It’s now clear after months of teeth gnashing and poll watching that the much-anticipated midterm “red wave” did not materialize. While some tight races remain to be called, the news for progressives is encouraging. This is especially true when it comes to down-ballot races and the success of young candidates.
Tuesday’s results point to a clear mandate for progressive philanthropy: Now, not next election cycle or next year, is the time to invest in building a candidate pipeline that will prepare more of these promising leaders to run for office.
Those who watch elections closely are familiar with the so-called coattails effect whereby a popular politician at the top of the ticket helps sweep down-ballot candidates into office. But those coattails can also be reversed. In Michigan and Pennsylvania, for example, big wins at the top of the ticket got an additional boost from progressive young candidates who drove voter turnout from further down the ballot. Candidates such as Darrin Camilleri and Sarah Anthony in the Michigan state senate, and Malcolm Kenyatta in the Pennsylvania statehouse, excited voters, won their own races, and contributed to progressive success statewide.
Even in Florida, where progressives were not as successful, rising stars such as Anna Eskamani in the statehouse and Maxwell Frost, who became the first member of Gen Z to win a seat in Congress, made their mark with big victories.
These young people are our future, and we need more of them. But the left needs a stronger and better resourced infrastructure to support them and compete with the far more developed efforts on the right. Philanthropy can support much of this work, which is driven by both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) groups.
As someone who cares deeply about nurturing young people, it pains me to see how effectively this has been done by the political right. The Leadership Institute in Arlington, Va., for example, boasts of training more than 200,000 young conservative politicians and in 2021 claimed revenue of more $30 million. It has an extensive catalog of courses including “future candidate school,” and fundraising and communications classes, all of which are offered at little or no cost with housing and meals included. Prominent alumni include Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, and Grover Norquist.
More recently, the far-right Turning Point USA emerged with a mission to “identify, educate, train and organize students to promote freedom.” It claimed income of $55 million from June 2020 to June 2021. In the meantime, well-established and deep-pocketed organizations such as the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society continue to offer support for emerging conservative leaders.
Groups on the left are also doing critical work and making a real difference. They include the organization I lead — People For the American Way — and its 501(c)(3) Young Elected Officials program. Organizations such as Run for Something, a 501(c)(4), and re:power fund, a 501(c)(3), consistently work with some of the most promising young progressive candidates in the country. But with annual budgets below 10 percent of the conservative behemoths, each punches well above its weight. This asymmetry has serious consequences.
Financial Security and Physical Safety
The young leaders cultivated by these organizations need specific forms of support. Like all beginning candidates, they need media training for TV appearances and interviews. They need to learn how to give a stump speech, ask for money, and craft legislation. And as the political climate grows more threatening and violent — especially toward progressives — many require security.
Fear for their families’ and their own safety can stop promising young people from running for office — whether they are aiming for a school board seat or Congress. This needs to be addressed head-on. My organization is polling young elected officials to learn about their safety concerns, with the goal of providing professional security consulting to all who need it. This will, of course, require more resources.
Young progressive candidates also need financial security. The romantic notion that public service is an honor, for which nobody should ask to receive a living wage, is misguided and must end. It ensures that mostly privileged people run for office and that people of color, young people, women, and those from the working class — in other words, the people who traditionally lean progressive — are more likely to be shut out. Grant makers can address this by supporting nonprofits that advocate for better pay for public officials. Additionally, direct philanthropic support for groups that offer campaign and leadership training will ease the tuition burden for young people — an approach the right has long embraced.
Philanthropy can further help address financial inequities among those seeking office by supporting nonprofits that study and advocate for changing how campaign finance works. Overhauling these laws would make it far less likely that candidates with the deepest pockets and greatest connections to wealthy donors have an automatic edge and would help level the financial playing field for aspiring young leaders.
While overhauls of the campaign-finance system have stalled at the federal level in recent years, exciting local innovations are worthy of support. They include Seattle’s Democracy Voucher public-financing program, which aims to reduce the influence of corporate money in politics. This year, the city of Oakland is poised to adopt a similar measure, and others will surely follow. Local advocacy groups leading these campaigns will need funding to succeed.
Front Lines of Democracy
Such efforts could have an especially powerful impact on who runs for local office. Young people are needed everywhere in government, but as a former mayor, I know how much they can make an immediate difference in the nation’s rapidly growing cities, where those who control city hall are on the front lines of democracy.
Similarly, state legislators are playing an increasingly essential role in shaping democracy, and statehouses require energetic new leaders to fend off the worst instincts from the right. This includes conservatives’ radical new “independent state legislature theory” — a doctrine that declares state legislators have sweeping authority over federal elections and can overrule even their state supreme courts.
It will take a few election cycles to train young people to take on this work and for the nurturing process to fully pay off. But when it does, those payoffs will be huge. Consider that 14 years after my organization’s Young Elected Officials program started in 2005, alumni, including Pete Buttigieg and Julian Castro, appeared on the presidential debate stage.
Let’s not wait for the dust to settle on this election before progressive organizations and donors begin strengthening the infrastructure needed to develop fresh political talent. This election year included some exciting bright spots and rising stars. With the right investment, many more will follow.
