For progressive activists, it’s often helpful to look at politics like a baseball player stepping up to the plate: If you get on base—or score a political victory—around one in every three tries, you’re doing a pretty damn good job.
But if that’s the case, then the Fairness Project, a political nonprofit focused on state ballot initiatives, is batting with robot arms and real-life cheat codes: Of the state-level campaigns it’s sponsored, including minimum wage hikes, Medicaid expansions and paid leave initiatives, it’s won an astounding 20 out of 21 at the ballot box.
“We’re selective,” Steve Trossman, the Fairness Project’s president of the board told Blue Tent in an interview this summer. To Trossman, this discretion helps explain the organization’s string of victories.
And these victories have had big-time consequences.
"All in all, our campaigns have changed the lives of more than 17 million Americans, and put more than $16 billion back into the hands of workers," said Fairness Project national press secretary Roya Hegdahl, citing hard-won Medicaid benefits, paid time off, and higher wages spread across more than a dozen states and the District of Columbia.
But don’t dismiss the Fairness Project’s wins as easy victories in liberal New England or on the crunchy West Coast, either. Along with raising wages in Washington and Massachusetts, ballot measures sponsored by the Fairness Project have won Medicaid expansion in Idaho, Utah and Nebraska, while increasing the minimum wage in Arkansas, Colorado and Arizona.
So how do they keep winning, even in the reddest of red states?
Big money, big labor, and a big idea
The Fairness Project is the brainchild of Trossman and Dave Regan, president of the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (UHW). Trossman serves as UHW’s top spokesman in addition to his role on the Fairness Project board.
Around 2014, Regan and Trossman felt the labor movement—and working people as a whole—needed a shot in the arm and saw an opportunity to circumvent politics as usual via statewide ballot measures. Regan and Trossman worked on the project on the side for a while, but weren’t making much progress initially.
“This can’t be our hobby,” was their quick realization, said Trossman.
So he and Regan founded the Fairness Project as a 501(c)(4) and hired an executive director and staff, with UHW providing around $5 million in start-up funding. Their small team quickly began pushing ballot initiatives.
“We realized lots of people in states wanted to do these things, but were just in over their heads,” Trossman said.
The Fairness Project saw almost immediate success; of their first six campaigns, four won at the ballot box, while the other two became redundant as lawmakers saw the writing on the wall and chose instead to pass the policies themselves.
Investing early
The Fairness Project team laid out a few early ground rules: Only support ballot measures; only focus on issues that improve the standard of living; only support campaigns run by people active on the ground. Rather than do the entire campaign themselves, Fairness Project staff help local organizers create the infrastructure they need to succeed, then shepherd the ballot measures from conception to election day.
“Where we give most of our money is early,” Trossman said.
In a ballot measure campaign, this means hiring firms to collect signatures, a must-have in states like Idaho where a referendum requires the signatures of a percentage of voters across several counties to get on the ballot.
“We’ve seen a lot of campaigns where the campaign went down because the signatures just weren’t there,” Trossman said. “Early money can really help get things off the ground.”
Alongside its signature collection operation, the Fairness Project distributes money to local grassroots organizers, helps those groups build their digital operations, and otherwise guides local leaders through the election.
Like all things in politics, the Fairness Project’s success has been expensive, and the organization has raised tens of millions of dollars to power its campaigns.
Much of its cash comes from the SEIU-UHW and other unions, but big foundations and wealthy individuals quickly started pitching in, as well. The group has received cash from the Black Progressive Action Coalition, Dr. Bronner’s (yes, the soap company), and Sixteen Thirty Fund, a liberal dark money group that spent more than $140 million during the 2018 midterms.
The organization has a growing small-donor network, but Trossman says much of the group’s funding still comes from big-money political players.
Watering the grassroots and riding the wave
The Fairness Project’s ability to raise and spend money has been vital, but the true path to the group’s 90-plus percent victory rate comes in strategy.
Rather than parachuting in with the help of state lobbyists and big law firms, the Fairness Project dedicates itself to finding and supporting local organizers capable of a sustained, year-long campaign. One of Trossman and Regan’s early lessons was that they couldn’t “bigfoot” local groups, as Trossman put it.
“Doing it that way, you’d have to put together such a huge org it would be impossible to get off the ground,” Trossman told Blue Tent.
In Idaho, the group rode to victory on the backs of Luke Mayville and organizers in his Reclaim Idaho group, who built connections with working people across the state to pass Medicaid expansion, which had been blockaded by a Republican-dominated legislature.
It helps that organizers like Mayville are pushing for clear, straightforward policies that benefit a wide array of people. Oftentimes, these widely popular measures have been blocked by Republican legislatures or governors. But even with sustained counter-messaging, a fair majority of voters tend instinctively to favor cheaper healthcare and bigger paychecks for themselves and their neighbors.
The Fairness Project similarly benefits from non-association with a singular candidate or political party, blurring partisan lines for some voters. In Missouri, for instance, while Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill was soundly defeated by her Republican challenger in 2018, a ballot measure to repeal the state’s right-to-work law won by more than 30 points.
And then, of course, there’s President Donald Trump. It’s impossible to discuss any big victories for the left in the last four years without mentioning the soon-to-be former president, who inspired a vicious backlash powering progressive wins in federal, state and local elections. The “blue wave,” which crashed a bit in 2020, no doubt caught the Fairness Project’s many ballot initiatives in its wake, padding liberal turnout in dozens of elections since 2016.
Challenges ahead, good and bad
But winning elections is only part of the equation — and one that may become more complicated down the road. In Alaska, where a state ballot measure to expand Medicaid passed, the governor and legislature have gone to work attacking the new policy (likewise in Idaho and Utah), while politicians in Florida tried both to raise the required majority for a measure to pass (from 60% to two-thirds) and sponsored a ballot initiative of their own to require future referenda to pass in two separate elections in order to take effect.
The Florida effort failed, but anti-worker and anti-democratic forces could likewise start using ballot measures—like California's Prop 22—to fight fire with fire.
These future challenges aside, the Fairness Project has reason to be optimistic, with big plans for the future.
Along with ambitions to further their current successes in winning Medicaid expansion, paid leave and higher wages, the Fairness Project has been in talks with officials in cities like Minneapolis about police reform measures. They’re in the early stages, but with massive protests and a willing city council, it’s not a campaign the Fairness Project could easily dismiss.
Photo credit: ImagePixel / Shutterstock.com
