Progressives’ Pitch: Movement vs. ​“Bulldog”

Hooksett, N.H.— Four years ago, Joshua Elliott trudged through the snowbanks lining New Hampshire’s twisting roads in hopes of helping Bernie Sanders become the next U.S. President. Elliott and fellow campaigners then started a local revolution back home by electing him to Connecticut’s legislature.

Elliott was back knocking on New Hampshire doors Sunday — but this time for Elizabeth Warren, Sanders’ chief progressive opponent in the upcoming first-in-the-nation Democratic presidential primary.

Sofia Cutler rode up to New Hampshire a day earlier with three fellow New Haveners to keep the Bernie Sanders flame burning. She told voters that Sanders will get Medicare for All through Congress because he has built a mass movement that will push from behind. 

Elliott, too, argued on doorsteps that his candidate would succeed in passing Medicare for All — because she knows how to push, and she has done it before. For example, when she created an entire new agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The two local trips north reflected the progressive battle du jour in American politics: over which standard-bearing senator to back in the presidential primaries. As the race has tightened and the first caucuses and primaries near, tensions have spiked between what were previously two camps of frenemies.

The pitches the two New Haven/Hamden travelers made on New Hampshire doorposts echoed the two camps’ main arguments: That it takes a movement, or it takes a bulldog, to push America to tax the wealthy more, crack down on corporate greed and corruption, and deliver universal health care.

Norman Gill (pictured above, with Elliott) squinted into the sun as Josh Elliott stood on the porch outside his black-shuttered house. Gill told Elliott that he will probably vote for Pete Buttigieg in the Feb. 11 presidential primary, though his wife might vote for Warren. Elliott listened as Gill explained his fears about the national debt and President Donald Trump’s fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants foreign policy.

After a few minutes, Elliott made his pitch.

He spoke of the attention Warren first attracted when she appeared with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show in 2009 to explain the financial crisis. Elliott has been a fan ever since. He would have supported Warren in 2016, if she had run then.

“After he talked to her for five or ten minutes, he said, ​‘This is the first time I actually feel like we’re gonna be ok.’ Because she had done so much research into how the middle class was being drained of their money and their wealth, and how our tax loopholes are making it easier and easier for people to accrue more and more wealth, and then how we really lessened the amount of regulations that we have on banking,” Elliott told Gill.

Fast forward a few years, and Warren is a U.S. senator, ​“and then she is the person who created the CFPB — that’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau … Three months ago — I run two small businesses in Connecticut, two little natural food stores that my mother started — and basically what happened was our credit card rates just jumped by about 50 percent. … So the place that I had to go was the CFPB. And so for me it was really satisfying to come full circle.”

He concluded: ​“She’s been there on issues for so long and she’s so data oriented, and she’s already shown how effective she is at being a legislator… I think that she works well with people and I think that she can win, and she’ll inspire and excite people.”

As Elliott walked away from Gill’s house Sunday, he hunched over his phone to enter into his miniVAN app that Gill is leaning toward Buttigieg. A dried-out head of hydrangea flowers bounced across the pavement in the wind in front of him like a tumbleweed, making a papery scraping sound as it went.

Elliott said he joined the Sanders campaign as soon as the Vermont senator announced in 2016. Gross income inequality and financial reform were two of the main systemic problems he was thinking about at the time, he said, and Sanders was speaking to those issues. So, he joined the fight, with the caveat that if Warren declared she was running, he would jump ship to support her.

After Sanders lost in 2016, Elliott, with the backing of other Bernie Sanders campaign volunteers, won an upset victory in the Democratic primary for Hamden’s 88th House District seat in the Connecticut General Assembly, inspiring a wave of progressive politicians who have become a formidable force in Hamden Democratic politics. Last year, that progressive energy helped Elliott and fellow progressives in the Capitol pass a long-sought minimum wage hike and paid family and medical leave.

“I love Bernie, too,” Elliott said Sunday, ​“but for me there’s a really big difference between those two candidates in terms of what I think they can accomplish.”

It Takes A Movement

A day earlier, inside a strip mall set back from Hanover Street in Manchester, Sofia Cutler sat in a crowd of 38 Connecticut Sanders supporters and listened as Organizer Susmik Lama explained how to use the miniVAN app. ​“BERNIE BEATS TRUMP” and ​“Bernie Vote 2/11/20” buttons glinted like blown-up cartoon eyes in the harsh strip-mall-storefront lighting.

Political change happens with ​“people like you coming all the way from another state,” Lama told the crowd.

In some ways, it looked and sounded like any other Saturday morning a month before the New Hampshire primary, in any other campaign’s office, in any other year. A stack of candidate signs leaned against the wall by the entrance. Quirky campaign posters showing colorful renderings of the candidate’s face stared up from the walls at the large rectangular strip-mall lighting panels — those lights, too, since short-term-leased strip-mall storefronts are another ubiquity of American electoral democracy.

And the statement about how ​“people like you” are the route to political change. Organizers for plenty of campaigns conveyed similar messages at that moment to their respective crop of volunteers just beginning to jitter from a cup of donated Dunkin’ Donuts.

But for the people gathered in the Sanders room, that statement was not just another organizer’s platitude meant as a psychological stimulant to complement the Dunkin’ Donuts caffeine. It expressed what all who spoke with the Independent said sets Sanders apart: He understands that he needs a mass movement to enact broad structural change. That, not Warren’s political acumen and meaty plans, will help him succeed once he’s in the White House.

Mark Gardner of Manchester, Connecticut, organized the ten cars that drove up from Connecticut to New Hampshire’s Manchester. He said he began to follow Sanders after the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Other candidates say ​“I have a plan. Just get me in office. Bernie says I need you,” he said. That was how he characterized the main difference between Sanders and Warren.

“I really feel Bernie has a better understanding of the challenges of getting these large pieces of legislation passed,” he said.

As Cutler trudged through crusty snowbanks a few hours later, she harkened back to that theme each time a voter opened the door.

“He has an organizer’s approach to change. He doesn’t assume, like Liz Warren, that you can elect him and he’ll have his plan that he’ll legislate. When he says ​‘not me. Us,’ he’s saying he needs a movement behind him,” she said, referencing Sanders’ campaign slogan.

Cutler (pictured) rode to Manchester in Caleb Malchik’s white Subaru Outback earlier in the day. She knows Malchik from the Democratic Socialists of America’s New Haven chapter. Malchik also gave rides to Acadia Kocher and Tyler Wakefield. Kocher is a fifth-year genetics PhD. Wakefield works part-time for the Sunrise Movement, where he met Kocher, and at a company that works on energy storage.

Lisa Conley was taking out her trash when Cutler approached. She told Cutler that she’s still undecided, though she ​“feel[s] closest to” Sanders.

Cutler asked what issues she cares about. Conley replied that for her, Medicare for All is paramount. She recently got on disability after eight years of trying, she said. She still struggles to figure out the system and pay the copays that come with her new plan.

With Trump in the White House, she said, ​“it’s hard to find hope.”

Cutler launched into her pitch: Sanders’ Medicare for All plan would do away with copays, deductibles, and premiums. It would simply be free at the point of service. (Sanders calls for simply lowering the Medicare age over the course of four years. Warren would first pass a bill to have a public option. Then, two years later, she would pursue Medicare for All legislation that would eliminate private insurance.)

“I never got involved in politics because it seemed like such a charade. Bernie is the first person I feel like has spoken to me… He’s been saying the same thing forever,” she said. ​“Bernie has been with the people from the way beginning.”

“But the big question is, is he going to be able to get that through to everyone?” Conley (pictured) replied. ​“Is Congress…” she trailed off. ​“Is that going to happen?”

Cutler was ready. ​“It will require mass movement,” she replied. “[Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell is going to fight this tooth and nail,” but unions and other large and small organizations will get involved and push it through.

As Cutler walked down the icy sidewalk away from Conley’s house, she explained how she sees the movement that she and her fellow canvassers kept referencing.

“By ​‘movement,’ I mean something that’s interested in struggling for power for working people,” she said. Sanders has brought groups together that have been pushing for systemic change and gave them a single platform: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Chicago teachers’ strikes, to name a few.

Cutler grew up in New Jersey and studied history and literature at the University of Toronto. Now she’s a first-year graduate student at Yale in American studies. She has gotten involved with the Democratic Socialists of America; working for Sanders has gotten her interested in possibly studying labor.

“Bernie giving all those movements a national platform is huge,” she said. ​“But it is dangerous to tie everything to Bernie. Because Bernie is not going to be able to do anything without really strong organizing happening… it has to extend beyond the electoral structure… It’s growing, and the beginnings of it were not Bernie, but Bernie is helping to organize it into something, and I want it to continue, and I want it to continue beyond Bernie.”

“People Fell In Love”

Once he finished his 30-door packet, Elliott got back in his black Jeep. He’d had a few good conversations, but had not talked to anyone who was a definite ​“yes” for Warren. As he drove back to the staging location from which the day’s canvass had launched, he talked about the Bernie movement, of which, in some ways, he still is a part.

He said he understands that people are afraid that what happened with Obama will happen again: the president-elect will let strong grassroots support fizzle and simply legislate through traditional political channels. But, he said, Warren also understands that she needs mass support for her policies once she’s in office. ​“I don’t know in what world she would not understand that,” he said.

“People fell in love four years ago,” he said of Bernie’s base. But ​“if you start parsing out what they mean by movement, it’s just a campaign… To me, this is still a campaign that understands you need a long-term strategy.”

Grassroots support is essential, he said. But so is an understanding of how to work through political channels, and a deep understanding of policy. ​“The purpose of what you’re doing” as an elected official, he said, ​“is to lead and create policy.”

Sunriser

After the Sanders campaign office prep session in Manchester, Malchik and Kocher set out together from Malchik’s Subaru Outback. Kocher had never canvassed before, and knocked her first few doors with Malchik before venturing off on her own.

Malchik said that before signing on to volunteer, he had to decide between Sanders and Warren. They seemed similar in the beginning, he said. But he decided to remain with Sanders, for whom he had canvassed for in 2016. He said he had started to notice small differences in their platforms and in their supporter bases.

For instance, he said, he doesn’t like that Warren’s Medicare for All plan would start with public option legislation before introducing full-fledged Medicare for All legislation a few years later. He said it might be a deliberately weak plan just to attract donors.

​“I don’t see any reason to negotiate against ourselves at the beginning,” he said, acknowledging that compromise might have to happen once negotiations are actually underway.

As Malchik walked between a maze of narrow residential streets, he recalled the movement he was a part of in 2016. It didn’t entirely dissipate after Sanders lost the primary, he said. Rather, supporters devoted their organizing energy to groups like the Sunrise Movement and Democratic Socialists of America, which saw a nationwide membership surge. The Sunrise Movement, which supports the Green New Deal to combat climate change, recently endorsed Sanders’ campaign, one of numerous endorsements from activist and progressive groups that have recently given his quest momentum.

Should Sanders lose, he said, he’s not sure where he will devote his organizing energy. He said he would probably vote for the Democratic nominee, but might campaign for issues rather than for the candidate, which he said could both help give energy to the Democrats and push the nominee to improve in certain policy areas.

“She’s Tough”

As dusk began to fall Sunday, Matt Lesser brought the pro-Warren message to his last few voters of the day. Lesser, of Middletown, is the deputy majority leader in the Connecticut State Senate. Like Elliott, he started following Warren after the 2008 financial crisis when she ​“was asking the tough questions about what went wrong and who was to blame.”

The unseasonable warmth of earlier in the day had vanished and given way to a damp chill that seemed to seep from the shadows in the woods by the side of the road.

“I think she really understands what it takes to take on powerful interests in a substantive way,” he said. Grassroots energy is necessary to enact change, he said, but not sufficient. You also need to build coalitions among politicians, and she has done that. She has a track record of major legislation, like when she created the CFPB, he said. ​“She is a bulldog. You need a bulldog.”

It was completely dark by the time he approached his last house. It sat at the end of a dead end. Eileen Egan (pictured above with Lesser) opened the door. He asked her who she supports, and she said she was still weighing the candidates, but that she likes Warren.

“She has the smarts, the toughness, and she knows how to take on the corruption of this president,” Lesser told Egan.

As Egan stood with her door propped open, cold air streamed into her mudroom. She invited Lesser inside to get out of the cold, and offered him water. ​“I could make you a pot of coffee if you’d like, too,” she said. Lesser politely declined.

Egan’s kitchen was filled with the warm smell of something cooking on the stove. She explained that her daughter was coming over for dinner, as she does every Sunday, and Egan was making her customary vegetable stew with peppers, onions, broccoli, mushrooms, and squash. ​“I’m Polish. What can I tell you?” she said, shrugging.

Everything Warren says is so fair and equitable, Egan said. A schoolteacher herself, she added, she knows a strong woman when she sees one.

“She’s tougher than any of them,” Lesser said, smiling.

“She’s tough,” echoed Egan.