Progressive Mass

Please donate to the show!

Today we will be highlighting a wonderful organization in the state that does fantastic work on the progressive scene. It is called Progressive Mass, and we will be joined by fellow podcaster Jonathan Cohn, the Policy Director.

Anna Callahan interviews fellow podcaster Jonathan Cohn. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 50. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

To stay informed:
* Subscribe to our YouTube channel
* Subscribe to the podcast (https://incorruptible-mass.buzzsprout.com)
* Sign up to get updates at https://www.incorruptiblemass.org/podcast
* Donate to the show at https://secure.actblue.com/donate/impodcast

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission is to help us all transform state politics. And because we know that we could have a state that supports the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful Commonwealth.

And today we will be highlighting a wonderful organization in the state that does fantastic work on the progressive scene. It is called Progressive Mass. I will be interviewing our regular co host, Jonathan Cohn.

But before we do, actually, as we do, our guest and regular co host is going to introduce himself, Jonathan Cohn. Take it away. Hello, Jonathan Cohn.

He/him is joining from the streets of Boston right now as I walk from the statehouse back home. And I'll be talking here because I'm the policy director at Progressive Mass. And looking forward to chatting today.

Fabulous. I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford and really excited to dive into Progressive Mass, which has been around for a while and does a lot of amazing work, I'm going to start us off with the very first question.

What is one thing that if you haven't heard of Progressive Mass, what's the one little tool that you guys provide that people could use today to find out some really amazing information? Awesome. So one thing I'm always very proud of that we do with our scorecard of the legislature. You can find it at scorecard.progressivemass.com.

and hold on, there's a fire truck going by me. This is how important the scorecard is, is now there are alarms blazing where Jonathan Cohn is because the alarms blazing where the legislators trying to prevent the discussion of their scores coming up. No.

So, as folks may already know, or if you even try to find this out, you'll soon come to realize it is very difficult to find out how your legislators are voting on things. Very few legislators actually will advertise their own votes. It will not be written up.

If you have a Globe subscription, you might find out for a final version of a bill what the numbers were. But even if, let's say, only five people on a bill voted no or five people on an amendment voted yes, the Globe will likely not publish any of the names. So you, as somebody who cares about these issues, really don't have a kind of a, have any of that data readily available.

And so what we do is twice during the legislative session, one in the middle, and once at the end of it, we put together a scorecard of the votes that they take, knowing that we don't include every single vote because a lot of votes are like a sick leave they might be like things required by law, right? They might be just kind of earmarks to somebody's district. They might be like a state loan or like movement of lands. And we focus on the votes that are actually votes that have some real stake or things that really matter to the issues that we care about.

And particularly votes that tell a story, because in the House and Senate, you have, there are a lot of votes that are unanimous and there are a lot of votes that are party line. Those tell some story, but the most revealing ones are votes to show some type of split anywhere. So we like to show a mix of those.

But it's particularly as it's important, if your legislators are saying that they represent you, you should know how they're doing that. And knowing how they vote is such a crucial way to knowing if you think that, knowing if the job that they're doing actually matches what they telling you that they're doing and that the values that they have so that, you know, as a constituent when it's your job to hire and fire them, hire or fire them every election cycle, you know, if you think, actually, yes, this person deserves another term, or maybe I, maybe I should try to find somebody else to run in that seat who better or vote for somebody else who better aligns with my values. Absolutely.

I always love how worked up legislators get if they don't have a perfect score on our scorecard, when, like, they decide what votes happen and what votes don't happen and they decide how they vote. So it's always funny to me if somebody's appalled, they have a b or a c. And I always like to point out that the way that we work our scorecard, that an a is excellent, a b is good, and a c is average.

And if you have a situation, as you do, particularly in the House, where everybody votes, locks out with the speaker, as we've talked about before, and if you vote lockstep with the speaker, you are average. That is exactly what you are doing. You are voting in an average way.

Yeah. And so just so people know, like, I love the fact that you guys have taken this information, which can be somewhat complicated, and you've really simplified it for people. So progressive mass has its own stance on each issue.

Like, what is the progressive way to vote, yes or no? And then you will take the totality of people's votes and you will give them a grade like we all understand from school, ABC. Right. So this is such wonderful way to take this information, make it really easy and bite sized.

You can just go to progressive math, look up your own legislator and see what grade they get. Woohoo. Very, exactly.

And we've, and we've also added into it over time, studied tracking, co sponsorship. So if you know there's a bill that you care about or a cause that you care about, we're tracking whether or not your legislators have co-sponsored any kind of relevant bills. And it becomes a great opportunity because of you.

Whether, if you want to provide positive reinforcement, if you want to like, ask them why they haven't done something yet. And I liked, I think I changed recently with the tracking of that from like the nos to the not yets because you should bother them. I don't yet know for so many people if they're actively opposed, they very well might be, but you should reach out to them regardless if they're not on board with something yet that you think that they should be.

And it's just how, it's the state House's website, which appallingly, I think a few years ago won an award that it didn't deserve, is very difficult to navigate and especially difficult to navigate compared to the congressional websites. The US House and US Senate websites are much easier. But even then, it's not necessarily intuitive.

And so we can do the work of finding that information for people so that people don't have to waste time kind of trying to piece through things as well as even to understand what they were voting on. Because often it can be very kind of arcane if you're looking at the text of something and it's saying like, well, in chapter five of section 33 of the Massachusetts general laws, change this sentence to this sentence. Right.

Like, nobody, like your average person will be like, I have no idea what that means. Exactly. And it's important to be able to distill that in ways that actually, like, communicate.

Okay, this is what it did and this is why it matters for the issues that we care about. Absolutely. And let us remind the listeners that we live in a state which is very unusual, where the state legislature is exempt from public law, which means they do not have to say how they vote.

And so there's, there's only one mechanism by which we actually get these votes. So the, you guys provide one of the only mechanisms by which we can find out how people have voted. And it unfortunately doesn't include all of the votes because so many of the votes, there is no voting record ever.

Anywhere. Ever. And there's no way to find it out.

Exactly. Not stored anywhere at all. Exactly.

And beyond that, just in the way in which they never have to share committee votes. You also have a number of the things that the legislature does simply on voice votes. Yeah.

If you're. If you're ever watching a debate, there will be a lot of issues that you'll hear somebody go, all those in favor say I. All those opposed say nay, then a have it.

The motion is not adopted about, like, even faster than I just did that then. And no one says, I don't like what is happening. They just. Because the outcome is determined.

Right. The outcome is already predetermined. And so you have a number of cases where with no discussion or debate or no seeming vote, you'll already have an outcome.

And so there's a real loss to kind of the kind of public accountability and transparency from that. You also have a weird phenomenon in the Senate where the Senate can do what are called standing votes, where you'll have all of the ayes stand, and then you'll have all of the nays stand. And so everybody in the room knows how everybody else voted, but it's not recorded.

It's like a cowardly move. Yes. And that gives all the power to, like, the leadership because they get to see how people are voting so they can pressure them, but the public doesn't get to see how people are voting, so we can't pressure them at all.

Exactly. And it can often be with stuff like that, just like a coward's move of legislators who believe that their constituents are more conservative than they are. So they don't want to be on record for something, so they don't want the one to actually have to vote on it.

Like, an example of this, which is just wild. I think this was actually a voice not standing, but the Healthy Youth act, which we talked about before in terms of getting medically accurate, comprehensive, kind of consent informed, LGBTQ inclusive sex ed. Yeah.

When the Senate passed it this session, they actually did it on a voice vote because some of those senators didn't actually want to have to be on record, even though they voted for in the past because of all of the, like, conservative school committee pushback. You had some conservative Democrats not wanting to have to take the vote. Yeah.

And so they did. So they did it with no record, which is. Which is a.

Which, again, it's. That's a loss for the basic democratic process when people are doing things without putting their name to them. So that was a little detour just for folks to be reminded of how broken our state legislature is.

But let me refocus us on Progressive Mass, which does amazing work. And in addition to our card, which I think is one of the pieces that people can just go to and get information from instantly. Tell us about the other work that you do.

There's local chapters, there's these, you guys organize people to send letters and show up for things and events and just go into various activities that you guys have. Yeah, can do. So we're like, as a little bit back on a multi issue kind of advocacy group, we kind of recognize that the people who care about, kind of, say, economic justice, are often also the people who care about reproductive rights and who are the same people who care about climate action and care about democracy, care about criminal legal reform, and you probably care about all of these and are pulled every which way and want to know what you should be doing.

And so we try to help do some of that work for people by part of a number of the different statewide issue coalition that are working to fight for policy at the state level. And we particularly do operate on the state level, as we've talked about many times on this podcast, that there's like a lot of attention needed on state politics that often gets lost when people focus specifically just on national politics. And so with that, we have kind of a structure where we have chapters in certain parts of the state that do a lot of work both for local accountability around their legislators and hosting events to help educate the community about different issues.

They also can do candidate forums come election season so people have a better sense of who and what they're voting on, as well as are often active around ballot question efforts. So we have those where we have, we have like a density of members. So if we have a few people who really want to put in the time, we have those chapters who can do that local work, knowing that legislators do need to hear consistent pressure from their constituents and that all districts benefit from greater year round engagement.

And how do people join these local chapters? Yeah, so you're interested in joining a local chapter. If you go to our website, progressive mass.com comma, you can see a list of the current chapters of the organization, and they should all have email addresses listed.

If you don't see a chapter in your area and you want to start one, email grassrootsogressivemass.com. and we would be happy to help get you started. Because the more the merrier when it comes is that everybody knows best how to organize their own community, but they do it better when they're connected with others in other communities across the state.

Because we can all learn from each other, because anytime that you're doing that kind of work of organizing, you can often encounter the same problems. And if you're encountering these problems that somebody else has encountered, you can share ideas together about how to deal with them, about what's, about your best practices, about messaging and about ideas for events and so much more. So we can do that.

We have a few committees to govern through our work. I had been a part of, before I moved over to staff, had been a part of setting up our Issues committee, which kind of is a volunteer, which brings together volunteers and members of chapters to talk about the legislative work of the organization, putting together a legislative agenda and tracking what's going on in the state house throughout the session so that people don't have to just do that themselves, as I've known before, because it can be very difficult to find, find out. And with that, make sure that we can send out action alerts, both when certain things are coming up for a vote or enough in advance of them coming up in a vote, so you can shape whether or not they do to get people to contact their legislators, whether it's emailing them or calling them.

And one thing that I've been very happy that we've started doing is doing more of calling into our own list to get people to call their legislators, because it helps. It always makes a difference when people call instead of email. So I think I've noted before, legislators always care about how much intensity there seems to be behind what somebody does, which makes a call more impactful than an email.

Customized email is more impactful than a form email showing up in person always has added value for that. It's also like we always hold lobby days each year to bring people to the state house so they can meet their legislators in person and talk about our, kind of our legislative priorities and work with chapters to have in district meetings where they can. They will have folks active in the chapter as well as people interested in getting more involved can meet with the legislator in the community rather than coming all the way to the state house.

Yeah, and it also sounds like when you say you're calling through your own list to get people to do things, it seems like because you guys have a good handle on which all the different districts and often something might be in committee, and you really need to reach out to the two committee chairs or particular people who need more pressure than others so you would be able to sort of navigate. Exactly. Exactly.

And that's one thing that's been useful because if we have a statewide list, we know that, okay, if these are people who need to be targets, because we need to get these people on board with legislation, let's try to drive higher engagement in that district. Or it's like, let's try to drive higher engagement in the district of the members of the committee. And that's really important.

It's useful for that. It's also what's valuable about having chapters in different areas, because everybody, some legislators are always already on board, but that's very few of them. And there will always be things where a specific district is needed for putting pressure and having folks on the ground who are willing to do that and are kind of know how to reach out, are interested in the issues, know who else in their community they can ask to reach out that can help be really helpful with building momentum behind policy.

Yeah, fantastic. As well as one thing. Go ahead.

One thing I was going to note as well, one thing also that we've always been kind of stressed as an importance in the organization is trying to avoid falling into a trap of like, it's very easy when lobbying in Massachusetts for people to become overly deferential to legislators and to avoid wanting to run afoul of those in power and to assume that if you play nicely forever, then you'll get something out of it. And we always like to be able to be ones that are willing to call B's when something is b's because we are in a position where we are able to do so. Some organizations could but don't, some, for different reasons, it is more risky for them to do so, and so they don't.

But because we're able to do so, I always think that's an important role to be able to play that if you are able to speak out and to call like this is actually bs, we shouldn't like this is your actual logic for doing this, or this place has far too much centralized power. And to explain that to people is an important thing to do to get people to understand why the system isn't working well, the extent to which the system is designed not to be working well, as well as one thing I often like to say when I'm talking to people about advocacy, and I just said this to somebody earlier today at a lobby day, I always like reminding people that they don't need to be an expert on everything when they're talking to their legislators, because so many legislators are experts on topic, and so that it's very easy for people to like kind of get scared about if they're contacting their legislators because you think that they're somehow like, because they have this position of authority. And I always like to try to get people to become more comfortable with doing that on a regular basis and to do it on a more regular basis rather than thinking that it's somehow, it's something to be, like, worried about doing or you need to have all of your eyes dotted and your teeth crossed.

Well, and that's, and I also want to bring up the word legislating because the legislators want people to think that. Right. Legislators, exactly.

You want people to think, oh, it's more complicated than you think it is. Oh, you don't really know how it works. Oh, no.

You know, they're very, what's the word, condescending with this because they don't want you to push back at them. So they're trying to feel like you don't know enough to say something. But the fact is you don't have to be an expert.

And as Jonathan just said, they probably aren't either. Exactly. And, you know, if you care about an issue, you know enough about it, or if it impacts you directly, you know enough about it to be able to talk about it to them.

And that legislators so often like to approach things from a position of reducing their own power to make change. And it's important for people to push back on that and to actually kind of ask legislators to understand the power that they have based on their office and actually use it rather than resign themselves to just kind of following along or even resigning themselves to a scarcity mindset where you can't do bigger things or you can't do multiple things because nothing ever happens if we constrain our ambitions that much. Right.

So I want to, first, I want to say how great it is to have Progressive Mass in the mix because as you kind of alluded to, it's very common in organizations to at some point view the legislators. The whole legislative and lobbying process is one where you have to become friends with the legislators, play nice and never say anything that they don't want to hear. Right.

So, so I would love to hear a little bit about the history of progressive mass because progressive mass is also one of the older organizations. And so when did it start? And what would you like to tell us a little bit about the early days? So progressive mass dates back to around like 2012, 2013. And it's always interesting because you have different, I think even 2011 in some definitions, it incorporated in 2013.

But the first ever like, member meeting was in 2011, which is wild to think back that it's been around that far. And it was a few of the things that I always say in the founding were one that you had. I'll do a few things and I'll talk about, like, that time period as well, that you had people who often saw the same people campaign to campaign and thought of how important it would be to have something that exists in between.

Because if you're somebody who's ever volunteered on a campaign, particularly if it's a progressive ballot question or progressive candidate in your community, you know who the other people who volunteer on those are. And you might. Each person might bring out each new campaign might bring out new people, but you know who the reliable ones are.

And having a place for them to stay connected in between so it doesn't be. Or having the new place where the new people can stay connected in between is really valuable. So it doesn't have to minimize that, like, stop and start dimension.

As well as the one thing I also like to point out when doing an overview of progressive mass is the study from back in 2012 that showed that both liberal and conservative state legislators think their districts are more conservative than they really are. Yep. But kind of around that time that you had, if you think back to the early 2010s, you had that period when Deval Patrick was governor, our democratic supermajority legislature was always actively fighting with the Democratic governor and often seeming to hate, like, often seeming to dislike the Democratic governor more than they, like, disliked Republican governors before in something that was always wild to me under Baker and like, how obliging they were always to Charlie Baker.

So you had that dynamic of it where we elected a governor who was in many ways more progressive than the median legislator, and that the legislator would be very hostile to any effort to let they raise revenue on things or to pass good policies on any range of issues. You also around that time have, like when Elizabeth Warren was running for Senate against Scott Brown. It was recently after the loss of that Senate seat, when Martha Coakley ran like a trash fire of a campaign in the Senate race.

You have that time as well, where you had increased attention to issues around inequality, where you had the Occupy movement coming up in 2011, raising attention to gross disparities of income and wealth in the US as well as you had at that time. One of the stories involved with the founding that I always found interesting and kind of illustrative is how some of the folks who were involved in founding the organization had been a part of the kind of organizing efforts around like OFA organizing for America, Obama for America and various iterations. But as folks, if you were old enough, you might remember, if you're young and listening to us, this might be before your time, that Obama's people actively wanted all of their activists to demobilize.

When you had a number, unbelievable. They just asked people to just stop. They said, don't, don't stay engaged.

They had said, like when you had all of these progressive grassroots putting pressure around, like the Affordable Care act, like Affordable Care act fight and a lot of the other legislative fights, rather than wanting to see that happen and to see that continue, they told all of their different organizing apparatuses around the country, country, actually, please stop. Please don't put pressure on conservative democratic members of Congress. It is not helpful to us.

We know better than you. And coming out of that time, some of the people who had been involved in that in Massachusetts were like, we're not going to stop and we're going to focus on the state level because it really does need work here, too. Because in Massachusetts, I like to joke that Massachusetts liberals would rather fix all 49 other states.

Yes, that's so true that we love going up to New Hampshire all the time or doing work for sending our money and our time to other states. And that's important work. But it shouldn't come at the expense of doing work in the state.

It should be a yes. And where we also need people to be focused on how we can get policy, better policies in Massachusetts and to be doing that, where we're organizing people in the communities as well as working with allies in labor and in different community organizations, especially those whose community organizations are rooted and those most impacted by policy. So that we're pushing those issues forward and that we kind of know, kind of can get a sense of what the best policies for those who will be impacted by them will be and that we can work collaboratively across the state to help build momentum behind them.

Yeah, well, really such an amazing gap to fill, I think, here in Massachusetts. And, you know, we're coming up on the end here, but I hope people will look into progressive mass, especially the scorecard. Get started there.

Scorecard.progressivemass.com. absolutely. And, you know, if you just get on the email list and they will for sure get you started in a variety of different, you know, sort of activist suggestions of things that you can take action in lobby days, you can show up for emails, you can send phone calls you can make, as well as just generally being informed about what things are coming up for a vote.

Yeah. Anything else, Jonathan, that you would like to say before we close it out? No, I would say that there's a lot of good, just emphasizing that point. There's a lot of good work to be done in Massachusetts, because when you do pass good policy in Massachusetts, you're improving the lives of the people who live in the state, and you're also helping to set a better example for the other states that people like.

People like spending their time in other states because they feel that has more impact there. There are a lot of states that are, well, worse off than we are. But when you get better ideas into law in Massachusetts, you set a model that others that can get momentum in other states and nationally, and that is an impact that you should try to make as well.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I think about this a lot about how if all we ever do is go to the worst states and get them up a little bit, then no one is pushing the boundaries on what we have in the United States of America. Exactly.

That, like the states that can do more need to do more so that we're actually going further kind of on our side rather than only ever playing defense. That's right. And as a state, we are like, people are like, oh, but we're like legislatively one of the better states.

Yeah, but, but legislatively we are to the right of what the constituents in the state, actually. Exactly. So we could be passing more here.

Exactly. Yeah. Wonderful.

Well, thank you so much, Jonathan, for being our special guest today. My pleasure. And as always, everyone can, you know, we encourage you to put in a few bucks to the show.

You can see a link down below. It just helps us to get the word out. We're all over TikTok.

We're doing a lot of social media. We create a lot of graphics for that social media. We have graphics for the show.

We have editing for the show. So a lot of behind the scenes stuff needs to happen. And your donations are always very much appreciated.

And we love that you listen to the show and we love that you pass this show on to your friends. So we look forward to chatting with everyone next week.