MAYDAY.US

Optimism

Lessig — 2014-09-13

Our blog is migrating. This blog post will now live here: http://blog.mayday.us/post/98260006830/

Our second election was hard — but after spending some time studying the data, and spending a day with the campaign team finalizing decisions on the last three races, I am again optimistic, and I want to share with you just why.

We knew our second race was going to be incredibly difficult. We entered the New Hampshire Republican Senate Primary endorsing a candidate with 9% support, against a candidate with more than 60% and with the firm endorsement of the Republican Party. Worse, we had only three weeks of effective campaigning. Worse still, two of those three weeks were in August.

But we entered the race because we knew this race was not just about a nomination in a Republican Primary. This is New Hampshire. And as we have understood from the beginning of this project, we will only ever win a Congress committed to fundamental reform in the way campaigns are funded if we can convince New Hampshire voters to make this corruption an issue. Not just the Democrats, but the Republicans, and even more importantly, the undeclared Independents. And not just in this race, but in every federal race — especially the race for President in 2016.

So we decided to go into the primary, and go big. As quickly as they could, a campaign team put together messaging, and built coalitions with Republicans in the state eager to elect our candidate, Jim Rubens. We were on TV and radio with our message. We bought digital, and print. We did three direct mailings, and supported a fourth through a local ally. The most incredible campaign manager directed the fight on the ground. Hundreds from across the country helped us get out the vote.

The result was not a victory, but we achieved an important success. We wanted to give the hand-picked Republican nominee, Scott Brown, a run for his money on the issue of money, because there was a New Hampshire grown Republican who had taken up this issue, and offered an innovative Republican solution. This is a battle for a part of the soul of the Republican Party, and as I have said again and again, if we are ever to win a Congress committed to fundamental reform, we need a Republican Party in which reform is not a four letter word.

From that perspective, the race in New Hampshire is an important victory. The second highest vote-getter in a Republican Primary for Senate was a candidate who spoke openly about the need to change the way elections are funded. He was supported on that issue by one of New Hampshire’s most prominent conservatives, former Senator Gordon Humphrey. And as we can see from our polling after the election, our issue had critical resonance with an important segment of New Hampshire Republicans. 37% said that “reducing the corrupting influence of politics was a major or deciding factor in their vote for Senate.” And among that 37%, our candidate beat the Republican nominee by 18 points!

So yes, 37% isn’t yet a majority. To win among them even by 18 points is not enough to win. But remember, there is just one Republican in Congress who has co-sponsored any bill to fund elections publicly. However steep the hill to get from 9% to a majority in New Hampshire, the climb from one in Congress to at least a decent minority is even steeper. This is a hard and long term battle, and what we have done — successfully — is to lay the foundation for a more sustained recognition among the Republican Party generally, and especially the party in New Hampshire, that a substantial portion of Republicans, too, want to end the corrupting influence of money in politics.

That foundation was critical to this election; it will be even more critical going forward. Because of our work, this issue became prominent in the reasons newspapers gave for endorsing Jim Rubens. The Concord Monitor, for example, listed it as one of two that justified their endorsement of Rubens. After we made this issue salient, we have seen a surprising rise in the advertising in other campaigns of references to our issue as the reason to support one candidate over the other. And obviously, now that Jim Rubens is not the Republican nominee, our issue will continue to be an important resource for the incumbent Democrat, Jeanne Shaheen, to use to distinguish herself from Scott Brown.

And our data shows clearly just how valuable a resource that will be. In post election polling among all voters, we found 82% who believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics – Democrats (92%), Independents (81%), and Republicans (74%). And 61% of voters say that a candidate’s positions on reducing the corrupting influence of money in politics will be a major or deciding factor in their vote for U.S. Senate. Shaheen leads brown by 22 points among voters who say that reducing the influence of money is important; she has a 24 point advantage among those who say it will be a deciding factor.

Now some New Hampshire Republicans might read that and say — see, all MAYDAY.US was trying to do was to help Jeanne Shaheen. But of course, had our candidate won (and while it was a long shot, I still think, had Bob Smith not hung on till the end, he could have won), our issue would be invisible in the general election, because both the Republican and Democrat would have agreed on the importance of reducing the influence of money in politics. So our consolation prize is two more months of this issue being salient among the voters in this critically important election. Winning would obviously have been a welcome first prize. But second prize isn’t so bad either.

After the election, however, a very different issue haunted me. On the morning after, I wrote a blog post declaring we had “lost” “badly.” (I followed that post with one about how we had lost “hopefully” and one about how Zephyr Teachout and Tim Wu had lost in their bid for the New York executive “beautifully.”) But if you read that post carefully (a scandalous thought, I know), you’ll see that my point is not about a loss in New Hampshire, but a loss in momentum for us, for MAYDAY.US. Because in the world of snippet journalism (hey, at least I called them journalists), I most fear not the long term battle for New Hampshire, but the critical fight to continue to grow the Mayday.US movement. We are at a critical moment; after a string of strongly positive pieces in the press, we were destined for the inevitable negative backlash. But when we launched this plan in May, I had expected that if we had gotten this far — with our $1M crowdfunding challenge met and matched, and then a $5M crowdfunding challenge — we would have secured the final match before now. I’ve not yet secured that match; and my greatest fear on the morning of September 10th was that this “defeat” would defeat the efforts to get that match. And then our plan for an adequate pilot in the 2014 cycle would be defeated too.

It won’t. After a few days taking the pulse of those most likely to step up, I am confident (and relieved) to see that they can think clearly enough to understand what I’ve just written. We are now settled on our our final three races (though because of the surprise needed, we’re going to continue for now to be stealth on at least two). And after working through the budgets with our incredible campaign team — a team that has been focused on the general election, not these two primaries — I am absolutely confident that we will be able to do what we set out to do. We will win the fight on this critical question: Can we move voters on the basis of this issue, and win?

The next 8 weeks won’t be easy. There will be good stories, and there will be other stories. But this is your movement, and you should feel entitled to push back: When a pundit tells you the plan can’t work, you should ask, “How do you know that? We haven’t even released the full list of the districts.” For the measure of our success is not a single race; the measure is the portfolio: Have we selected a sufficiently diverse range of districts with different kinds of challenges, and demonstrated across the mix that we can move voters on the basis of our issue?

Of course we can fail in that — we could pick a bad mix, or we could fail to show progress in the mix that we pick. But two things are for sure: First, without knowing the mix, you can’t know whether the mix makes sense. And second, even when the full range is known, single victories, just like single losses, won’t matter. The measure of our success is the movement we show among a well selected mix. And as the press starts to report better on exactly how this judgment is being made — by whom, and with what knowledge and experience — you will see the sense in what you’ve helped us to do.

We will make mistakes. That’s the nature of startups; it’s the nature of projects trying something no one else has done in the same way. But we are building on the important work that Friends of Democracy (now EveryVoice) did in 2012. And I am even more confident than ever that when this cycle is finished, we will have done something you can be proud of.

I am grateful for your support so far. This has been the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, inspired by the most difficult loss I have ever suffered. But we will show what we need to show by December, 2014. And when we do, the fight to win a Congress committed to enacting fundamental reform in the way campaigns are funded will seem not just possible, but inevitable.

Please help us now however you can. Share this email with anyone you know with the patience to read 2,000 words. Share your support for MAYDAY.US on Facebook or Twitter. Get a MAYDAY.US shirt on Zazzle. Or even better, embrace the irony and donate. Whatever you do, we need you now. There’s an extraordinary amount left to come, and your help will be essential.

Thank you for reading this far. And thank you as always for everything you have done. There are many in this fight to win back a representative democracy. And when the story of that victory is told, we will have played a critical role.

-Lessig


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