interviews
Labor and the White House
by Dave Weigel
March 31, 2021
This interview with Dave Weigel, national reporter covering politics for the Washington Post, was conducted and condensed by franknews and Payday Report.
DW | The White House's involvement in the Amazon union drive was a big surprise. I mean, we know where it could have originated, the union talked to the White House; they have kind of an open door with Biden that they didn't have with Trump. We know that Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ campaign chairman, and his group, Perfect Union, got involved. So, there was public pressure.
The fact that the White House and the president released that video was a big deal to people. And, he made this decision to get involved very early on in his presidency. It was within his first 50 days. He decided to do what hadn't been done before and give a message in support of the union. It was a very careful message. The new labor secretary, Marty Walsh, when asked specifically about Amazon, responded in more general tones.
But, no matter what happens, if you are in for a penny, you are in for a pound.
A lot of previous presidents, including Barack Obama, said a lot less about these union drives and, in doing so, limited their own exposure. If the drive didn't work, people didn't say that the president supported something that didn't work. The fact that Biden made a statement, early on, when it wasn't clear how this was going to go, is a real political statement of what they thought was important.
frank | How do you think his background plays a role in this?
He's always leaned in really hard and identified with workers in the same way he's tried to identify with different civil rights movements. Joe Biden has always wanted to be seen as the kind of person who is coming from Scranton, who has lived through the sixties, and who wants to jump to the front of the march if there is a struggle happening.
He frames everything in terms of fairness. He's not as natural as other members of the party in talking about this. When Bernie Sanders talks about this, for example, he talks about greed, he names CEOs, he says nobody deserves that much money, he talks about a maximum wage and how there should be no billionaires at all. Biden doesn't go that far. Biden has never gone after Jeff Bezos. He's never gone after individual heads of companies the way that Sanders does. He does this sort of a "Hey man, these guys are under assault, somebody needs to stick up for them."
That is something that he has always wanted to be part of his brand. Even when he was voting for trade deals like NAFTA as a Senator, he was never really comfortable. He had the same ideological mindset as a lot of the Democrats in the eighties and the nineties. He did it because he saw that that was the way things were moving and he voted strategically. But, the stuff that fired him up was when he could side with workers. It is the same thing with the projects he took on under Obama when he was Vice President.
During the Democratic primary, he didn't get the same amount of labor support that Hillary Clinton did, but, Sanders didn't get it either. There wasn't the same sort of a landslide of labor to get in early and say, this is our candidate. Instead, they were demanding more of the candidates.
I would cover presidential primary events with the Teamsters in Cedar Rapids or the Building Trades in DC and you would kind of look to the level of applause as an indicator. The interesting thing is that at those events Sanders would lay out the things he did and what he wanted to pass. Biden would go on at length about non-compete clauses and about wage theft and things like that. It was less, "I have studied all of the papers on this and I've decided this is my policy," and more of "this seems unfair and I'm against this thing."
I think the Democratic Party is increasingly understanding what labor can mean for them strategically.
Republicans have gotten kind of tangled up on labor. They have done better with union households, but they are basically the party of deregulation still. They've never really moved on the labor part of their messaging. That makes it easier for Biden to compete for these workers. When it comes down to it, Republicans want “right-to-work." Josh Hawley, who branded himself as a working-class candidate, for example, supports a national right-to-work.
Biden was very concerned with winning back more union households. Union workers were saying, “Democrats had the presidency for 16 years. What do they do for us?” Biden didn't have all the answers that labor wanted, but he was making a lot of specific promises about how he was going to act. He talked about infrastructure spending and about how he was going to run the NLRB and how he was going to approach employers. It was less than Sanders did, but that's way more than Democrats had done in the past.
I mean, the McCain/Romney era Republicans had no appeal to the sort of voters who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump. Biden only peeled back maybe 10% of them depending on where you're talking about, but it has made life easier for Democrats.
This fight has in large part been framed in the context of continuing a battle for civil rights. Do you see Biden lean into that messaging?
Biden did not really lean to the racial justice aspect or the civil rights legacy aspect of this labor fight. When the congressional delegation here came down a couple of weeks before the vote, they were much more explicit. Someone like Jamal Bowman or Cori Bush is much more comfortable saying that than Biden. That is the thing about Biden. He basically sets boundaries. He says what his position is and backs off and lets the action happen without his constant commentary. It's very different than Trump in that way too. And that's different than the Sanders position. And it's different than what Warren said her position would be as president.
Can you give us context on how or why you started covering this story?
I started covering the Amazon drive because of the president and members of Congress intervening. I mean, labor decided to get involved months before, but the fact that Democrats were getting involved was new. It has been interesting to monitor their investment in this over other Democratic Party causes.
There's a little bit of intervention from the Democrats, but not, I'd say equal to what Amazon is doing. They are not the advertisements on TV. We all know the Democratic party is kind of involved, but it is not the same political project that I've seen in other places.
There are two stories that kind of were happening at the same time; they have merged, but not completely. One is this labor drive, which is smaller than most drives that have succeeded. It is not overwhelming. You don't see labor signs everywhere you go. But, on the other hand, the level of national involvement is kind of new.
Had Biden said nothing, there would have been a story, but it wouldn't involve the White House, it wouldn't involve the Democratic Party, and it might not involve the PRO Act.
And I think that's going to change because of this.
New interview w/ @daveweigel @PaydayReport
— frank news (@FrankNewsUS) April 6, 2021
"The White House's involvement with the Amazon drive was a big surprise ... Previous presidents, Obama comes to mind, said a lot less. The fact that Biden did that early on is a political statement of what they thought was important." pic.twitter.com/MwYlmqE4xQ
That was a big decision Biden made to be a part of this.
Right. And that political story is interesting. The story here is much more independent. A lot of the people who've come in to help canvas are from smaller groups. You have Black Lives Matter and DSA groups from the area, but you don't have the Democratic Party getting involved in a huge way. I think that is something that people will revisit after the vote.
Should the Democratic Party, like most left parties in the world, be very involved with labor? Should they always take the side of labor?
Most social democratic parties are labor parties and they build up from there. Their coalition includes labor unions. In the British Labour Party, for example, labor has a role in electing the leadership. That is not the case here. That's the conversation I think they're going to start having when this votes over. For example, if there are, and the union says there are, hundreds of people around the country calling them saying, "Hey, I have some questions about what I can do at my fulfillment center in my town," that will be a question for Democrats.
And if Amazon wins, do you get spooked? Amazon has been very punchy in their PR. They might say that a bunch of elite Democrats stood with the union and the workers stood with Amazon. That is very comfortable turf for Amazon to be on, and that leaves a big question open for Democrats. If the union succeeds, throw all of that out the window. I think the lesson that everyone would take in that case would be that if it takes less than a three-minute video from the president to get momentum for something like this, then we should keep doing that. As we talk, I don't know the answer to that question. I think that is something that is going to be answered when the votes are in.
interviews
The "Do It Your Way" State
by Judd Choate
October 17, 2020
This interview with Judd Choate, the State Election Director in Colorado, was conducted and condensed by frank news. The article was originally published in May 2020.
Colorado made the change to widespread vote-by-mail six years ago. Can you talk about what that process looked like, and where you received the most pushback if any?
There was basically no pushback. Our change was over a long period of time. In 1980, Colorado allowed no-excuse absentee — People would sign up each year to be on the mail-in ballot list, and after each election, they would have to again request a mail-in ballot. In 2006, we created what's called the Permanent Mail-in Voter (the PMIV list), and in 2010, we provided an online way to sign for the PMIV through our online voter registration system. By the 2012 election, over 70% of our voters were receiving their ballots by mail.
While it's true that that legislation was part of a very partisan bill – only Democrats voted for it and every Republican voted against it – it was not partisan because of vote-by-mail. Republicans didn't like other pieces of legislation. That became law in 2013, and we have been a vote-by-mail state ever since.
What did you see a change in the electorate? Did more people of a certain demographic start to vote because they were allowed to vote-by-mail? Did more people in general vote?
Well, these are really hard questions to answer. I'm a social scientist, I have a Ph.D. in political science, and I was a professor for several years. When I am posed with these questions, I always struggle because, yes, there is a relationship between the adoption of vote-by-mail and voter turnout, but did it cause it? I don't know.
It is certainly true that over the last 20 years we went from a state with an average turnout to a state with one of the highest turnouts. In the 2000 federal election, we were just slightly above the national average turnout. Since then, we have become the state with the highest turnout in the country behind only Minnesota. Minnesota always has the highest turnout, and we hate them for it. They are always the rockstar of turnout and we are now consistently trailing just behind them.
But, is that because of vote-by-mail? I think vote-by-mail did have a positive effect and increased our turnout, but there are a whole bunch of other things that are in that calculus as well. I haven't run the numbers, I haven't collected the data, I haven’t run the regressions, so I'm uncomfortable with the idea of saying that the increase is due to just that one factor. But, there is no doubt that vote-by-mail was one important factor in driving up our turnout.
Right. Do you feel like you act as a model for other States?
Yes, I do believe we're a model, and that is not just me talking. The California legislation that was adopted a couple of years ago was largely patterned after Colorado. In fact, I went to California and testified and explained what the transformation Colorado undertook looked like and how this legislation takes a lot of those pieces and incorporates them into a California timeline. So yes, absolutely. We have been a model for Utah and Hawaii as well.
We mail a ballot to you 22 days prior to the election. Then we open early voting locations 15 days prior to the election, and we have early voting all the way through until election day. And then on election day, we have additional vote centers. All of the early voting stations also operate as voting centers, and then we are statutorily required to have many more. And we have same-day voter registration. No other state has all of these elements.
All these elements are designed around this idea that our voters are our customers and the customers should be able to make decisions that best match their needs to be able to vote. We just try to maximize that opportunity by creating as many opportunities to have the chance to vote the way that you need to do it to correspond with your lifestyle.
It seems like common sense that states would try and make this as easy as possible for people, but obviously, that is not true. Which red states have adopted these tools?
Utah conducts all elections entirely by mail, and that was a recent adoption. They looked around and they saw Colorado, Oregon, Washington use vote-by-mail, thought that the model looked right to them, and adopted it statewide. Over 70% of the votes cast in Montana are vote-by-mail, and I don't think anybody could argue that Montana is not a red state. Arizona has over 70% vote-by-mail. Nevada, which has a Republican Secretary of State, is adopting vote-by-mail for the elections this year. I don't know if they are going to keep it, but they are for this year, given the COVID-19 issues. Iowa has over 70% vote-by-mail, and Iowa also has a Republican Secretary of State.
Clearly, there are a lot of Republican election administrators or people who are the chief election officials who look at the data in other states that have adopted vote-by-mail and see it's a model that could work for them.
What do you anticipate the response from the states to President Trump's wariness about vote-by-mail to be? Are you thinking about November any differently?
Well, I'm not going to talk about the president.
All of the people that operate in this space, all of the election officials, understand how vote-by-mail verifies voters and only counts ballots that we can verify came from the right person. The states that employ vote-by-mail aggressively use verification methods. When people who don't understand elections, idly throw bombs at it, that just shows they don’t understand how it operates. There are built-in safeguards all along the way, which in many respects are much greater than are required for in-person voting.
What are some of those safeguards?
We mail the ballot to you. If that ballot comes back as undeliverable, we know you don't live there anymore. That in itself is a verification of the fact that you are who you say you are and you live where you say you live. States with polling place elections have to take people's word for that. We're validating that they live in our state or jurisdiction every single time they vote. That's a huge piece of verification that vote-by-mail states have that polling place states do not have.
The second thing is that in Colorado, and most vote-by-mail states, the way that voters verify their identity is by signing the back of that ballot. For every single voter, that signature on the back of that envelope is verified against the signature that we have on file for that voter. There is no better verification, that is not biometric, than comparing the signature that voters gave when they got their driver's license to the one on the ballot.
Are you looking for even more ways to engage voters in Colorado?
Absolutely, we want to be the new Minnesota. We want to be the state that every other state hates. The way we do that is to figure out any possible way that we can maximize voter participation while protecting against voter fraud. So how are we doing that? Well, this year we're going to send a postcard to every person who appears to be eligible and is not currently registered to vote. Colorado has the highest rate of registration in the country at over 90% — 90% of our eligible voters are registered to vote. But if you have 5 million people who live in a state, 90% means you still have 500,000 people out there who might be eligible to vote and are not registered. If we register them to vote, they are in our database, and we're going to send them a ballot 22 days prior to the election. That is going to drive up turnout.
We are also installing drop boxes all around the state. We already have over 400, but we've set aside some of the federal money that we have received recently to encourage our counties to install more. We hope that by this election we will have closer to 500 drop boxes around the state. We would like to capture metrics about how close every voter in the state is to a dropbox to try to figure out how we can reach every single one of our voters, not just in the metropolitan area, but all around the state.
We have a number of different little things that we do on the edges to try to maximize voter participation, and I can walk you through a couple of those.
We used to be pretty restrictive when it came to felons. Now, the only restriction on felons is if you are currently incarcerated for a felony. If you are out on probation, if you are on parole, if you are an ex-felon, you can vote with no problem whatsoever. We also created a program to get people who are in felony status registered to vote more quickly. We require parole officers to alert people who are leaving an institution to the fact that they can register to vote, and tell them how.
Recently, we have also allowed 17-year-olds to vote in primaries if they will be 18 by the general. So for Colorado, that means you could have been 17 and voted in the presidential primary, and you could have been 17 and voted in the state primary. That has proven to be a really nice way to get young people engaged. In fact, among 17-year-olds who were eligible in the last presidential primary election, we had over 50% turnout. That's an amazing number. And that means they are very likely to vote in the general election because they are already engaged.