on cnn, like, what would you say to them to say why this has happened?

Yeah, you know, I think to your first point, that we know we had some big advantages in our experience that Maine has small legislative districts and we have publicly financed cases campaigns. Every state should have publicly financed campaigns. Makes running for office much more accessible. But just kind of stating those for the record, which we do in the book, because most states don't have those qualities. But I think that nevertheless, we were talking with folks who were on all parts of the political spectrum. And I think it didn't take us long to see that folks were frustrated and voting for Trump and kind of going more right for the same reasons that I was running for office, which was that we both felt truly disillusioned by our political system. We didn't feel represented. We didn't feel like our government was working for our best futures, and we felt like something needed to change. And so I think this goes to a common theme about our work and just organizing in rural America in general, which is that so often we have really deep values in common, but our political discourse doesn't really focus on values. It talks about policy and issues and candidates and the media and this targeting you talked about. So we're really many levels divorced from why we care about these issues in the first place. And so much of our work was really trying to get back to those values. And almost everyone I talked with, we could agree on that one thing, which is that politics is broken. So there you go. You already have something to have a conversation about with anybody.

Kenyon, if you had run in, I don't know the size of the North Carolina legislature, but if it were the same size you'd done the same thing, would it have been the same story you would have gotten from the people you were running? I mean, it's obviously a conservative district as well. Would it have sounded the same?

Yeah, I think overall, I think, again, you go back to that shift that Chloe talked about from, like, as recently as 2009, the partisan lean being even to this huge gap that's opened up in a short amount of time. And I think so much of that is a truly national story of disinvestment in organizing in these types of communities all across the country that has set us back so far. And, you know, on the campaign trail, we went down driveways on the daily and talked to folks that had not been talked to by a Democrat ever or whose Last contact was 2008, Obama's historic grassroots campaign. And so I think since then, we've just ceded the ground largely. We just haven't been in those communities, maintaining those relationships, staying in the conversation. And we've let, you know, talk radio and Fox News come in and carry the day and plant some really dangerous seeds.

And how much of the problem do you think is the media that we consume, which tells a constant and consistent story, depending on which channel you tune into, about why our side Is right. And the other side is crazy. And how your job as an American is not just to believe these people beliefs but to hate anybody who doesn't believe these beliefs. I mean, is this, does this feel like a big chunk of it that distinguishes what it was like to be a 15 year old, where you came from, from where it was like to be a 25 year old? Chloe, let's start with you.

Yeah. I mean I think undoubtedly that the media has a huge part to play in the discourse. And I think, you know, I think this is a generalization, so owning that. But you know, I think in urban spaces or suburban spaces you can, you have your media but it's much easier to kind of, to organize, to access different communities, to have different conversations. But I think in rural, in rural communities, like I haven't interacted with a single human being all day today and probably just going to interact with my, with my partner today. So. And I'm just going to read the news, I'm going to read, you know, so there's kind of just like in a more inherent isolation in the way, in the way of life. And so, you know, so, and I, and then, you know, all these, all these memories of walking up to houses and you see Fox News playing in the background. And so it just kind of creates an echo chamber. And I think it's really, I think it's really dangerous. I also don't know a way to counteract that except by showing up on someone's porch and having, looking someone in the eye and having an honest conversation. I think those media forces are really, really powerful. They've been decades and decades in the making. That messaging is, is fine tuned. So you know, there's amazing people working on kind of confronting that media, especially in rural communities and providing different perspectives. But I think that's another reason why canvassing is so important and why campaigns give you access to canvas. Like you have an excuse to show up and talk to folks when it's a little weird to do that any other time of the year.

Yeah, I mean this is another thing that just screamed out of the book that was so striking and important. You know, if you accept the point you just made, I don't know how to counteract that. You said. I think I agree. I don't know how you counteract the media. And in America with the First Amendment, there's nothing the government could do to counteract the media. We need to accept we have a media which is deeply committed to partisan discourse because it turns out unfortunately for us that's the most profitable way for them to function. The question then becomes, how do you do politics in the shadow of that kind of media? And the standard way politics is done, of course, is on the media. It's like television ads that are hateful and aggressive in just the way that the media is. But the point is, like, when you can do, or in your case, have to do politics in a different way, it's almost protected from that media. I mean, the Fox News can be screaming in the background, but they can be looking you in the eye and realizing you're not a crazy person, you're not a evil person, you're a decent person who has common values because you come from the same place. And that's how politics can pursue. So it's almost as if the kind of campaigning you were forced to do protected you from the worst parts of this media. Now I'm closer to Maine. I've spent more time in Maine, so I have faith in Maine like that. My parents are. My mother was from the South. But I've got to say, I would have less faith this in the South. But Kenyon, would you. Would you say the same what happened there? I mean, whether it. I mean, you know, obviously Chloe is a compelling candidate, so. And I don't want to make you sound like you need to say you're as compelling as she is. So imagine a Chloe in North Carolina doing the same kind of campaign. Do you think it would have been

a winning strategy even in North Carolina?

Even in 2020 or 2018?

Yeah, 100% I do. I mean, granted, Maine, you know, Mainers have an independent streak, as we can see by, you know, the US Senator that they've sent back. But I think the basic principle there is we. We live in this age where all of us are fed these narratives of the other side, these just like deeply othering images of. Of what their beliefs are, why they are voting, the way that they are, that are really extreme from both sides, and the way that you break through that is showing up and having a actual conversation with the person. And it's revealing for us as progressives to show up and see, see why these people are thinking and voting the way that they are, and that it's not rooted in the worst of them for the most part. There are certainly threads of white nationalism and extremism that are really awful, but those are the minority as opposed to that core voting bloc. And then for them to see us on their doorstep not showing up with the condescending narratives that they so Often see from the left not jumping down their throat for. For not phrasing something quite the right way and staying in the conversation and being genuinely curious about their life experience. I think that that's. That feels like the most hopeful way forward for us. For not totally breaking down and letting the social fabric rip to shreds.

Yeah. No. So, Chloe, between 2018 and then 2020, I remember when I was reading the book and realized this next step of the story was you were going to run for Senate in the middle of the pandemic. I thought, oh, my gosh, now we're going to see it fails, because you, in fact, can't be going door to door all the time. In the same way, the campaign astonishingly sort of shifted into the best of what government could be as you were trying to provide services to people in the middle of COVID especially elderly people. But between the two campaigns, I don't know what the number is. Tens of thousands of times you've knocked, you've confronted somebody to talk to them about why they should support you in a campaign.

What's the modal story?

Or what's the most common way you would characterize what the interaction looked like? As they saw you, a young woman Democrat, asking them, typically older, white, let's say male Republican, for their support, how did it work, and when did you know it was not gonna work, and what did it feel like when it was really certain gonna work, Certainly going to work.

Great questions. Yeah, I knocked on just about 20,000 doors between those two campaigns, over 13,000 in 2020 during the pandemic, very, very carefully and safely. So I feel like I don't know much in this world, but I know a lot about door knocking. And I. You know, I think the script was really simple. Just saying, hi, I'm Chloe. I'm running for state senate. I'm just here. Here to see what's on your mind. And that's, like. That was literally how I would introduce myself. You know, I'd say 50% of the time, people are. People give you the. What, you know, what party are you from? Oh, I'm a Democrat, but I'm a good Democrat. And then they're like, I'm never gonna vote for a Democrat. And it's a tough conversation from there on. You know, that. That ends up in maybe, like, a really great conversation or just you shut down. And I think the other part of the time, you know, people are just genuinely happy that you showed up on their door. I mean, the bar is so low in politics. That really just showing up with kindness and openness and having just like having a good conversation with someone goes such, such, such a long way. And so, yeah, that's, that's how it went, I think, in, in 2018. I mean, both times had no idea if we were going to win even in, in 2020, you know, on. On election eve at 1:00am you know, New York Times had us down 1%. So just. That's another incredible thing about local races, especially in smaller districts, which is that every single vote matters, and we use that so much on the campaign show, and folks just feel disillusioned about voting. Like, what's the point anyways? We just elect people who don't listen to us and betray what they told me at the door. But just being like, every vote really, truly does matter, and you can really shape what your politics looks like at the local level. It's an empowering way to approach our democracy in this tricky time.

Yeah. Now, I want to go back to a point you made which is critical about funding. Maine was one of the first. Connecticut and Maine, about the same time, did public funding systems for state offices. Arizona followed afterwards. And we've had great experiments, like in Seattle with vouchers to help fund campaigns locally. We've then also seen the rise of super PACs in these districts, which in some sense diminish the significance of this public funding. Because many districts, you've got a real choice. If I accept public funding, I'm limiting the amount I can be spending. Super PACs will come in here and swamp the amount we can do publicly. So I can't afford to do public funding. I wonder, in your district, I imagine we didn't see much of that. But if you look at the state as a whole, what is your sense about the health of public funding in the state of Maine?

I think Maine, you know, Kane was kind of talking about this before, but Maine in particular, also, like many rural areas, has just this really strong independent streak. And so we. So our publicly financed system works really, really well. And it's like a point of pride for people. We call it running clean. So most people run clean. And if you're running traditional, like, accepting, accepting, you know, you can accept up to $400 per. Per contributor. If you're running traditional, people are like, oh, you must have money. You must know people who have money. Like you. Like, you're gonna raise tens of thousands of dollars through your networks. Like, okay, I'm not so sure. So it's a, you know, it is a point of Pride to run clean. And I. And I really like that about our state. Like, like you said, there's. There's loopholes like independent. There's unlimited independent expenditures. Folks can spend as much as they want. So, like, while our budget for our Senate campaign was 70,000, 75,000, Canyon knows best. You know, there's hundreds of thousands spent on behalf of us so that we didn't know about. But you know that that's how independent expenditures work. So it doesn't quite solve the problem. But I think the huge benefit of the system is that you raise money by talking to voters in your district. You can only accept contributions from registered voters in your district, and you don't have to be connected to lots and lots of wealthy people who can give you $400 at a time to be able to run a really solid campaign, to pay your team, to get your stuff out there.

So, Canyon, you don't have public funding in North Carolina, and indeed there was for judges in North Carolina, I believe, for a while. And then the independent political action committees fought to get rid of that. The money in North Carolina looks like. What is it? Basically, the big money that's driving the results, or how would you characterize the way money plays a role?

Yeah, money. Money is huge. Unfortunately, North Carolina is a pretty big state and very, very much a battleground, and the role of big money in the state is enormous.

But, I mean, so the money that I'm really focused on now is money coming from Super PACs or. In Maine, there's no such thing as a super pac. I don't know about North Carolina, but in Maine, it's just political action committees that spend on independent candidates, and they can take unlimited contributions. So they can be quite important in at least terrifying some side. There's a great paper called the iceberg effect of campaign contributions that basically said, look, the real money, the real significance is not the money on top of. It's the money underneath the water, which is the threat to give money to one side or the other, which is enough to discipline people, to make them behave in the right way. Obviously. Chloe, you had a couple years, two terms in the legislature. How did you see money playing in the legislature? What was the way that it mattered after the election?

Yeah, I think the main legislature in the grand scheme of. Of state legislatures is pretty small town. But I think the dynamics are very similar to what I've heard happens in other states. I mean, I think the most obvious one is that the institutions, companies, individuals with the most money can hire lobbyists to go spend their entire day in the legislature waiting to find their person. Spend all day, just spend their entire existence there lobbying for an issue. Whereas most grassroots groups that are advocating for folks with actual lived experience with many of the issues we talk about don't have that kind of budget to really be so present. So the perspective that legislators hear is really, really skewed by who has resources and who doesn't. And I think it's another reason why it's important to get organizers elected to state legislatures because they come with that perspective of, well, let me check with the community, let me check with the folks who are really impacted by this policy. Policy. And not just the folks who are standing in the building. So I think that's huge. And I mean, I think with like, with any elected official, maybe not any, because I'm going to exclude myself and many people I know from this, but, you know, many, many elected folks will have PACs, and you can like, look up who donates to their packs and you're like, okay, this per, you know, the. The utility donated to this person and now they're voting for the utility. Like, is there. There's may not be an explicit connection there, but it's kind of. It's hard to avoid that. Money. Money influences how folks experience the issues and the votes that are coming our way. So I think, yeah, just another plug to elect folks who are really there to serve their community and not really look into to make money or a massive career out of their public service.

It also drives a kind of cynicism, right? I mean, because you can't. You're very quick to assume any decision that seems weird must be driven by the money. I've been in these debates about the main governor who vetoed the bill that would have enacted the anti foreign money initiative so that they had to go to the ballot. And on the ballot they won with 86% of the vote. And so you're like, why would this governor veto the anti foreign money provision? And never could I get anybody to explain it other than something tied to money somewhere, and it must be terrible to be her and just have nobody even think that there could be a different reason or a credible reason. It turns everything in politics into this kind of cynical story.

Yeah, that's a really interesting perspective, and I think that's true. It's like, did someone have the idea and then the money was there and so, you know, just kind of validated their original thinking or was their thinking influenced by, you know, how their campaigns are funded? It's it's hard to tell. And I think the biggest lesson I've learned in politics, which is maybe the biggest shift in my thinking from going from organizer to politician, is that politics is so nuanced. And that nuance seems really frustrating from the outside, but sometimes on the inside, it's really necessary to paint a full picture and to create policy that is really inclusive. And so I really try and give. Give space for that kind of nuance on people with any issue. And I'm sure Governor Mills. Yeah, I don't know what her reason is. That's the reason I've heard, too, but I'll let her tell her own story about that, I think.

But we.

Sorry, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, also, I think there's a core issue of just the fact that so much of our time campaigning and as legislators in office is spent dialing for money. And so you're just constantly, constantly spending your time talking to the richest people that you can get a hold of. And that as opposed to using your time like Chloe was able to, going door to door and talking to regular people, the just like, really subtle one brick in the wall after another influence on your worldview of spending your time talking to the richest people you can, as opposed to normal constituents is something that I don't think is talked about enough.

It's a great point. When I first started doing the work about money in politics, and I surveyed all the academic work, and the estimate was members of Congress spend anywhere between 30 and 70% of their time dialing for dollars. And of course. Or that's a kind of boomer's language, I mean, calling people for money. And of course, when they're calling, they're not randomly calling. They're calling very targeted lists of wealthy people who have very specific interests. And at the same time that's happening, there were people, this was like 2011,

who were denying that there was any

evidence that money affected politics or political decisions. And I remember just saying, what kind of human could spend 30 to 70% of their time sucking up to rich people and not be affected by that? I mean, even without even recognizing it, you must be affected by that. And this is why what Maine did with clean elections and other states have tried to since is so critically important. Because if, you know, I mean, like in Connecticut, like Connecticut, like, once you qualify, nobody raises money after a certain point, and that's it. They just get their checks and they go and they do their campaigns. They can just be legislators. And when you describe that to members of Congress, they can't imagine that because literally the day you are elected, the first thing you do is start raising money for your next election. And this plugs into the messaging point. And I really want to push a little bit on this question question, because I think it's the place that the consultants would resist your argument most firmly. So the first point is, if you're raising money, you raise money by polarizing. That's just the best strategy. You don't raise money by kumbaya singing. You don't raise money by we're going to make everything work. You raise money by saying, these people are the devil and if we don't get in there, the devil's going to run things. And so to the extent you, you are frantically trying to raise money, you are only amplifying the energy of this polarization. But more generally, the political consultants would say, yeah, that's true, that's because it works. And they would say, for example, one really striking thing about your campaigns was the kind of homemade or authentic messaging and signs you would produce and very targeted cards that you would distribute. And I think the consultants would say, that feels good, that feels like it's authentic or genuine, but our data will tell you that that's not as effective as. And then they'll substitute their prepackaged message that they've issue tested with focus groups.

How did you resist Canyon, you were

the data guy, so how did you resist the claim about data? Did you say, we don't know or did you say, actually, we've got data to show your data is wrong?

I mean, I think that there's really, really strong inertia with several foundational principles like that amongst kind of the establishment consultant group. You know, folks would say, absolutely, you cannot, you cannot avoid negative attacks. And, you know, Chloe was really committed to this principle of we're going to run a completely positive campaign. And I think that, you know, we don't have, we don't have vast research, but we have the receipts to show Chloe beat the sitting Senate minority leader in a challenging rural district without saying a single bad word about him. So I think there's a lot of dogmas that dictate the way things have been done and continue to be done. But I think that there's plenty of room to push, push back on them. And I think, you know, the fundraising you're talking about, yeah, it's effective in some ways, but it also, I think it does erode trust to some extent and shows a lack of respect for the people that you're talking to with these, you know, you gotta give by midnight the, you know, the dark deep demons are coming. And I think you've got to show people respect. And if you keep on doing that, cycle after cycle, email after email, it erodes that relationship.

Yeah, I mean, the political consultants or the campaigns in their very transactional way of dealing with voters, obviously have a very limited time horizon. Their objective is an event that happens on a particular day in November. And then they go on and they think about other campaigns. They're not really worried about the long term. What was striking about your book is that it was describing a different conception of what political organizing was. It was about building tissue that would survive beyond a campaign, that would continue to fuel a movement beyond the campaign. I mean, I think many of us reflect on the deep mistake the Obama movement made when it became the Obama campaign and turned its back on Marshall Gantz's ideas and didn't turn the hundreds of thousands of people who were rallying for Obama and Obama's mission into a movement. They just were waiting to the next election to treat them as potential donors and people who would turn out to vote. So this alternative politics is exciting and hopeful.

But I wonder whether you would concede

that maybe it wouldn't work if you were running for United States Senate in the state of Maine or United States Senate in the state of New York, or Congressperson in Philadelphia, where the opportunity to do that kind of politics, I mean, you could do it, you could go out and knock on 20,000 doors. You would have then knocked on what percentage? 10% of the possible voters in the district. So you just couldn't run that kind of campaign in that space. And so maybe in that space, the only campaign you can run is this poisonous, transactional, polarizing, horrible type of politics that we have. Is that possibly true? Let's start with Chloe.

I think every campaign, especially at the different level of the ballot, is going to look really, really different. But I, I don't know, I feel like there are some really inspirational examples of congressional and statewide campaigns that have been really impactful on me, like AOC for example, or BETO in Texas. You know, folks who have really committed themselves to a long term ground game that kind of transcends election day. And they've committed to those peoples and those organizing spaces even beyond election day, beyond whether they got elected or not. And I feel like there are more and more roadmaps emerging for what, what this kind of organizing looks like at a much larger scale. Obviously it's going to look different than what we did at the local level. Because, yeah, you can knock 20,000 doors. I don't even know if someone can knock that many doors in a year. And it's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of folks in the district. So it looks really different. But I think there's also, you know, I don't know, look at statewide referendum campaigns and we just pass right to repair here in Maine, like, which is a huge anti corporate move. And that was like a statewide campaign. And so I, I don't know. I think, I think that while it's. Can be a little. The tendency can be diffused to kind of stay true to this kind of organic grassroots way of doing politics. I, I feel like I see a lot of incredible folks bringing it to a larger scale, which is obviously what we need.

It's what we need. But Kenya, do you think it's plausibly what we're going to get? I mean, yes. AOC is obviously an extraordinary story person and story, and she can be in that district for as long as she wants. Beto, of course, was a guy who succeeded in being elected to Congress. Remember when he came to Congress, he was first elected to Congress, he came to Harvard. He had just read the first book I'd written about this, and he was so depressed and he came to me and he described how he had just been lectured to by the Democratic Party that he had to spend four hours every day calling people to raise money. So he had from the very beginning a vision of a different politics. And he tried to execute on it twice at the statewide level. And despite his overwhelmingly compelling campaign, obviously it fell short in a state like Texas. So when you think about scaling it, you, you know, obviously every new, every additional campaign like yours is a good thing.

But do we imagine getting to a

place where a critical mass of campaigns are like yours? Or at least do we imagine getting

there, given the kind of size of

districts and character of campaign funding that we've got right now? Or do we have to change both of those before we get to this kind of promised land that you're thinking about? Kenyon, what do you think?

I mean, I think we can, we can push both forward in parallel at the same time. And I think we need to. Another, Another example that comes to mind is the work Stacey Abrams did in Georgia was so foundational on a really large scale of shifting the whole landscape in Georgia, a really big state. And I think the more stories that we can tell about successful grassroots organizing, especially in rural places where we're expanding the map. I think that's how we get there and that's how we push back on the inertia of the establishment and the leadership that tends to call the shots from really cushy districts that they've been in sometimes for decades. And we really need to push back against the top of the ticket races, calling all of the shots where there's a tendency to lean into that type of campaigning and just focusing on turnout, squeezing every ounce of Democratic support from the most populous areas. I think we really, really need to push back on that because top of the ticket, calling the shots on the resources in the state is a lot of the reason why we're in the situation that we are.

Yeah. So, Chloe, I mean, you, you two, Kenyon and you are starting an organization called Dirt Road Organizing, which we taking the lessons that the book teaches so brilliantly, but that your experience teaches as well and trying to spread it. So what's your optimistic pitch to the funders who are going to be eager to hear whether there's a real chance that this works? Like, how do you sell the people who might be willing to invest to make sure that this vision of organizing politics, MARSHALL gantz, Vision of politics becomes a dominant vision, at least in a certain slice of American politics?

Yeah, you know, I mean, it worked for us. It changed our lives. And now we run Dirt Road to really provide community structure and support for rural candidates and staff across the country. You know, since our since our campaigns, we've had and the book being published, we've had the huge blessing of being able to talk with folks in almost every state about their experiences doing this work. And while every community is different, the experience is eerily similar. Hearing folks who just feel so under supported, who just desperate for more community because this is lonely, isolating and difficult work. But it's also deeply important. And they're also looking for the skills, you know, like how do you take a traditional campaign training and translate that into what works in a rural setting? So that's really what we're doing with Dirt Road. And we have, you know, we're running our we have two cohorts running right now. There are small groups of people. We have 10 staff and 10 candidates, you know, and, and everyone is doing truly inspirational like democracy saving work in their in their corner of rural America. We have some candidates who are going to be the first Democrat on their ballot in over a decade, folks who are really trying to push back against some of the stories that we hear about what it's like to work in rural communities. We already got enough interest to run more cohorts next year. So we're really seeing so much interest and desire for this kind of support and structure and just, yeah, plain old community. Like having people who know what you're going through and what it's like and who are there to brainstorm with you and celebrate and grieve and process and all of those things. You can have all the skills that you want, but if you don't have that community and that support system, this work is very difficult to sustain.

So are all of the districts like yours, Were there districts where you could in fact run a successful campaign where you're going to talk to people three or four times in the course of the election and you don't need to rely on television advertising or in fact you wouldn't because it wouldn't be productive? Is that the character of each of these districts?

We're working with folks in a bunch of different states and everyone's district looks a little bit different. There are that are more similar to what we've experienced and some that aren't, but are. Our training program involves lots of folks, not just me and Canyon, to bring in expertise to provide folks with many different forms of expertise and many different forms of organizing in different contexts. So yeah, just trying to build a support system for folks that can really meet them, where they're at in terms of what their district looks like, what their campaign might look like, how much staff and support they got. So just being as customized and flexible as we can be.

Okay, but how do you pitch it? So I'm trying to teach you about politics that is like this, not like that. Like what is the frame that like the first time you meet somebody who's running in a rural district as a Democrat for the first time a Democrat's done that in a decade. What's the story you're telling them? Why is this different?

I think there's a really growing recognition that the path to sustainable power in state legislatures all across the country to fight for the issues that we care about runs through rural America. We have to elect strong progressives in rural places if we have any hope of passing the legislation that we want to. And the way that you do that in these communities is investing in the grassroots and building these door to door campaigns. Because that's the only way you break through the Fox news and the talk radio is by investing in building organizing power in places where that muscle has atrophied over the past decade. And so folks are folks are really invested in taking that approach and trying to do things differently in a way that also leaves their communities and their districts better off for them, having run and campaigned and invested in training folks whether they win or lose.

Yeah, but. So, Chloe, I mean, I just read a story about how the Democratic party is going to spend a bunch of money in really red states at the state legislature level, realizing that they've just failed miserably over the past decade. And that's part of the reason we're stuck in the way that we are in states like Wisconsin, for example, where it's a perfectly purple state at the statewide level, but it's 2/3 Republican in the district because of gerrymandering and the like. Now they're going to come in and they're going to spend a lot of money, but I imagine they. There's going to be an argument about the way the money gets spent. Is the money spent in the way you and Canyon have built a kind of organizational movement politics, or is it spent in just flashier, like, you know, mailing cards and more biting radio ads? I mean, have you begun to have that argument with people? Is there like a. At least people understand that this is a debate that has to be had, or is the presumption that the old way is the only way?

I think that. I mean, what you're just saying is alluding to this, like, larger recognition. I think that we see as well that the left has got to be investing more resources, in every sense of the word, in rural communities if we're to create paths for a just and equitable democracy. So I think all of that is happening, and I think it's really good that these are. That the conversations are happening at the state level because it's. Because ideally, these conversations should be informed by the folks who are doing the hardest on the ground work, who are working in impacted communities, and those should be the voices informing how, you know, how money is spent. I think that, you know, that question of who's at the table, who's not at the table, why is someone at the table? Those are big questions that will forever be asked when large chunks of money is being spent. And. And we're not part of that specific conversation in Wisconsin, but that would be our hope, is that frontline communities in Wisconsin, in any state that's facing this kind of situation would be informing this. I think that there's a lot of. I mean, in our political system, there's so much entrenched money, there's so much entrenched interest in doing things a certain way. And I think, as is the way of human nature, there will always be pushback when folks are like, I don't think I want to do it this way or can I try it another way? And I feel like I hope for humanity that there's some grace when folks push back, that it's not seen as a threat to a person or an identity or an institution, but it's a commitment to trying to figure out how we can all do this work better together. And. And that the more diverse approaches and perspectives and experiences that we bring to this work, the more robust our campaigns and candidates and an elected official body will look. So that was my little rant about how I hope things work.

It's a perfect rant to end the conversation and to begin watching as you both do extraordinary work. I mean, the book is an inspiration even for those who are not going to run for office. But for anybody who's thinking about it, the brilliance of the book is both. Part one is the story. Part two is really about. I mean, part one is about the setting it up. Part two is the story of running. And part three is about the principles and the practicalities, like what the step by step standards are to make sure that this is success. And it already has been in a very big way. I'm so grateful you would take the time to talk and I'm with you and urging the success that you need. Because if we could make your politics possible, I think this is the way I think about it after you're reading your book. If we could make your politics possible, meaning make it possible to win doing the kind of politics you want to do. We will have protected ourself from the poison that now affects our politics like Fox News. Won't matter if people decide who they vote for by meeting them and talking to them face to face. That's just the reality. That's an important lesson. I'm grateful you would teach it. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you so much for having us. And I just really echo that. If you're even considering running, running for office, please do it and reach out to us. Go to dirt road organizing.org we will be here to walk you through every step of the journey. We need good folks in every corner of the country.

This has been the 20th episode of season five of the podcast Another Way.

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