Originally posted at Young Philly Politics. A number of my responses to comments made at YPP are below
There is an article in the Inquirer today that briefly reports on some of my experiences with ward politics during the last election. I was disappointed by the article, in part because I thought I was talking off the record with the reporter and in part because the article is misleading about the role that wards and street money played in my campaign or other grass roots campaigns. (The Inquirer will be running a clarification about part of the article tomorrow.)
I plan to write about this subject in detail later, because these are two subjects that most people interested in Philadelphia politics do not understand very well and about which I learned a great deal in the last five months. Here are some preliminary points.
1. What Street Money is For. Street money is money paid to political organizers of all kinds for providing campaign services on Election Day. This includes paying campaign workers, paying organizers of the campaign, paying for campaign literature (e.g. ballots, door hangers, letters to constituents), and paying for lunches for campaign workers.
2. All kinds of organizations take street money not just ward leaders. Philly for Change sought street money from its endorsed candidates during the last election in order to pay for campaign literature. So did Acorn. Mayoral candidates and District Council candidates take street money from the candidates on their ballots in order to pay for campaign workers, literature and mail pieces. Independent contractors create political organizations that take street money for the same things
3. Almost All Candidates Pay Street Money. Every progressive candidate running at large who raised any money at all paid someone street money for something. While I spent a lot of energy on seeking support from ward leaders, paying street money to them was a small part of my campaign. I spent far more money on staff and cable television and campaign literature than I put on the street.
4. Street money, in most cases, does not buy places on ballots. I did not get on the Philly for Change ballot by offering them street money. I did not get on ward ballots in twenty or so wards by paying street money. In every case in which I was involved, an organizer of a ballot decided to put me on their ballot for one reason or another and then some asked for street money. That is what Philly for Change did and what some of the ward leaders who supported me did.
5. In some cases spots on ballots can be bought and it is not just ward leaders who sell them. Some so-called progressive organizations do so as well. A ward leader told me that one at-large candidate offered her up to $15,000 to be on her ballot and other ward leaders told me that the same candidate was offering about $4,000 per ward. All these ward leaders, by the way, turned the candidate down. Other ward leaders did not. I never offered any ward leader a dime either before or after they told me they had a spot for me on the ballot. And I did not pay very much after being asked.
6. There are lots of ways to get on a ballot. I got on some ballots because of my stands on issues or on reforming the city. I was on the Philly for Change ballot because I won an open election. There were at least three ward leaders who put me on their ballots either because they agreed with my reform ideas or because I had worked with them on some issues in the past. One did not ask for street money, a second asked for a little money for lunches for campaign workers, and the third asked for street money. Sometimes you get on these ballots because of personal relationships. Lou Agre has written about how his support of me was based more on our personal relationship than on anything else, although he was certainly more inclined to support me because of my ideas. I became friendly with a number of ward leaders over the course of the election. Over time they came to trust me and recognize that I would be a good council member and in the last few weeks they offered to help me out. Sometimes you get the support of a ward leader because the committee people know you well and demand that the ward leader support you. That was one factor in my getting the support of a ward leader with whom I had worked in the past. Sometimes you get on a ballot because of the recommendation of a powerful politician. Over the last two years I got to know some people in party or political positions who made a few calls to ward leaders recommending me. Sometimes you get on a ballot because of intra-party politics. When I announced that I would support Anna Verna for Council President, a few political officials were willing to help me get ward support and a few ward leaders were interested in helping me out. Again, in this case, only one of the four or five ward leaders who supported me for this reason asked me for street money. Sometimes you get on ward ballots because in one way or another either you or a ward leader backing you helps a candidate supported by another ward leader. That helped me in a few cases.
7. Sometimes people who put together ballots don’t keep their word or don’t really follow through. Luckily for me, with just a few exceptions, I was on all the ballots that people promised me I would be on. However, just being on a ballot is not enough. Organizations can decide to help some of their candidates more than others. Philly for Change, for example, put much more effort into Maria Quinones Sanchez’ campaign than it did in mine. The campaign of one district council candidate called me the other day to offer to return some of the money I paid them because their field operation did not help me much. A number of ward leaders put little effort into helping me get votes even though I was on their ballot. Sometimes that was because the ward leader really does not have any control over his or her committee people. Sometimes that was because my campaign was very low priority for that ward leader. Ward leaders are much more likely to really put out an effort for a candidate when they fear disappointing a fellow ward leader. That’s part of the reason Lou Agre was so important for my campaign. If I had three Lou Agre’s helping me out, the results would have been better.
7. Ward leaders make money in other ways. Most ward leaders hold parties that are also fundraisers. If you are candidate who is running for office city wide, and want to meet ward leaders, committee people, and other political officials, you have to attend these parties. All of us did so at a cost that was usuall from $10 to $50 altough one ward leader charged candidates $250 for his party A few days before Election Day, I was joking with some of my fellow candidates about which one of these checks was hardest to write. The competition was pretty intense.
8. Street Money Is Inescapable. Until thousands of people are willing to volunteer their time in politics, street money is going to be inescapable. And even if we had all those volunteers, it is going to be necessary for some things.
Over the course of the election I probably had 80 people who did some kind of volunteer work for my campaign and another 100 or so who worked for my campaign through Neighborhood Networks or Philly for Change That is not a lot of volunteers in a city-wide campaign in which there are 800,000 potential voters in over 1600 divisions. I would love to create a city-wide progressive organization that can put 2000 volunteers on the street on Election Day. That was my goal when Neighborhood Networks got started. In almost all cases, volunteers are much more effective campaign workers than paid people. But even an all volunteer campaign is going to need some kind of street money for literature—which is not cheap—and for lunches and for gas money for the rovers who distribute the literature and, most of all, for organizers. Our experience in Neighborhood Networks and the experience of other grassroots organizations is that it is very hard to find volunteers to do the important middle level task of recruiting, training, motivating, and directing volunteers. That’s why most organizations that rely on volunteers—such as Philly Against Santorum—have paid middle level organizers.
Reformers sometimes think that grass roots politics can be done without money. That’s simply not the case. One of my aspirations is to realize a slogan of Neighborhood Networks—the power of organized people can defeat the power of organized money. But organizing people takes some money and always will.
9. Moral Issues Arise in Election Politics Everyday. They arose every time I sought money from someone or support from a ward leader. Here are some examples.
Many of the people I asked for money, including many friends I called, could in one way or another have personally benefited from my being in office if I were inclined to help them. (Consider just this: Council members often help their constituents lower their property tax assessments.) Only in one case did a potential contributor raise such an issue with me and I immediately ended the conversation. But it was in the back of my mind all the time. This is, of course, a potentially corrupting feature of our politics and is one reason I so strongly support public financing.
Someone seeking political office has to try to win. It is sometimes said the first task of a politician is to win. That’s not my view as I’m not willing to do anything to get elected. My first task in politics as in everything else is to live my life in a way that respects my own ideals. But the second task is to win. And so every time I sought the support from an organization I had to ask myself if I could live with the consequences of that support. And that is not true with regard to ward leaders but also with regard to progressive interest groups and labor unions.
I am strong supporter, for example, of labor and of our municipal unions and was very glad to get the support of DC 47. I agree with most of their positions. But I was concerned that, in the face of growing health care and pension costs, DC 47 would ask me to commit to something that was beyond what I think the city could afford in the future. They didn’t.
Similarly, Clean Water Action is very concerned about the environmental costs of dredging while the longshoreman want dredging to happen yesterday. I sought the support of both groups while defining my position on dredging in a way that didn’t make either of them absolutely happy but that they could both live with. If they couldn’t then I was willing to sacrifice the support of one or another group.
Ballot politics raises similar issues. I was asked at one time if I would support Jannie Blackwell as Council President in order to be on a certain ballot. I said no. Once or twice a ward leader asked me for something inappropriate and I stopped talking with him. One ward leader asked me if I would give a job to one of his committee people. Patronage is a touchy issue with me, although I’m not absolutely opposed to patronage jobs. I had to make sure we understood that we were talking about a real person doing a real job well. Nothing every came out of that conversation and, in the course of the campaign, I never offered anyone a job in return for their support.
Another difficult decision is who to endorse. It was hard for me not to say who I supported in the Mayor’s race or in some district races. Being quiet just runs against all my natural inclinations—which are much more those of a teacher and political analyst than a candidate. But I simply couldn’t do that without jeopardizing my chances of getting elected. In one case I rashly made an endorsement that I later regretted.
Balancing the importance of winning with the importance of winning in the right way is something political leaders should think about all the time. I know I did and I think that I mostly came up with the right answers. I regret one or two decisions I made, but they turned out not to be problematic. Having gone through this difficult process, and knowing how hard it is to always strike the right balance, I’m a little more forgiving of politicians than I once was. But I have not wavered in my belief that your can run for office and still hold true to your ideals. I think I did so.
Wilson Goode commented, that I initially started running as an outsider and then, realizing that this wouldn’t work, tried to develop some inside support.
I wrote:
Inside or outside?
Didn’t you ask me that question above?
And isn’t your answer the same as mine…work outside and inside at the same time?
A new organization, like the Black Political Forum, can build its own operation and use it to win support from inside the system. And then it can try to take over some of the system. As you said,
“The Black Political Forum set out to be successful independent of the Party – and to change the Party from within – but prepared to force change, from within or without.”
I know this history, partly from books, and partly from talking with the people who helped make it such as Maurice Clifford who was a friend and colleague of my father-in-law. And I once had a talk about it with a very important figure in the city who you know well.
Speaking of history, have you seen Matthew Countryman’s new book on the rise of independent black politics in Philadelphia, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia? Much of that history you know first hand, but it goes back a bit before your time. It is a good book, which progressives of all kinds should read.
You asked me whether I wanted to work on the inside and the outside.
My answer is that reformers can try to work both on the inside and outside. That was what I have been trying to do. And I learned to do it from the movement that lead to the election of your father.
I’m not trying to tell anyone how to get elected to office. If I really knew that, I would have won on Tuesday.
I’m trying to give people a better understanding of how ward politics works, something I understood in rough outline but not in detail.
The reason I’m doing it is that some of us reformers think that the ward system blocks good public policy and that it should be replaced / modified / destroyed.
To reach any judgment about that, we need to understand how the ward system functions, who it serves, and what the alternatives are. The answers to these questions are simply not obvious. I need to think real hard, hopefully with folks here, before I’ll be ready to come to any answers. And that will help us figure out what we want and, also, how progressive candidates in the future should relate the ward system.
That still isn’t political strategy, which involves knowing in detail the individual players and what they want. I’m not talking about that here and can’t tell you what the answers are going to be in 1, 2, or 4 years.
People who do electoral campaigns aren’t coming here to give free strategic advice because their life revolves around running and winning elections and they don’t want to give out their secrets. That’s how they make their money, after all. They are useful for that.
That’s not my life’s goal. I’m trying to work with people in the city to build a democratic (small d) progressive movement that focuses on issues as well as elections. Small d democracy requires / demands an educated membership.
To someone who wrote that after being a political scientist for 25 years I should haven known how the ward system worked, I wrote.
For me it is the details that are interesting and that you need to know if you actually want to understand how our politics works. And the details are not in any book of political science, for a couple of reasons.
The first is that there is no good book about Philly ward politics. I know of only one decent book about machine politics written in 25 years for the simply reason that there are only two political machines left, Philly and Chicago. A guy named Dick Simpson wrote a book about Chicago. Our machine is very different from Chicago’s. (A good book about New York’s ward politics was written about thirty years ago.) There has, unfortunately, not been a good book written about our ward politics. I’m looking forward to writing at least some articles about it.
The other thing is that no book of political science can tell you how to run for election. That requires practical experience. Suppose I explain that you can sometimes get a ward leader to support a candidate for council at large by offering to support his candidates for municipal court judge. I knew that before I ran. But I didn’t know which judges were supported by which ward leaders. I didn’t know the value of different wards. I knew how large they were but not how unified they were or how much regard other ward leaders had for the skills of a particular ward leader in delivering votes. I didn’t know when these kinds of deals get made. I didn’t know what the relative value of a judge and council at large candidate was. I didn’t know the details about the difficulties of putting coalitions of white and black ward leaders together or any details about the two different collections of black ward leaders (although I knew they existed) or about the tensions between South Philly and Northeast Ward leader or about the role John Dougherty plays in the ward system or about how Chairman Brady can sometimes can influence the decisions of ward leaders and sometimes not. I didn’t know about 20,000 other details that make the difference between really understanding the system and not.
And by the way, I’m still a rank amateur. But I know who to go for the real expertise and I’ll be talking to them when I write my book.
If you think all you need to know about Philly politics is what Wilson told you, try running for office with that information. And that’s not a criticism of Wilson. I suspect he really does know his stuff. But he hasn’t told us all his secrets.
And, anyway, I’m not in the business of giving anyone advice about how to run for election. If anyone asks me about that, I’ll refer them to someone who really knows. Again, that is a different thing than understanding in fine enough detail how our politics works to be able to make some recommendations about what is wrong with it and how to fix it.
A further response to more rude marks from someone calling himself Monsoon.
A little context
I don’t know who you are Monsoon, and you evidently don’t know who i am.
My life in Philadelphia politics is not defined by the recent election. I’m been blogging here and on my own site for a long time, talking about public policy and political reform.
And I have been a community and issue activist for years. I helped start Neighborhood Networks in part to pursue that issue activism adn in part because I thought philly politics, including the ward structure, needed reform.
I don’t know that I’ll ever run for office again. But I will be active in issue and electoral politics. And that is why I writing here now.
And, if you had been reading closely, you would see that I actually have some positive things to say about the ward system. In fact, my experience in the election made my view of the ward system more positive than it was before the election.
1. I had thought that money played a larger role in securing positions on ward ballots than it does. It is still too important. But the other factors I listed in the first post make money less important than I had thought.
2. I didn’t realize how good committee people are around the city until I visited a lot of polling places on E Day. They are the best poll workers. The only folks I saw as good were the Neighborhood Networks and Ackelsberg people in the northwest.
3. More ward leaders than I thought actually care about good public policy and some care about reforming our political system. Some fit the stereotype of being wholly concerned with their own power and money. Not nearly as many as the press and reformers seem to think
4. Ward leaders are not as enamored with incumbents as I once thought…although I still think they are too inclined to support them.
5. Ward leaders really care about winning elections, much more than many progressives. That is a good thing.
If you had asked me before the election what are the greatest barriers to progressives winning, I would have said the ward system and raising enough money.
In the aftermath of my race, I’d say the big problem–and certainly my big problem–was raising enough money.
That the ward system was not as big a problem raises some interesting questions about how progressives can build the city wide organization we would like to have, and how much doing so is possible within the party as opposed to outside it.
So that’s the point.
In response to someone who wrote that politics in philly will never change, I wrote:
This is a very short sighted view of politics
First, political machines have been dying all over the country for decades. There are some pretty obvious reasons. The number of patronage jobs has been reduced by civil service rules and the number of people who seek patronage jobs have declined, at least in cities that are thriving more than our city. (And certainly in the working class community in Philadelphia, patronage jobs are not as critical as they once were. Ward leaders play a much smaller role in deciding who gets to be a fire fighter or police officer these days than in the past.)
There have been major changes in the ward system in Philadelphia in the last thirty years, most importantly, the rise of powerful black ward leaders and black factions in the party in both the Northwest and West Philadelphia.
Even small, but important, changes occur from year to year. The ward system was a little different this year because the party chair was running for Mayor. City Committee ballots were produced differently than they have often been produced in the past.
Sometimes changes in a ward system happen fast. Tammany Hall—the Manhattan Democratic machine—was very powerful in 1960. Ten years later it was a shadow of its former self. Bob Wagner ran for reelection as Mayor against the machine in 1962, Ed Koch defeated the boss of Tammany, Camine DeSapio for precinct leader which, according to the NY rules, kept him from being chair of the party. And the New York Democratic reform clubs began to gain a great deal of influence. We progressives should study the reform clubs because, in many ways, our aims are close to those of the reform Democrats in New York, as are the tensions in our movement. (The story is told in James Q. Wilson, The Amateur Democrat). The Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx political machines survived for a while. But two of the Bronx bosses have wound up in jail, one of the Queens bosses did and another committed suicide just ahead of legal trouble, the last Tammany Hall boss is probably going to jail and now all parts of the machine they are looking pretty weak.
I can think of lots of things that could dramatically affect our ward system in the next ten years.
1. The rise of more little d democratic wards beyond the 9th, 27th, and to some extent the 5th and 30th. This might be spurred by the election of new progressive committee people in three years.
2. The rise of more wards influenced by Local 98. John Dougherty tried to elect new committee people
before. He might do so again.
3. Merit selection of judges.
4. The retirement of Bob Brady.
5. New legal scrutiny of the process by which money changes hands in the ward system. Some of what we take for granted in Philadelphia might not be legal by the standards that are now being applied in New York.
6. New rules for mid-term replacement. In the aftermath of the defeats of Carol Campbell and Dan Savage, the party might be willing to find a different way of filling these seats.
7. Public financing of political campaigns. I think this is more likely to be adopted in the next few years because it was so hard to raise money in the last election.
8. The election of Michael Nutter. In our strong mayor system, Michael Nutter could have some influence over the direction of the ward system.
In other words, the are large possibilities for change in how we do politics in Philadelphia. What we progressive decide we want to fight for can play a role in stimulating one kind of change or another. That is why it is useful for us to start thinking about what we want.
Maybe it is too soon to be talking about what I really want to talk about. What do you all think of this ward system? Is it all bad? If so, how can we get rid of it? If not, what are its virtues and what are its flaws? And how should we reform it?
I am not at all interested in discussing my campaign here. I’m still going over my decisions to figure out the things we did well and the, many more things we did not do well. I may write about that sometime, but probably not for a while.
I started this thread to talk about the ward system and to explain how the system works to people who don’t know much about it.
What I am writing about here are not things I learned all in this campaign. I knew a great deal of it before. And I had one of the best consultants in the city working with me who explained a great deal to me long before the campaign started.
There are some specific things about particular wards and ward leaders I learned that I didn’t know before running. This was pretty much easy to figure out, between the data we had and the advice of our consultant.
And there were some campaign specific things we picked up, and could only pick up during the campaign, about who was backing whom and how much they cared about those candidates. That changes every election.
We actually did some very creative things in gaining ward support, stuff that, to my knowledge, was not done before. And we got some support from ward leaders in some surprising places. Obviously we weren’t as successful as we might have been. I’m not ready to talk in specific about either the good things we did or the mistakes I made. Someday, but not now.
It’s not about me I just think that people would like to know how the ward system really works. I’ve been a political scientist for twenty five years. And while I had studied political machines, and had a rough idea how they worked, I learned an enormous amount from this campaign and understand it much better than I did before. And I also see why this machine is both more valuable than I had realized and more problematic as well.
Those of us who want to reform politics in Philadelphia have to learn what it is we are reforming and what the consequences of various kinds of reform would be. We can’t do that without understanding how the system works.
At this point, I’m actually more uncertain about what kinds of reforms would be helpful and what would not be. Politics in Philly is a lot more complicated than I had understood before I undertook this campaign. So I want to report–here and in article and books I hope to write in the future–about what I found. That way, we can all work together to figure out what a reformed Philadelphia should look like.
And, beyond that, I’m a political scientist for a reason. I find this stuff fascinating. (And I’ve just scratched the surface here.) I went to ward meetings and parties both as a candidate on a mission and also as an observer who had been let into a strange world that was really new to me, a worked with all sorts of interesting characters and practices. That’s part of the reason I had so much fun campaigning.
If you don’t care to know about the political system and reform or don’t find inside politics fascinating, just stop reading.
They were made off the record because I wanted to inform a reporter about my experiences but didn’t want him to publish them in a newspaper. I didn’t want them published in a newspaper because I didn’t think a newspaper would devote enough space to the issue to explain the system thoroughly. And that is pretty much what happened. The article today made it seem as if I paid ward leaders for support, which was not true, and that I didn’t have some reason to think that ward leaders would follow through on the deal. Most of them did put me on their ballot. But, as I learned, there is a difference between just being on the ballot and having a ward leader really go to work for you.
We paid by check which makes it seem a little less sleazy.
Think about the expenses of a good ward leader:
1. rental of the hall where the ward meets. (Not unimportant. NN could use a permanent meeting place but can’t afford one.)
2. Cost of paying to print the ballot.
3. Cost of sending a letter to voters from either the ward leader or committee people.
4. Food for poll workers
5. Perhaps some rovers to distribute literature during the day or to check on polling places.
And these expenses are not just for one election but for keeping the ward going year round, year after year.
So I’m sure wards run a profit this year and that helps them stay in business the next four years.
I’m sure a few ward leaders line their own pockets. I don’t know how many do that but I don’t think it is many. In all but a few cases, I didn’t write checks made out to ward leaders but rather to the ward organizations.
Of course, it would be nice if ward leaders opened their books. That’s the first reform I’d institute.
We concluded, by the way, that the key to spending street money wisely is looking for the ward leaders who have the best hold on their ward and the committee people who are strongest in influencing their division. I’m not going to say here how you can figure that out, but it can be done.