“The Folks That We’re Fighting For Are Ourselves” Ludovic Blain on How to Overcome the Political Donors Trying to Buy Allegiance

Ludovic Blain is the CEO of the California Donor Table.

Every day since I had this conversation with Ludovic Blain, I’ve thought about something he said. I don’t mean that one thought has echoed. I mean that many of the things he said have come to mind over the last couple weeks, as I’ve tried to make sense of what’s happening in this country.

Blain is the CEO of the California Donor Table, a statewide community of donors who invest in communities of color so they can elect people who can represent their values and can hold their elected officials accountable. He also has years of experience building people of color-centered movements around economic justice, environmental justice, media justice, voting rights – and campaign finance reform.

We talked about what we can learn from Reconstruction and Progressive Eras, and why it’s so motivating to remember that our heroes were also just regular people.

Meaghan Winter: What are some ways that you think progressives should be working against the influence of so much money in politics?

Ludovic Blain: I’m an old time money and politics campaign finance person. I was one of the organizers for the one-to-one campaign finance match and a lead lobbyist for the four-to-one campaign finance match in New York City.

There are a few things that are different now. First of all, before, when you put a spotlight on people giving a lot of money, those people would have some shame and take a step back. Now, when Elon says he’s going to give $100 million, he’s bragging about it. Rightwing fascists pledge that they’re going to give money, and then you see the reporting, and [it turns out] they actually didn’t give all of that money. You’re just as likely to catch that they didn’t actually fulfill their pledge to politicians, that’s the outcome of transparency work now! So, not only does shaming them not work, [donors] actually like the transparency, because they’re actually trying to buy both private and public allegiance. So, how do we adapt to that?

We’re at a time where we have a president who brags about not just campaign fundraising but actual corruption. He says, “They told me they’re giving me a plane.” So, we need to think through what we really mean by corruption. How much corruption is in campaigning versus after people win? And how do we really tackle those things?

The second piece that always struck me about how the U.S. looks at money in politics is versus other countries. In other countries, you actually can’t spend the same amount of money. The campaigns are shorter. There’s access to public media. In the US, we have these other complicating factors in dealing with money in politics.

For many folks running for office, the biggest campaign finance [problem] is actually a personal campaign finance issue. Because very few elected offices pay any kind of living wage, and almost none of them have a pension or anything for your future when you retire, there are great financial pressures on elected officials. They cannot take three to six months off to campaign. That means you need more campaign money, right? These are some of the things we need to think through.

Finally, the New York City matching program reduces the impact of the largest givers, but it actually didn’t bring in many more lower level donors. That’s different from the Democracy Dollars program in Seattle, where every eligible voter gets $25 vouchers that they can give to candidates. That kind of program can create more accountability between elected candidates and voters.

The first thing we need to do is to diminish wealth concentration, right? As the folks did in the Progressive Era, we need to start to dismantle the oligarchy because one of the ways power accumulates is through wealth.

Winter: There’s a common critique right now that Democrats are not fighting hard enough. Can you tell me about any examples of people who are fighting back and meeting this moment?

Blain: It is mostly true that Democrats aren’t fighting hard enough, but saying that is not nuanced enough. Moderate and business- and corporate-friendly Democrats are not fighting hard enough. Progressive, radical community-centered Democrats are fighting. The difference between corporate Dems and progressive Dems is who they’re fighting for. Anybody in a blue city, blue state, blue county, knows that it’s not really how many Democrats you have, it’s how much they’re willing to fight for you.

You look at folks like Eloise Gomez Reyes in the Inland Empire, now a state senator, who replaced the previous Democrat who represented the Amazon warehouse owners, not the people, in her district. She’s fighting. Mayor Barbara Lee of Oakland, Mayor Karen Bass of LA are fighting hard.

When voters vote for change by voting for Democrats, and those Democrats are working for corporations, so regular people don’t feel the change, eventually those voters vote for a bully, because they figure, ‘Well, the bully may bully me sometimes, but hopefully, sometimes he’ll bully other people for me.’ Voting for a bully isn’t really going to help, but people are accurately voting for a bully.

So, we need Democrats who are not afraid, who stand up, and who stand up often. So I’d say, in some ways, our Governor Gavin Newsom, who’s not known for courageous stands generally, is doing the right thing on redistricting. And when somebody does the right thing, you should applaud them for that, not forgetting the other things, but applaud them for doing the right thing. We need more Democrats willing to do sufficient acts to protect democracy.

Winter: What lessons can we learn from the Progressive Era?

Blain: The Progressive Era is the one era in American history that actually tackled oligarchy head on. That’s where the term “fat cats” comes from. That’s where “eat the rich” comes from. The Progressive Era was not just a response to the concentration of wealth of oligarchs, but also the presidents they were supporting. You get fascist authoritarians, because oligarchs need someone to protect them when they’re stealing money from us. That’s how fascist authoritarians get elected, right?

We have to diminish wealth to hold oligarchs accountable – and not just performatively. We have to actually diminish their power by diminishing one of the ways that their power accumulates, which is their wealth.

Yes, there were racist, sexist parts of the Progressive Era. But many of the subsequent movements were about inclusion, not fighting oligarchs. And so whatever we learned from subsequent movements, now we have to make sure that we’re putting at the top of our list decreasing the concentration of wealth, because if we can’t do that, we can’t do anything else.

There are a lot of lessons to be learned. During the Gilded Era, the progressive fight was a state by state fight. A lot of what ended up as the New Deal were things that were piloted on the state level, some of which worked and some of which didn’t. Some of the first environmental laws, worker protection, public pensions, women voting rights, were all state protections. We need to have states implement progressive policy, because the next time we have a good president, we can’t ask them to do something that no jurisdiction has ever done before.

Winter: How are you coping with what’s happening?

Blain: Things are bad. I was born in 1970. I try to remember that most of America’s better times overlapped with my life. It seems like we’re going backwards. Assuming that going forward was destiny was not actually not true. The forward times that we’ve all experienced are most of America’s forward times. So, we’re protecting what was only recently won.

The second thing: After every Reconstruction – which is when Black folks, specifically, and additional groups of oppressed folks like queer folks, immigrants, women – win rights, there’s always a white supremacist redemption, a backlash. Now, none of that makes me feel better, but it does contextualize that this isn’t the first time. This isn’t the only time. We’re not the first people to be fighting this fight, and we’re fighting it again.

That’s my really political answer. My personal answer is old Prince videos, my family and my dog help a lot. When the Warriors win, that’s also helpful. We need to lean into our joy, because without joy, you cannot sustain the struggle. Our joy helps us who we’re fighting for, and the folks that we’re fighting for are ourselves. So, it’s not sympathy, and it’s not even empathy, it’s self-protection plus sympathy and empathy.

The last thing I’ll say is that I remember listening to some Civil Rights folks talking about their fights in the fascist authoritarian times. When it’s the end of their lives, when you’re in the inspirational part of the book or the documentary, these people are larger than life. Someone like Cesar Chavez seems so much larger than life. But actually, these were regular people who had to pause in the meetings to go to the bathroom, who had to figure out how to take care of their kids, who were laughing at each other’s haircuts, doing regular people stuff. I’ve tried to remember that, because if world changers were regular people, we can all be world changers.