Trying to change public policy can be a slow and grinding business. And if you’re on the left, you often spend much of your time just playing defense. Republicans have held the White House for 12 of the last 20 years, and they’ve been even stronger at the state level, wielding complete control over the government in nearly two dozen States.

These tough realities make the Fairness Project a super-interesting organization to take a look at. Until a few months ago, I had never heard of the Fairness Project, which keeps a pretty low profile. It’s focused exclusively on making changes at the state level and, where it works, on passing ballot initiatives.

What makes this group stand out is its track record of scoring campaign victories in states. Since 2016, it’s helped achieve big increases in the minimum wage, expansion of Medicaid benefits, and new laws guaranteeing paid leave. The Fairness Project says that it has won 20 out of 21 of its ballot campaigns working in both blue and red states.

Those campaigns have brought health insurance to more than 800,000 people and paid sick leave to 3 million people. That is quite a track record, and all the more so given the bleak political landscape of the past four years. So the obvious question is, how has the Fairness Project been so successful? What’s its secret sauce? 

To get into all this, I talked recently with Jonathan Schleifer, who is executive director of the Fairness Project. Listen to the podcast or read the transcript below. (See all my other podcasts here.)

Editor's Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and length. 

David: Hi Jonathan, thanks for coming on the show.

Jonathan: Thanks for having me, David.

David: So I’m keen to get into the pretty remarkable work that you’ve been doing with the Fairness Project, but before we go there, I’m interested to hear about your background. I know that you started off as a public school teacher in New York City and that you became deeply involved in the antiwar movement after 9/11. So I’d be interested to hear about that and how that work eventually led to the Fairness Project.

Jonathan: Right after college, I was a teacher in the South Bronx for five years. And I like to say that teaching middle school was one of the best lessons in politics and political communication, because to handle 45 kids who are going through puberty and trying to get them to do the one thing you want them to do is very much akin to a lot of what we do in politics and persuasion—trying to get someone’s attention, trying to express the value of what we’re doing, and really understanding where people are in communicating with them. 

I was a teacher because I thought it was one of the most impactful things I could do to help confront racial and economic injustice. I really just wanted to get boots on the ground as quickly as possible and see what I could do for the community in the Bronx where I was teaching. In our second year, three or four days into teaching was September 11th. One of my students literally pulled me to the window and showed me. We could see the smoke from the towers.

And that sort of expanded my horizons in terms of, not just focusing on domestic policy and injustice, but really just putting a broader eye toward the world. Especially as I saw that, you know, New York City was being used as the drum on which the war in Afghanistan and Iraq was really being beaten. And so I got involved in the anti-war movement, first trying to just slow down the march to war in Afghanistan. I learned how to be an organizer, trying to stop the Bush administration and the neocons from advancing an agenda that they had invested decades in.  

There was so much enthusiasm for peace. And as a relatively young person, I was convinced that we could stop it. And I just remember the pain of sitting in a friend’s apartment, and she and her two little daughters and I were like cutting leaflets to hand out the next day for the next protest. And the president announced that we were going to go to war in Iraq. I was trying to understand how we could have had hundreds of thousands of people who are so clearly opposed to this position and not be able to do anything about it.

And I just remember that night, my mentor at the time, whose house I was in, just saying, “all right, now we go from organizing to stop a war to organize to end a war. And this is the work.”

Between teaching in the Bronx and that anti-war work, I feel like these were pivotal anchoring points in starting my career.

David: So you left teaching and you went into full-time work in advocacy and politics. You had several different jobs, you worked in Congress as a staffer, you led an education advocacy organization, you’ve been part of a communications firm, part of a Senate campaign. That’s a lot of different positions you played. I’m keen to hear what sort of vantage points you got on how to wield power, how to get it, and what you learned in that journey.

Jonathan: I like to say I’ve sat on both sides of the desk—like, for example, the congressional lobbying meeting. I’ve been there as the staffer hearing the pitch from the advocates and the lobbyists. I’ve been a lobbyist for teachers and veterans. And I think two things became really clear to me. One is that people on both sides of the desk had very little power and agency at that moment. Because the staffers are often limited by their bosses’ priorities or their bosses’ funder’s priorities, right? 

The advocate is limited by the fact that they have to be able to move that staff to move their boss. And even from meeting with the boss, the boss is still limited by all these other forces that are impacting their decision-making process.  But I think the greater lesson is that people play by a set of rules that they have very little control over, that was designed to limit progress, to maintain and increase the power of those with lots of resources at the expense of everyone else. 

And one of the most profound examples of that was when I was working with the veteran’s organization. I was meeting with congressional staff and we were advocating for mental health coverage and additional funding for widows and orphans of those who had died in combat. This veterans advocacy was my anti-war work coming full circle. We were sort of making the case for just how critical mental health funding was and just how critical funding for programs for widows and orphans were. And the staffer sitting opposite me said, “Well, you know, my boss will support all that funding, but we’re going to have to cut the new GI bill to pay for it.” And, “Is that OK with you?” I am not a veteran, but I was sitting with veterans and I asked him, “Are you asking us to choose between mental health—and widows and orphans, and education funding?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “How can you expect us to choose from that? These women and men deserve all the above. Your boss is probably going to be at an event this weekend standing in front of veterans, wearing hats and the flag and claiming to support veterans. How can you ask to choose? “

And his response was, “Well, these are the rules, you gotta play by them.” In my head, I just said like, “Fuck the rules, I’m done.”

After that happened, I was talking to a friend who said, “I’m working with this group that’s just starting up, that’s gonna go straight to voters and ask the voters what they want, and stop asking the politicians what they want.” And she was talking about the Fairness Project. 

They were looking for a new director and that’s where I came in. 

We know to an incredible degree what needs to get done to close the racial disparities in economic and health, and gender inequality. We have a lot of really good ideas that have been tried and tested around the world, and even at home. But it is finding the political will among those empowered to get it done, and that’s where we fall apart. The Fairness Project is designed to go around that broken political system at the state and local level—to work with local communities, to put an issue in front of voters, and to have them weigh in on it. And what we found is that 95% of the time, in our first five years, voters have sided with a progressive policy in red and purple and blue states.  

David: For people who don’t know about the Fairness Project, it’s focused on ballot campaigns—direct democracy. Interestingly, direct democracy through ballot initiatives was invented a hundred years ago by progressives who had a lot of the concerns you’ve just articulated, at a time when state legislatures were dominated by the trusts and oligarchs, the railroads and the oil magnates, and that’s how ballot initiatives came about. I live in California, in the recent election, there were no less than 12 statewide ballot initiatives that I had to sort through. I have a degree in political science. I found it very confusing. I have to say, I have some ambivalence about these ballot initiatives. I know that progressives can embrace them and do some good. But justify this on philosophical grounds. Why lean so heavily on this kind of tool?

Jonathan: My first question back would be to ask to justify the political system as it is that allows for such undue influence of those with wealth and resources, the corporations, right? The ballot initiative is a response to a profoundly broken system. One that was founded, to your point, as a response to the undue and excessive influence of the oligarchs and others. I think that the question [to ask is], how do we justify our current system? When we’re able to have a representative democracy that delivers for workers and their families and not for corporations and the rich, then we won’t have to have corrective measures like the ballot initiative.

And what we find over and again is that progressive policies, ballot initiatives, serve several functions in different states. To address California in particular, California has a $15 minimum wage only because four and a half years ago, we came together with groups in California and started collecting signatures for a $15 minimum wage. Months before that, the legislature couldn’t pass it. I think it was like a $13.50  initiative. And so, as soon as we started collecting signatures and qualified, using the ballot initiative as a lever of power, we were able to break through. The governor and the legislature called and said, “If you pull your signatures, if you pull the initiative, we will pass $15 on our own.”

The same story was true in Washington, D.C. The same thing is true in Massachusetts. So the ballot initiative can be an incredibly powerful tool for creating upward pressure on Democrats and blue legislatures to do the right thing. And then it also has the power in purple and red states—where there’s no chance the legislature is going to pass progressive policy—to go around the legislature, to go around the governors, and to pass progressive policy. And that’s what we’ve seen in the last few years as we’ve passed Medicaid expansion in Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri. There was no path except for the ballot initiative. 

David: I want to get to some of those battles you’ve been involved in, but say a little bit about how the Fairness Project was created. It is just a few years old, it’s a relatively new organization. Who founded it? How is it funded?

Jonathan: The Fairness Project was founded out of a California healthcare union, SCIUHW. The president of the union was observing that labor nationally was being stressed. And that there are also a lot of workers that were not represented by unions, and there was no way for them to effect change to change their own lives. The way for labor to become relevant, and the way to support workers who couldn’t organize—because they’re in so-called right-to-work states, and because they didn’t have legislatures and governors who were looking out for workers—was to embrace the ballot as a strategy. He offered to put some seed money from the California union, his rank and file voted to contribute money to launch an organization. And the Fairness Project was formed out of that idea. And we are an independent 501(c)(4) organization that is still funded by SCIUHW in California. But we also now have institutional funders, various stakeholders from the different industries that we’ve worked in, as well as over 6,000 online donors. But we’re always looking for more.

David: Let’s talk about the Medicaid expansion battles. Medicaid was mandated to expand to all 50 states, but that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. It became voluntary. Many Republican states chose not to expand. At one point, over 20 states had not expanded Medicaid, leaving millions of people uninsured and causing thousands of unnecessary deaths. Now, the number of states that have not expanded Medicaid is down to 12, and you all have played a role in that. So that strikes me as an amazing success. You’ve helped extend health care to 800,000 people at least. And, Maine, I believe, was one of your first big battles in 2017 to expand Medicaid. So tell me, how did this work unfold?

Jonathan: On the most fundamental level, there wouldn’t have been these Medicaid ballots without the Fairness Project, and that’s not hyperbole. The anchor for this was the main ballot initiative, which you mentioned, heading into the 2016 election. We had been working with some groups in Maine—the Maine People’s Alliance is one of them, an incredible grassroots organization. We had been working together on minimum wage. We ultimately won a minimum wage increase in 2016. And even as we were preparing for the 2016 election, waiting for Mainers to vote ... we were talking about what we could do next.

They had a particularly conservative, aggressive, close-minded governor in Maine. And so we decided that even if Secretary Clinton would win the White House in 2016, they would not have Medicaid expansion. Their legislature, I should say, passed it five times. Governor LePage had vetoed it five times. And so we thought the next best thing after minimum wage would be a Medicaid expansion in Maine.

And of course, everyone knows how it went. Secretary Clinton did not win the White House and we had already started collecting signatures for Medicaid expansion. And in talking with the folks at Maine People’s Alliance, it became clear that we had the absolute responsibility to continue working on it, even under a Trump presidency and the threat to the ACA. And on top of that, we were talking internally about what our role in a Trump presidency could be. We couldn’t ask working families to wait—for higher wages for family leave and healthcare—for Trump to leave the White House, right? So much of our work is based on this notion that we just can’t ask working people to wait for our democracy to be fixed. And so we sort of identified the lack of healthcare and the assault on the ACA, on Obamacare, to be one of the greatest threats coming out of the Trump presidency.

Our theory of change is based on getting voters to say yes. And so we decided that we were going to aggressively expand Medicaid, to provide healthcare to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. And with two strategic outcomes—one being providing healthcare to people, and there’s potentially nothing more important than that, but secondly, to change the political calculus around the ACA. As a result of our work in the last four years—Medicaid expansion in six states, almost 60% of GOP members of the House now are representing Medicaid expansion states. We’re moving the political dial toward leaving the ACA alone and leaving Medicaid expansion alone because it has proven over and over again to be one of the best things we can do for closing racial and economic health disparities.  

David: It’s one thing to win Medicaid expansion in a state like Maine, but you’ve also won in some much tougher places, some pretty deep-red states. And my understanding is that ACA, at least according to the polling, was quite unpopular in these Republican Trump states. How did you move the needle on an issue that Republicans have spent almost a decade demonizing? 

Jonathan: There were lots of people who thought we were nuts to advance these fights in the red states. A lot of national progressive organizations told us we should leave it alone, it was a suicide mission, and that we were going to set the policy back if we advance it on a ballot initiative. Thankfully, we didn’t take their advice. We were able to find allies in Utah, Nebraska, Idaho, Oklahoma, Missouri, who were willing to move ahead with us on this.

One of the things we’ve learned, and this is true for all the policies we work on, is that while the right has effectively demonized the program, they haven’t demonized healthcare. And if we can tear the partisan labels off of the policy and just ask voters fundamental questions like “Do you want healthcare for the person who’s checking you out at the grocery store?” “Do you want healthcare for your niece who can’t afford it right now, who is working two jobs and still can’t get healthcare?” “Do you want higher wages? Do you want paid leave so you can take time off when you get sick?” When we ask people in red, purple and blue states if they want these fundamental things, these progressive values, they consistently say “yes.” And as long as we can keep the partisan labels off of it and not make it about ideology and tribe, people are just much more generous than our politicians want us to believe. 

David: What’s not to like about the expansion of Medicaid? And of course, you have major allies in the hospitals and other healthcare providers throughout these different states who want it. What about the opposition? The Koch network and various groups have spent probably hundreds of millions of dollars fighting to destroy the Affordable Care Act, fighting to stop Medicaid expansion in states. It’s a longstanding, well-financed battle. So how did you manage to prevail?

Jonathan: A couple of things. One is, in our early work in any of these campaigns, we invest in building as broad and inclusive a coalition as possible—and truly strange bedfellow coalitions. The most extreme being in Idaho, which is a state Donald Trump won by double digits. Butch Otter, who was the sitting governor at the time in Idaho, who had spent the last six years of his career opposing Medicaid expansion as governor, he and his wife endorsed the initiative, shot an ad for us, did a press conference for the campaign. So much of this is about giving a permission structure to those who have formally opposed the policy for whatever reason, whether it’s ideological or political, and saying, let’s have an honest accounting of what you want for your state and the country. And so that’s how we managed to get around all that.

We have our power with voters and so long as we can get to voters, I think we can continue to win.

David: Speaking of what’s popular among voters, let’s shift over to the minimum wage. That’s an issue where large majorities of the public have long supported raising the minimum wage. Bizarrely, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. You have been part of a larger movement to break through on that, with minimum wage hikes at both the municipal level and the state level. The Fairness Project has been involved in half a dozen ballot campaigns to raise the minimum wage, including some pretty major victories. 

Jonathan: The minimum wage work is some of our proudest, and we’ve been able to change 10 million lives. We have a counter on our website where we calculate the number of dollars put in low-wage workers’ pockets as the result of minimum wage increases. Just to emphasize that this is such a powerful and transformative policy change, because it is felt paycheck after paycheck after paycheck. Deep red states are passing minimum wage increases with more than 60% of the vote and you don’t win 60% of the vote on many issues in this country anymore. Every week, I can see raising the wage is a way to bring the country together. And as we look to unify this country, it’s a great place to start. We’ve been able to do that in states like Arizona and Arkansas, that trend is pretty dark red. Just now, this last cycle, we saw a campaign in Florida was able to raise the minimum wage to $15. 

David: Which passed by 60%, and a state that Trump won by a healthy margin. So that, to me, speaks to the kind of way in which that issue sort of operates out of the polarized box. If you can get it in front of voters.

Jonathan: That’s right. And we even saw in 2016, where a minimum wage in Arizona outperformed Donald Trump. It outperformed Secretary Clinton in Colorado and Washington State and Maine. You see these policies are so much more popular than even the winning candidate. That’s a function of just how important they are in people’s lives.

David: Paid family leave, time off, is another area that you’ve worked on. Tell me about that.

Jonathan: We’ve worked on paid leave issues, campaigns in several states, including pairing paid leave with minimum wage in a few states in 2016. In 2020, there was the country’s first paid family medical leave act ballot initiative. In Colorado, 2.6 million people will benefit from this paid family medical leave. We’re excited to think about how we can do for paid family medical leave what we were able to do for Medicaid expansion, with each state.

David: I know Medicaid expansion has not yet happened in Texas, which has more uninsured people than any other state in the country. Is that on your hit list? Or does it not have that? 

Jonathan: It doesn’t. Texas has local initiatives and we worked with some local groups in Texas, like the Texas Organizing Project and Worker’s Defense in Texas to stand up paid leave initiatives in San Antonio and Dallas, and we were able to pressure the city council to pass those as policy. But they don’t have a statewide initiative, and it’s heartbreaking. Tragically, there is no way for voters in Texas to weigh in on Medicaid expansion and just show their legislature and our governor how out-of-touch they are with what the people want.

Because I’m confident, if we could have a ballot process in Texas, we would win that one. Four states have a ballot process and have not expanded Medicaid yet. They are Wyoming, Mississippi, South Dakota and Florida. And we’ve been working with an incredible coalition in Florida for almost four years now. Florida is just a monster of a state when it comes to running and winning ballot initiatives.

The need in Florida is for us to be able to raise the resources to be able to advance a campaign there. So if any billionaires are listening to this, by expanding Medicaid in Florida, we provide healthcare to 900,000 people. And it’ll be a particularly interesting race if we can get Medicaid expansion on the ballot in Florida [in 2022] because it’ll be Ron DeSantis, who has been an opponent of Medicaid expansion, and also has done a horrible job managing COVID. He will share the ballot with Medicaid expansion. So if that’s a pitch to support the work of the Florida campaign, what else do you need?

And then there’s also Mississippi and South Dakota and Wyoming. And we’ve been working with coalitions in both Mississippi and South Dakota, and are hoping to make our way to Wyoming, to build the coalitions that we described. The Fairness Project has won 95% of our campaigns, which is 20 out of 21 campaigns. We only advance campaigns that we know we can win. We like to say rule number one is winning. And rule number two is, don’t lose. And that’s because, when it comes to putting a question in front of voters, if you lose, you provide the opposition with a talking point that’ll just set back legislative advocacy years, if not decades.

And so we want to make sure that the healthcare workers in California will support their money by being invested in changing lives and winning. And so, what we’re doing now, and in Florida, Mississippi, and South Dakota is building the coalition, checking all the boxes, making sure we got the policy right and about language rights. So we can advance a winning campaign that’ll have the immediate effect, and will be able to be smoothly implemented once we’ve won.

David: The track record is impressive. Again, living in California, where we just saw the high-profile, progressive ballot initiatives fail, millions of dollars spent major setbacks, to look at your track record, it’s pretty remarkable. What are the transferable lessons of your work to other people out there who aren’t in this area where you can go straight to ballot initiatives, a very unusual mechanism that other advocates don’t have access to in many cases? What would you take from your work that you would want to say to other advocates?

Jonathan: One is, there are only 24 states that have a ballot process. So tragically, the other 26 don’t have a leveler of power. But I think a few lessons we’ve learned are particularly important. One is just the need to build as broad a coalition as possible around an issue. One of the rules of McConnell’s politics was to pit people against each other. The reason why we build strong, diverse coalitions that includes folks from the hospital association and far-left activist groups is because that inoculates us from attacks. 

Second, is just emphasizing the importance of these sort of really fundamental issues. That’s wages and healthcare and leave. It’s the issues that have been raised during COVID, where we’re living at the intersection of a healthcare and economic crisis. These are the issues to focus on and to lift up because the impacts are felt across communities. I think that’s critical.

And the final thing is, Americans on these issues are much more generous than our politics and Twitter would suggest. And as much as possible, trying to get out of the political corners and trying to move away from the ideological debates and have more fundamental questions about what this is all about.

I got into teaching because I wanted to change lives. I got into politics because I wanted to change lives. And I believe we can move forward a politics that’s not about power but is about impact. I understand that power and impact are closely related. I’m not naive to that fact. But I think we can sometimes lose sight of what’s really important, which is, how do we impact as many people as possible, especially those who have been deprioritized, devalued and forgotten? How do we push back against the extreme power of corporations and the wealthy? That’s by building that broad coalition and by moving past the partisan politics. 

David: Jonathan, thank you for coming on the show.

Jonathan: Thank you for having me.