How can Change Agents Be Heard
Today, I’m widening the lens a bit to pose a vexing and complicated question: How does one engage in a kind of criticism that impels those with the power to change actually to make necessary change without the criticism being seen by those in power as an attack on their very being thus rendering the critic outside the circle of people who will effectively be heard. I come to this question following a recent article in which I was grateful to be cited but which left me concerned that my friends at the Grassroots Connector need to take a breath before lashing out at our Party leaders.
I understand why overstatement might be tempting because sometimes more measured criticism seems incapable of producing results. In my case, I often find that reforms I suggest receive widespread acclaim. Clear explanations produce general agreement. But then when it comes to people actually making change, there are crickets. So, to some degree, pushing harder through naming and shaming may be necessary. But the downside of that is the people you name won’t listen to you afterwards. For some people that’s a risk well worth taking. Mothership Strategies, for example, needs to stopped, not reformed. And, of course, when it comes to Republicans, I have joined many voices in offering appropriate levels of disdain for what they are doing to the country. But with respect to more responsible actors, the balance is much more complicated.
When it comes to the Democratic Party, for example, my complaints are of a much more measured nature. About 75% of the time I am more likely to want to defend the party from detractors rather than join in throwing barbs. As a for instance, I get the idea of just reflexively voting against all Trump Nominees. Were I a Senator, I am not sure I could resist that temptation personally. However, when hoping to distinguish the merely bad from the catastrophically terrible , showing a united front against the second category is helpful in demonstrating the difference. One quick way to think of this is, is the person being considered worse for the job they are being considered for than Trump is for his job. If the answer is no, then voting to confirm the person feels bad but might make some sense politically.
Right now, my number one complaint about the Democratic Party is how it raises and spends money. Given that the world seems to be on fire, this seems a pretty minor concern. But I ask you to think about money as a resource to put out the political fire just as water would be for a real one. Through that lens, we are talking about how we use water; how we direct water; and how we get people to pour their water on the fire, rather than saving it for when they might be closer to the fire, or merely because they feel they need it to drink. How and how often we ask for water plays a decent sized role in whether we get enough of it, I don’t know whether it is too late to put out the political fire, but we have to try. I will note that every single one of the DNC Chair candidates to one degree or another agreed with me on this point. (I may have to do a video super cut of them doing so.) But to actually accomplish the sort of change I propose requires the sort of difficult conversations that risk making someone personae non grata in our movement because it requires really radical change from people who think they are doing good but are in fact doing almost as much harm as good.
Let’s start with a simple question, If someone had $1000 (a non-trivial amount, but one which triggers no campaign finance limits) to spend on Democratic Campaigns or Causes (like a State Party, or an Outside Group), and their goal was to see as much of the Trump agenda stopped as possible, while seeing a Democratic Majority in the House by 2026, where should they give that money? I have about five solid recommendations for places to send such funds, and might consider splitting them, or just giving to any of the five (and there’s no magic to five, maybe someone could get me up to ten). But the key point is that if you are not one of the identified highest impact groups, then the bottom line is that you should not be asking grassroots donors for money. It is actually as simple as that. If you still need cash to function, you have high net worth big donors and political action committees and the amount you already have saved up to live on. There are two years till 2026, so making sure every dollar goes to the best place possible for those two years is extremely important. This may sound great in theory, but in practice it means Politicians that we deeply admire for all of their great work generally need to change what they are accustomed to doing when it comes to how they raise and spend money. The DCCC, HMP, DSCC, and SMP all need to get out of the small donor business entirely because campaign money goes further than soft money. So small donors should never give into soft money accounts.
Another absolutely crucial thing to channel money to the right places is that campaigns and organization have to be much clearer about what they are going to do with the money once they get it. I am going to use an example here because examples are very often the best way to explain things. But I stress that not all examples are chosen to highlight the worst actors. In this case, I offer an example of someone whom I really like, someone I have known for over 20 years and whose electoral record is extremely impressive. To my mind, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy is right now saying all the right things and is skyrocketing up to be easily one of our ten most important political leaders. He was unfortunately prescient about too many things and now is leading the charge at being clear about the authoritarian danger we face. As a result, I admire him greatly. His campaign’s communications, unlike so many, do not actually upset me too much because they speak extremely well to the moment. But there is still a problem. What is Senator Chris Murphy going to do with the money he is now actively raising. He was just re-elected this past November. So the next time he must face the voters is 2030, and he entered 2025 with 5.5 million dollars cash on hand. Why does he need money, and more importantly for what does he need money in the next two years? Here is the way his team put in the most recent e-mail I received.
An important request before you click away...
Chris Murphy is at the forefront of Democrats’ efforts to fight back against Donald Trump and Elon Musk. He’s trying to model the kind of leadership you deserve from your elected officials in this moment and inspire his colleagues to join him.
It’s a tough fight that requires his full attention. Small-dollar donations ensure he can give 100% of his time to this effort. Anything you can give makes a difference.
The basic promise here seems to be that if you give money, Senator Murphy can focus on fighting Trump and not fundraising, But the truth is Chris Murphy does not need to fundraise for himself for the next two years. He could probably fund his political operation on the 5.5 million dollars he currently has, but, of course that won’t be true if he is spending $ 400,000 a month on Facebook Ads. Like this Ad
But those ads mostly exist to build lists to raise more money. At this moment, I can’t even find a website that is not just a fundraising page. This does make a lot of sense for Senator Murphy. It raises his national profile: NYT Profile.
But within the entire ecosystem, a gift to Senator Murphy would only qualify as the best possible gift if he and his team could outline how they plan to spend the money they receive on political activities that would benefit Democrats/ hurt Trump within the next two years. If not for someone like me asking directly, the odds are very good no one is going to even ask that question. And the reward matrix for many office holders who say things people want to hear, have their comments well-received, and then publicize those statements to a wide audience, will induce that wide audience to reward you with the money you seek. Such funds give them the ability to make the ads go wider and successfully building their brand. Whether that brand truly becomes big enough to be of more broad use to the overall cause is much more doubtful.
The simple act of entering the ecosystem to promote yourself has the impact of making it harder for those with a true and current need to receive money. So we are clear, what I pointed out about Senator Murphy is true for many out of cycle Senators. It is true for a great many House members who are in completely safe seats. It is true for a number of organizations that frankly have not proven themselves to be even worthy of continued existence. (The mothership cut outs) All these different actors combined take a toll on our ability to fundraise for the right things and hinder our ability to communicate information about anything other than fundraising because communication channels are so clogged.
Everyone who is raising money needs to be explicit about why they need money, what they are going to spend it on, and why that need is urgent and immediate and what can be accomplished with that money? Every single fundraising pitch that sidesteps those crucial questions has the impact each and every time of making us just a little bit weaker. Obviously, some people’s why will be not particularly strong and thus they will struggle to obtain money. The requirement of saying why would do our ecosystem a huge amount of good. As donors we need to begin to demand it.
Yet to return to my opening point, changing our fundraising means we need to have unpleasant conversations with the people whom we might otherwise venerate because their actions in the fundraising space make all the rest of our work more difficult. We need to be respectful, and we need to understand the power that our leaders do and do not have. But we also need to be firm that they have an obligation to help make sure our donors’ money gets to right places and they have an obligation to not over ask if they are not the right place, or at a minimum in the process split their proceeds with places that seem the best candidate to be the right places. Far too many people are able to hide behind what is considered to be their “good” works, that it obscures that they had the power do much more but are not doing so. If you give away $1 million, but could relatively safely spend $3 million and choose instead to save it, should we be grateful for the $1 million or be more frustrated by what you didn’t do? Should we think of that money as yours because you raised it? Or ours because you raised it from us? When you asked for the funds, did donors respond to your call that giving was necessary because they envisioned their funds would be part of your $1 million effort to help the cause now or as part of the $3 million you might hold back for a rainy day. I am not sure I know exactly what the correct ratio is, But I know for sure that when House Democrats ended the 2024 cycle with well over $ 200,000,000 in cash on hand, and the Majority was lost by 7310 votes, then we didn’t get it right. While I wonder to what degree I am echoing Michah Sifry call
or he is echoing mine, when it comes to rallying our leaders to the overall cause, we unfortunately need to be uncomfortable to get our members to act. But we also need to do so in a way that is not seen as desire to throw them out, but instead a requirement that they step up and do better. This is our challenge, and one we need to take on.