Boston Globe: What would it take to normalize candidates of color running for office?

A new initiative called New Power x New Politics wants to lower barriers and support a new generation of officeholders who look just like millions of Americans who are disenfranchised or disengaged from voting.

By Marcela García

For every Ayanna, there are many Juanas and Andreas.

That is to say, for every person of color who succeeds in getting elected to office against all odds — like Ayanna Pressley did in 2018, when she beat US Representative Michael Capuano — there are many more who are not able to conquer the additional hurdles that Black and Latino candidates typically face. Think of Juana Matias that same year, who came up fourth in the crowded, and very close, Democratic primary for the Third Congressional District in the Merrimack Valley (Matias would have been the first Latina elected to Congress to represent Massachusetts); and, more recently, Andrea Campbell, who failed in her Boston mayoral bid in a five-way preliminary field that included two other Black candidates. (Campbell finished third.)

It’s become a truism in electoral politics: Candidates of color from marginalized or underserved communities face higher barriers of entry when deciding to run for office. A new initiative called New Power x New Politics wants to lower those barriers and support a new generation of officeholders who look just like millions of Americans who are disenfranchised or disengaged from voting. The project aims to recruit and support leaders who are the closest to these communities’ plight, according to Emily Cherniack, who is behind the new effort.

Sounds like a no-brainer, but breaking down the dynamic that candidates of color face hasn’t been easy. Even with a generalized awareness of those barriers of entry, and important gains, it’s still hard to elect people of color, particularly women of color, whose numbers are low in elective office.

And it’s been far too common to blame some candidates of color’s electoral losses on competency. Yes, sometimes that’s a factor. However, more often than not, it’s about poor access to capital (a classic hurdle) and/or entrenched unconscious biases in certain power structures, particularly in liberal circles, which are more insidious and thus harder to dislodge.

The latter is what makes Cherniack’s project intriguing. She is the founder and executive director of New Politics, a national nonprofit that supports candidates with military or national service backgrounds, like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. In that capacity, she got involved in Matias’s campaign for the Third Congressional District. “I didn’t think about it in terms of race,” she said about the challenges her candidate encountered.

Yet after the loss, “Juana’s race crystallized the barriers and the role of racism for me,” Cherniack said. “There was what Emily’s List said about Juana [when considering an endorsement.] They told me, ‘Are you sure she doesn’t want to run for state senate first?’ Juana’s qualifications were questioned in a way that other candidates’ weren’t.” Sometimes, Cherniack said, it was white liberals talking out of both sides of their mouth. “They’re the ones who say, ‘We care about diversity,’ but we’re going to support the white woman who was Marty Meehan’s chief of staff a gazillion years ago and has never held office before.” Cherniack was referring to Lori Trahan, who went on to win the seat.

A lot of candidates of color start with a lot of self-doubt, said Matias, who’s Afro Latina. “Can I? Can I do this? And it’s because generations and generations of people like us have been excluded from this process,” she told me. “Running for Congress seemed so massive to me. I didn’t even know how much money you needed to raise or how to raise it. But [Cherniack’s organization] helped and then told me: You need to hire consultants, a reliable pollster, a communications team, a reputable mailer. I said, what do you mean?!” New Politics guided Matias and provided meaningful support, like sending 50 volunteers to knock on doors to reach potential voters and helping Matias fill out endorsement surveys from nonprofits and unions.

Those are examples of the support Cherniack’s new project wants to offer to candidates of color across the country. New Power x New Politics will also provide mentorship by connecting potential candidates to elected officials of color, such as Matias and Campbell, both of whom are members of New Power’s advisory council. “I’m a white girl and I had limitations to understanding Juana’s journey,” Cherniack said. The importance of building confidence in them, offering a space for introspection, and telling them, “yes, you do belong,” will be critical and empowering, Matias said.

Ultimately, it’s about normalizing candidacies of people of color. Remember the demands Campbell faced a few months ago during the Boston mayoral campaign? Some in the Black community were urging her to drop out of the race, since suddenly there was a Black female acting mayor running for the job permanently. The notion that there can be only one Black candidate in order to succeed must be retired. Why is it that the Black candidate must be some sort of Black Panther-type of superhero and yet average white candidates throw their proverbial hats in the ring all the time, sometimes many at once?

“If we want to transform the political system so it’s representative of the people we serve, we’re going to have to have numerous candidates of color, Black and brown, running,” Campbell said in an interview. “Sometimes we know that the best candidate is a low-income resident or a person of color who comes with the experience of growing up in a disadvantaged community, and maybe even has the policy experience, but they lack the network and relationships to be successful.”

If indeed running for office were some sort of ideal meritocracy, women of color would be in elected office in greater numbers. “It absolutely has to do with biases,” said Matias. But it’s becoming clearer that those biases, both conscious and unconscious, are embedded across the political spectrum, even among the most progressive and well-meaning among us.

This column was originally published in the Boston Globe.

Reno Gazette-Journal: The 9/12 Generation: servant leaders | Alberto Ramos

BY ALBERTO RAMOS

After two decades of memorials and remembrances, you’ve probably heard some version of this exhortation: “The best way to honor the victims of 9/11 is to live every day as if it were Sept. 12.” It’s a familiar refrain that urges us to remember the days immediately following the attacks when it felt like there was a shared sense of common purpose amongst every American.

As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks, we should make it our duty to revisit the sentiment behind that refrain, then answer its call to bridge our divides, revitalize our democracy, and redefine what it means to be a member of the post-9/11 generation.

When American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s north tower, I was waiting for the school bus. Normally, the 90-minute drive from East Las Vegas to Hyde Park Middle School provided a perfect opportunity to catch up on sleep, but on that morning, everyone sat awake and alert as we listened intently for updates on the radio. Later that night, my younger siblings and I sat with our mom and tried to make sense of the day’s devastation. Just weeks into eighth grade, the farthest I’d ever been outside of Las Vegas was a trip to Pahrump, Nevada, never mind faraway places like New York City or Washington, D.C. And yet despite my adolescent naiveté and thousands of miles of distance, the overwhelming pain and heartbreak felt like it had occurred right next door. 

As unforgettable as the events of that day were, my most vivid memories are from the following morning on Sept. 12. I can still hear the voices of my Hyde Park classmates echoing in the halls as we all shouted the Pledge of Allegiance, proudly and in sync. Most enduring of all is the sense of pride I felt in my country. In the resilience of my neighbors, be they fellow Nevadans, New Yorkers or everyone in between.

Sept. 12 to me represents the best of America — it represents the power of community, of our commitment to each other and to our values. It represents our courage and our unending capacity for growth and empathy.

It's the day that sparked in me a call to service — as valedictorian of A-TECH High School’s Class of 2006, the only college I applied to was the United States Naval Academy. After 16 years in uniform, it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

9/12 marks the beginning of a generation defined not merely by its proximity to a single tragic point in history, but rather, by the flame of purpose that fuels its continued impact across the country and around the globe — the flame of servant leadership.

Our generation isn’t just the military veteran who volunteered knowing we were a nation at war; it’s every servant leader who in the last two decades asked themselves, “if not me, then who?”

It’s the TFA and Americorps alumni who found purpose in empowering their neighbors at home; the Peace Corps volunteers whose service abroad demonstrated American humility, a stark contrast to the hubris of our leaders; and, of course, it’s the women and men in uniform who fought for each other in foreign lands, even as their missions appeared dubious and increasingly futile.

This is the generation born on 9/12. These extraordinary citizens are the future leaders our country needs now, and it’s why I work so tirelessly to empower them to seek elected office.

To be sure, the insidious strain of nationalism that’s so rampant in our politics today can also trace its roots back to 9/12. Cases of Islamophobia and racially motivated harassment began to grow, and would only increase in the following days, distorting a genuine moment of national unity into violent expressions of nativist resentment. 

In the wake of last year’s bitter election cycle and the ongoing polarization that resulted in another attack on our home soil — the Jan. 6 insurrection — it’s become increasingly clear that American democracy is ailing. Just as clear to me, is that my generation, the 9/12 Generation of servant leaders, are the remedy. 

And so, on the 20-year anniversary of Sept. 12, 2001, I urge my fellow veterans, this generation of servant leaders to once again answer their country’s call to service — step into the arena one more time and join us as we work to bridge our national divides, transform our politics, and revitalize our democracy. Together, we can demonstrate to the world what a generation of American servant leaders can accomplish. 

Alberto Ramos is a proud native of Las Vegas, graduate of Annapolis and 16-year Navy veteran. He was a White House Fellow and currently serves as the director of talent development at New Politics, a bipartisan organization that recruits service veterans to run for office.

This article was originally published in the Reno Gazette-Journal.

The Hill: Finding hope in the hard unfinished work of building and revitalizing our democracy

BY REP. JASON CROW (D-COLO.) AND EMILY CHERNIACK

Memorial Day is a day to remember and honor the men and women who bravely gave their lives in defense of American democracy. As we reflect on their sacrifice this Memorial Day, we should be asking ourselves how we can properly honor them during a time when there is so much division in our country, and when the foundations of our democracy are often under attack?

Today, less than one percent of Americans serve in the military. Most Americans don’t have a connection to someone killed in action, or to the military community more broadly. Memorial Day is a chance for all Americans to reflect on the generations of Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice. It’s also a chance to reflect on why they made that sacrifice.

To us, it is the promise of America. The Founding Fathers set the task for us when they wrote in the Constitution that, “we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union… do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” In the two hundred and plus years since, we’ve endeavored to form a more perfect union in starts and stops. From the evils of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation and Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights movement, and our ongoing fight for racial, climate, and economic justice, the story of America has been one of struggle to achieve our higher ideals.

So after a long overdue and ongoing reckoning with racial violence, more than 500,000 American lives lost to a once-in-a-century pandemic, and a deadly insurrection on our Capitol, has the distance between the American dream and our American reality become a chasm simply too wide to cross?

In a word, no. In Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, he correctly noted that it is the livings’ job to dedicate themselves to “the unfinished work'' that the dead fought to “nobly advance.”

There are different paths to get us there, of course. For us, we’re proud to lead a movement of military veterans who, across the country and across party lines, are answering the call of duty and finding inspiration in the subtleties of the American experiment. From city halls to the halls of Congress, women and men are seeking to represent their communities with a commitment to servant leadership — leadership that is selfless, values-driven and above all, courageous. The kind of leadership that puts the interest of people over politics, and service before self. And the well from which we draw both our strength and hope, is found in our shared American story.

As we gather with friends and family this Memorial Day, we urge every American to think of the sacrifice on which this country was built. Let us always remember that we’re united — not by class, creed, or ideology, but by our shared values, our shared history, and our love of a country that is not perfect, but is striving to be. Let us find hope in the hard and inexorably unfinished work of building and revitalizing a democracy that may one day be worthy of every life given in its name.

Jason Crow is a U.S. Army veteran and two-term congressman representing Colorado’s 6th District. Emily Cherniack is the founder and executive director of New Politics, a bipartisan organization that recruits and elects military veterans and national service alumni at every level of government.

This article was originally published on The Hill.

Bay News 9: Florida’s New Political Candidates go to “Boot Camp”

By Mitch Perry

Venice-based Democrat Lisa Stortstrom says her interest in electoral politics began to evolve after she began attending environmental caucuses meetings hosted by the Sarasota County Democratic Executive Committee. So, when she began seriously considering a run for office earlier this year, she began taking free classes with the National Democratic Training Committee.

“They have training courses all the way from if you’re thinking of running for a seat and what to think about, and then next steps,” she says.  “They give you the skills one at a time with the tools to actually implement this type of career.”

Stortstrom is now challenging GOP incumbent James Buchanan for the Florida House District 74 seat in Sarasota County in November. 

The National Democratic Training Committee (NDTC) is one of a number of “boot camps” around the country that provide tools for first-time candidates running for political office. The NDTC works exclusively with any Democrat who wants to run for office, work on a campaign, or become a local leader, says CEO and founder Kelly Dietrich.

Dietrich began working on Democratic campaigns for U.S. House and Senate after graduating from college. During that time he says he saw the need for such services, and began offering free courses in 2016.

Any Democrat who signs up with his program gets access to more than 70 online trainings, starting with videos such as “So You Think You Ought to Run” to what to do on Election Night. 

“We place a big importance on understanding the goals your campaign needs to meet to win, and then building plans for those,” he says. “All of our courses are designed so that it’s not just the big picture. You have immediate takeaways: you have downloads, templates, examples to put to work on your campaign immediately.”

The NDTC says that more than 1,200 Democratic candidates, ranging from Congress to city council to hospital boards, have taken at least one of their courses this election cycle. Among those who have taken such courses in Florida include Democratic House aspirants like Stephanie Dukes, C.L. Townsend and Lloyd Dabbs.

While the NDTC works exclusively with Democrats, there is a surfeit of other organizations that work with more specific type candidates.

That includes New Politics, a bipartisan organization which works with military veterans and national service alumni from organizations like AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

“We’re not about any party platform or ideology,” says Gabe Ramos, a spokesman for New Politics. “It’s really about the individual that we’re working with. That they have demonstrated this commitment to service, they have this set of core values, they’re ready to get into office and lead with courage, integrity and empathy and they’re going to put partisan politics aside.”

Among the candidates they’re working with this election cycle in Florida is Matt Tito, a Marine Corps veteran and businessman now running as a Republican this November in the Pinellas County House District 68 race against Democratic incumbent Ben Diamond.

“I knew I wanted to get into politics from the time that I was in the Marine Corps,” Tito says. “But where do you go? Where do you start? What do you do?”

He says he learned about New Politics “kind of randomly” and took a five-week virtual course called “Answering the Call.”

“It was all about learning about the journey into politics,” he says. “Crafting your mission statement and really doing a deep dive into what are your core principals.” (Tito is featured in a New Politics podcast that you can listen to here). 

Another candidate that New Politics is working with is Fiona McFarland, a Navy Reserve officer running this November as a Republican in the State House District 72 race.

To get more information on the National Democratic Training Committee you can go to their website.

For more information on New Politics, check out their website.

This article was originally published by Spectrum Bay News 9.

Washington Post: Vulnerable House Democrats unite to try to flip more House seats in Trump country

By Jacqueline Alemany

A handful of House Democrats who helped retake the majority in 2018 are uniting to fundraise for a slate of candidates running to capture Republican-leaning House districts in November.

The “Second Service Coalition” is the brainchild of New Politics, an organization dedicated to recruiting candidates with military and national security backgrounds, and will announce on Wednesday that it is endorsing seven House candidates around the country. During the 2018 cycle, New Politics raised over $7 million for its breakout class, pulling off some of the biggest wins of the cycle.

The group’s class of candidates this time around is part of the broader push to grow the community of former military veterans and intelligence officers serving in Congress — making them an increasingly robust force in electoral politics.

“I don’t think any of us who have been in national security and have served for many years all over the world with friends and allies — I don’t think any of us have a hard time talking about this or explaining our decision” to impeach Trump, Sherrill said in an interview. “As long as we are putting the needs and interests of the country first, we are very confident in how we talk about that, and we’re confident about voting on that as well.”

But, Sherill noted, her advice to the candidates endorsed by the coalition is to “be focused on whatever your district needs . . . and whatever it is in your district that keeps people up at night.”

The group is backing candidates in some of the most competitive House races in the country: Army veteran Dan Feehan is again bidding to flip a seat in southern Minnesota after narrowly losing to Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R) in 2018. Gina Ortiz Jones, who was narrowly defeated by incumbent Republican Will Hurd in 2018, has also thrown her hat back in the ring to flip Texas’s 23rd district now that Hurd is retiring.

Kim Olson, an Air Force veteran, is running for Texas’s 24th district; Zahra Karinshak is running to flip Georgia’s 7th Congressional District; Jackie Gordon wants to pick up retiring Rep. Peter T. King’s (R-N.Y.) seat; and Nikki Foster is aiming to unseat Republican Rep. Steve Chabot in Ohio’s 1st district.

The coalition’s collective support for impeaching Trump, a potential liability for Democrats in swing districts where Trump remains relatively popular with GOP voters, has not dissuaded Democrats from embracing their would-be colleagues.

“Our country needs public servants who know exactly what it means to serve something larger than themselves — leaders who know that our values and our country’s promise are worth fighting for, and that doing so means putting people over partisan politics,” Ortiz Jones said in a statement. “I’m thrilled to earn the Second Service Coalition’s endorsement, and to join this incredible group of leaders who fight every day for our shared values.”

Read the original article in the Washington Post