Why Democrats Are Losing the Working Class | Chuck Rocha Explains

Political strategist and labor organizer Chuck Rocha, founder of Solidarity Strategies, joins Pete Altman on The Campaign Strategist to talk about why progressives are losing touch with working-class voters—and how to fix it. From his start as a teenage union steward in Texas to running Latino outreach for Bernie Sanders, Chuck shares hard-won lessons on strategy, cultural competency, and building lasting political power.

About Chuck: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chuck-rocha-476a6276
Solidarity Strategies: https://www.solidaritystrategies.com/

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Transcript

Chuck Rocha

Chuck Rocha (2): [00:00:00] We're never gonna be the bosses. We wanna represent the workers and the folks who have to fight back against the bosses. There's a party of the rich and the bosses literally on stage when he got sworn in. And there's a party of the workers who are with the nurses, the unions, the environmentalists, whatever your thing is.

We are with the people, and I would call 'em the workers, and they're with the bosses. There needs to be a contrast and we are no longer the party of the workers. We

pete altman: Hmm.

Chuck Rocha (2): get back to that, or no matter what your little single issue is, and it may not be little. Reproductive, right. Environment, guns, LGBTQ plus.

None of that matters 'cause we all are workers. So we first have to get people to understand we're going to be with the workers and while we're protecting workers, we'll protect gay people. We'll try to get less kids killed. Killed in school. We'll try to make sure that our air and our water is clean.    

pete altman: Hello, and welcome back to the Campaign strategist. My guest today is Chuck Rocha, a veteran [00:01:00] political strategist, labor organizer, and one of the foremost experts on Latino voter outreach in the country. Chuck got a start in politics as a union leader in East Texas, becoming the youngest officer of his local.

At just 22 years of age, he went on to make history as the first person of color to serve as national political director of the United Steelworkers. in 2010, he founded Solidarity Strategies, a trailblazing political consulting firm dedicated to diversity, inclusion, and mentorship.

Over the past decade, his firm has become one of the most successful minority owned political consulting firms in the nation. Chuck has played a key role in multiple presidential, congressional and gubernatorial races, including both of Senator Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, where he pioneered a groundbreaking Latino voter outreach strategy.

He's also the founder of Nuestro pac, a leading super PAC focused on mobilizing Latino voters and the author of Tío Bernie, his inside. Look at how Latino voters helped shape the 2020 race. I'm thrilled to have them on the campaign strategist to talk about What campaigns are getting wrong and how progressives can build power in today's political environment. Chuck, [00:02:00] welcome to the pod.

Chuck Rocha (2): All I'm gonna say, brother Pete, if we're gonna cover all that, we're gonna probably need four to five hours.

pete altman: I like people to understand the background of the guests, you know? so speaking of background. I had like to start with sort of, you know, your early years, what lessons did you learn or,

what experiences did you have coming up in Texas that helped you become a strategist and tactician and got you into this work to begin with?

Chuck Rocha (2): Pete, it's a great question and I wanna thank you for having me on.

I think that these podcasts that kind of dig deeper into this longer form of what our industry is. You know, me and you met many, many years ago working in the enviro justice space, and people just assume, we just grew up in this space and neither one of us, none of us just say we're gonna grow up to do this work.

So think starting in the beginning, because my story. And I don't care who you have on this podcast will not be like my story. ' cause everybody's story is unique. It doesn't mean that one story is better than the others, but if I've learned anything is that, that we're all so unique and found our way here.

My story is unique because I grew up in a trailer house. That means that's a house you [00:03:00] could hook on to with a truck and drag it away if you wanted to. in Deep East Texas, my mother was just 15 years old. my mom and dad had met at church. My father was 18. He was a Mexican. His family had come from Guanajuato, Mexico, and my mother was a young white girl from East Texas whose parents had immigrated down from Tennessee to a farm sugar cane.

They were more

pete altman: Wow.

Chuck Rocha (2): Mexican family, and so I grew up in rural east Texas working on a farm. It was my grandparents' farm. It was 30 acres. So I had that life that most kids now would never dream of, of. Working with cows and pigs and horses and tractors and farming and hunting and fishing like every other country.

Boy, where I grew up, none of this, and nobody in my family were involved in politics, public service, civil rights, anything of any form or fashion in any way. in my family had ever been to college. Most people in my family never graduated high school. my family were middle class to lower middle class, just trying to, you know, eke out a living.

And that's how I grew up. And I never knew nothing about politics. I [00:04:00] never knew anything about the news. I never knew anything about the history of our country. You'd say, well, didn't you learn that in school? Well, you should come to East Texas and go to school because you don't learn none of that. You learn about Sam Houston and about Santa Anna, but you will not learn about our forefathers. And so it's really a unique story to say that. I went to work in a factory when I was 19, and that's my first glimpse of politics. I had just had a son and I'd carried on a long tradition in my family of babies having babies. So I'm 19 years old. I got a new baby. I've just taken full custody of this new baby at three months old and I needed a job with healthcare.

I'd always worked since I was 14 to support my mother, 'cause my mother and father divorced when I was only five. And so I'd always worked. but going to work in the factory (?) I joined a union and I joined the union. By happenstance, I was not an activist, knew nothing about the union.

The union had negotiated a four hour orientation over at the union hall where you were voluntarily asked to sign a union card, and I was like, yes, I'll sign whatever. Because it was the best job that I [00:05:00] had ever had. And that's how it all started is I got involved in the union. Uh, somebody many, many months later would ask me to be a union steward. There's this funny, I wrote a book called Tío Bernie that you referenced. I tell this story because it's the reason I'm here today. would've been here today I hadn't have said okay to this guy who was recruiting me to be the union steward on my shift, you know, eight or nine months after I'd been there.

'cause nobody wanted to be the union steward. 'cause all the kids worked on the back shifts, the dirty shifts, the nighttime shifts, where we were working, and that's how it all started. It just kind of snowballed. Into going to union meetings, learning what a union steward does. Many years later, running for chief steward against that guy that recruited me, becoming that young, uh, officer of my local union.

'cause I felt he was not very good. And that's how it all started. That would grow into, we could go on for an hour about working on campaigns around Texas, the local union. Working with the international to get me off of my job, to send me out, to start working on real campaigns around the country. And that's how it all started.

I would've never got [00:06:00] involved in the local Democratic party or even knew what a Democratic party was, if not for joining that union because the local union in most neighborhoods or in most small communities, are the centerpiece of the local Democratic party. It's the only self-built infrastructure that they have.

So being in the local, uh, union, which was the largest union in my community. rubber worker local. Then we joined the steel workers. We had over a thousand men in that plant. So when the local Democratic party had their meetings, guess what, they normally had 'em at our union hall. I got to sit in. I got to learn about it. They recruited me to be a precinct chairman where I helped run the local elections in my community. Keep in mind, I'm like 22, 23,

pete altman: Mm-hmm.

Chuck Rocha (2): I've actually come up doing the grassroots part of campaigns before I ever became the CEO of a firm or became this TV personality like I am today.

It started like every other farm kid. This story though, this is, I'll end with this on this windup. The most important part of that story is I never end up ever going to college. I was a teenage father. I got in lots of trouble when I was younger [00:07:00] and all, any one of those things would've kept me out of what most folks would see as somebody who'd be so successful in politics.

One of those things, and I'm all of those things, and so didn't take the normal route,

So I've thrown around words like shop steward, chief steward, and all of that. So this was a giant plant we made Pete, it's, I remember these numbers 'cause I lived them every day, about 38,000 tires a day. 1300 men on the shifts, over four shifts. So it was broke up into where it was always running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So you needed four shifts of people.

So one shift could always be off. a union steward was on those, in those departments in the factory. Each one of those shifts had a union steward. , to be the chief steward that mean you were elected in that department to be over all of those union stewards and you kind of dealt with grievances once they got past the entry level, when it went to the department

pete altman: Hmm.

Chuck Rocha (2): level.

And then once it went beyond that, then they was a chief steward over the whole plant who then would take it to arbitration with you. So it was representing workers on the work site to enforce. A [00:08:00] contract that had been negotiated between the company and the union. And if they weren't adhering to that contract, you could take legal action or get back pay for somebody, like if somebody had gotten skipped in an overtime canvas. 

pete altman: That sounds like amazing, training for like developing people skills and people management, especially if you're the, the intermediary between people with a grievance and higher ups, to say.

Chuck Rocha (2): here, ' cause this is the strategist podcast, is that I just realized about three weeks ago that the first election that I ever ran was for myself and it was 30 years ago. Because when I decided to run for Chief Steward, that means in my department for over all four of the A, B, C, and D shifts, I had to run against the guy who had been there for 15 years on the A team. And the A team, which was daylight, had about 40 or 50% of all the workers were on the daylight shift. 'cause that's where all the business happened.

And the night shifts were just smaller. We kept everything running. Yeah,

as part of this first strategy I ever thought about in any campaign, little notes to [00:09:00] me that this was real strategy, it was common sense to me. Back then, only way I could beat this fella. Was I had to organize the three back shifts.

Who could out vote all of the old white guys on the daylight shift, on the back shifts. It was mainly young guys. Mainly young boys of color, a lot of black kids and brown kids. so when I started organizing to run against him, I organized the back shifts and I beat him by 13 votes and nobody on daylights voted for me.

pete altman: I'm curious about, the 2016 Bernie campaign where you were brought in to, help or, or run their Latino strategy. What was the problem that you identified that needed to be overcome and how did you go about figuring out how to tackle it?

Chuck Rocha (2): , in 16, we didn't really Enough of a robust effort to capitalize on the support he did have in the community. By the end, we realized. get to this in a second about why we would start the 2020 race with Latinos, because it was kind of unbeknownst [00:10:00] to us. The first thing I did in 2016 is get a call from Jeff Weaver to meet with them because they wanted to have a diverse staff because he had only run senate races in Vermont, and Jeff said they had great local people working around him that had run Senate races, but they were all white people from Vermont. And so my first. which I think kind of gets to your question was is they asked me to go round up the most talented Latinos Black and AAPI and other diverse community activists, consultants, staffers, and put a list together and start asking them if they'd come to work for Bernie. And so I think having those people involved at a high level Bernie,

pete altman: Mm-hmm.

Chuck Rocha (2): those connections because they were being very intentional and they were smart enough to know what they didn't know.

And they didn't know this community that well, and so I kept getting more and more responsibility in that race. Of doing more like doing services, like doing Latino male Spanish language communication. But it was growing so [00:11:00] quickly, so fast. Remember, he had no money and nobody thought he was gonna win, and he was a joke.

He, he announced on the, out in the Senate gardens out in front of the office so he wouldn't actually be in the office. Little did he know that being on federal property outside was still a problem, but he did it anyway. Uh, so that's how naive we were. And then that would grow into, oh my God, he was raising so much money by the fall.

We were kind of flying the airplane while we were, uh, building it.

pete altman: Yep.

Chuck Rocha (2): the time we got to Nevada when it was almost over in 2016, we had this huge groundswell of support with all these Latinos that were flocking to him while never really spending the right amount of money or giving them the attention they deserved because we didn't know what we were doing either because we were growing too fast or that we would have a budget to actually have that communication. That would be much different we would start the 2020 campaign. now we knew, now Jeff would bring me in to kind of head the whole operation. I [00:12:00] wrote about this in my book, Tío Bernie as well, about how I turned down manager job. To be put in a senior director or senior advisor and actually run the day-to-day operations the campaign in the states with the state directors while finding somebody who was, had a much, let's just say, calming demeanor than myself, who probably should have a family and little kids and not drink and smoke and cuss.

'cause I was gonna get us in trouble from day one. 'cause I do all of those things, or at least I did back then. And we found the first Muslim American to ever be manager. So we didn't drink. I'd never heard him cuss. He was a calm voice. He had a beautiful wife and two little girls, and he was the best choice we ever could have made.

And he managed Bernie and he managed the press and the rallies while I ran the day-to-day operations in the States, which was actually running the campaign. So we leaned into that in 2020 and started the campaign there. More Latino staffers than ever hired in a, in a beginning of a campaign. We started talking to them way, way early.

We knew they loved Bernie's populous economic [00:13:00] message, and I just leaned in because I was also in charge of the budget. So we spared no expense. And a big long story short is because we did three things that I wrote about in the book that I open source so everybody could do, which was start early. Expand the target list to talk to infrequent voters and make sure all the ads were made by Latinos with lots of cultural competency while building up staff in the states that looked like the state. And that was the recipe for success.

pete altman: talk about cultural competency, because it's a term that we're hearing more and more. And in terms of sort of the differences between the left and the right, the right seems to have a pulse on the culture of the people that it's engaging. What, what does cultural competency look like in the context you're talking about?

Chuck Rocha (2): It's such a broad term, so I'm gonna break it down in a very simplistic way than give you a broader look. When I talk about it normally I'm talking to people who wanna know about Latino voters. A basic of cultural competency within the Latino [00:14:00] voting diaspora is that we come from many countries all over Latin America and South America, and we're all considered quote unquote Latinos, but in places in the America, like New Mexico, south Texas, and other places, they even refer to themselves not as Latinos, but as

pete altman: It. Yep.

Chuck Rocha (2): And that's. Knowing the, the group of Latinos or Hispanics in America who refer to themselves as Latinos or as Hispanic is the first test of you having some cultural competency. That means you understand that not all Latinos are the same, which sounds pretty basic, but I would take that two and three steps deeper. I'm a Mexican from East Texas. sound like this. I wear this funny hat all the time 'cause I grew up in it. There are also Mexicans in East la. There's also Mexicans in Arizona. There's Mexicans, big Mexican population on the south side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. [00:15:00] all of those Latino groups, even though they're all Mexican, all have a little cultural nuances that if you know about when you're making an ad, you can make it show up. In a way that when you're there, they know that you understand the community. One of the, one of the examples I give to people with well intentioned white consultants who are trying to do Latino outreach is you shouldn't be sending a taco truck to your Latino event in Miami. Miami, Cubans and Dominicans love tacos, but that's not part of their culture.

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): And so that's something very basic that you laugh at, but I've seen it done and messed up. So when you're making an ad. Think about this, Pete. This is what my firm does. I should have led with that solidarity strategies. My firm is an all encompassed firm that does tv, radio, mail, digital and all those things. So when I'm making an ad, a radio ad in Miami, and Miami is such a Spanish dominant city, when I make the ad and I'm talking to the voiceover actors that I will use in the ad, most ad companies just use what they [00:16:00] call generic Mexican Spanish because. of all Latinos in America are Mexican descent. So it's a safe bet if you're in the middle of somewhere to use basic generic Mexican Spanish, and it won't kill you. But if you show up in Miami basic Mexican Spanish, they will tell that you don't even know the kind of Spanish they speak, and they'll tune you out right away if you're not using a Caribbean Spanish.

That's really from a Cuban voiceover actor to show your cultural competency to show up in a space. That they know you didn't understand.

And let me explain this to your audience 'cause they're a bunch of nerds like me and you are, which is, most people have to have a poll to tell them what the poll says, people. Want to talk about, keep in mind the posters determining those questions. So that may not even be right 'cause they may leave out questions that are really most important. then you figure out who's the people that are the most likely to go vote. And then you just go talk to them about whatever that issue is the poll tells you to do. And [00:17:00] then if you're probably bigger than a state reps race, you're probably taking that data out of a shared voter file and through predetermined what I'd call modeling. We figure who's the most likely to vote and who's the most likely to turn out. And in our mine and Pete's industry, we call that a turnout model and a persuasion model. So we leave out people who aren't to show up to vote per the model, or who may not be decent Democrats per the model. And you just leave big swaths of people who over

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): never hear any message from the Democrats or the issue advocacy.

You know what I'm getting at, right,

pete altman: they're not showing up as regular voters and so they get skipped over so they never get talked to, so they never end up becoming regular voters. 'cause nobody's trying to

Chuck Rocha (2): to

pete altman: talk to them to get 'em to show up.

Chuck Rocha (2): Yep. And so

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): insert a guy named Donald Trump. People are like, how does Donald Trump do

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): the things is Donald Trump is a known quantity. So it starts there. He has name id and then [00:18:00] because he has an echo chamber of people that are talking about him and what he's doing with a message, by the way. With the message, which sounds like the reason Chuck Rocha joined the Democratic Party, which was to fight nafta, to drain the swamps of rich people who thought they were better than me and to stop investing my money into foreign wars when my local community needed that investment. why I joined the Democratic Party, and now you've got this guy that everybody knows, saying the same message I used to do when I ran as a Democrat across channels where there's no targeting, spewing it to the masses. my people in our party would be like, oh my God, it's a waste of time.

Nobody's gonna see this.

it cuts at the margins every year. Right, Pete?

pete altman: It does, and we're seeing it, it is extraordinary to hear you say that because not many people want to acknowledge that he is tapping into something that, for whatever complex set of reasons, I think that a lot of advocates have sort of gotten away from, in terms of talking to people about what they're actually concerned [00:19:00] about and I still do this because in some ways you have to, in certain circumstances, you have to figure out what's the best way to talk about what I want to talk about, right? Because if I'm, you know, I'm advocating for environmental policy or climate policy, maybe I don't want to know what you want to talk about.

I know what I wanna talk about to you. And so I'm gonna commission that poll and the focus groups to try to figure out what's the best way to get it through you. And I think that's related to, you know. Support for climate action support for the environment is pretty strong in general terms like, you know, among republicans, less so right now, but generally 55 to 60% support, you know, doing something good for the environment or climate and more like 70% when you get toward Democrats, but it's never an issue that they're actually voting on.

And like that says something to me about the difference between trying to figure out. How to talk about something so that people will sort of go like, yeah, sure. I support that. Versus getting to the stuff that they are really [00:20:00] interested in and is actually gonna motivate them to go to the polls and vote a certain way.

And I don't know, maybe there's a name for that gap. Um, but it, it seems like an important one to figure out. that was kind of a ramble. I've never actually thought about it that way before. 

Chuck Rocha (2): the Republicans have made it. A science out of this, and they've invested in the long term.

They've invested in a Fox News over a long period of time. Then they got into the podcast and they've invested into

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): a long period of times. Right? And so what you have now is an echo chamber. they have single-handedly made this immigration issue a wedge issue with. there's not an immigration crisis in most neighborhoods.

If you live in the cities and you're on the border, there is definitely things you should deal with every single day. It's a real issue. people from Central America coming over, much different than the Mexican immigrants that were happening five and 10 years ago, the way that they took that issue to demonize a group of people and make them be the blame. So that the anxiety that the regular worker was feeling and there was an anxiety because [00:21:00] we've forgotten the working class of this, of this country, and Bernie Sanders stepped into this as much as Donald Trump did, to say the millionaires and the billionaires are taking all of your money while you get nothing. But then they had, they turned it, unlike Bernie and was like. It's all these Mexican's fault, it's these immigrant's fault, and they're bringing all this crime and dysfunction. And then we had covid. So you have that accompanied with an echo chamber. You get the perfect recipe when you have a person with a percent name.

Id like a Donald Trump.

pete altman: he definitely comes with a, uh, a built-in advantage, but the right wing media ecosystem has been growing in building for decades. I mean, it just used to be Rush Limbaugh. and obviously it's grown tremendously since then. And so this is one, I think the, the central challenges of our time on the left for democrats, for climate advocates, for environmental, for any progressive causes.

How do you deal with this asymmetrical information warfare environment?

we've got.

A big infrastructure on the right that's, decentralized [00:22:00] but still coordinated. We've got these algorithms that continually prefer hostile, and, misinformation, communications and, um.

voters are increasingly distrustful of, of facts and institutions and, and now we've got the major social media platforms aligning themselves with Trump in terms of how they're tweaking their algorithms or regulating or monitoring what's set on the platform.

So.

So how are you thinking about how to cut through and compete in this kind of information environment?

Chuck Rocha (2): Well, first of all, it was gonna take a commitment mainly from the donor class. And the donor class is used to getting their way and getting their way immediately because they're rich people. And as a person who is semi rich, that means I've got money in my savings account now. I want things done now. I don't wanna have to wait. I have got a couple hundred thousand. I got a hundred thousand dollars.

My life savings. I should deserve to have it right now. [00:23:00] Well think about if you've got a million dollars or a hundred million dollars and you want to do good, right? what I mean by that, and it sounds funny, is. These people need to realize that this didn't get broke overnight

pete altman: Mm-hmm.

Chuck Rocha (2): some long-term investment.

I don't mean we have to have our own Fox News. I don't mean we have to have our own Joe Rogan. we do have our own Joe Rogan in a way, and I'm sitting right here, but I'll, I'll take calls later. the thing that I would like to talk about is that we need to say two things and we have a unique opportunity right now in the next year or two year and a half,

Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The president and the co-president are fixing to break things badly. You already see them cracking and some of them

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): Whether it's our federal government's efficiency and being able to do basic stuff, the stock market, ways now show real differences between what they believe. And what we believe, we are so used to 'cause we're a bunch of Ws chasing them down a rabbit hole. Instead of standing up to them and going, [00:24:00] this is bad. And you can see this is bad for us because of this. They've snookered you in devoting for them. We don't blame you. You had your anxiety and we weren't there for you, but we will be.

Now we understand. We learned our lesson. So admit our fault with Joe Biden. Even though he did wonderful stuff, which really pisses me out 'cause he was a wonderful president,

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): for the environmental community. So let's leave that there, but say, here's our vision forward for you workers. And you root this message around two things.

One is work the sanctity of work. want my Candace now to talk about. Work, whether you're putting on a pair of work gloves or a shirt with your name on it, or you're putting on a suit and tie. We're all going to work at some level and if we can show up and talk to people about needing to make work easier, make you make more money at work, have healthcare and the basic things that go around what we have to do every day, which is make a living for our family, it gives you a way in to be like, and we're gonna fix this 'cause right now. trying to [00:25:00] fire workers, do away with workers' rights, do away with insurance, do away with oversight of workers. We're making everything harder for workers. And by the way, and this is the second thing, and to me it's real, uh, I don't know the fancy word, but to show a contrast is they've represented the bosses and the richest people since they've been running this campaign. fine. We're never gonna be the bosses. We wanna represent the workers and the folks who have to fight back against the bosses. There's a party of the rich and the bosses literally on stage when he got sworn in. And there's a party of the workers who are with the nurses, the unions, the environmentalists, whatever your thing is.

We are with the people, and I would call 'em the workers, and they're with the bosses. There needs to be a contrast and we are no longer the party of the workers. We

pete altman: Hmm.

Chuck Rocha (2): get back to that, or no matter what your little single issue is, and it may not be little. Reproductive, right. Environment, guns, LGBTQ plus.

None of that matters 'cause we all are workers. [00:26:00] So we first have to get people to understand we're going to be with the workers and while we're protecting workers, we'll protect gay people. We'll try to get less kids killed. Killed in school. We'll try to make sure that our air and our water is clean.

Like, it's almost like I do this for a living. Pete,

pete altman: So you mentioned the need to make long-term investments, and in addressing this communications, sort of, I dunno, deficiency or, the imbalance in, uh, the information environment. So what do those investments look like to you?

Chuck Rocha (2): It would be a year round communications. People mess this part up too, and they like, we need to build infrastructure for year round organizing. Sure do that. And you should have people talking to people year round, but when's the last time you opened up your front door when somebody knocked on it? We all have a ring camera now.

pete altman: Yeah,

Chuck Rocha (2): Canvassing has become very hard.

pete altman: has. Yes.

Chuck Rocha (2): yes. So I've been saying, you know, show up at community events, show up at things where there's already gatherings of people. That's part of the way I look at organizing now. Not, [00:27:00] not, not that door knocking don't work, but there's a new way to door knock and one is. You can text people with peer-to-peer texting that gets old after a while. the part of communicating to voters hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is now digital advertising is more robust. ask me what the most effective form of advertising is with working class people today. Oh my God, I'm so glad you asked Pete. It's the nons skippable 15 second ad you have to watch on YouTube. You've got to watch it and you're on YouTube, and guess what? Most people under 40 are on YouTube or YouTube tv. So it's the old TV commercial of the seventies. Yeah.

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): And you gotta watch the 15 seconds to see your fishing program or your art show, or your, in Pete's case, your cooking show or whatever.

Right. Like you got to, so like these are the nuances we haven't changed with, but that's where you show up and start being like, Hey, we can geotarget this YouTube ad, or You're sick and tired of this thing we're fighting back in the community. Call [00:28:00] this number if you wanna join the team and you can start like just organizing online.

pete altman: It is really interesting 'cause you're, you're, you're also talking about meeting people where they are, go out to community events or happenings where people are already gathering. , so there is a need to figure out where, I mean, to me, a

Chuck Rocha (2): a

pete altman: huge amount of this is understanding the distinct cohorts of audiences and what are they already watching?

Where are they already gonna be found? And figure out a way to get there, whether it's you or the right messenger or however you do it. But. Anyway, re reaching beyond your already existing base. And I'm really focused on, in the environmental community, how do we get better at reaching beyond our base and breaking through?

Do you feel like politically campaigns are adapting more quickly? I mean, obviously not so much in the last cycle, where are you seeing people really.

Figure out how to navigate in this environment and what are they doing that's working

Chuck Rocha (2): I still [00:29:00] think everybody's doing a lot of this half-ass, and I think the Republicans get a lot of credit for organizing that they're not doing. just because you show up at an MMA fight. it was some other senator who showed up there and it wasn't Donald Trump, it wouldn't be covered. It wouldn't matter.

But then consultants come to me

pete altman: I.

Chuck Rocha (2): why ain't you sending your congressional person to the MMA fight? I'm like, if a tree falls in an MMA fight, nobody sees a tree fall, then it never fell. I don't believe all of this bullshit about like, you gotta do what Donald Trump did. I think that you do have to expand the target.

Let me give you an example of this, of what you're talking about in real time. In the last election, the National Wildlife Federation, a group I work with closely. Uh, I'm on their C four board, and they did, and we did some real unique testing to get outside of our comfort zone just talking to environmental or conservation voters.

And I went to the voter file and we pulled everybody in Montana and in Southern New Mexico for a targeted Senate race. [00:30:00] House race, who had a, a hunting license who were outdoorsmen, who were modeled, again, back to this model as outdoorsy types and environmental types. we pulled the Latinos out of that and did two different kinds of tests. We went and talked to Latinos, not about a immigration. We didn't even talk to Latinos about the price of eggs. talked to Latinos about access to parks,

pete altman: Mm-hmm.

Chuck Rocha (2): Angling and hunting, and then did that to hunters and anglers. So I think doing some more of that and it was very successful. Uh, I think till this day, I'll tell you this, a single reason gay Basquez got reelected in that race, along with he's a great candidate and has a great team. I think it helped a lot in Montana, even though we lost, but I think we need to do more of that as environmentalist and conservationists. 

To your point, that's different and outside the box to where let's not just talk to Latinos about immigration or black people about prison reform, for God's sakes, that's so disrespectful. let's think about the way we message people around the environment or conservation, right? With a little, if I can, cultural competency about. lot of folks are poor. A lot of [00:31:00] folks are like Chuck Rocha, who grew up in a trailer house, who the mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Saturday night was my number one entertainment. We only had three channels back in those days, but I never missed the Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom and it sticks with me till today. Like these are the cultural nuances when I say we should do things a little different.

pete altman: we're just about, toward the end of our time, but I want to ask you there's a lot of distress right now about what do we do about Trump and how do we deal with this? And the Democrats are.

let's just say not impressing, people with their approach to standing up to Trump. and I think a lot of us are trying to figure out how do we find a way back. So I want to give you an opportunity to just give us chuck's wisdom what should we be focusing on? What do we need to do in order to, get back to a point where we've got a government that's actually representing.

The true interests of working people.

Chuck Rocha (2): Two things have never changed in politics. If you're gonna get rid of somebody, like the president a congressman and you gonna win an election, you have to do two things. [00:32:00] There's no difference between these two things. If from 1970. Till 2025 today, it's one of the things that's never changed in politics. The first thing you have to do is you have to tell people why they should fire that party or that incumbent. That story is writing itself now, but don't chase every rabbit down every rabbit hole, or you'll never be focused on one of the things you come up with. A theme democrat of this administration, in my humble opinion, is hurting regular day working folks. The price of things are going up, and he's making things worth because of his own ambition and his own pride, he's hurting American workers. That's why he should be fired, and you can show one of a thousand examples of how he's hurting regular people. That's your. your point to fire him. The next part is what Democrats sadly get wrong. 'cause we've been running eight years, 12 years, all these years to say that we're, why should we vote Democrats?

And we say, 'cause we're not them. Well, that gets you so far. And he [00:33:00] could even win an election sometimes like that. Joe Biden 2020, like that's how he got elected. It's like, we'll elect this old white man 'cause he seems safe. He's been around a long time. He won't break nothing. And by God he didn't. And he did great.

He just got old on us. Yeah, to finish my thought, the second thing you have to do is tell people why you're going to make their lives better and why they should quote unquote hire you if they're firing them. So the vision is what I laid out earlier. You should hire me. this party was built on the backs of working people.

We've lost our way a little bit over some time, but we're gonna revert back to what this party was built on. The, you know, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt top Theology of Workers and People First. Yeah, and we can, and we're gonna be the party of all things social issues as well. But after we take care of the core values of who we are, which are Americans and American workers, we're not scared to talk about the flag.

We're not scared about being patriots. We're not [00:34:00] scared to say America first. But what we're gonna do is put the worker in front of all of those things. And I don't care if they're a gay worker, a black worker, a woman worker, an old worker, a worker. Everybody's gotta work. And

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): old to work and you, depending on the social security that you paid into, we're gonna protect that as well.

'cause that's your work money as well. I'll be here all day and I should have ran for DNC chair 'cause I think that would've fixed the party.

pete altman: uh, what's a, piece of wisdom or a lesson you learned or something a mentor shared with you early on that you wanna pass on to the next generation of. organizers and campaigners.

Chuck Rocha (2): I'm smiling 'cause I love this question. I have two answers 'cause that's who I am. the first answer is what I would title my second book, which would be an advice book. And it would have a simple title to the book. would say, nice, show up on time, and chew with your mouth closed. That's the first advice. If you do all three of those, you're gonna be all right. The

pete altman: [00:35:00] Mm-hmm.

Chuck Rocha (2): suit, and they think that they're the cat's.

pete altman: Yeah.

Chuck Rocha (2): And they want to show you their authority. They're mean and they're rude, and they're even more mean to that intern that's working under the lowest paid person in that job. The old man here has been doing campaigns for 35 years. I've been on this Earth 56 years. I can't tell you how much work and why I'm a success based off of how many people that I have come in contact with over that 50 years who's paid me back in spades through work advice, I just tried not to be an asshole to people and it went so far. So that's the advice I'd leave you with. That's great,

pete altman: Chuck. Thank you so much and thank you for [00:36:00] showing me the kindness of spending time with me today. I really appreciate it.

it's great to have you

Chuck Rocha (2): you. Thank you

pete altman: and

Chuck Rocha (2): you do every day and for your lifelong work in the environmental and conservation space.

It's been good to get to know you through the years, and I'm honored to be on your show.

pete altman: thank you. Thank you so much.