Primary 2022 Debrief: What We Gained This Season

This year’s primary election was a successful one for South Jersey Progressive Democrats. That might seem odd if you equate electoral success solely with winning the race because it is true we did not do that. This year, SJPD took a broader look at electoral organizing. We centered our work on concrete, strategic goals. For the past four years, I’ve been deeply involved in every primary, either running or running campaigns. This is the first year in which after the race, I feel not overwhelmed or exhausted but clear eyed and energized. We have a bright future ahead. I know because of the boxes we’ve been able to check along the way this season. Here they are:

We Made the Machine Give Up the Ghosts

The primary season began on a high note for us when we redressed a major democratic problem that has plagued Camden County for over a decade. We successfully challenged the phantom freeholder candidates recruited by the machine to act as spoilers and siphon votes away from real challengers while also pushing us further afield on the ballot into far columns. In other states, this practice of recruiting fake candidates has been deemed illegal.

Prior to filing, we sort of informally took bets on whether we thought the machine would run phantoms again. Yes, they’d been doing it for over a decade and most dramatically when Donald Norcross was on the ballot but hadn’t we shamed them sufficiently for this underhanded practice of ballot manipulation and intentional voter confusion? On filing day, when we requested opponents’ petitions and saw that again there would be ghosts, I spent a half an hour fuming around my house, muttering “how can they be running phantoms again?” before getting down to work. There were various moving pieces involved in challenging the petitions — looking up registration, party affiliation, addresses, signatures, legal names, checking for same hand signers. Getting the phantoms knocked out of the running was a major accomplishment for us, a big step towards better elections..

We Focused on Base-Building

You can canvass anytime of the year, of course, but knocking doors for an election is a unique opportunity to analyze the present and envision the future together. This primary season, we prioritized base building, forging connections in places where we previously had not really engaged. We knocked doors in working class communities, ready to learn and listen to blue collar Dems. For me, this was personally meaningful because as someone who grew up in the world of SJ working class whites, it frustrates me to see the Democratic establishment write off this demographic.

Building up our list, deepening relationships is partly electoral strategy; we cannot just show up when we want people’s votes. But more than that, it’s movement building. We meet a machine with a movement. (That’s not original to me. That’s AOC). The dominant view of power is that it flows from the top downward and this view has unfortunately colored the political work being done by so many who are looking for change. People invest time and energy into finding one silver bullet solution, getting one person into office with the hope that via that one solution or one person, we will be able to kick back and watch the system fix itself.

If it’s discouraging to accept that we need to stay engaged no matter who’s elected, no matter what big fix is being floated, the upside is that if we truly have a movement full of people purposefully engaging with democracy problems where they are, it’s not such a heavy lift.

We Increased Our Election Knowledge

Running as a progressive challenger means running without the party’s blessing — and without the party’s money, staff and assistance. Now that we are many years into electoral organizing on our own as challengers, SJ Progressive Dems have amassed deep knowledge that is impossible to get without actually running in the elections. The red tape, the deadlines, the paperwork — we’ve learned a lot and mostly the hard way! I’ve been keeping a running list of our campaign decisions — the successes and the failures. My plan is to pass this knowledge on. There’s no shortage of “how to run for office” trainings but there are complexities that SJ Progressive Dems can uniquely speak to because of our firsthand knowledge.

And here’s a fact that’s sure to please no one but it’s true all the same: running as a challenger is a lot like learning an instrument. You can’t learn to play an instrument by watching someone else do it and you can’t just pick it up and become an instant virtuoso. To get better at running as a challenger you have to do it, have to try and fail, then get back up and do it again. There are no shortcuts.

We Reoriented In A New Political Landscape

SJPD entered this year’s race with a keen sense of the SJ political landscape and where we fit into that landscape. In 2021, there were several seismic shifts that we‘ve had to adapt to. Though we continue to take on the Norcross machine, Governor Murphy made peace with Norcross in advance of his re-election campaign (perhaps at the end of the day, multi-millionaires always end up on the same side). The 2021 election also delivered the upset victory of Trump Republican Ed Durr over machine politician Steve Sweeney, both confirmation of increased Republican organizing and fodder for more.

What does this mean from a SJ Progressive Dems’ perspective? To present it cinematically, consider a scene in which the rebel army stands ready to take on their regular opposing forces when suddenly, on an adjacent field, another hostile army rolls in. At the initial realization we would be fighting both, it was hard to respond with anything other than “oh shit!” But every challenge is an opportunity if you look at it right.

For years, SJ Progressive Dems have been deeply embroiled in intra-party battles. At last we can start organizing around the issues that brought us into this work in the first place. And what’s more, we can publicly demonstrate that we are the active Dems of South Jersey. Progressives know how to mobilize, how to agitate into action. And it’s not just work we know how to do; it’s work we want to do.

And Some Final Thoughts…

When I first started organizing, I envisioned this work as linear, thought of allies and opponents as a fixed cast of characters. But the path is circuitous, rife with variables we cannot predict. It’s essential to be agile, adaptive while holding on to a clear purpose.

Being a Progressive Democrat often feels like tight rope walking. It’s like being an adherent of a religion that deems you a heretic but still, you keep the faith. Over the years I’ve watched allies step away, into different work, away from the party, fed up with the transactional politics and the party’s tendency to talk big and fail to deliver. I’ve watched others step away from the movement to get in lockstep with the party, perhaps for personal advancement or perhaps believing if we insinuate ourselves into the system we can get permission to make change, risk-free.

Progressive Democrats need to continue pressuring the party to do more, to do better, to be better. It’s challenging work and it’s the work SJ Progressive Dems will continue to do. And we hope you will join us. The movement needs you.