This week on The Downballot, hosts David Nir and David Beard discussed updates from North Carolina, where there are currently many moving pieces, and talked with guest Amanda Litman, co-founder and co-executive director of Run for Something, about the organization’s brief history and momentous future.
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A lot is happening in North Carolina right now: A competitive Senate primary on the Republican side with former governor Pat McCrory and Congressman Ted Budd being the two leading candidates. Former Congressman Mark Walker is a third contender in the race, but, as Beard mentioned, it's really primarily between McCrory, the more pro-Trump/GOP establishment candidate, and Budd, who has been endorsed by Trump and is more of the Trumpist wing of the party.
This week, the United States Supreme Court also rejected Republican appeals to intervene in two redistricting cases, one decided by the North Carolina Supreme Court, the other decided by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. In both situations, the state courts implemented congressional maps that are by all metrics, quite fair, upsetting Republicans—especially in North Carolina, where the legislature passed its own maps, only to have them twice struck down by the courts. In Pennsylvania, a deadlock meant there was no map for the court to overturn, so it drew its own map instead. The U.S. Supreme Court said it wouldn't block either map from taking effect this year, but, according to Nir, “As far as we can tell, the only reason why it didn't intervene is because of how late it is in the election cycle.” Elaborating on why he is so interested in talking about these two cases, he said,
The real reason is a dissent that Sam Alito, one of the most extreme far-right justices on the Court, wrote in the North Carolina case. And it's downright terrifying—and I really don't use that word lightly. Alito endorsed a radical, totally extreme, and anti-democratic legal doctrine called the Independent State Legislature Theory. And what this theory says is that when it comes to federal elections, only state legislatures and no other body in the states can decide how those elections are run. That includes voter registration, voting procedures, and redistricting.
In other words, state legislatures have supreme authority to draw lines for their own districts, and not even state courts can police them. Not even state courts interpreting the state’s constitution can say these lines violate [that] constitution. And this obviously would hand massive power to state legislatures—many of which are already gerrymandered themselves. And it seems like the court is really on the verge of endorsing this.
Two justices signed onto Alito's dissent, Gorsuch and Thomas. “You have Brett Kavanaugh who wrote his own concurring opinion saying that he thought it was really too late to get involved, but he's definitely very interested in this theory, this Independent State Legislature Doctrine,” Nir added. “And then you have two other conservatives, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett, who might well be very sympathetic to this. I think that we are going to see a case before long where the Supreme Court adopts some version of this crazy doctrine that says that when it comes to redistricting, state legislatures have absolute unfettered authority to do whatever they want.”
Beard weighed in on what he saw as hypocrisy, given that a number of these justices signed onto a recent opinion a few years ago that said that they couldn't get involved in any partisan gerrymandering cases, because there was no way for them to rule on it fairly:
In that opinion, they pointed to things like independent commissions as a way for the public to deal with nonpartisan gerrymandering, if that was what they wanted to enact. But if they [adopt] this new concept of independent state legislatures, they couldn't even create independent commissions, which was the very thing that they had pointed to as a way to resolve this. They're basically shutting every single door to prevent partisan gerrymandering one by one.
Also in North Carolina, Madison Cawthorn’s eligibility to appear on the ballot this November has been challenged by a group of voters under an unusual and interesting North Carolina law that is based on the 14th Amendment. However, there has been good news for him. As Nir noted, Cawthorn had the fortune to appear before an extremist pro-Trump judge named Richard Meyers. When Meyers was delivering his ruling, he said, "The federal court is tasked with protecting the soap box, the ballot box, and the jury box, and when these fail, people proceed to the ammunition box."
“In other words, he was saying that if he doesn't let Madison Cawthorn the ballot, some people might start shooting and therefore that is why he won't enforce the law,” Nir explained.
Beard and Nir then pivoted to some issues of interest on the international stage—notably, the results of the presidential election in South Korea earlier this week. Beard laid out the situation, highlighting concerns that the newly elected president resembles “the sort of mini new right-wing candidates that we’ve … seen pop up across the world”:
There were two leading candidates, one from Moon's party, which is the more progressive party. And that was Lee Jae-myung. He's a former governor of one of the larger states in South Korea and he's from, as I said, President Moon's more progressive Democratic Party. And then the other leading candidate was Prosecutor Yoon Suk Yeol of the opposition People Power Party, which is the more conservative party. So Mr. Yoon has just come out today that he's very, very narrowly won the election by less than a percentage point with all of the votes provisionally counted, but the opposition Democratic Party has conceded the election, so he's expected that he'll officially win and take office. So Yoon came to power as a prosecutor. He prosecuted the previous president, the one who was felled by scandal before President Moon came to office … There have been a number of comparisons to President Trump. Most notably he complimented the former South Korean dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, and he's also claimed that systemic gender discrimination no longer exists.
Next, the hosts welcomed Litman onto the show to share more about how Run for Something got started, and what important things the organization is working on right now.
Litman provided a rundown of what Run for Something stands for and how they operate:
Run for Something was born of the ashes of the 2016 election. I worked for Hillary for two years prior to this. My co-founder, Ross Morales Rocketto, has worked in campaigns for about 15 years. About a week after Election Day, I got a message from somebody I went to college with. ‘Hey, Amanda, I'm a public school teacher in Chicago. I'm thinking about running for office. What do I do? You know this world. You've worked in politics for 10 years. What do I do?’ I didn't have answer for them, because at the time, if you were young and newly excited about politics and wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was nowhere you could go that would be guaranteed to take your call. And that to me felt like a symptom of really big problems, both with the Democratic Party and with our democratic system at large.
So I reached out to a whole bunch of people, one of whom became my co-founder, Ross, and we wrote a plan and we built a website and then we launched Run for Something on Trump's Inauguration Day, thinking it would be really small. We would get maybe a hundred people who wanted to run for office in the first year. This would be a cool hobby. When we launched, a thousand people signed up in the first week. As of today, we're up to more than 110,000 young people all across the country who've raised their hands and said, ‘I want to run for local office. What next?’ So we've built a program that does just that. We recruit and support young, diverse progressives. So for us, it's folks 40 and younger who are running for the first or second time for positions like school board, city council, coroner, state House, state Senate, community college board of trustees, boards of education—the real building blocks of the democratic process. And in the first five years, we've endorsed nearly 2,000 and helped elect 637 people across 48 states, mostly women, mostly people of color.
“One of the things I find really interesting and positive about Run for Something is that, as you said, it came out of the ashes of the 2016 election. It launched on Trump's Inauguration day, but there was so much energy at that time. And there was a lot of good things all across this sphere that developed, but Run for Something really took a long-term view,” Nir replied. “These are candidates who hopefully get elected at a very local level and then someday may run for higher office. And so this is really, as opposed to looking at the 2018 elections or looking at the 2020 elections, this is an organization that really looks at the next 10, 20, 30 years in America.”
“When you think about the long-term vision for what we're trying to build, it's both a bench of talent, but also a broader way of understanding where Democrats can and should be competing,” Litman added.
People often have many questions about the process, like “How do I figure out who on that voter file to talk to?” and “What do I say when I talk to them?” As Litman explained,
Campaigns are basically small businesses that are meant to explode after Election Day. And if anyone who's ever listened to this has started a small business, yes, a lot of it is the philosophical belief and the vision you have, but a lot more of it is just logistics, that if you've never done it before, you don't even know where to start.
Litman said that the organization aims to ensure that every candidate they work with has a really strong vision for how they engage with voters:
So are you knocking on doors? Are you making calls? … Do you have a vision and a plan for grassroots engagement in a meaningful way? Because the most important thing a local candidate can do, and this is especially true in a place where it's going to be really hard, is building a personal relationship with voters. Then we want to make sure that candidates can really clear really answer the question, why are you running for office? And not just, why are you running, but why are you running for this office? What are you going to be able to do in this position that you couldn't do elsewhere that you can only do here to make progress on the problem you care about and why should voters want you to win?
Which is different than ‘why do you want to win.’ You want to win because winning is great. Voters want you to win because you're going to deliver for them in a meaningful, practical, tangible way. So we really want candidates who, as they're thinking about engaging in this process, can answer that question and then are willing to do the work. Everything else from how to get on the ballot to what to do when you're on there, we can teach you, but we can't teach you to care, and we can't teach you to have work ethic around this.
Beard asked about how the organization works with Democrats in deeply red areas.
According to Litman, “We really want to make sure people understand that, as a Democrat living in a red community, you are the best messenger to your Republican neighbors, because they might not like the Democrats they see on Fox News or hear about on the radio or see on TV, but it is much harder to hate the person you meet at your home.” Citing Run for Something’s work with Chloe Maxman, who was first a state representative in Maine and is now a state senator, Litman recalled how Maxman flipped a seat red to blue in both chambers. “She was the first Democrat to ever hold the seat, or was one of the first Democrats to hold it in quite a long time in the state House, and then again, in the state Senate. She represents one of the oldest, most rural, whitest districts in Maine,” Litman said.
In closing, Litman mentioned the organization’s focus on elections for school board positions, as well as local election officials: “We want to be able to fight back in a way as meaningful as possible, especially understanding that what happens in a school board ripples out because it determines the kind of people our kids grow up to be.”