When Democratic National Committee Deputy Chair Keith Ellison – who represents Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District – came to St. Louis with U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay (D-MO) to co-host a town hall on raising the minimum wage and to join an SEIU picket line in Ferguson, he stopped by The St. Louis American for an editorial board meeting.
He was delivered by Stephen Webber, chairman of the Missouri Democratic Party. In the year and change that Webber, a former state rep from Columbia, has chaired the state party, he has visited The American’s newsroom several times and penned a few op-eds for the paper. No previous Democratic Party chairman visited The American under the paper’s current leadership, which dates back more than 30 years, or wrote for the paper. Roy Temple, we are talking about you, for the most part.
The meeting started with a long conversation led by Mike Jones, a member of The American’s editorial board, as well as of the State Board of Education, and a former senior staffer for both a mayor of St. Louis and a St. Louis County executive. This interview joins that conversation in progress, just as Ellison begins to open up.
Both Ellison, 54, and Webber, 34, attended the meeting with party staffers; they all appeared to be young, in their twenties, at most early thirties. This is what most impressed Jones, who saw their youth through the prism of jazz icon Miles Davis remaining relevant and continuing to grow as a musician as he aged.
“As Miles got older,” Jones said, impressed by the youth of the party’s staff, “his bands got younger. That’s the way it’s supposed to work.”
St. Louis American: At the end of the day, we are going to fight a decisive battle in November. That’s coming, and everyone’s sides are already picked. How is the Democratic Party planning on playing its hand?
U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison: “Every Zip Code Counts” is what we’ve tried to do. It means showing up everywhere, right? It’s not my first time coming here. In rural areas, going to 84 counties last year and showing up and handing out water at protests and marches of Black Lives Matter in St. Louis, physically being there.
One challenge the Democratic Party has as a party, particularly reaching out to communities of color, is how do you balance the fact that you have to stay out of primaries and the fact that we have provide value to candidates? Right now we’re seeing a huge crop of really talented, energized young African-American candidates in the St. Louis region. Those folks are going to turn out their base and they are going to have volunteers knocking on doors.
So what we can do is we can provide trainings. These trainings are open to anybody, but the folks who are most energized are the ones who are going to take most advantage of it. It’s a way that we as a party can help train this generation of leaders. It’s not just candidates. It’s having people like Rosetta [Okosohn-Reb] who we brought on to do fundraising. Developing leaders like Rasheen Aldridge; he’s going to be opening a Democratic Party office in St. Louis. Not just focusing on November, but a permanent presence for the Democratic Party. That is the vision.
It’s not a short term thing. The Democratic Party has to get off this treadmill of every two years. It’s not just one day in November. How do we change the culture over the next 20 years?
St. Louis American:Over the next six months, what does that look like?
Keith Ellison: We make sure that in every single state and every single zip code that the Democratic National Party is channeling money to strengthen state parties. State parties will be expected to strengthen county and local units. They are expected to focus on candidacy and grassroots engagement and create a pipeline.
And then there has to be a recognition that politics ultimately shouldn’t be about winning elections. It’s about building community. If you have strong community, then the election becomes a no brainer. People believe that through politics not only can they know their neighbors, their neighbors have their back, not just when the snow falls.
The real answer is to say that we are going to have a Democratic Party that’s going to engage you at the door and address this chasm of economic inequality. We are going to use democracy to help you meet your material reality. And so that way the election is not the most important thing. Community is the most important thing. And then elections become a much easier to win.
What is the secret of Alabama? The DNC didn’t put any money into television. We spent it all on canvassing. Spent $600,000 on nothing but canvassing. We didn’t fill up the bus full of Georgetown students. Usually you got a campaign, you get kids from George Washington University and maybe Howard.
St. Louis American: Add a little color to the bus.
Keith Ellison: And then we’d drive down and then they go canvas Alabamians. And they say, “You all aren’t from around here.” We hired exclusively Alabama people. If politics pays mortgages for rich consultants, then it pays rent for working class people. When we say that we are going to professionalize politics and use TV as our primary persuasion tool, we’ve taken the money from working people and put it in the hands of consultants.
St. Louis American: That’s our criticism, right.
Keith Ellison: So that answer is to put the money back in the hands of people, but not just around election time. You’ve got to do it early. We’re acknowledging that we didn’t just lose one election the November before last. We lost 1,000 elections all over America, governorships all over America. So the thing is, if we just say that we just lost by 70,000 votes, then we miss the hell out of the point. We have not been competitive with Republicans for years.
There should not be one single American who Democrats are not talking to about our vision. Why do they beat us? I think it’s because they are more highly motivated. Why are they so highly motivated? Because they know they are in the distinct minority. They are advocating a program that’s only going to help the top one percent. If you’re not making $400,000 a year or more, then what they’re doing is not really going to help you. But how do they win? They deceive you. They divide you. They discourage you.
The Democratic Party is changing. You would not catch me within Democratic politics even five years ago. When I ran for office the first time, my district is 75 percent white. And the 25 percent is not solid African-American. We talked about what everyone shares. I was able to get the party endorsement by emphasizing that we all drink water, we all want our kids to go to good schools.
I ran a poll. The pollster said if you don’t do something you just might lose. If you go get 10,000 people who have never voted in a primary, you just might win. We did it. There are so many people who just don’t vote at all. We can win an election if we go get them. That’s what we should be doing because it’s moral and it’s just and it’s right. I started Voter First. Last summer, I wasn’t on the ballot, but we still knocked on 50,000 doors.
Ever since Trump has been in office we’ve been stealing seats where we aren’t supposed to get them. Red parts of Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, all over the country, we’re getting them back.
We need a cultural shift that says politics is about community, not just elections. We’ve changed the DNC mission. It used to be about electing a Democratic president. Now it’s about electing Democrats up and down the ballot.
