In a story Tuesday in The New York Times, Hiroko Tabuchi scrutinizes various anti-transit campaigns of the Charles and David Koch-funded propaganda arm, Americans for Prosperity. She focuses on the defeat of a Nashville, Tennessee, $5.4 billion referendum on a sales and business tax to fund improved mass transit. Backed by a coalition of businesses and other groups, that referendum was expected to pass easily. But AFP opposed it. And when the vote was counted, it had been overwhelmingly rejected.
In the past three years, AFP has coordinated campaigns on at least seven local or state-level ballots. Most of the time, it was victorious. Both AFP and other Koch-funded organizations have opposed at least 25 transit-related ballot issues around the nation.
The way the win was achieved in Nashville and those other cities is about more than just money for advertising and mailers. While those also were part of the campaign, a door-to-door organizing approach using local residents was a key element. In Nashville, AFP volunteers made 42,000 phone calls and knocked on more than 6,000 doors. Akash Chougule, AFP’s policy director told Tabuchi: “There’s nothing more effective than actually having a human conversation with someone on events that affect them on a day-to-day basis. It’s a great opportunity for us to activate people in their own backyards, and we’re among the first to do it in a sustained, permanent way.”
Chogule is absolutely right about those face-to-face human conversations. AFP is funding the kind of local organizing that we progressives should be doing more of, had better be doing going forward if we are going to turn the occasional blue wave into something more solid and long-lasting. We cannot match the money the Kochs and other rightist billionaires can so easily provide. But we don’t have to. If fewer dollars are combined with the right level of passion and commitment, we can craft our own victories despite the right’s deluge of cash. Call it asymmetric electoral warfare.
Although AFP uses its proprietary i360, what the Times calls a “sophisticated” and “particularly powerful version of the technologies used by major political parties” to profile voters, the organization’s approach is decidedly not just having outsiders parachuting in during the final three months or so of a crucial campaign, then leaving when the election is over, often taking mailing lists and data and even the software with them. While AFP is initially drawn to a city or state based on some issue that matters to the Kochs, the bigger idea is to spur local activists into building chapters and infrastructure. This makes eminently good sense. Precinct by precinct, progressives should work to expand existing local efforts or establish new ones, in Chougule’s words, in “a sustained permanent way.”
The Koch’s argument against mass transit expansions is the usual rancid libertarian one. The brothers are usually against more taxes, so votes to enact levies for better mass transit are an obvious target. But you don’t see AFP lobbying or dumping money into campaigns to eliminate funding for roads and highways. That, of course, might have something to do with a big hunk of their business: oil, gas and petrochemicals. Electrified light rail with a green source of power is simply not in their interests and they will fight it no matter how much the Koch-funded Cato Institute tries to give ideological cover to their transit opposition by arguing that it’s all about consumer freedom. That can be a persuasive argument among people who are already predisposed to reject most new taxes.
Whether it’s seeking support for mass transit projects, green energy policy, civilian review boards for the police or backing candidates for local and state offices, aspects of the AFP technique merit careful progressive consideration. That doesn’t mean giving up other proven means of moving votes leftward, but it does require a shift in organizational priorities.