The victories in those two states were no great surprise to Steve Phillips, a political donor and author who has spent years talking about how to mobilize new voters of color and win more elections. Steve has long argued that the Democratic party and its donors need to do a lot of things differently to build a new American majority—like stop wasting so much money on last-minute TV ads at election time and start investing in year-round organizing as part of a long-term strategy to build power.
Steve has made this case in op-eds in the New York Times and The Nation, as well as a book he published in 2016, “Brown Is the New White.” With his wife Susan Sandler, he invests in grassroots work through the Susan Sandler Fund, a philanthropy the couple created last year.
Steve is the host of Democracy in Color with Steve Phillips, a color-conscious podcast on politics, and founder of Democracy in Color, a political media organization. His new book, “How to Win the Civil War,” will be published this fall.
You can read a condensed version of our conversation below or listen to the full interview, which is the latest episode of my podcast, Inside Change.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
David: Hi, Steve. Thanks for coming to the show.
Steve: Thanks for having me on.
You published your book, “Brown is the New White,” in 2016, and I read it only recently, after the 2020 election. I was struck by how prophetic the book was on several fronts. For starters, you argued that Georgia and Arizona were states that could be flipped blue by mobilizing new voters. How were you able to see that so clearly five years ago?
That’s really why I wrote the book. I thought all of this was obvious, and apparently, it was not. I came of age in the 1980s in the Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns. I partially dedicate my book to Jesse Jackson, who had shown the power and potential of an electoral campaign tied to the movement for social justice in this country.
So Jesse rooted his campaign in those communities. He had this concept that when the minorities come together, they comprise a new majority. This was the idea of the rainbow.
Obama lost Georgia by 200,000-plus votes, got 47% of the vote without even trying. There were almost a million people of color who didn’t vote. So the math was always there, and I had seen it and understood it. So then, when I met Stacey Abrams, and she was saying, “Obama lost by 200,000 votes. There are a million people of color, we’re going to go register them.” I’m all like, “that sounds like a good idea.” So that’s how I got behind her and partnered up with her from that point.
You have known Stacey Abrams for a decade, long before she was the household name—or practically in some circles—that she is today. In fact, you and your wife, Susan Sandler, were among her first national funders. How did you tune in to what she was doing so early?
So we have a friend in common, Ben Jealous, who was the head of the NAACP. Ben was out here in the Bay area, and we had gotten to be friends when he was at the Rosenberg Foundation and active in the Bay area. Ben knew Stacey from 20 years ago. So he connected us. He sent an email in December of 2010 to connect us. In January 2011, that’s when we got together.
She had this 26-page plan for how she was going to change Georgia, methodically, year by year. In the very first email to me, she said we have a lot of potential in Georgia, but it will require careful planning and friends from the outside. We partnered up, gave her a little bit of money, and helped her raise money.
I was talking to her the other day, I said, “So that $10,000 we gave you in 2011 is now translating to $2 trillion going out across the country,” in terms of the COVID relief bill and having flipped the Senate. She says, “I like to provide a return on investment to my people who support me.”
So we gave her $10,000 and she raised $54,000 in 2012. In 2020, she raised $90 million.
In light of what happened in Georgia and Arizona, do you think that the Democratic donor class and the foundation world now fully appreciate the gains that can come from playing the long game, investing in year-round political organizing, and trying to move the needle in some of these purple or red states?
I don’t think sufficiently that they do. There’s still this obsession with an attempt to persuade white supposed swing voters—presuming that there are a lot of swing voters—over trying to do the methodical, nitty-gritty work of increasing turnout of voters of color.
I still don’t think that the big money is enthusiastic at the scale that it needs to be. That remains the challenge, to continue to educate people, to learn those lessons, and invest in that work. As our experience showed, it’s far more cost-effective in terms of what you can yield, in terms of impact and results—and ultimately, public policy results.
I think it is true that there’s a major culture gap, right? You have the donor classes, disproportionately white, come from coastal America. Many of them are coming out of Silicon Valley or finance, and have very few connections to the world of grassroots organizing and movement building. Is that your sense?
Very much so. It’s systemic and structural in that the people who have money resonate with people who are like them. They don’t get as excited about someone like Stacey Abrams, about someone like Michelle Tremillo in Texas [executive director of the Texas Organizing Project], or Andrea Mercado [executive director of New Florida Majority]. That’s not the model that they’re used to, in terms of who are the brilliant, flashy, cutting-edge people. So they’re supportive, but they’re not enthusiastic, and that is part of the difference. That translates in terms of how many zeros you put into your check to those folks.
You’re writing a new book, “How to Win the Civil War,” about the changing balance of power in American politics. You have an analysis of what conditions need to be present for a state to flip from red to blue. You argue that all of these conditions are now present in Texas. Walk me through your analysis of what these conditions are, how they apply to Texas, and also some other states where they may also apply.
We have five case studies, looking at Virginia, San Diego, Arizona, Texas and Georgia. All of them do have certain common elements that are present. One is underlying favorable demographics. Trump won Texas by 600,000 votes. There are 4 million people of color who did not vote in that election, so the potential is enormous if people would invest in closing that gap like they’ve closed it in Georgia.
Another component is leadership, taking the concept from Jim Collins, with his book “Good to Great,” where he talks about level-five leaders. All of the great corporations that he had seen go from good to great had this level of leaders who are very personally humble, but extremely ambitious for their organization. They’re very driven and disciplined and focused. So all of these places have those types of leaders: Tram Nguyen in Virginia [co-executive director, New Virginia Majority], Andrea Guerrero in San Diego [executive director, Alliance San Diego] John Laredo in Arizona, Michelle Tremillo in Texas and Stacey Abrams in Georgia. They have that kind of leadership, and they play the long game. All those places have had 10 years of work that they’ve been sticking with.
The last piece is that there’s an organization driving civic engagement work, and the work to expand voter participation has changed the composition of the electorate.
The places that have had all of those elements are the places that have made progress. Less attention has gone to Arizona, but a similar thing has happened in Arizona. Arizona also flipped, as well as Georgia did. A place like San Diego, California, which used to be the launching pad for different Republicans within the state, has now flipped its politics. In Virginia, all the levers of government are controlled by the Democrats. This has taken place over the course of a decade as the population has changed. So the model was there—if people would see it and if they would invest in it.
One of the things I love about your work is that you have a vision of victory, you have a plan for achieving it, and it makes me feel very hopeful. But let’s talk a little bit about how things could go wrong. Let’s start with the Democratic Party and its limitations. The infrastructure of the Democratic Party is not well fused with this new organizing and movement-building work that’s been so effective. The party’s leadership and the consulting class around it tend to think very differently about politics. How do you change that and create a Democratic Party that does work hand-in-glove with all this new movement building going on?
Well, you have to change who are the people making the decisions. Are the people who have done the work and driven the change in Georgia, Arizona, Houston, San Diego, Virginia—are those people who come out of those movements going to be given the keys to drive the overall party apparatus? Or are they going to be kept at a distance?
I did a piece for The Nation in 2016, showing that every Democratic infrastructure organization that had a budget of over $30 million was run by a white person in 2016, in a party that’s half people of color.
Until we crack that and are willing to give those folks the money and the responsibility to run and execute the programs, we’re going to continue to be fighting these fights in frankly frustrating ways.
Let’s talk more about the electorate, the voters. A key argument of your book and an argument you’ve been making ever since was that Democrats should forget about chasing these swing white voters that everybody’s always talking about and focus on mobilizing this new American majority coalition.
Meanwhile, Trump went in the exact opposite direction, looking to mobilize disengaged, non-college white Americans, and that strategy was pretty successful in places like Wisconsin and Michigan. It’s easy to imagine a future in which more diverse states in the South and Southwest swing into the Democratic column, while mostly white states like Wisconsin become more Republican—and there goes the “blue wall” for a generation. Are you worried about that? We have, of course, millions of non-college white voters who don’t vote. I read that in Wisconsin, in 2016, there were half a million non-college whites who didn’t vote in that election. More broadly, my question would be, if political competition and voter mobilization become more structured in America along ethno-nationalist lines, does a Republican white party that manages to bring new whites into the electorate continue to be pretty strong in a number of these mostly white states?
The new American majority is a majority, but it’s a narrow majority. It’s not a given by any stretch. It is enough of a majority across enough different states to be able to win. It’s getting bigger, but it’s narrow.
In a lot of ways, Trump manifested and tested the theory. Lost to the analysis about how Trump increased his vote is that he did lose a lot of white voters. There’s a lot of the suburban whites who switched. So if he lost voters and then still got 10 million more voters, that means he brought more than 10 million people out. I would argue that he squeezed every racially fearful white vote he could find.
The other thing I think that people are missing in a lot of these analyses is young people. People talk about the electorate as if it’s static, but it’s getting increasingly diverse and increasingly progressive, I would argue, in terms of who’s coming up. That’s going to become a bigger and bigger sector of the electorate.
What do you think is the right balance between working to mobilize voters of color and paying attention to white voters to get over the thresholds that Democrats need to win in places like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan?
Well, that’s the other point I was going to make, too; I think there’s a lack of appreciation for progressive whites. A meaningful minority of whites are progressive. Some whites believe there should be a multiracial democracy, and do want to see racial justice, and do have a more progressive viewpoint. There are more of them that could be brought out, as well.
So it is a balance. But fundamentally, I think what we saw in Georgia and even in Arizona, some white people who voted for Trump flipped back over for Biden. Not a huge number, and it was only a number that mattered because so many people of color had voted.
When I was working on my book—I don’t even shop much, but when it came out, I discovered Costco, which is the only place I believe where people pay the company to be able to shop there.
Costco’s focus is on retaining its customers. It doesn’t spend much money on advertising at all. It tries to serve its actual customers. I think that’s gotta be the fundamental dynamic [for the Democratic Party]. You have to inspire, secure and tend to your supporters first. Then you can talk about trying to persuade others. But right now, the balance is completely out of whack. At the moment, I would say it’s probably 90% persuasion, 10% mobilization. Whereas it probably should be the other way around, or at least 70% mobilization, 30% persuasion.
Steve. Thanks for coming to the show.
Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.
