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The Campaign Strategist
Why Restoring the Old Order Won’t Save Us | Michael Podhorzer Explains
Michael Podhorzer joins host Pete Altman to talk about what really happened in the 2024 election—and why the fight ahead isn’t about restoring the old order, but building a new one. From the failures of civil institutions to the importance of unions and organizing, this is a powerful conversation for anyone trying to navigate the Trump Era with clarity and strategy.
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To get past this, we have to understand that we are not trying to restore the order that he's disrupting. That's an old world that's never coming back. The question right now, the contest now, is what is our new world going to look like? And that's a project we should all be excited about that we all have to lean into because it is still contingent. But as long as we think our mission is to restore the Democrats or to restore the old order, we are empowering the monsters.
UNKNOWN:Bye.
SPEAKER_00:Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Campaign Strategist. My guest today is Michael Podhorzer, one of the sharpest strategic minds in progressive politics. If anyone out there is playing 4D chess, it's Mike. He served as political director of the AFL-CIO for over 25 years, helped to launch Catalyst, a progressive data service that helps progressive and Democrats reach the voters that they need, and the Analyst Institute, which uses evidence-based research and analysis to strengthen strategies and tactics. Mike writes Weekend Reading, a newsletter that cuts through the noise to name the real forces threatening our democracy and what we can do about them. He has a constant presence in the progressive community sharing information, helping people learn more about where we are and where we need to get to. And if you're trying to understand what time it is politically and how to act with strategy and clarity, Mike is someone you want to hear from. Thanks very much for joining us today. I appreciate it. Tell us a little bit about how you got into this work.
SPEAKER_01:Perfect. Wow.
SPEAKER_00:So 50 years. I've got a little experience with this. Let's start with the 2024 election. There are a lot of different stories out there about what happened. Voters massively swung to the right. Democratic voters lost faith in the party and stayed home. No one could have survived the inflation of last year, not to mention late in the cycle swap out of candidates. What do you think happened in 2024? And what does it really tell us about voters and where we need to go next?
SPEAKER_01:I've written much about it. And so I'm just going to hit the highlights. But I think that the best starting point is the recognition that most Americans think the system's broken, that the choices they have are not the ones they want. For most of this century, by two or three to one, people have felt the country's going in the wrong direction. As recently as the last day or so, there's another poll saying most people want either to burn the system down or big change. And so So it's not surprising that in the last 10 elections, in nine of them, voters have thrown the party in power out. And that has just not much of a precedent in American history, right? At the presidential level, going DRDR has only happened once before, and that's more than a century ago. Voters keep trying to say, we want a different system, we want different choices. but they don't get it. And so we toggle between these two alternatives. One that is saying, I want to burn the system down. but not in a way any of you really want. And the other saying, I'll slay that dragon, but to defend the intuitions none of you have confidence in. And to me, it was the fact that at least 17, 18 million, if not more people who were alarmed enough in 2020 to come out to vote against Trump stayed home. We see in the polling for Democrats now that voters really didn't lose confidence in them in 2024. They lost confidence for a long time. But when you only have two choices, like every other election, you're the not loser. So in 2024, the big failure, once we got to November, was that not enough people were alarmed about what was obviously going to happen if Trump was elected. I'm going back to that one second. The other aspect that both reinforced the sense of lack of alarm as well as literally made it possible was the way in which the Roberts Court first rewrote the Constitution to take out the Insurrection Clause and then delayed accountability and then came up with immunity. In a world in which the institutions were functioning properly, Donald Trump would not have been on the ballot to begin with. In the last week, especially as we've seen Trump's approval rating go down, even on things like the economy and immigration, which were supposed to be his best things, we see that the source of that are the voters who are least engaged in politics. Remember that Trump has done nothing he didn't tell us he was going to do. Did people not understand what dictator on Bill 1 means? Did people understand I'm going to deport 20 million people Did people not understand I'm going to put huge tariffs on every country? But the way in which civil society institutions failed, it was the media not taking it seriously enough, not reacting as if this is what was actually about to happen. And so the average voter who doesn't have 24-7 to do their own understanding of it just felt, well, we survived the first Trump administration. We don't like the way things are going now. Just stay at home. Basically,
SPEAKER_00:I've got a couple of questions from that. And one of them is, as a strategist, as someone who really studies things, how do you parse things like David Shore, a prominent Democratic pollster, made the case that most of those voters who stayed home, if somehow they had been sort of spotted off the couch and gone out to the vote, that they would have voted for Trump? How do you figure out which is the right interpretation? Understanding what's actually happened is essential to knowing where you want to go and how you want to get there.
SPEAKER_01:First of all, the argument that I just made about Biden voters who stayed home is different from if somehow someone had a magic wand and everybody voted. And so it's a little bit of a rhetorical sleight of hand. Most of the people who stayed home, voted in 2020 and didn't vote this time, happened to have a lot of markers that they didn't want to live in this fascist country. It was very disproportionately different. people who lived in cities, people who were registered Democrats. One of the fatal flaws of the sure view of all of this, which is really not just limited to him, is that the only way you can possibly understand Americans is through these polls where you have all these people doing online surveys and you can't look to the real world for revealed preferences. In that area where turnout was down and America moved to the right, seven Republicans Republican members of the House lost their elections. They flipped seven seats. There was only one Democrat on the Cook marginal list that lost. None of the senators or governors running in blue states where all of this drop-off was won by less than 12 points. And that was in Maryland, where you had a successful Republican governor in an open seat. Because their view is so attenuated into the four corners of a survey they wrote, They can't contemplate that Americans in blue America and in cities in red America actually kind of want to keep the right to an abortion. They want a higher minimum wage. They want all the things that are under attack right now. The prerequisite for taking all that kind of stuff seriously is accepting that you can only trust what a pollster tells you. After that, they make you believe. There's the expression, you're going to believe me or your lying eyes. A lot of people, I think, are intimidated by people who use a lot of numbers. It's probably better to say you're going to believe my number or your lying eyes. And somehow that actually tripped people up. But even there, and this is an important point that I didn't start with because I have skepticism about the polling generally, but what's also problematic in terms of how the media interprets it is that the data that he put out there is itself contested by other pollsters. There's another survey that's usually seen as a kind of gold standard academic consortium CES that says that those who did in vote actually favored Harris, just as they had in the last couple of elections. And so it's deeply problematic.
SPEAKER_00:In one way or another, that's a whole bunch of people that we have to figure out how to get back and to get engaged and to want to come out and support candidates who are going to stand up for freedom and the values that we're used to in, say, the Constitution. I'm not sure I want to be
SPEAKER_01:associated with that we. I think that since 2010, the country has been on borrowed time. As I was saying before, what Democrats have done, how people perceive them, I'm just talking nationally, level now, has not worked. It's not what people want. They've won because, alternately, they see Republicans as worse. That is an unsustainable system that you just keep winning because of how bad the opponent is. You inevitably get a point where the disillusioned Americans just don't bother to show up. It's really important to understand that the way Biden didn't lose 2020 was that an enormously number of people who up to that point had been alienated from the entire process decided to vote because of how alarmed they were about Trump. And it was those people who decide to not go out and vote again in 2024.
SPEAKER_00:You mentioned the failure of the media and others to sort of really explain what was in store if we got Trump back. And you recently spoke with Anat Shankar-Osario, who's a brilliant messaging communication strategist, about that we don't really have language to describe what's going on. Assume those things are related and it's difficult for the media to figure out how to talk about what's really at stake because of that missing language. Is that Is that how you see it?
SPEAKER_01:or other countries where they elected fascist leaders and where Le Pen and AFD are on the ballot, where there's a universally understood shorthand for what it means to elect a fascist government. There isn't the same ingrained sort of like lived memory for the country that can attach to those words. But the problem is if you don't have a different word for what's going on now, then you can't communicate what is actually happening. And we're long overdue for that. I'll give you a couple examples. One is if you remember after January 6th and in 2021, when the Republicans were still sort of backing Trump or doing different things, and there was a lot of back and forth about, well, you can't say that about Republicans. My uncle's a Republican or, you know, that's too broad based. And so fortunately, people started talking about MAGA Republicans. And MAGA Republicans says that this is a different thing than your uncle who's a Republican. And same way, and I wish we'd had more success earlier on this, the continuing use of the word Supreme Court to describe everything that comes out of the building instead of, say, the Roberts Court, when those decisions are by fiat, essentially. When we say the Supreme Court gave him immunity, we've lost the argument from the jump because we're saying that this legitimate institution did a legitimate thing. And when you say the Roberts Court gave them immunity, you're saying, no, this group of people who are put there by the Kochs, by Billionaire Project, the Federalist Society to do just this, people have traction on an understanding of why we're here.
SPEAKER_00:It's interesting how important it is for us to think about, carefully think about the language, the words that we use as in those examples. And one of the other ones you talked about was it's important not to talk about the Trump administration. It's a regime. It's like administration is weight It confers legitimacy. It confers normalcy. And one of the ways we have to adapt our language is to call out what's, well, not normal and what things really are. That's just one of the challenges that we face when we look at the communications landscape, which is one of the things I think causes us tremendous angst and trying to figure out we're now in this communications landscape that's incredibly asymmetrical, that the right has both helped to shape and also seems to be very much at home in because it's much more driven about winning and like engagement through the natural human emotions of anger and outrage. And that's what algorithms are then tuned to, not to mention the big social media giants basically seeking favor from Trump by aligning themselves to him. How do you think about the challenges that are posed by this communications environment and how do we need to adapt? Because audiences influence, we have to adapt or die. How do we meet this challenge? The answer to
SPEAKER_01:any of these questions is not easy because the decisions made long ago through the media that allowed the takeover of most media by corporate giants and by billionaires is the essential issue. The taking away of guardrails like the Fairness Doctrine and other things, and that's the thing about the whole aspect of where we are, is that in the second half of the 20th century, but coming out of the New Deal, there were a lot of guardrails put up against the disaster of allowing for the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands, whether it was Glass-Steagall for banks, whether it was the Fairness Doctrine and like how many things you could own for communication, all these different things, there were guardrails. And so for a half a century, you had decreasing inequality. You had the greatest burst of shared prosperity in human history in the United States, for real, that by the 60s was starting to expand beyond white people. And then they were starting to be successful in taking away the guardrails that made that possible. And surprise, we get all the problems that led to the crisis of the New Deal. And here we are again. Unfortunately, it's that deeper problem. And I think to bring in is that, and this is where I think it's another one of the guardrails that doesn't get enough attention, is ability of working people to act collectively in unions, making sure that we each have to be satisfied with, you know, oh, every two years you get to cast your vote, so this is exactly the country you want, is the problem. We were successful for decades because there was a counterweight to corporate power. And you don't have a counterweight to corporate power unless you have stronger unions.
SPEAKER_00:There's this interesting challenge we have right now, the collective action problem. We're seeing it play out with law firms and definitely media companies, especially with Paramount, what's happened to 60 Minutes and some of the first universities Trump went after, where on an individual basis, if the president of the United States comes after you and is able to threaten your interests, your safety, your welfare, your money, it's a perfectly rational decision to go, whatever, give him what he wants and we'll survive. When you have those decisions, that's how people keep making the decision. It means all of the voices and centers that could be pushback, opposition to what's going on are falling. The challenge of trying to get everybody to go, hey, it's in all of our best interests not to accede to this kind of weaponization of the federal government seems to be a real challenge. And I don't know if there is something that can be done about it or if we have to rely on the bond market freaking out in order to curb the worst impulses of the president and maybe some corporations. I'm just curious what your thoughts are on that. It's a great
SPEAKER_01:point, but there's a piece to add to that. John Dewey, who's a thinker in the early part of the 20th century, had this great expression that politics is the shadow big business casts on society. I think if you reformulate what you were saying about the way the law firms have capitulated in universities and also the Democrats in Congress, compare it to 2017, the first time around. People couldn't be anti-Trump fast enough in those quarters, right? Those law firms were doing a lot of pro bono work on this, all of this. They showed up for the Muslim ban. They were just like all out there. Same with universities. Well, a big difference is that in 2017, most of corporate America really was pretty freaked out that Trump won. So all of that standing up was bolstered by the corporate community who are the clients of big law. At the same time for universities. This time around, we saw before the election, corporate America pretty much wanting to go, Trump won't be that bad. We'll get our tax cuts. All of the corporations still are not part of the resistance or whatever, the way they were eight years ago. It's not that those law firm partners or university presidents are becoming less willing to stand up in a vacuum. In terms of their own incentives, there's less of it. Or even think about the Democrats. In 2017, most of them. Not all of them. There's obviously a few exceptions. They spend an enormous amount of time raising money every day. And in 2017, when they were raising money and talking to the affluent, talking about how they were going to rein Trump in was a positive. And the people they were talking to were pretty concerned about what might happen. Right now, they're calling around to get money from people who are not that concerned and who are not showing the same sense of alone they did eight years ago. We as sort of spectators to Congress to think about them in this kind of vacuum that, well, you know, the voters think this or the polls say that, but they're spending hours every day in a milieu where there isn't the same urgency or
SPEAKER_00:alarm. I feel like I must have missed something. The evidence of how poisonous Trump is for this country is more clear than, way more clear than 2017, but Democratic donors are less concerned? Yeah, not like
SPEAKER_01:marquee Democratic donors, but they have to call through to all the corporate PACs. They have to call through to a lot of anonymous Wall Street people or Silicon Valley people who get no attention in the media.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:but who don't wear it on their sleeves
SPEAKER_00:necessarily.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. And why are they less concerned? I think that there are different reasons. It's a complex story, but I think that in the immediate past, many of them felt that Biden was too antagonistic. The antitrust stuff, the extension of the tax cuts, going on a picket line for the UAW, you know, Lina Khan, all of that. Whereas in 2017, up through 2020, the next Democratic administration was hypothetical. And so they had, like, we just don't want this. And in a more proximate sense, although this isn't the only thing by any amount, if you really roll your memory tapes back to November 2020, when the business community was so Yeah. And so it didn't quite work out that way. Yeah. And so it didn't quite
SPEAKER_00:work out that way. was hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work for the beneficiaries, I guess, he picks. Who does he have in mind? Like, was that just a way to dig him in and cost him more money and time and embarrassment? Or do you think he and his regime have some groups in mind that they, you know, will need legal defense? What do you think that means? Does it mean something or is it just...
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I absolutely think it means something. I mean, we'll see whether things are changing, but I think what they have in mind is Yeah. blue states, they can, you know, challenge the try to decertify labor unions. They can do amicus briefs for Elon Musk's case to make the NLRA unconstitutional. There's no shortage of legal work that they can be deployed
SPEAKER_00:for. That seems like something that would be good to have more attention on. If anybody can spare the time. I think of Trump largely as an amoeba who's like stimulus response, stimulus response. And, you know, we know the triggers. He clearly has powerful political instincts, but there's also a lot of very deep thinking in MAGA world. I mean, I know we both read Project 2025 and talked about it last year. That's a very comprehensive playbook that they are executing 100% and way faster than I ever thought. One of the things that I think a lot of people worry about is how Trump regime could use the power of the federal government to permanently plant future elections in favor of the Republicans to effectively lock Democrats out of party. And I thought it would be something like a national voter integrity law, which they have introduced called SAVE, that would sort of pull together the best of the crap they've pulled in states. I hadn't actually thought enough about them attacking the institutions that are part of the electoral machinery. And just this week, Trump's executive order instructing the DOJ to go after Act Blue, I think is really frightening. How concerned are you? Where do you see that going? Do you expect them to open up more fronts attacking essentially the infrastructure that helps Democrats get elected in advance of 2026, when in normal times, one could reasonably expect that the Democrats would be able to retake the House? I think they're going to
SPEAKER_01:get as much of it accomplished as they can, right? And that, again, to come back to earlier in the conversation, is where words matter. Because there's some people, unfortunately, throw off expressions like, yeah, throw elections, right? There are going to be elections. But the problem is that when you go vote in 2026, the current The substance of what an election is will be different than it was before. And as long as we keep making just the fact that you get to go to your high school and cast a ballot, the checkmark for we're still a democracy, to add to what they've done in a way that it's hard to calculate what it means, for a long time, the federal government has invested a lot in protecting elections from cyber threats, and they have stopped doing that. Trump's own appointee, Chris Krebs. check, we're still a democracy.
SPEAKER_00:You know way more than I do about all of this stuff, and there are times I freak myself out about foreseeing, like, you know, each of these pieces combine to sort of, you know, seal us into the empire from Star Wars of absolute domination and control, which is not healthy. It can absolutely be demotivating, not to mention the mental stress. How do you keep it together, being able to see, like, all of the sort of pathways that these individual things go down and the way they interconnect and could mean that we had our last, I mean, I wouldn't even call recent ones all that free and, they're pretty free and fair, right? But, you know. No, we already are. How do you handle
SPEAKER_01:that? We are already past that. That's part of the problem. Yeah. If you remember like where you were in January of 2009 when Barack Obama was sworn in, you probably had a pretty good feeling. And if someone from January 2025 time traveled back to you, told you Right. Because remember, in 2008, it was before the election. for Citizens United, and no one could do any of that. But that is what I mean about how, like, you keep using the same word. Well, the 2012 election, they're not the same thing. That's in the rearview mirror. We had someone who should have been found guilty of insurrection who was president. That's not a free and fair election. I think to get back to how do you keep your sanity and how you actually be emboldened and ready to try to deal with it, we're at a time that's not that much unlike the period in the 1920s and early 30s where you had rising fascism coming across Europe and you had after the First World War and you had Soviet totalitarianism coming out of that and the same kind of in Incredible inequalities, both in terms of wealth and income and political power. And there was an Italian dissident who was imprisoned by Mussolini, Antonio Grubsky, who said this. He said, the old world is dying. The new world is yet to be born. Now they're just monsters. And that describes where we are now, right? Even in the 30s, there was a much more robust fascist movement in the United States than we tend to remember. But the key insights here is that the old world has died. The miracle for the United States at that point was that the new world that was born was the New Deal. It wasn't fascism. It wasn't totalitarian communism. It was the New Deal. But it was absolutely not the old world progressives might have had in mind or that the Democrats, I should say, would have had in mind. It was that kind of departure. And the challenge now, and this is why earlier I was saying I'm not sure I want to be part of that we, is that to get past this, we have to understand that we are not trying to restore the order that he's disrupting. That's an old world that's never coming back. The question right now, the contest now, is what is our new world going to look like? And that's a project we should all be excited about that we all have to lean into because it is still contingent. But as long as we think our mission is to restore the Democrats or to restore the old order, we are empowering the monsters.
SPEAKER_00:I think that's an important point to make. And I'm hearing people make it more and more. It already wasn't a perfect system that in fact led to so many people feeling left behind, left out, dismissed, not in control. It has nothing for me. So what does it look like as we move forward? What do you think are the biggest challenges progressives and Democrats need to really sink their teeth into to figure out how do we create the future that we want?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think that an important element of it is co-creating with a broader group of folks and with working class people, basically. Going back to that New Deal comparison, the people at that point understood that the importance of siding with working people against corporate power, right? And that's when unions were created. And unions played a huge role. Working people played a huge role in ensuring the success of the New Deal project up until the Wagner Act, which created unions, the government mostly helped corporations suppress collective action. After that, it defended it for a brief time, but it meant that very quickly a third of the American workforce was unionized. And that third of the American workforce continuously voted for FDR and the Democrats 80-20. When you have a third of the country and their family understanding that there's a conflict between your interests and corporate interests and that the Democratic Party was on your side, all the things we think about now, like, well, the economy wasn't so good or all of the ways we think about elections now didn't matter. In the Depression, it went down into another recession, but Roosevelt still won because voters understood that Roosevelt was on their side, that they were smarter in a way than voters now who understood clearly the stakes for them and the And so you had five straight elections where the New Deal won. And then the next two with Eisenhower, he won essentially promising not to disturb the New Deal. And then you have Kennedy and Johnson. That is when America's been successful for the most people, but it's also when the most people have been organized to have a voice in their future. And so in this moment when it's encouraging to see how many people are going out into the streets, doing things to defend the people who were, you know, abducted to El Salvador, which is all important to do. It is not, not that. They have to understand that it is as important as the Trump regime goes after working people in their unions, that that is as dangerous or more dangerous to them, not just to the people in the unions, as any of this other stuff.
SPEAKER_00:One way, one of the many ways, 2024 was notable, was the Teamsters declined to endorse Vice President Harris and I think that you said, wrote or said recently, right now union membership sort of 60-40, if I'm remembering correctly. Yeah, 57-43 this time around. And I'm guessing that largely speaks to the disaffection, the dissatisfaction that people had with what was the status quo or how things were going. Looking forward, is the way to unite the working class and to restore the sort of the power of people over the corporate elites, is it through unions? Is that the only path or are there other ways that that can be done? can be expressed and organized.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, it's the only path that's ever worked. One of the pieces I wrote recently was about the much broader connection between unions and real democracy. And I go through some examples that almost everyone's familiar with, but somehow doesn't think about it in a union context. The overthrow of Soviet totalitarianism, starting with solidarity, the union in Poland. You had the event, the success of the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, not just the obvious genius of Nelson Mandela, but also the pressure of the organized miners in the country. The source of not being a democracy is the imbalance of power between corporations and individuals. And unions are the only way that there's been an institution at scale that goes against that. In terms of for freedom, I think in a way that that in sort of concept also gets this idea across, but not with the same values, is the role that the evangelical and Christian nationalists play in the country now, where that is another 80-20 constituency, where it doesn't matter what Trump does, it doesn't matter what Republicans do, because their understanding, it's flawed, it's wrong, is that Yeah. And I think sometimes people on our side, when they see the ways in which the Republicans or Trump are immoral or do things that should offend them, they are blind to the way in which the justices they've put on the Supreme Court did jobs. They continuously roll back the separation of church and state. We're having Supreme Court cases now that could bring taxpayer money to religious institutions. Yeah, I think the jokes on people who think they're stupid for going along with a thrice-married adulterer.
SPEAKER_00:They
SPEAKER_01:actually understand power.
SPEAKER_00:When I think about the difference between the right and the left, I often think they seem to be far more focused on winning, just winning. I mean, I grew up from the advocacy community, but it much just thinking about winning a policy, winning on an issue, driving that forward. It seems to me like a somewhat different psychology that has benefited them in some ways, the fluidity and the flexibility to not really care about the, how much does this really line up with our values? We just want to win and have that power. Another notable Supreme Court decision was giving Trump immunity for just about anything he chooses to do, which means that there's really no consequence. I mean, he can pardon anybody in the administration that violates the law and he's not going to be held accountable. And that definitely contributes to what we're seeing these days. Who do you think in the electoral world, who's doing a good job of figuring out what's a pathway forward to grow influence, to reach audiences that we need to reach, to get people more engaged, you know, to start to build up this resistance? Who do we look to as good examples of this? Well, here I'm going to be a little disappointing, maybe. It's one of those little questions where I should have done
SPEAKER_01:the answer first. The people who will lead us to a better new world are people we really don't know yet, that it's going to be people who are insurgent. Not to say that everybody in Congress is corrupt or anything like that, but if we look back for examples of countries or even the United States in similar situations, like a key ingredient of making a new world is not being part of the old one. We're still at the very beginning stages of coming to terms with this. And in In the conflicts that are certain to be coming over the next year, two years, three years with the Trump regime, we're going to see a lot of new leaders. We're going to see a lot of folks with new strategies, you know, new visions of what should come next. The most important thing for us to do is to be open to all that, to not just discount them because we don't know who they are.
SPEAKER_00:What is a piece of advice that you got or a lesson learned from a mentor or otherwise early on that was really important to you that you think is a important to
SPEAKER_01:share with younger campaigners. regulatory proceedings against corporations. And it had passed during the Ford administration. And then Carter was elected, so it was assumed. And he vetoed it. I can't remember if he actually vetoed it. But anyway, he got to Carter. He said he would sign it, all of that. Once it became obvious that the bill would be signed into law, the business community just did an enormous amount of lobbying. The bill got weakened and weakened in committee, but it was still something valuable. And so then by enormous number of post-functions. We have the whole vote count. Day of the final vote comes, and my role is to be in the gallery to keep track of who's voting and for what. At that point, you vote electronically, but you're not seeing who's voting for what, but I know them by sight. When the call for the final vote comes, all the members of the House or they are listening to the speeches by both sides. Tip O'Neill's ends with a fiery speech. We know it's going to be really close. And so we watch the vote and it's neck and neck till it gets to be about 170, 170. And then there is not another single vote cast for it until after it's lost. That is how powerful the lobbying was, right? Which is something you would not know otherwise because the vote would have looked much closer because once it was clear that it lost, a whole bunch of Democrats like stuck their cards in the voting machines and voted for it after it was too late.
SPEAKER_00:You mean after time had No, no, no. After it
SPEAKER_01:had gotten to 218 against, they knew it would no longer be seen as voting against business.
SPEAKER_00:So the rest of them felt then they could cast their vote for it without suffering the consequences
SPEAKER_01:of corporate retribution. pretty key moment for me because I realized what an illusions created around the ability to fight against that kind of upward power through elections or the political system.
SPEAKER_00:That must have been, well, but you stayed in the
SPEAKER_01:game. Not in a NGO advocacy way, in a way that really understood that the labor movement and the kind of community groups that I was with before that worked with the labor movement were categorically different in that all of the resources that go to those groups come from the people that are those groups. In the rest of the NGO community, the money comes from other people from foundations or rich people or who ultimately don't have the same interest. And that's why the labor movement is so essential, because it is the only way people can put their dollars together on their own behalf.
SPEAKER_00:That's a great point to land on. Great. Mike, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into The Campaign Strategist, where we dive into the art and science of advocacy. Thanks again, and see you next time.
