Read the Full Report in PDF or HTML
Become a Citizen Cosponsor of the Agenda
Tell Your Friends about the Agenda
Read About our Task Force Partners

Building a Progressive Majority in the States:
Introduction

This November, we saw voters taking the first steps to repudiate the rightwing ideology and institutions that have long dominated much of the political landscape in our states. For too long, we have seen rightwing politicians, backed by corporate money and by conservative think tanks, blocking communities from improving wages, impeding expansion of health care, and auctioning off public assets and public contracts to big monied interests.

But now we can build on these progressive victories to build towards a progressive majority in all our states. On issue after issue of concern to working families, there are solid majorities for enacting progressive policies. What we need is a coordinated strategy across states to highlight those issues that can broaden the coalition of progressive voters and reframe the debate across the nation about why it matters to working families that progressives hold office in our statehouses.

This past year, a group of legislators, non-profit leaders and advocates formed the Progressive States Network to provide day-to-day support to state legislators and community organizations in each state to help make that happen. This accompanying package of issues is not designed to be an exhaustive set of policies but instead strategically focuses on those that can attract support from disaffected voters and thereby "wedge" those rightwing politicians whose allegiance to campaign contributors clashes with the desires of many of the voters who put them into office. And Progressive States as an organization has committed to providing legislative support to campaigns in states advancing these policies.

Supporting the Program: The policy options in the following pages are meant to be just that: a set of options that can each illustrate the values associated with each set of issues. Some are simple common-sense reforms while others are more ambitious, comprehensive policies, but all would make concrete improvements in the lives of working families and improve our communities. Each policy builds on the others to reinforce the progressive message. The idea is that local legislators can promote those options most appropriate for the political environment and needs of their states.

As an organization, Progressive States will support the policy program by providing progressive legislators with both the technical and messaging support needed to enact those policies into law. Our constant goal is to help legislators by promoting best practices for these issues, providing background research, assisting legislators in drafting versions of the policy appropriate to their individual states, and helping them advance related legislation that has already been introduced in their states.

Through partnerships with think tanks, national political partners, and local grassroots organizations, our goal is to build support for these state-specific legislative campaigns, while promoting a message continuity across multiple states that reinforces the progressive message nationally. By strengthening communication between legislators and grassroots organizations across different states, Progressive States acts as an information hub so that legislators can keep up-to-date on news from other states, identify trends so that progressive legislators can anticipate what is coming their way, and help legislators educate each other on how to win.

Progressive States will also act as a "war room" to help legislators respond quickly with legislative amendments, provide expert policy testimony, and generally act as surrogate staff members to help encourage passage of legislation. Our aim is to promote campaigns, including innovative online communication strategies, that generate a crescendo of interest that sweeps multiple states simultaneously and raises progressive issues to a political prominence that helps redefine state politics.

What Progressives Face: Even with November's victories, progressives confront a political landscape shaped by a well-organized rightwing network that has worked for decades to establish political power in the states. In a February report, Governing the Nation From the Statehouses: The Rightwing Agenda in the States and How Progressives Can Fight Back, the Progressive States Network outlined how groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and a range of other allied rightwing groups have hijacked public policy in the states.

Tens of millions of dollars of rightwing corporate money has poured into local research think tanks and lobbying organizations to create an "echo chamber" around their issues. This rightwing network of groups have drafted and promoted state legislation across the country that has crippled social service budgets, deregulated industries, slashed medical care for the poor and undermined consumer and worker protections in state after state. At both the federal and state level, they have promoted policies that have "wedged" progressive groups against each other while cementing a rightwing coalition around rhetoric of tax cuts and rightwing social issues. Progressives have often failed to counter these wedge issues promoted by the corporate-backed conservative movement and de facto ceded what should be progressives voters to the opposition.

A prime goal of the Progressive States Network is to assist progressive state leaders in expanding support among many voting groups that should be supporting many progressive policies. The opportunities for that outreach is significant, as the Pew Research Center, which has developed a typology of voter beliefs, emphasizes:

• In its "2005 Political Typology," Pew divides the population into nine different voting blocs and finds that even many voters that sympathize with progressive economic values are voting for politicians with rightwing economic views.
• Among two groups, "Social Conservatives" and "Pro-Government Conservatives"-who make up a majority of the Republican base-- over 80% feel "too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies" and a strong majority of both groups support stricter environmental regulation, raising the minimum wage, and guaranteeing health care for all Americans.
• In fact, one small demographic, what Pew calls "Enterprisers" who make up just 9% of the population, are the ONLY group whose members generally oppose raising the minimum wage, the ONLY group which opposes guaranteed health care, the ONLY group that thinks outsourcing is good for the economy, and the ONLY group whose members generally think environmental regulations are not worth the costs.

What is startling is that this last small voting group, just 9% of the population, in combination with the corporate-backed rightwing apparatus, has been the tail wagging not only national and state politics but driving many policies with which even the majority of the Republican base disagrees.

The Progressive Opportunity: Progressive States believe these numbers highlight an opportunity for progressives to make inroads in all fifty states. Most progressive policies have far more popular support than past voting patterns would indicate.

Some progressives argue that politicians need to "move to the center" and blur the political lines with their opponents, especially on issues like reproductive rights or other social issues. Yet given that a majority of the population supports Roe v. Wade -- as reflected by all three anti-abortion initiatives being voted down this November -- such an approach is as likely to lose votes from the present progressive base as gain them with new voters.

And if anything, the problem for progressives has not been that its current leaders are seen by the population as too ideological but that they are seen as not standing for much of anything. For example, a 2005 Democracy Corp poll found that only 27% of Americans thought Democratic leaders "know what they stand for" compared to 55% who see GOP leaders as clearly articulating their positions.

If progressives reverse this problem and clearly assert what they stand for and define themselves around popular progressive policies, it leads to two major results:

• First, since you have a whole group of socially conservative, economically progressive voters who know where rightwing leaders stand on social issues those voters support, but are unsure where progressive leaders stand on the economic and environmental issues that those voters also believe in, those voters often deliver their votes to the rightwing leaders who take a clear stance on SOMETHING they support. But if progressive leaders clearly emphasize the progressive policies that those disaffected voters DO support, that give those voters a real choice at election time. And as November election results show, that can lead to electoral gains for progressive candidates.
• Second, campaigns on these popular progressive issues can solidify support among many swing voters and mobilize the base of progressive voters. Such mobilization is important not just for increasing turnout of those voters but for expanding the volunteers who in turn will help recruit their neighbors -- and give those progressive activists a message that they can actually use to win over members of their communities to the progressive cause.

In this way, good policy becomes good politics.

Values: The Need for a Multi-Issue Narrative: Still, it's not enough to just highlight a few popular issues; those issues need to be embedded within a narrative and a broader set of values. An issue, no matter how popular, loses much of its political force when discussed in isolation. The political power of any issue is that it expresses the values that connects that issue to peoples' lives and to other issues that also matter to them. In this way, a politician's support or opposition to any issue becomes symbolic of a larger connection to the interests, values and cultural worldview of a voter. Additionally, without that multi-issue narrative, it is far easier for opponents to pit single issue progressive groups against each other and undermine voter identification with progressive leaders.

Adam Werbach, the dynamic former President of the Sierra Club, has emphasized that, despite general support by the public for environmental policies, they have often failed politically because they were not articulated in ways that united them with those of worker advocates, civil rights organizations, womens' groups, and other progressives through common values and aspirations. But he emphasized the success of environmental advocates in, for example, talking to manufacturing workers who easily embrace environmental values when it is framed as investments in new technologies and jobs and the broader value of strengthening our communities.

Similarly, it's often less specific issues than the lack of a strong pro-family narrative by progressives that alienates many cultural conservatives. The modern economy is hard on families, with both parents often forced to work long hours in a workplace that usually gives them little flexibility to deal with family emergencies. The rightwing will succeed in promoting a narrative that abortion and gay rights supposedly endanger the family unless progressives create an equally strong message of how promoting a minimum wage and family leave and better health care can ease those burdens on the family. With a strong progressive pro-family narrative in place, any particular cultural issue gets debated on its own merits as one of many issues a person may care about, not as a symbol of some more general anti-family bias by progressive leaders.

How this multi-issue narrative is shaped will no doubt differ in each state, but there are core values that progressives share and that will help reinforce that message across states. Progressive States' goal is to help legislators promote these common values and issues that reinforce a narrative about improving the lives of their constituents. All of our policies start literally from where people live and work to promote a core progressive narrative of Rewarding Work, Valuing Families, Strengthening Communities, Growing the Economy and Increasing Democracy in our society. These or appropriate variations can be used to highlight the broad values that tie together the specific issues into this multi-issue narrative.

Outline of the Policy Program: Within this framework of values, Progressive States is initially providing legislative support for six key issue clusters. Although these are obviously not exhaustive of the issues that embody the progressive agenda, they reflect issues where progressives can make some of the most serious political inroads in the present environment:

• Wage Standards and Workplace Freedom -- assuring that American workers receive a decent wage and the freedom of speech in the workplace to stand up for their own interests.
• Balancing Work and Family -- helping create a more family-friendly workplace and society through better family leave policies, paid sick days, support for child care, and access to contraception.
• Health Care for All -- extending health care coverage to all Americans, while helping cut costs for those currently receiving health coverage.
• Smart Growth and Clean Jobs -- promoting energy independence and job growth through new transit options, smart development to strengthen our communities, and new energy technologies.
• Tax and Budget Reform -- creating more equity and accountability in state tax systems, economic development subsidies and public contracts.
• Fair and Clean Elections -- reforming lobbying corruption, establishing public financing for elections, protecting voting rights and election reforms like vote by mail to improve the voting process.

As will be outlined in more detail in the following pages, each of these issue clusters are not only good policy for working families, but they each expand and deepen the progressive coalition by appealing to disaffected, swing and even many self-described conservative voters who nonetheless care about these issues that express the value of work, family, community, economic growth and democracy.

Additional details on legislative models and other supporting materials will be available on this website in coming months.