The Democrats’ historic loss of working class voters across race and gender lines has led to some debate and hopefully soul-searching about how the party can win back the support of working class voters, and what has prevented the party from an agenda and narrative that resonates with these voters. But the party’s reliance on wealthy individuals and corporations for campaign financing presents an obstacle to making this shift. So how can Democrats win? Or more importantly, how can a coalition that authentically centers working class interests win? I am not a national political strategist, but my experience in a city where a progressive political alliance has, for 20 years, won with candidates who accept zero corporate money, has something to offer.
Corporate-free and Winning for 20 years in Richmond, CA
In the last 20 years, progressive organizers in one US city have run candidates without financing from corporations and won three mayoral races and a majority of city council seats three times. In the Nov. 5 election, two out of three races were won by progressive candidates, successfully defending a progressive majority on city council. Two-thirds of the city's population of 114,000 residents is without a college degree (same as the US as a whole), and no racial/ethnic group has a majority (like an increasingly large number of US towns and cities). Richmond, California is an inner ring suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, but has demographics that are more similar to an average US city than to the famous liberal cities in the region.
Home to a major oil refinery, Richmond was long politically ruled by the Chevron corporation, which even had an employee with a desk in city hall. The corporation dominated the local Democratic party, and allied with the police and firefighters unions, chamber of commerce and other corporations - playing gatekeeper to who could be elected locally. When the progressives began running candidates, Chevron dumped millions of dollars into defeating them, but largely failed.
Chevron and its allies used tried-and-true campaign strategies: "law and order" racially-coded narratives, framing progressives as anti-business socialists who will scare away economic opportunity, and fake racial equity narratives that the progressives were excluding people of color and causing gentrification. Voters defeated Chevron-backed candidates so thoroughly that in the last few elections the corporation has not endorsed candidates or even used an independent expenditure, instead attempting to indirectly influence by setting up a local online news site, supporting local unaffiliated spokespeople, and coordinating with certain construction trades unions to organize on their behalf.
The force behind the progressive victories is an alliance of local community leaders, public sector unions, environmental justice advocates, tenant groups, and others who maintain a year-round organizing effort as part of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, an independent political organization. In the latest election progressive candidates Claudia Jimenez and Sue Wilson won their districts by 20 and 13 percentage points (minimal votes still being counted), while progressive Melvin Willis is losing by 8 points. Campaign funding for Jimenez, for instance, was $60,000 total, with a one-third coming from unions and 501c4 groups, and the rest from individuals. A labor and community Independent Expenditure also supported the three candidates.
Over the years, progressive majorities on the council and in the mayor’s office have adopted policies like increasing the minimum wage, rent control and just cause for eviction, rights for formerly incarcerated people, strict controls on air pollution, community-based violence prevention programs, and progressive taxes that reduce taxes on small businesses while raising them on the wealthiest. Campaign narratives focus on the pain and voices of everyday people, commitment to a future vision of all residents having dignity and wellbeing, the problem of progress held back by wealthy corporations hoarding resources, and the solution of everyday people who by joining together can take back government and make sure that it provides tangible benefits and protections to all residents, especially those with greatest needs.
The Democrats’ Dilemma with Corporate Allegiance
Policies like those passed in Richmond are popular in much of the country, but they haven’t been prioritized and passed nationally. Research analyzing who has the most influence on policy outcomes in the US confirms voters’ sense that the economic elite have captured government. A survey by OBI earlier this year found that 69 percent of Californians believed that large corporations had too much influence in politics. A press release announcing the survey results notes:
"This share has grown by 8 percentage points since the first California Survey on Othering and Belonging in 2017. While respondents from all racial and ethnic groups say corporations have too much influence in politics, the largest increases from 2017 to 2024 came from Latinx and Black Californians, which saw more than 10 percentage-point increases."
For the Democratic party to challenge corporate power with policies and narrative, it has to decide what to do with their corporate alliances. In his post-2024 election critique of the party, Gabriel Winant writes:
"The demobilization of the Democratic electorate is thus the product of the party’s contradictory character at more than one level. The accountability of the Democrats to antagonistic constituencies produces both rhetorical incoherence—what does this party stand for?—and programmatic self-cancellation… Each step taken by the party’s policymakers in pursuit of one goal imposes a limit in another direction."
“Programmatic self-cancellation” occurs when the party moves to advance a policy that boldly serves working people, but is then pulled into watering it down or retreating by corporate donors and their allies. Or as Congressmember Pramila Jayapal put it: “We’ve got to pick some big fights where people can’t be in denial or question whether or not we are standing up for them or whether we’re standing up to the big corporate interests. It’s a difficult message to send when you’re trying to court money from that community.”
But weaning campaigns off of corporate money means devising whole new strategies and alliances for winning. The Harris campaign raised a record $1 billion in 80 days and said it wasn’t enough. Running campaigns without billionaires’ money will be fundamentally different from the party’s standard approach. Lessons on how this has been done at the local level may give clues on national strategy.
Building local progressive alliances that have the capacity to run and win local elections can create partners for national campaigns, offering the local infrastructure of organizers the credibility and attuned understanding that comes from deep listening and trusting relationships built over time.
What it Takes to Win Without Corporations
Organized money must be replaced with organized people. Strategies that require immense funding are replaced with those that require the labor of massive numbers of people. Volunteers who have greater numbers, year-round commitments to organizing, and deeper connections to the communities take canvassing to another level because of the number of contacts they make and the authentic listening and deeply informed real conversations they have. The transformative impact on voters this has outweighs the paid ads that are the main expense of corporate-funded campaigns. Being able to rely on grassroots volunteers can reduce the dependence on high-cost tactics that require more funding.
The question is, how much organizing capacity would it take to build a winning field operation at the scale of a congressional district and state? Some 501c4 organizations supporting candidates and ballot measures have been building toward this scale for years, but have mostly held back from building independent political organizations that recruit and run candidates.
To generate this people power has implications for strategy not just inside campaigns but inside the allied organizations who are going to carry out the campaign. If an organization's members are not being empowered and organized to be active, the organization only really has its staff to put in real organizing. Building power through leadership development and base building must be a commitment of all partners in the alliance.
The progressive organizing strategies in Richmond have evolved over the years, but several cornerstones have emerged as essential to success yet distinct from typical campaigns:
- Strong alliance of unions and community groups across issues and election cycles: More durable than an election campaign and more structural in commitments than a coalition, the alliance is a structure for long-term strategy, shared resources, and alignment. With a steering committee that includes seats for tenant organizations, union locals, environmental justice advocates, and empowered residents, the Richmond Progressive Alliance is able to support each other as needs arise, share resources for each other’s organizing, co-create policy proposals and recruit and screen candidates together.
- Organize year-round and ramp up election campaigns early: Organizing year-round ensures the candidates who already won are supported and held accountable, activates a wide network of committed volunteers, allows deep listening to what’s important locally, and other benefits. Campaigns relying on organized labor over organized money ramp up early because of the time it takes to knock on all the doors, call all the numbers, and spend time on each that allows for authentic listening and relationship building.
- Run regular people with solid progressive values, community ties, and a commitment to remain free from all corporate influence: Telling voters our candidate takes zero corporate money is often enough to win support because it’s a material distinction rather than nice words, and the candidate’s lived experience with the issues they work on and existing relationships are a strong foundation for their public identity and narrative.
- Advance a policy agenda that delivers tangible benefits and transformative change: Ballot initiatives and even city council-adopted policies have been instrumental in demonstrating the values of progressive candidates. For instance, a ballot initiative to pass rent control and just cause eviction protections created a bright line that candidates had to take a side on in that election. Other polices have also had a powerful effect on the voters’ understanding of what progressive means, like a local business gross receipts tax that was progressively restructured to be lower for small businesses, higher for wealthy ones, and generate more revenue.
A logical fear of Democratic organizers is that their corporate backers will oppose them as soon as the organizing gets free of their influence. In Richmond, Chevron aggressively campaigned against progressives for a few election cycles, but their losses proved that voters cared so much about their candidates being corporate free that the money Chevron was putting into defeating progressives was actually backfiring. The corporate influence was neutralized in a sense, with Chevron deciding to not directly engage in elections. Even still, there are corporations engaged in every election, but the voters’ political literacy and commitment to corporate-free candidates grows each election.
The applicability of Richmond’s experience to other communities depends on some unknowns that would have to be learned through experience. Is this strategy possible in places with weaker or non-existent unions? Could corporations be sidelined in places where the voters are more politically conservative, or those where corporate power is more diffused? The corporate presence may not be as visible as a refinery on the hill that spews pollution, but may similarly cause harm to residents and dominate control of local government, whether they’re a developer, landlord, industry or other type of corporation.
There are more lessons from Richmond that don’t fit here, but Steve Early, a local labor organizer and author, recently wrote about 10 lessons from progressive organizing in Richmond. Early’s book Refinery Town, and Gayle Mclaughlin’s Winning Richmond also chronicle the recent history and their takeaways.
Seeding Local Alliances for a New National Strategy?
What would it look like to support emerging progressive alliances in localities across the nation? How could this be part of a long-term strategy to build national power for an agenda that reflects and resonates with working class voters?
I offer three points to these conversations:
- Local alliances must be empowered to emerge by strengthening existing and forming new relationships of trust, shared analysis, and authentic commitments. They cannot be created by top-down orders.
- Hubs at the regional or state level should be organized for supporting local alliances with training, research, and spaces for sharing challenges and insights across localities.
- There should be a fund for local alliances that is governed through a participatory process by the alliances themselves with a clear mission to grow new alliances and meet only the financial needs that are essential to this mission.
However it is done, those of us deeply committed to the wellbeing and dignity of all working people across this country, and to building a movement powerful enough to win nationally, must organize to free our political organizations from dependence on corporations.
Eli Moore is a resident of Richmond, member of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, grassroots organizer and researcher, as well as a staff member at the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. The views expressed here belong to him and not to his employer or to UC Berkeley.
