Wellstone Action!

posted by Sara Beth Mueller

NOVEMBER 10, 2011

A week or so ago – Halloween weekend, actually – The New York Times stepped up its holiday spirit with a very scary story. The kind you tell while aiming a flashlight at your face.

It gave frightening new details about a group of ultra-conservative Tea Party stalwarts who meet in Washington, D.C. each month. They share polling, opposition research, and voter contact strategies. They preview media pitches and advertising angles. And they coordinate the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars they plan to raise and spend between this November and the next.

Hundreds of millions. Like, one of these organizations – American Crossroads – is going to spend $240 million all by itself.

Because progressives aren’t terrified enough about next year’s election odds. Happy Halloween, y’all!

It’s no secret that those of us working to take back our progressive vision for this country have been plenty afraid about our chances for success. We’ve watched the rise of a re-energized conservative movement, backed by billionaires, that believes in everything we don’t. And Tuesday’s elections, with everything from voters’ rights to workers’ rights to women’s rights laid bare before a not-so-metaphorical grim reaper, were watched by all of us with at least as much fear as there was hope.

But then, my facebook feed began to blow up. Posts from my pals about victory in Ohio, then Maine, then Mississippi, and then a late-night left-fielder about an undoing in Arizona.

These wins – for justice, for fairness, for all of us – were the lift our spirits sorely needed. While these zealots with cauldrons whipped up their witches’ brew in legislatures across the land, the people resoundingly refused to take a drink.

And this wasn’t anything magical, right? It was the result of months of focused work, of good, old-fashioned organizing. Of these four achievements, Wellstone Action! had a hand in two of them. And we’re not even close to finished.

In the face of extremist politics, the people of Ohio proved their collective power. Wellstone Action! has a deep history in Ohio, with years of offering our Camp Wellstone, Advanced Campaign Management, and Labor trainings to citizens, campaign workers, and candidates. And as things heated up this past year, we were pleased to partner with the Ohio Democratic Party, Ohio Education Association, and We Are Ohio to train Ohioans how to mobilize and organize at the grassroots. We also joined with Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative, developing a voter engagement plan and supporting their efforts to beat back this most recent assault on workers. And, as of Tuesday, two more of our Camp Wellstone alum – Grant Hutcheson (City Council) and Yvette Simpson (City Council) – join fellow Camp Wellstone alumnus Armond Budish (House Minority Leader) as elected officials.

Wellstone Action! also had the privilege of working in Maine to restore voter’s rights, alongside our friends at National People’s Action Electoral Power Cohort and the Maine People’s Alliance, who collected 71,000 signatures through Maine’s “People’s Veto Ballot Initiative Process”. What was a neck-and-neck race just one week ago turned Tuesday into a 20-point landslide. Wellstone Action!’s role in this win actually began this spring, when we teamed up with Maine State Employees Association (a member-run organization of SEIU) working intensively with campaign leaders to develop member engagement, mobilization, and lobbying strategies that would ignite voters against a number of anti-union, anti-public worker initiatives.

Our campaign in Maine was strategically positioned to not only defeat this spooky public policy, but also to serve as the springboard for this week’s victory on voter registration, and the means for taking back our progressive power in this state. And, in the spirit of what we teach at Wellstone Action! – that building power and winning change requires a serious, strategic, and sustained investment – our work isn’t even close to over. In fact, it continues next week, when we team up with Engage Main to train folks from their labor and community-based organizations and recruit candidates for next year’s legislative elections. And after we recruit those candidates? Well, Wellstone Action!’s going to train them, too.

The tricky thing about nightmares – be they on Elm Street or Main Street – is that we’re sometimes not sure whether they’ve ended. After all, there’s a whole lot of money to be made in drawing them out: you can remake the original film using different actors, you can conjure up a crossover showdown between two epic villains from two different franchises, and your pockets can stay full as long as the antagonist’s defeat is always ambiguous.

So while Tuesday’s triumphs don’t exactly let us roll the closing credits on this conservative, national nightmare of ours, they absolutely signal how we the people can shift the plot when the “good guys” stick together – when we progressive protagonists stand up, keep fighting.

This story’s not over yet. And I’m already excited for the sequel.

Sara Beth Mueller is the Director of Communications and Marketing at Wellstone Action!. She hates scary movies but is awfully fond of metaphors.