Ask Rebecca Katz, founding partner of consulting firm New Deal Strategies, about why she co-founded a firm aimed at helping progressive candidates and groups, and you’ll get a long and involved answer.
Katz, a veteran of Capitol Hill and a number of political campaigns, founded New Deal Strategies in February 2019. The firm exploded onto the liberal political scene shortly thereafter as one of the groups opposed to the so-called “DCCC Blacklist,” an effort by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to stymie progressive insurgents targeting conservative party incumbents.
Blue Tent talked with Katz shortly after the general election on her firm’s work. What follows is an edited and condensed version of that talk.
New Deal Strategies is a consulting firm, but you’re also a player in the progressive movement. How did that happen—where did you begin your work?
I worked in government and campaigns for a long time. I did traditional consulting work. I was a political junkie. I was never an activist.
But it wasn’t until 2013 and I was working on the Bill de Blasio campaign that I saw the opportunity. There were several major candidates who were all talking to the middle class and to the city and then there was de Blasio, talking to the poor about how to make the city work for them.
Everybody said, you can’t do it this way. You can’t just say you’re going to tax the rich and get in the way of running campaigns.
Even in New York City, that was always kind of running to the center. And we won. His time in office is a different story. I’m talking about the campaign.
And then in 2016, I went to go work for John Fetterman in Pennsylvania. He was running for U.S. Senate and he was a hell of an inspiring candidate, just like nothing, nobody I had ever worked for before. He ran on a pro-gay marriage, pro-immigrant platform.
His wife was undocumented. He endorsed Bernie, and ran a populist campaign. When we started, we had no money, but we started getting excitement.
It started with people on Facebook saying, ‘Can you come to my town? I want to host the event for you.’ And John would get in his pickup truck and drive around Pennsylvania. And we started getting excitement, and you started having these events where people were lining up around the block to meet him.
But he didn’t have the money. We went down to Washington, D.C., which is what you’re supposed to do with these things. And they basically laughed him out of the room. They said, ‘we heard you want to legalize drugs.’ And they’re like, ‘That’ll never work. That’ll never work.’ They were basically mocking him to his face.
I was so angry. They just didn’t see it. And a few months later, even as we were surging in the polls, they came in with a few million dollars for Katie McGinty. And then our campaign just flatlined.
We were able to win 20% of the vote after being outspent by millions. But at the end of the day, they got their candidate and she underperformed Hillary Clinton by about eight points. I’m still very troubled by that race.
He’s been in the news a lot since the election and Pennsylvania’s count (Fetterman is now Pennsylvania lieutenant governor).
John’s been all over television lately, and people keep saying, ‘oh, he’s so great. I hope he runs for something.’
After that, I worked on the Cynthia Nixon campaign. The entire Democratic establishment was so afraid of Andrew Cuomo. I’ve never felt so alone on a political campaign as that one.
I feel like we got all the votes from people who knew Andrew Cuomo personally, but no one would say it out loud. And it was just really hard.
I just got fed up and I did some soul searching after we lost, and then I decided that I wanted to try something completely different.
So this was a different kind of consulting. It was done not to make money, but to actually help progressives win. We didn’t know how it would go. We launched in February and then in March, the blacklist happened. And I think that that is what saved us. That was what turned the tide.
Are you still blacklisted?
I would assume so, yes. I mean, I haven’t heard from a mainstream candidate, like, in terms of work. I work for Sunrise Movement. I work for Justice Democrats. I work for Jamaal Bowman. I’m proud of all the people I work for. I love the people I work for.
So going forward, with a Biden administration coming in and with a progressive movement that’s still very strong on the left, what will New Deal Strategies and other groups like yours do in the next year or two?
All of these progressive groups fought like hell to elect Joe Biden. And now, we’re going to fight like hell to push them to the left. That’s the plan.
I mean, look at what just happened. Biden won by millions of votes—with zero coattails. For the first time ever, we won the White House without even picking up seats—losing seats—in the House. We got destroyed in state legislatures who are going to go back to doing redistricting, and we’re going to get fucked all over again.
Why do you think that happened? Was it a failure of policy? Messaging? Both?
We had no compelling economic message coming out of Washington. We had nothing. We weren’t Democrats. We had these milquetoast candidates who weren’t running on anything. They were just running on the ability to work with the other side of the aisle. What is that like? That doesn’t resonate. We didn’t focus on the stimulus, we never banged that drum hard enough. We basically gave up on it in the middle of the summer and made it a process story about the talks that are going on between Pelosi and Mnuchin. It was not a drumbeat.
And that is why most voters don’t know which party is going to fight for them. And that is a travesty.
