After one year of consultation with progressive groups and legislators from all over the state, we have launched our 2018-2019 statewide election & legislative strategy with a list of 29 good progressive bills.

2018-19 Retake Electoral and Legislative Strategy

About 600 progressives from throughout the state descended on the ABQ Convention Center for the Progress Now NM Progressive Summit. During the very first session, Retake Our Democracy and our partners Espańola Indivisible/NM Resistance (now a merged group called UNITED) presented our 2018-19 Electoral and Legislative Strategy to a packed room. I asked the audience to close their eyes and imagine April 1, 2019. If we all work together by that day we will have passed the Health Security Act, capped predatory lending at 36%, raised the minimum wage, increased our commitment to renewables, and created automatic voter registration and much, much more. This would be no April fools’ joke, it would be law.  But we need a strategy and we need you. Here is the story and the strategy. If you already know the story, click the blue button above to take the survey.

In 2016, we retook the roundhouse and were brimming with anticipation. But, in 2017, teams of Retake volunteer advocates attended hearings, met with legislators and offered testimony to committees, and we left disappointed but not deterred. With the Roundhouse solidly Democratic, we still passed very few bills. So, in March, a small number of Retake Our Democracy Roundhouse Activism Team members who had been active throughout the 2017 Session got together to sort things out. We had learned a good deal in 2017:

• A Legislative Report Card was not so easy to develop.  We had planned to produce a Legislative Report Card comprised of how legislators had voted on each of our 60 bills- But too many bills died in Committee for reasons that weren’t easily captured in a report card and so there was precious little to report.
• It isn’t just the GOP’s fault we are not getting what we want. We learned that it wasn’t Republicans alone who killed good bills, but that a handful of Democrats in each chamber introduced bills at the bidding of industry lobbyists and killed good bills by flipping in committee or just failing to show up.
• Committees are often where good bills die. We knew we needed to better understand how the Roundhouse worked and we knew we needed to create a stronger majority in committees as with committees comprised of 6-5 and 5-4 Democratic majorities, it only took one flip to kill a bill.
• We need a statewide network.  We also knew we needed a bigger base. Last year, in the hall after a hearing, Monica Youngblood looked at me with a smirk and said—“Are we supposed to care if Santa Fe has 100 people packing the room. My constituents aren’t here.”   And Youngblood was right and so we realized we needed to expand our base and develop a Response Network throughout the State.

We also knew that our team of ten or so volunteers was not experienced enough to build upon what we knew and couldn’t develop an effective strategy for 2018-19 without the guidance of experts. So we developed a structured interview protocol and spent 9 months interviewing leadership from 20+ progressive advocacy groups like Common Cause, Planned Parenthood, 350.org, NM Voices for Children, Prosperity Works, Sierra Club and others.  We also met with legislators like Speaker Egolf, Peter Wirth, Matthew McQueen, Bill McCamley and Liz Stefanics.

Over the course of nine months of conversations with legislators and advocacy groups, we developed a two-prong 2018-19 Electoral & Legislative Strategy.

It worked in 2016. Time for a repeat performance only this time, we need to strengthen the Roundhouse.

Prong I–A 2018 Election Strategy:  We realized that we needed to increase the Democratic majority in the House and especially in key committees. 5-4 majorities were simply too narrow and subject to defections. So, we plan to replicate Retake the Roundhouse from the 2016 Campaign, join forces with other progressive groups across the state and target a few districts to provide house party (fundraising), canvassing, and phone-banking support. We plan to target three kinds of districts:

1. ‘Safe’ districts with what we call a Recumbent Democrats, an incumbent who lies down on the job and habitually impedes passage of progressive legislation and/or carries bills for industry lobbyists. We identified House Districts 41 and 46 as meeting this criterion. Our other criteria was that a strong progressive candidate emerges to challenge the Recumbent. And here we are pleased to announce that Andrea Romero will be challenging Carl Trujillo in District 46 and that on Feb 1, a very strong progressive will announce her challenge Debbie Rodella on Feb 1. In conversation yesterday with Eric Griego from Working Families Party, we agreed to join forces in supporting these primary challengers.
2. Identify vulnerable Republicans and support strong Democratic challengers in the general election. Here the Democratic Party has done excellent research and identified 9 House Districts where Republicans won narrowly AND where Clinton had won those districts. We need to do more research as we can’t work in that many districts. Criteria for narrowing the number of races will be:  1) strong Democratic challenger; 2) likelihood of success; and 3) benefit from defeating the GOP rep, e.g. Nate Gentry is part of leadership and Monica Youngblood could be future young leader of the GOP.
3. Identify good Democrats who won narrowly in 2016 or who may otherwise be vulnerable to challenge. Three of the closest races were decided by only 558 votes.  Damon Ely in District 23 won by only 102 votes. Candie Sweeter in District 32, a champion for small agriculture; won by only 230 votes; and Rodolpho Martinez in District 39 (223 votes). We need to support these representatives.

With these three election strategies we hope to strengthen progressive representation in committees and make it harder to kill bills there.

Prong II– A 2019 Legislative Strategy.  For nine months, we met as a team twice a month and developed a two distinct components to this strategy, a list of high priority, must-pass bills and a statewide network we came to call a Rapid Response Network to lobby on behalf of those bills.

A List of Must Pass Bills. We began with phone calls to our advocate allies through which we identified 50 good bills. We knew we had to hone that list so we developed four criterion for guiding our selections: 1) introduced as a bill in 2017 but while not signed into law, was felt by our allies to be something that could pass with pressure and persistence; 2) could have a significant impact statewide; 3) aspirational while also a practical; 4) honored the perspective of distant, rural communities. We eventually narrowed the list to less than 30 organized into 13 issue areas.

While we were very happy with this list, we knew that for the list to be an effective lobbying tool, it required some form of statewide validation, a demonstration of strong support in every region of the state. We developed an online survey that is bing launched TODAY.  It asks you to identify how strongly you support each bill and which 5 bills are most important to you. It also asks for your House and Senate District (providing the names of all the legislators to make it easier for you) and we ask for contact information so we can share with your the results and keep you updated.  Click here to complete the survey. It will take no more than 5-10 minutes and is vital to the success of the legislative strategy.

Raise Your Voice. Tell Them What You Want. Click the Button Below

A Statewide Rapid Response Network.  Working through other progressive organizations throughout the state, we plan to build chapters of progressive voters in key districts. When we launched this strategy yesterday at the Progressive Summit almost 100 attendees signed on to become involved and we had people from distant and key Districts in Raton, Embudo, Las Vegas, Dixon, Velarde, Belen, and many from Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  We will build this network through dissemination of information through our lobbying allies and supportive legislators, State and County Democratic Central Committee members, sympathetic County Democratic Chairs, and other organizational networks. And we will build this base through collecting contact information from people who complete the bill survey (above).

Once we have assembled chapters in key districts, we will ask these voters to bring copies of our final list of priority, must-pass bills, share them with their elected representatives in the House and Senate and stress the bills that they care most about. We will ask these voters to meet with their officials 2-3 times in the summer and fall, to attend some of their town halls, and to generally make sure that their Sen. and House legislators know them. Then during the 2019 session, working with our advocacy allies at the Roundhouse we will send action alerts to voters in key districts when a key committee or floor vote is coming. We will provide them speaking points, contact info, and encourage calls and emails to make our priorities known and we will ask our network to write and call to remind their representatives of their prior meetings, their priorities, and their intention of paying close attention to the support provided by their legislators.

This is the two-prong strategy. We are in this for the long haul and expect to expand the network, refine our bill research, strengthen our alliances with progressive advocacy groups, and win some seats in the Roundhouse. Yesterday, was a tremendous start, but now we need YOU to do two things:

1.  Take the survey today and provide House and Senate district info and contact information
2. Use every network at your disposal and every communication strategy you have (email, calls, Facebook, twitter, or all of the above to disseminate this survey. If you are in a Ward, a member of a church, part of a social group and especially if you know people in other parts of the state, please share the link below broadly and encourage people to take the 5-10 minutes needed to complete the survey.

The impact of this strategy depends upon our getting large numbers of respondents from throughout the state. If we have 500 respondents mostly from Santa Fe, the platform will have little statewide credibility. But if we get scores of people to respond in every region of the state, it will be a powerful tool for legislative leadership and progressive advocates to use with wavering legislators, pointing to how constituents from their district who responded to the survey favored this or that bill by a 4-1 margin.

We will get better at this as we move forward, but input yesterday from dozens of attendees was very clear: This is a very good and very strategic approach. We think we are on to something. But now it depends upon you.

In solidarity,

Paul & Roxanne

Ranked Choice Voting Made Simple by Andy Fertal

Categories: Election, Political Reform & National Politics, Local-State Government & Legislation

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