Originally published in DCist on November 19, 2018.
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Already a leader in offering universal preschool for three and four-year olds, Washington D.C. now aims to position itself again at the forefront of early childhood investments. In June, the city council unanimously approved the Birth-to-Three For All D.C Act, a big ticket bill which Mayor Muriel Bowser then signed into law in September.

The legislation calls for increased investments in health services provided to infants and toddlers, particularly those living in Wards 7 and 8, and expands the city’s home-visiting program, a support for pregnant women and new parents. The legislation also boosts subsidies for early childhood learning, both to expand access and to increase the wages of low-paid workers. While the most generous supports are still targeted at the poorest families, the bill caps out-of-pocket childcare expenses for even the most affluent, with no household paying more than 10 percent of their income.

This all comes at a steep price: an estimated $500 million over the next decade. So far, just $1.3 million has been earmarked for the Birth-to-Three Act in the 2019 budget, financed by a tobacco tax increase last spring.

This month 18 local organizations—banding together under the umbrella of the “Birth to Three Policy Alliance”—sent a letter to the mayor, requesting she invest $30 million in her next budget for the legislation ($22 million to raise the wages of educators, $6 million to expand home visiting, and $2 million to expand healthcare supports).

“We can’t forget that this city is in better shape financially than most communities in this country,” says Carrie Thornhill, the chair of the D.C. Early Learning Collaborative. “That allows us to do some things that other jurisdictions can’t do.”

Advocates say these are smart investments, especially as scientific evidence continues to show the bulk of brain development happens in a child’s earliest years, a period where young people learn social-emotional skills like focusing, empathy, and regulating feelings. Research suggests that greater investments in early childhood can help close the achievement gap, help more students graduate from high school, and avoid the criminal justice system.

Quality childcare, advocates say, will also help attract jobs and families to the District. A study released in September by the Center for American Progress found that since D.C. began offering universal pre-K in 2009, the city has seen a large, positive increase in its maternal labor force participation, almost entirely attributable to the preschool expansion. Part of the goal of the Birth-to-Three Act is to raise the job standards for early childhood educators, making the workforce itself more professionalized, and to pay them more.

“Generally when states talk about investments in their early childhood workforce, they’re asking what scholarships can we put in place to encourage educators to obtain higher credentials, or what bonuses can we give them once they do,” said Barbara Gebhard, the assistant director of public policy at ZERO TO THREE, a national organization focused on infants and toddlers. “It’s largely tweaking around the edges. I like that D.C.’s legislation is really targeting the problem, which is that compensation is just too low. Until we really crack that nut, we’re not going to solve the problem.”

There’s been some pushback to the city’s new requirement that early childhood workers obtain advanced degrees, a policy change leaders say will improve teaching quality. A federal lawsuit was filed this spring, arguing that D.C. requiring college credentials is an unconstitutional occupational regulation that will needlessly lock people out of the profession and cause a spike in costs for parents. “You don’t need to know how to integrate a function or write in iambic pentameter to take care of a newborn or toddler,” said a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

Still, advocates and city officials say science is on their side, pointing to evidence like a 2015 National Academies report which made recommendations on improving the child care workforce. But the report, opponents point out, is “inconclusive” when it comes to the link between teacher education level and quality of instruction. Supporters counter that the report also says “almost all rigorous studies of childhood programs that have shown large effects have come from programs with licensed teachers who have bachelor’s degrees.”

The Bainum Family Foundation, based in Bethesda, has been a key driver behind the Birth-to-Three Act and the associated advocacy for it. Founded 50 years ago and long-focused on providing students with college scholarships, the foundation pivoted in 2015 to focusing on early childhood investments. A Bainum-funded report released that year detailed the wide disparities in early childhood development between rich and poor families in the District, leading to a five-year $10 million pledge to change that.

Earlier this month, the Reinvestment Fund released a new Bainum-funded report detailing the supply and demand for early learning opportunities in D.C. Among other things, the study found the city would need to add about 31,000 high-quality seats if it wanted to serve all infants and toddlers, including those who commute with parents into the District. The report also showed more than 30 percent of infants and toddlers live in areas where the cost of a center-based program exceeds 50 percent of the median household income.

“That kind of data—it’s hard to come by, and it’s frankly expensive to put together,” says Noel Bravo, the Senior Director of Program Development at the Bainum Family Foundation. “But it’s extremely important to understand the issue, and that’s one way we feel we can be helpful.”

Birth-to-Three advocates are trying to glean lessons from the District’s successful universal preschool expansion. Carrie Thornhill, a leader in that effort as well, notes one similarity: In both cases, they had the unanimous support from the D.C. Council.

Infant and toddler care was originally part of the preschool legislation, but was stripped from the bill because legislators back then had difficulty being convinced that it was truly a necessary educational reform. “Things have changed a lot since 2008,” says Thornhill. “People really do get it now.”

In September, after signing the legislation, Bowser sent a letter to Council Chairman Phil Mendelson saying that, while the goals are “laudable,” she worries the Birth-to-Three Act creates “false expectations” for families because of its cost. She encouraged the council to consider redirecting money allocated to paid family leave to the Birth-to-Three Act, a suggestion that sparked protest in the community.

“Paid parental leave is one of the most essential investments we can make in caring for our youngest kids,” says Judith Berman, the deputy director of DC Appleseed. “It really does not make sense to take money from one pot to support the other.”

LaToya Foster, a mayoral spokesperson, would not comment directly on whether Bowser still supports shifting funds from paid family leave to Birth-to-Three, but noted the mayor “has made critical investments in early childhood education and will continue to look for opportunities to do so going forward.” Foster added that Bowser thinks “we must invest strategically in our greatest needs” and recognizes child care costs “continues to substantially burden many families.”

The Child Care Aware of America estimates the average annual cost of D.C. center-based early learning to exceed more than $23,000 per year. A single parent with one child living at the federal poverty line would need to spend 91 percent of their income to afford the opportunity absent a subsidy.

According to Thornhill, Ward 7 Councilmember Vincent Gray told the D.C. Early Learning Collaborative that an increased tobacco tax, revenue from legalized sports betting, and tapping into the city’s surplus budget are three possible funding sources for the legislation.

In a statement to DCist, Gray said that while the city had to work hard to secure funding for universal preschool, they were ultimately successful, and the same will be true for this.

“Again, as with Pre-K, we knew it would be a heavy lift,” Gray said. “While we do not have a firm timetable for funding Birth-to-Three, with Pre-K, we projected it would take five years. We did it in three. I am confident we can do the same with funding for Birth-to-Three.”

Originally published in The Intercept on November 15, 2018, co-authored with David Dayen

Amazon’s announcement this week that it will open its new headquarters in New York City and northern Virginia came with the mind-boggling revelation that the corporate giant will rake in $2.1 billion in local government subsidies. But an analysis by the nation’s leading tracker of corporate subsidies finds that the government handouts will actually amount to at least $4.6 billion.

But even that figure, which accounts for state and local perks, doesn’t take into account a gift that Amazon will also enjoy from the federal government, a testament to the old adage that in Washington, bad ideas never die.

The Amazon location in Long Island City, in the New York City borough of Queens, is situated in a federal opportunity zone, a Jack Kemp-era concept resurrected in the 2017 tax law that, in theory, is supposed to bring money into poverty-stricken areas. The northern Virginia site, in the Arlington neighborhood of Crystal City (which developers and local officials have rebranded as “National Landing”), is not directly in an opportunity zone but is virtually surrounded by other geographic areas that are.

Under the tax overhaul signed by President Donald Trump last year, investors in opportunity zones can defer payments of capital gains taxes until 2026, and if they hold them for seven years, they can exclude 15 percent of the gains from taxation. If investors carry the opportunity zone investment for 10 years, they eliminate taxes on future appreciation entirely. Investment managers have been salivating at the chance to take advantage of opportunity zones. Special funds have been built to cater to people holding unrealized capital gains — such as Amazon employees with large holdings of company stock.

Not only could Amazon benefit from the opportunity zone directly in Long Island City, but Virginia employees with unrealized capital gains will have an escape valve next door to an Amazon campus. “People who happen to be sitting around with long-term capital gains may now have vehicles for hiding them,” said Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that scrutinizes economic development incentive deals between cities and companies, and has analyzed the Amazon deal.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the opportunity zone or the Good Jobs First estimate of the subsidies it could receive.

Supporters claim opportunity zones spur renewal and revitalization in impoverished areas. It’s a decades-old bipartisan fantasy that sits uncomfortably at odds with the demonstrated results. Researchers who have studied opportunity zones find that these tax schemes rarely ever help cities, and often financially cripple them.

“At best, they divert investment from one part of the city from another, resulting in no net gain for the city as a whole,” wrote Timothy Weaver, an urban policy and politics professor at the University of Albany, last year. “At worst, they result in tax-giveaways to firms that would have been operating anyway, thereby generating a net loss to city revenues.”

Still, Republicans and Democrats are loathe to give up on what they continually tell themselves can be a win-win for everyone, if we just try really hard. And now a major beneficiary of this federal largesse happens to be one of the world’s richest companies, led by the world’s richest man.

According to Good Jobs First’s calculations, Amazon will get $4.6 billion in state and local subsidies for its new headquarters — and that’s not counting the opportunity zone benefit.

Amazon’s press release cited two New York state incentives, a $1.2 billion grant over the next decade from the Excelsior Program and a $325 million, 10-year grant from Empire State Development. But Amazon did not quantify proceeds from two other city incentives, the Industrial & Commercial Abatement Program, or ICAP, and the Relocation and Employment Assistance Program, or REAP.

ICAP gives a partial tax abatement for 25 years, and based on the expected $3.6 billion campus in Long Island City, Good Jobs First estimates that value at $386 million. REAP, a per-employee tax credit of $3,000 per year for 12 years, comes out to $897 million if Amazon meets its projection of hiring 25,000 employees.

Those estimates, combined with what Amazon already cited for the Long Island City location, brings the total to $2.808 billion. That results in a cost per job of $112,000, far more than the $48,000 per job Amazon claimed they would get in the Long Island City deal.

LeRoy, of Good Jobs First, noted that ICAP and REAP are available to most businesses relocating into New York, but a single entity’s ability to combine all their benefits distorts the purpose of attracting economic development. “I don’t think the original sponsors ever envisioned individual transactions costing 10 figures,” he said. “There’s a strong argument for capping programs on a per-deal basis.”

LeRoy added that this is not a full accounting of the benefits out of New York. Amazon will benefit from a payment in lieu of taxes, or PILOT, in which a portion of the company’s property taxes will flow directly into enhancements for the project area. Plus, there’s the federal opportunity zone.

That Long Island City is a designated opportunity zone Amazon might exploit is especially mind-boggling given that the fast-gentrifying area has had no trouble attracting new investment, has a 10 percent poverty rate (half that of New York City), and has a median income of $130,000 per year.

While the overwhelming majority of opportunity zones are defined by having high poverty rates, about 200 of the 8,700 Treasury Department-approved census tracts are like Long Island City, economically prosperous but adjacent to poverty. This includes neighborhoods in well-off cities like Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, and Portland. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said last month that he expects the opportunity zones to attract $100 billion in investments.

Amazon’s estimate for Virginia — $573 million in cash grants — also leaves out a huge benefit for Amazon. “They’re planning a big Virginia Tech campus in Alexandria, adjacent to the site,” LeRoy said. “It’s a public university, the money is coming from taxpayers.” In a press release, Virginia Tech puts the cost of the campus at $1 billion and added that Amazon “credited the Innovation Campus in Alexandria as a key component in its decision to locate in Northern Virginia.”

Good Jobs First added that a redevelopment subsidy known as tax increment financing for on-site infrastructure and green space in the area could also benefit Amazon at the northern Virginia site. There was no cost estimate provided for this, though the Amazon press release mentions $195 million in commonwealth-funded infrastructure projects in the neighborhood, and another $28 million in funding from the city of Arlington.

The total amount of subsidies in northern Virginia, according to Good Jobs First, is at least $1.8 billion, almost as much as Amazon said it would be reaping in government subsidies overall.

Previously, Amazon has reaped $1.6 billion in state and local subsidies for its warehouses and data centers elsewhere across the country. On the same day as the New York and Virginia announcements, Amazon also announced a new “Operations Center of Excellence” in Nashville, Tennessee, a 5,000-worker facility for which the city gave Amazon $102 million in subsidies. Nashville was one of the top 20 finalists for the HQ2 auction, and parts of the city are also opportunity zones.

The cash handouts also do not take into account regulatory leniency and accelerated permitting that characterizes the Amazon projects. “There is a strain of thought that says if you give a company prompt variances, because time is money, companies would value that more than property tax abatement,” said LeRoy. In this case, the cities are offering both!”

The deals do not appear to include guard rails for what is expected to be rapid gentrification in the locations. Condo sellers in Crystal City took note of overnight price hikes of as much as $20,000 the day after the announcement. As gentrification likely pushes out residents in the opportunity zones surrounding the northern Virginia site, Amazon employees who buy real estate could not only find a place to live, but also avoid unrealized capital gains taxes.

Progressive politicians like Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and conservative commentators have joined forces to question the deal. Community organizations held a rally in New York on Wednesday, urging a re-channeling of the taxpayer subsidies. Following Amazon’s announcement, Ron Kim, a Queens assembly member, introduced new legislation to redirect taxpayer funds designated for corporate subsidies to canceling or buying student debt. Virginia delegate Lee Carter, a democratic socialist, also criticized the deal for its exorbitant tax giveaways and the lack of transparency under which the terms were negotiated, calling it “comic book villain stuff.”

Originally published in The Intercept on November 7, 2018.
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Last night, Ben Jealous, the Democratic candidate for governor in Maryland, lost his race to incumbent Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, 56 percent to 43 percent. Jealous would have been Maryland’s first African-American governor and was running on one of the most left-wing policy platforms in the country,

Although polls had been showing Hogan with a significant lead for months, progressives hoped a strong blue wave on Election Day could bring about a major upset. After all, Democrats outnumber Republicans by a 2-1 ratio in Maryland.

But Jealous didn’t lose because he ran on issues like “Medicare for All,” a $15 minimum wage, and legalizing marijuana. In fact, voters in Maryland largely agree with Jealous on his signature policy issues. A Goucher College survey released in mid-September found that 54 percent of Maryland residents hold a favorable opinion on “Medicare for All” or single-payer health care, with 33 percent holding an unfavorable view. Support for other key parts of Jealous’s plan polled even higher. Seventy-one percent of Marylanders support raising the statewide minimum wage to $15 dollars per hour, with just a quarter of residents against it. This was actually a substantial jump from February, when Goucher found 66 percent of Marylanders supported the $15 minimum wage. On legalizing marijuana for recreational use, 62 percent of Maryland residents support it, with just one-third opposed.

A Hobbled Campaign

The primary reason Jealous lost is that his campaign couldn’t pull in the necessary funds to compete effectively. Despite winning 22 out of 24 counties in the state’s crowded Democratic primary, the Jealous campaign’s own internal polling revealed that as of July, one-third of Maryland voters, and one-quarter of the state’s Democratic voters, did not know who Jealous was. He had never run for office before, but had earned the teachers union’s endorsement in the primary, which many believe helped secure him his June victory.

Meanwhile, Hogan started out with a big fundraising advantage and a high approval rating. Although Jealous assumed he could turn things around after Labor Day, by then it was too late to change the narrative.

At the end of August, Hogan had $9.4 million to spend for his re-election campaign, compared to Jealous’s mere $385,000. And the gap never closed. In the final two weeks of the campaign, Hogan had almost 12 times more cash than Jealous, or $3.3 million to the Democrat’s $275,000. Few people wanted to donate to a race that seemed uncompetitive, which in turn made it even less competitive as the weeks went on.

While Hogan’s campaign and the Republican Governors Association have blasted negative ads against Jealous nonstop since July, Jealous’s campaign didn’t run its first TV ad until mid-September, and the Democratic Governors Association didn’t run their first ad against Hogan until late October. Jealous couldn’t afford to compete on television, or even really through mailers.

The Jealous campaign understood that it needed to invest more in on-the-ground organizing to make up for the complacency that gripped Democrats in 2014, when Hogan eked out his upset victory. So this year, 70 Democratic organizers were hired to work across the state, compared to 15 field organizers for the state’s Democrat-coordinated campaign in 2014.

But even Jealous supporters noted that his campaign was making it difficult to rally support for his team. On his campaign website, there was nowhere for supporters to order lawn signs, bumper stickers, or other paraphernalia to demonstrate support — unlike on Hogan’s website, where such ordinary purchases were made prominently visible and available. Supporters had to ask around to learn that they had to show up in person at a campaign office to get any swag. That information wasn’t even available on the website.

And while Democratic candidates across the country have been leaning on new media platforms like viral two-minute online-only campaign ads, the Jealous campaign relied predominantly on awkward and less popular tools like Facebook Live. 

Lack of Endorsements

The Washington Post has been writing favorably about Hogan for years, so much so that a reader wrote a letter to the editor in June asking, “Seriously, has Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) changed his name? Apparently so, at least according to The Post. In nearly every reference to the governor, The Post’s writers insist on referencing him with a new first name of ‘popular,’ as in the popular Maryland governor.”

As a result, it was unsurprising when the Washington Post gave its endorsement to Hogan, praising him for having the “agility and sense to govern as a moderate — that disappearing breed of American politician.” The Post dismissed Jealous’s plans as mostly “politically unrealistic” and “unwise.” But more staggering was the Baltimore Sun, which endorsed Jealous in the primary but endorsed Hogan in the general election, despite literally acknowledging in its own endorsement that Hogan’s “actions in office have too often treated [Baltimore] as an afterthought, if not with outright contempt.” (Hogan’s decision to cancel the Red Line light rail, a project that had been in the works for a decade and to which the federal government was going to contribute $900 million, was a disastrously cruel move for the long-neglected city.)

Outside Maryland, the national press was also largely uninterested in Jealous’s general election challenge, especially when compared to the attention paid to Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum, black candidates running to be Georgia’s and Florida’s first African-American governors, respectively. The Maryland race was deemed uncompetitive, and thus less exciting to cover.

During the primary, most of Maryland’s Democratic establishment lined up behind Rushern Baker, the outgoing county executive in Prince George’s County. (Kevin Kamenetz, the county executive for Baltimore County was also a frontrunner, and had raised more money than other candidates in the primary, but he died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest six weeks before the election.)

After Jealous won, several dozen Maryland Democrats announced their support for Hogan, though most were older white men who hadn’t served in office for years. Others had received political appointments from the governor, or had records of supporting Republican candidates in the past.

Jealous did end up securing endorsements from the Democratic Party’s current elected officials, but some were much slower to voice their support, and many remained muted in their enthusiasm. The long-serving state Senate president, Mike Miller, was a prime example. He was guarded in his support for Jealous, while being enthusiastic in his praise for Hogan’s work. Ike Leggett, the outgoing executive of affluent Montgomery County, at first withheld his endorsement of Jealous over tax issues that he said would hurt his wealthy constituents. When he finally did endorse Jealous in in mid-October, he did so in the world’s most half-hearted way.When the Washington Post asked him if Jealous would be a better governor than Hogan, Leggett declined to say yes. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I’m simply for the Democratic nominee.” About 45 percent of Montgomery County ended up voting for Hogan.

It’s unlikely that vocal enthusiasm from Leggett and Miller could have really changed Jealous’s fundraising numbers in a substantial way, but they certainly didn’t help.

Jealous also tamped down enthusiasm from some otherwise natural allies. Despite running on one of the most progressive platforms in the country, he didn’t even try to court some of the newly established Democratic Socialists of America chapters or get their endorsements. He also upset a lot of leftists over the summer, when he disavowed socialism in a way that not even Barack Obama did during the eight years he was blasted for being on the left. After Hogan called Jealous a “far-left socialist” in an interview, a different reporter followed up by asking Jealous if he identified as a socialist. Jealous responded, “Are you fucking kidding me?” The Republican Governors Association funded a TV ad this summer that featured Jealous saying, “Go ahead, call me a socialist,” cutting off the rest of his sentence, in which he went on to say, “It doesn’t change the fact that I’m a venture capitalist.” The Jealous campaign demanded that local stations pull the ad for being false and too misleading.

Larry Hogan Was a Better Campaigner

Hogan’s schtick of acting moderate was largely successful, in part due to the light press coverage his administration has received over the past four years. Over the summer, for example, he earned glowing national headlines by recalling Maryland’s four National Guard troops from the southern U.S. border — thus appearing to be someone willing to stand up to Trump and his family separation policy — but his actual record on immigration was far more hostile and overlooked. Hogan also moved to the left when he felt he needed to politically: In July, he announced a new student debt relief plan and announced he would no longer take donations or an endorsement from the National Rifle Association. In 2014, he took the gun lobby’s money and endorsement, and also received an A- rating.

It also helped that while Maryland voters are generally Democratic, they’re not always very progressive. Fifty-six percent of Marylanders think their state taxes are “too high,” and Hogan spent the bulk of his campaign emphasizing that he’d continue to cut taxes and that Jealous would significantly raise them. While the Jealous campaign was banking on major turnout in the city of Baltimore to push him over the edge, in the end, nearly one-third of Baltimore went for Hogan, up from 22 percent in 2014.

In the Maryland legislature, however, Democrats maintained their veto-proof majority. Republicans had targeted eight Democratic seats and hoped to flip five, but failed. Baltimore’s three largest suburban counties will now also be led by Democrats, with Anne Arundel and Howard counties flipping blue.

Originally published in The Nation on November 1, 2018.
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Undocumented immigrants and permanent legal residents in San Francisco will have the chance to cast their ballots for the local school board on November 6. This newly established right is the result of a ballot initiative approved by 54 percent of voters in 2016. (Past referendums failed in 2004 and 2010.) Advocates made the case that noncitizen voting would increase parental involvement in schools and that expanding democracy to marginalized groups would help fortify civic life.

But Donald Trump was also elected president in 2016, throwing this hard-fought victory into a tailspin. “The timing is unfortunate, but we’re dealing with what we have,” said Norma Garcia, the director of policy and advocacy at the Mission Economic Development Agency, a community-based organization that helped to pass San Francisco’s noncitizen voting. Activists have been working to assuage panic—but the fear is real. To register, noncitizens have to provide their address and date of birth, and are explicitly warned on their forms that any information they provide to the Department of Elections may be obtained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “and other agencies, organizations and individuals.” Immigrants are being encouraged to consult with an attorney before signing up.

Hong Mei Pang, the director of advocacy at Chinese for Affirmative Action, another San-Francisco-based organization that helped pass the voting-rights measure, said they’ve been educating immigrants and stressing that noncitizens shouldn’t feel pressured to vote. “The cruelty of this particular administration is it’s forcing immigrants to make impossible, hard choices,” she said. “They’re manufacturing these dilemmas, and one should never have to choose between their right to health, dignity, and to be a free person who can exercise their political voice.” As of October 30, just 52 noncitizens had registered with the San Francisco Department of Elections.

At the same time, other cities have started conversations of their own around noncitizen voting. Montpelier, a liberal Vermont city of just under 8,000 people, held a public forum this past spring to explore the idea, and will have a referendum on its ballot this November. Boston leaders also held a public hearing this past summer, led by the city-council president who said noncitizen voting could be a way to signal solidarity with immigrants in the age of Trump.

Meanwhile, a backlash has been brewing. In July, Doug Ose, a Republican from California who served in the House of Representatives, submitted a ballot initiative to ban noncitizen voting statewide—saying San Francisco’s new right convinced him to take action. (He will need to collect 365,880 valid signatures to get his measure approved for California’s 2020 ballot.) Two months later in Washington, DC, Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), introduced a non-binding resolution condemning noncitizen voting, with the decree specifically citing San Francisco. It passed with 279 votes in favor. “There’s a new movement that’s going on around the country, allowing illegals to vote in our elections, disenfranchising Americans,” said McCarthy, who is expected to become speaker of the House when Paul Ryan steps down from the job later this year.

Voting rights in the US is typically understood as the slow and steady march toward universal suffrage—but noncitizen voting stands as a major exception to this narrative.

During the colonial period and after the American Revolution, white male property owners—regardless of citizenship—were allowed to vote. Noncitizen voting was common at the local, state, and even federal levels for the country’s first 150 years. It was seen “as a means to train newcomer white Christian men to be good neighbors and promote active participation in the life of their new adoptive homes before their eventual naturalization,” write San Francisco-based scholars Ron Hayduk and Kathleen Coll who have studied the history. “In frontier states, it was also a way to lure new white male immigrants to permanently occupy Native lands.” It was not so much a substitution for citizenship, but a pathway toward it.

Yet hostility toward foreigners increased during and after the War of 1812, and a few states began to restrict noncitizen voting. The surge of Irish immigrants, who generally opposed slavery, was one factor fueling the xenophobia. In 1861, the Confederate Constitution carved out a prohibition for persons “of foreign birth” from voting, although the practice continued and even expanded in the next few decades. But in the years leading up to World War I, a new wave of nativist sentiment prompted states to eliminate noncitizen voting, with Arkansas being the final state to end the practice in 1926.

In 1993, Jamie Raskin—now a Democratic member of Congress from Maryland though back then an American University law professor—authored a legal paper, where he argued “the current blanket exclusion of noncitizens from the ballot is neither constitutionally required nor historically normal.” Three years later, however, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, banning noncitizens from voting in federal elections. But on the state and local level, it can still be legally authorized today.

The first city to bring back noncitizen voting was New York City in 1968. As a concession during the city’s fight over “community control” of schools—a movement to hold schools accountable by empowering parent representatives—New York granted its noncitizens the right to vote in school-board elections. Noncitizens voted in these elections up until 2002, when the city switched to mayoral control and abolished its elected school board.

Since 1989 Chicago has also allowed noncitizens to vote and serve on its school councils, bodies that approve how school resources are allocated, develop and monitor school-improvement plans, and select a school’s principal. Aside from Chicago and San Francisco, 10 other cities allow noncitizen voting, and they are all in Maryland. This is partly because Maryland cities can pass laws around noncitizen voting and enact them without state approval. While four Massachusetts cities—Amherst, Brookline, Cambridge, and Newton—have all also approved noncitizen voting, unlike Maryland, their local laws have never taken effect because the Massachusetts legislature never gave them the necessary go-ahead.

But why has this history gone so under the radar? “It’s an obscure piece of history, but when you realize how extensive and widespread it was, it is really surprising that it’s not more widely known,” Hayduk said. He guessed that one reason is because of the radical implications of it being on the table. “As the immigrant-voting-rights people put it, ‘It could give you ideas,’” he said. Once you accept the idea that democracy is strengthened by allowing noncitizens to weigh in on local elections, excluding those same people from state and federal contests becomes harder to defend.

Activists in San Francisco have looked to Takoma Park, a Maryland suburb outside of Washington, DC, that has successfully implemented noncitizen voting for the past quarter century. In 1992 the city adopted a charter resolution that removed its citizenship requirement for voting and holding local office. Takoma Park was also one of the first sanctuary cities in the country, passing legislation in 1985 to protect refugees arriving from Nicaragua and El Salvador. In a city of 18,000, 347 noncitizens registered to vote in 2017.

Like San Francisco, Takoma Park’s voter-registration form for noncitizens includes a warning: “Please be aware that registering to vote or voting in jurisdictions other than Takoma Park may result in adverse immigration consequences for a non-U.S. citizen.” Jessie Carpenter, Takoma Park’s city clerk, said she liked the more explicit language used by San Francisco “and would consider expanding ours to include some of that.”

“We’ve had noncitizen voting for a while, but given the national context, it’s taken on renewed importance as an expression of the inclusive values we hold important in our community,” said Kate Stewart, the mayor of Takoma Park. “We want to make sure people who live in our city have a say in local government, and while we felt that way for decades, given the climate we’re all living in, unfortunately we think it’s important to not only talk about being welcoming and inclusive but to show that we are.”

Arguments against noncitizen voting generally center on claims that it weakens the value of citizenship, could discourage immigrants from seeking eventual naturalization, and could increase the likelihood of voter fraud. Indeed even immigrant-friendly liberal cities have rejected noncitizen voting for these reasons. Portland, Maine rejected a ballot measure for noncitizen voting in 2010, while Burlington, Vermont rejected its own in 2015. Legislative efforts have also launched and failed several times in places like Washington, DC and New York City.

Still, there’s reason to think noncitizen voting could expand, especially as more cities, like Boston, see the move as a way to push back against the anti-immigrant policies the federal government is imposing on them. But it could take time, and several tries: Unlike a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour or Medicare for All—noncitizen voting generally takes longer to explain and build support for—as most people upon first-hearing about it assume it’s illegal or unAmerican. But attitudes change, as the eventual successful effort in San Francisco showed.

Plus there’s the fact that noncitizen voting is already expanding across the globe, especially in the last few decades. “More than 45 countries on nearly every continent allow resident noncitizens to vote at the local, regional, or national level in the host countries’ elections,” write Hayduk and Coll, citing the European Union, Venezuela, Israel, and New Zealand as examples.

With 22.5 million noncitizens currently living in the United States, advocates remain cautiously hopeful about the future. If all those people could one day vote, the political implications for where they’re concentrated could be tremendous.

“We know federalism is a cornerstone of American democracy, and noncitizen voting is one way that we in San Francisco can set the tone for how we think about engaging immigrant communities to feel a sense of belonging when the federal climate signals to them they are not welcome,” said Pang of Chinese for Affirmative Action. “This has already been a tremendous victory, and whether or not the turnout is huge—that’s not the right metric to measure how effective and positive it is.”

Originally published in The Intercept on November 1, 2018.
—–

The California charter school lobby is testing its influence in the race for Superintendent of Public Instruction, turning an election for a somewhat obscure statewide position into a notably expensive battle.

More than $50 million has flown into the contest between two Democrats for a nonpartisan office with little statutory power. For perspective, this is more money raised than in any U.S. House race this cycle and most Senate races, not to mention every other race in California, save for the governor’s.

The race, largely understood as a proxy war for the future of California charter schools, is the second attempt by the state’s charter school lobby to demonstrate its influence this election cycle. The candidates, Marshall Tuck and Tony Thurmond, both insist that the race is about far more than charters, which currently enroll 10 percent of the state’s 6.2 million public school students, though they admit that they hold different visions for the publicly funded, privately managed schools. That’s something their funders also acutely recognize.

Tuck, a second-time candidate for the position who has never held elected office, has received endorsements from the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News and the San Diego Union Tribune, among others. He’s is backed by the charter school movement, which has spent close to $30 million in support of his campaign. Three individuals alone — real estate developer Bill Bloomfield, Gap co-founder Doris Fisher, and venture capitalist Arthur Rock — have given a combined $11 million.

Tuck’s campaign has also raised over $5 million, something he says challenges the notion that he’s bought and paid for by the charter lobby, which did not directly give money to his campaign. “People focus on the independent expenditures, but I go the opposite way. We’ve raised money from over 4,000 individuals in direct contributions, ranging from high income to low income, people who support charters to people who oppose them, and everything in between,” he said. “People backing me just believe public schools aren’t working for all.”

Thurmond, a state assembly member representing a city in the San Francisco Bay Area, previously worked as a teacher, a social worker, a city council member, and a school board member. Thurmond has support of The Sac Bee and Los Angeles Times, the state Democratic Party, the California Teachers Association and other unions. He has raised close to $16 million. The California Teachers Association is Thurmond’s biggest supporter, donating $8 million to his campaign.

The charter school lobby’s interest in Tuck is not surprising. He served as the first president of the Los Angeles-based charter school network, Green Dot, and then became a founding CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a city-district collaboration focused on turning around low-performing public schools. He also serves on the board of Parent Revolution, a school choice advocacy group.

In an interview, Tuck said the amount of money being spent on the race is refreshing and an appropriate change for a state that has deprioritized public education. “There are 19 million registered voters in California, so when you take a step back, that really boils down to about $2 per voter, which doesn’t seem like an obnoxious amount of money,” he said. “I do think it’s good that we finally have a lot of resources focused on education in a statewide race. In California, it takes a lot of resources to communicate.” He pointed out that not one question was asked about education in the only debate for California’s gubernatorial race.

Thurmond, despite also pulling in millions of dollars, was more critical of the influx of money. “I really wish the amount of money being spent on this race was being provided to states and school districts to educate our kids,” he said. “I think it’s a waste. That money should be going to close the achievement gap, I’d rather see it go there.” He also lambasted the billionaires who “are spending lots of money to support [Tuck] and denigrating me and the kids that I served in a low-income district. They think they know more than the educators, and I know many of those billionaires have strong feelings against teacher unions.”

The California Charter School Association — a formidable force in state politics — is aware that this election is an important chance to show its influence has staying power. The lobby is backed by a few key repeat players—including billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings — and has flexed its financial muscles in recent years, spending more than the teacher unions, which have historically dominated education politics. As EdSource reported, in 2015 and 2016 the California Teachers Association donated $4.3 million to candidates and political committees, while the charter association spent more than $17 million on state and local candidates.

In 2015, for example, the charter lobby spent more than $2 million to elect Ref Rodriguez to the Los Angeles school board, making him the first charter school operator to join the board. In 2017, education reform advocates won three more seats, giving the board a slim pro-charter majority for the first time ever. The 2017 races were the most expensive school board races in U.S. history, with the charter lobby spending $9.7 million to elect its candidates, next to the union’s $5.2 million.

The charter movement’s victory was short-lived, however. Last September, Rodriguez was criminally charged with money laundering during his 2015 campaign. This past summer, Rodriguez pleaded guilty to conspiracy and resigned from the board — an embarrassing debacle for charter advocates, and one that leaves the school board’s balance of power once again up in the air. A special election to fill his seat is set for March.

Charter advocates faced another big defeat this year when they spent $23 million backing Antonio Villaraigosa for governor. It was the largest independent expenditure effort for a gubernatorial primary in California’s history, and despite the flurry of attack ads, Gavin Newsom won the contest easily. The next governor is expected to play a major role in shaping state charter school policy, and many observers felt the charter lobby overplayed its hand by attacking Newsom so much.

California’s outgoing governor, Jerry Brown, was supported by the teachers union throughout his tenure, but he’s largely avoided placing stricter rules on charters and has steered clear of debates about their long-term future in the state. (Last month, however, Brown signed a bill, co-authored by Thurmond, that would ban for-profit charter schools. He had vetoed similar legislation in 2015, which was opposed at the time by the California Charter School Association. The association supported the bill this time around.)

Compared to the governor, the State Superintendent for Public Instruction commands far less power over education policy, but has an influential soapbox that many expect will be important as California charts its future on public education. The outgoing state superintendent, Tom Torlakson, has spoken out about the need to retool some of the state’s charter school authorization policies.

Reached for comment, the California Charter School Association referred questions to EdVoice, a separate pro-charter organization said to be handling media for the state superintendent race. EdVoice did not return multiple requests for comment.

The race has gotten more heated in the weeks leading up to Election Day, with EdVoice funding an attack ad against Thurmond that focused on his time serving as a school board member of the West Contra Costa Unified School District. The ad misleadingly suggested that Thurmond had been sued personally by the American Civil Liberties Union and reprimanded by the Obama administration. “Tony Thurmond failed the students he was supposed to help,” it states.

In 2012, the ACLU sued the district over its school facilities, and Thurmond, as a board member, was a named defendant in the suit. The ad, however, does not mention that four other board members were also sued, as were the superintendent and the associate superintendent. In 2013, the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights released a report finding that West Contra Costa had failed to promptly respond to the sexual harassment of students, though Thurmond was not a board member at this time. He said his campaign sent a cease-and-desist letter in response to the ad.

The California Democratic Party Women’s Caucus chair also issued a statement in response to the ad, calling it an exploitation of the #MeToo movement, while the California NAACP sent a letter to Tuck calling him out for “using lies and fake news to smear prominent leaders of color.”

The Thurmond campaign, for its part, has been running its own misleading ad, calling Tuck a “former Wall Street banker” and a “paid backer of charter schools,” who is “backed by Donald Trump’s education adviser and financed by the same billionaires behind Betsy DeVos.” The adviser referenced in the ad is Bill Evers, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, who wrote an op-ed in support of Tuck in September and served on Trump’s education transition team. But the ad zooms in on a picture of DeVos, confusing viewers into thinking that the education secretary herself endorsed Tuck

Tuck sent his own cease-and-desist letter to the Thurmond campaign, calling its ad dishonest for implying that he was backed by DeVos and that he was on the charter movement’s payroll.

Tuck told The Intercept that his campaign is weighing whether to sue for libel but that it would be an expensive endeavor, and they would have to prove that the ad had long-term damage. “We’re still actively investigating it, and if I could sue knowing it wouldn’t cost us $50,000, I would do it tomorrow,” he said. “It’s just the financial calculation, but we shouldn’t normalize lying being OK.”

In terms of education policy, Tuck and Thurmond’s visions have some broad similarities. They both speak passionately about ending the achievement gap and better serving the state’s neediest children. They both condemn the fact that California ranks 44th in the nation on K-12 education, according to the U.S. News & World Report, and they both want to increase state funding for schools, address the state’s teacher shortage, and expand prekindergarten.

But their visions for charter school growth are substantially different. While Tuck said ineffective charter schools should be shut down more quickly and that there needs to be “really strong accountability and transparency” for the schools, he supports opening more charters in neighborhoods where traditional public schools are producing low academic results. “I don’t think we should stop charter schools on the state level,” he added, alluding to a fierce ongoing debate over whether the state should step in to curb charter expansion.

Tuck stressed that, despite his support for charters, “the vast majority of the focus has to be on traditional public schools because that’s where the majority of the kids are.” He said his opponent has called for a “moratorium” on charters — a term Thurmond strongly contests. He prefers the word “pause.”

Thurmond, for his part, said he does not want to limit the ability to open a new charter “that has merit” but that the state must be more “intentional” about charter growth. “As a legislator, I think we have to ask ourselves, where is the tipping point at which we hurt the entire public?” he said. A study on the impact of charter schools, including “the good, the bad, and from the standpoint of what we can afford — how much more we can handle,” would be useful, he said.

Tuck is skeptical of using financial impact measures as a reason to halt new charters. “Finance should be a focus in every decision, but I don’t believe that if charters take additional kids, that would impede your ability to provide a quality education,” he said. “It would only have an impact if you don’t change your behavior at all.”

With less than a week until the election, the two candidates will continue to battle it out over their qualifications to lead California’s schools. Thurmond has the more weighty endorsements, but Tuck is outspending his opponent more than 2 to 1.

A poll released Wednesday by the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found Tuck leading Thurmond 48 percent to 36 percent, with Tuck’s advantage “underpinned by the strong backing of Republicans” and a majority of Democrats supporting Thurmond. Independent voters in the poll backed Tuck 5 to 3, while 16 percent of likely voters remain undecided.

While Thurmond points to his tenure in politics as proof of his experience and readiness for the job, Tuck has cast him as a career politician who won’t buck the status quo. The State Superintendent of Public Instruction “has been held for the last quarter century by politicians,” Tuck told the San Francisco Chronicle. “You can’t solve these problems with a bunch of bureaucrats in Sacramento.”

“I am proud to be a politician and a public servant,” said Thurmond. “The state superintendent has to work with the governor and legislature, and I have a record of doing just that. I love my job, and I could stay in the assembly if I wanted to, but I want my political legacy to be about helping kids.”

Originally published in the fall 2018 issue of Jewish Currents 

Discussed in this essay: Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s, by Marc Dollinger. Brandeis University Press, 2018. 272 pages.

THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMUNITY tells a very particular story about its history. We came over to the United States, mostly from Europe, as poor, often persecuted immigrants, and through a commitment to education and hard work, we rose collectively to seize the American dream. We especially like to highlight our commitment to civil rights and the African American struggle in the 50s and 60s, and in the decades thereafter our energized commitment to the state of Israel. While most Jews acknowledge that yes, things appear less harmonious today between blacks and Jews, we don’t dwell too long on those details. And besides, we learn, it was African American separatists who turned their backs on the interfaith work anyway.

In Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s, Marc Dollinger, a historian in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, tells a very different kind of story. After scouring primary sources from the era, he finds that Jews not only anticipated the splintering of the great interfaith, interracial coalition years before it happened, they also acknowledged their responsibility for the split. What’s more, Jews benefited directly from it.

It’s not unfounded that most young American Jews grow up learning about the role Jewish activists played in the civil rights movement. Jews really were involved and supportive in ways that differed from other white subgroups. Polls from the era revealed that Jews were almost twice as likely as white Protestants to consider “racial inequality” the most important issue of the day, and over a third of Jewish respondents thought civil rights reform was “too slow.” Jews comprised at least 30 percent of the white Freedom Riders, lent critical financial support to organizations like the NAACP, and submitted amicus briefs in support of civil rights to the Supreme Court. In 1963, Holocaust survivor and Newark rabbi Joachim Prinz spoke just before Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington, and in 1965, Rabbi Abraham Heschel famously “prayed with his feet” as he marched alongside King in Selma, Alabama.

Still, that’s not the full picture. Because despite their vocal support for the African American struggle, most Jews were not risking their livelihoods for black freedom in any real way. As Dollinger writes, Southern Jews embraced Dixie and were overwhelmingly silent on civil rights. Northern Jews took pride in their support for justice, but “most experienced that movement from the safety and comfort of their living rooms, where they read about direct-action protests in the newspaper or watched it on television.”

On top of their oft-exaggerated support, Jews actually began to retreat from the civil rights movement in the 1960s, a retreat documented at the time in a slew of confidential ADL memos authored by local regional leaders for the national office. While the leaders expressed concern over growing black militancy, “they also framed their assessment,” Dollinger writes, “. . . with a clear awareness of Jewish culpability in damaging relations with African American civil rights leaders.” One Buffalo ADL leader wrote that members of his local Jewish community felt blacks were “stirring things up too much.” Another leader overseeing the Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi region wrote, “the Jewish community is not fully living up to its own power . . . [and] by and large do not get involved in the area of race relations.” These private conversations and acknowledgements eventually spilled over into the public. “The dirty little secret of our community after all,” Dollinger quotes a Jewish activist saying to the Synagogue Council of America in 1969, “is that its leaders have always spoken more forcefully and radically than its followers have felt.”

This recognition of the partial blame Jews shouldered meant that when African American leaders began voicing frustration with their Jewish allies, tired of their gradualism and paternalism, Jewish leaders often conceded those critiques had validity. And when some of those African American frustrations veered into outright antisemitism, Jewish leaders tended to minimize the prejudice. “Embracing the era’s emerging analysis of power relations, they differentiated between antisemitism, which posed relatively little risk to the continued social mobility of American Jews, and racism, which continued to limit African American advance,” Dollinger writes. It’s hard to fathom American Jewish leaders issuing such measured responses to black antisemitism today. Consider the Jewish establishment’s fixation with pressuring black leaders like Keith Ellison or Women’s March co-founder Tamika Mallory to disavow Louis Farrakhan and his greatly diminished Nation of Islam.

A central tenet of Black Power, Jewish Politics is that as this political rift opened between blacks and Jews in the late 1960s, as black activists began organizing more exclusively by and for black Americans, the space for Jews to organize by and for Jews in the United States widened, too. This then enabled Jewish leaders to build a new kind of narrative for the Jewish community, one of “Klal Yisrael.” Sometimes that meant flooding the streets and Capitol Hill on behalf of Soviet Jewry and the State of Israel. Sometimes that meant organizing for more explicitly Jewish institutions in the United States like an expansion of Jewish day schools. (There were 35 Jewish day schools in 1940, with that number rising to 323 by 1965, and 425 by 1973.) Jews began to publicly lean into identity politics in a way that before would have felt unkosher, too vulnerable to charges of dual loyalty. “Black Power proved quite good for the Jews,” Dollinger quips at one point.

Neoconservative intellectuals helped bolster this new framework of Jewish community. In 1971, Nathan Glazer, a former Commentary magazine editor, argued that Jewish dissidents who challenged this newfound unity around Israel (and anti-communism) displayed “anti-Jewish tendencies.” That same year Norman Podhoretz argued in Commentary that Jewish radicals who challenged the communal consensus were actually committing acts of antisemitism. As Jews drifted further from their roots of interracial, interfaith solidarity, they adopted the language of solidarity more exclusively and dogmatically for themselves.

Today, rather than teach young Jews the different ways Jewish Americans responded to the civil rights movement—including both inaction and opposition—we opt for a sanitized picture that obscures the complex racial, economic, and geographical dynamics of the period. Rather than teach how Jewish and black leaders during the civil rights era recognized the often challenging power dynamics between the two communities, American Jews teach a glorified history of Jews as brave, selfless allies, motivated by our sense of tikkun olam, unfairly spurned by black nationalists later on. Just this past spring James Kirchick penned an essay in Commentary echoing this narrative, touting Jewish involvement in the NAACP and the civil rights movement, and how “perplexing and painful” it was when black separatist movements like the Nation of Islam and Black Panthers grew in power, espousing a “Third Worldist ideology” and “anti-Israel (and often anti-Semitic) rhetoric.”

Meanwhile, the ADL is hardly on the front lines of the civil rights movement anymore. Beginning in the 1980s, as American Jews continued to climb the economic ranks and assimilate into white society, the group’s approach shifted away from overt political advocacy toward providing educational resources and workshops for combating racial bias and discrimination. Today the ADL goes so far as to sponsor annual trips to Israel for US law enforcement to learn from and train with Israeli police and military officials. While the organization casts these experiences as opportunities for enhanced counterterrorism efforts, it’s hard to defend equipping American police with the discriminatory tactics deployed by an occupying army.

Unfortunately, in the name of Klal Yisrael, we’ve simultaneously thwarted intellectual growth in our community and hindered real accountability. While there is greater individual reckoning on the part of Jews with the power dynamics between ourselves and African Americans, our engagement in solidarity activism rarely examines our community’s power and wealth. This past summer, Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, gave a speech at the tail end of the Poor People’s Campaign, saying that “Jewish tradition teaches us that poverty is the greatest issue facing our society.” While Jacobs is right to publicly highlight the issue of poverty, we in our community know that many wealthy American Jews—including those who belong to Reform congregations—oppose massive redistribution of wealth, and rarely have to answer for it.

And rather than teach the rich tapestry of dissent and debate over the question of Jewish self-determination, we teach absolute support for Israel, as if questions around a Jewish nation-state have not only been settled, but were never really debated at all. Within our communal institutions, we censure voices that seek to stigmatize those with wretched politics and exorbitant wealth. It’s why mainstream Jewish organizations continue to ingratiate themselves at the feet of billionaires like Sheldon Adelson.

This ideal of communal consensus is seductive and reassuring, as is emphasizing aspects of our history in which we can take pride. But it has prevented a real honest reckoning with Jewish history and Jewish power, and at whose expense our power has come. Books like Black Power, Jewish Politics are a bold first step toward such a discussion.

Originally published in Washington City Paper on October 10, 2018.
—–

This week D.C. will hold its third and final round of public meetings for a little-known planning process that could reshape the city’s balance between neighborhood schools and charters.

For the past 16 months, Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office has been developing a blueprint for the future of the city’s schools, known as a “Master Facilities Plan.” By law, this comprehensive report will provide city leaders with an overview of the state of school buildings across the District. The goal is to analyze population projections and school building data so that policymakers can plan for the next decade of D.C. public education. How should resources be directed? What schools need to be built? Where?

The stakes are high. Though D.C. has one of the largest charter school sectors in the country—educating nearly half of all city students—most families assume they could still send their child to their local neighborhood school, a District of Columbia Public School, if they wanted. A 2014 advisory committee on student assignment led by the deputy mayor for education found strong public support for maintaining schools that students living within a certain distance are entitled to attend.

But since 2008, the number of charters in the city has increased from 93 to 120, while the number of neighborhood schools has declined from 134 to 114. Only four new DCPS schools have opened in the city during this period, compared with 27 charters. Many advocates say there needs to be more coordination between the two school sectors if D.C. wants to ensure that all families have access to a neighborhood public school in the future.

Expected demographic shifts add another layer of complexity. The D.C. Auditor projectsschool enrollment to grow by 12,000 to 17,000 students in the next 10 years, with the bulk of that growth occurring in the middle and upper grades. A separate analysis produced by the D.C. Policy Center puts those estimates even higher, predicting just over 21,000 new students by 2026.

The city historically hasn’t been great at planning for school facilities—inequitably distributing capital dollars, haphazardly drawing school boundary lines, and failing to ensure that taxpayers get the best bang for their buck. The D.C. Auditor’s office examined school modernizations between 2010 and 2013 and found that the city lacked “basic financial management” over its $1.2 billion in spending, allowing large cost-overruns and misallocated funds. “District resources are finite,” said Auditor Kathy Patterson at the time. “We owe it to taxpayers to see that modernization funds are spent well and prudently, to assure our ability to complete the task of upgrading all of our schools.” The 21st Century School Fund, a local nonprofit that advocates for high-quality school buildings, estimates D.C. will need to budget at least $400 million annually to maintain its DCPS and charter schools in good repair.

While more than $4 billion has already been spent on local school upgrades since 2000, schools with high rates of students in poverty have historically gotten the short end of the stick. Some schools that clamored for renovations received practically no money for capital improvements, while others successfully lobbied for multiple rounds of investment.

D.C.’s leaders have taken a weaving path to this moment. School facility planning has been a long-standing issue, but has grown especially charged since 2015, when, aware of mounting issues, city leadership finally resolved to act. At an oversight hearing before the Council, then-DC Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson advocated for revamping the school modernization process. “My very honest assessment is that the whole [capital improvement] process is jacked up,” she said, calling it too political and expensive, and proposed a new, transparent system for addressing school facilities. Henderson envisioned distributing public dollars based on “logical” criteria, not “how loudly your community screams.”

In a process spearheaded by At-Large Councilmember David Grosso, who took over in 2015 as chairman of the Education Committee, the Council held hearings and drafted new legislation—the Planning Actively for Comprehensive Education (PACE) Facilities Act—to bring order, equity, and transparency to the school planning process. Bowser signed it into law at the end of 2016.

Yet in the nearly two years since the PACE Act’s passage, a number of glaring obstacles to comprehensive school facility planning have emerged. The mayor’s office has blown many months of deadlines and worked actively to conceal information about charter facility conditions and costs. Elected officials, reluctant to confront tough politics, have worked to reinterpret or simply ignore the intent of the law that they themselves authorized.

Compounding these issues is the fact that charter schools are not required to share their long-term growth plans with the public. Residents say they worry that when all is said and done, the city will not really be in a place so different from where it was before—thinking through complex issues with incomplete data, having no expectation that DCPS and charter-sector leaders work together, and not even requiring that the data collected be used to guide school planning decisions.

***

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to determine how many schools are needed to educate the District’s 91,000 public school students, and where new schools must go to accommodate student growth in the years ahead. Publicly, at least, city officials agree that they’d like to maintain D.C.’s balance of a choice-based charter system and traditional public schools that students can attend by-right. Even Scott Pearson, the executive director of the DC Public Charter School Board, has said he wouldn’t want to see D.C. go all-charter. “The current model, with two public school systems pushing each other to be better and cooperating whenever possible, is proving to be the right mix for the District’s schoolchildren,” he wrote in a 2015 Washington Post opinion piece.

But maintaining this rough balance could require new limits on the charter sector’s autonomy, something charter leaders and the mayor’s office are loath to discuss. “It takes real planning,” says Danica Petroshius, the co-vice president of the Capitol Hill Public Schools Parent Organization. “Which means making decisions and sharing oversight over the two sectors because they are for one system of students.”

The Public Charter School Board currently has complete authority to open and close charters across the city, and typically approves new schools to open before charters have determined where they’ll in fact be located. Pointing to the long waitlists for some of the city’s top-performing charters, leaders say they feel a moral urgency to grow new high-quality schools as fast as they can. “I’m not interested in joint planning as a cover to put some sort of moratorium on charters,” Pearson once told The Post.

The passage of the PACE Act, though, was considered one of the clearest signs that leaders were finally open to making comprehensive, cross-sector decisions about school facilities in D.C.

The 2013 Master Facilities Plan, which included a limited amount of charter school data, articulated the problems D.C. faces when it comes to school planning. “At present, there is little coordination of school facility needs with expenditures across all public schools, for both DCPS and charters” the 2013 report acknowledged. Charter schools were “growing haphazardly” as schools “open wherever they can find space that is both affordable and sufficient for their needs, and many remain in substandard facilities.” DCPS and charter facility data were “inconsistent, inaccessible or both,” and the lack of a comprehensive fact base made it “nearly impossible to make strategic facility investments” and “perpetuates the conflict between DCPS and charter[s].”

Three years later, by 2016, the Council’s Education Committee reported that little had changed. The PACE Act, the Council made clear, would be its attempt to finally take action. The act directed D.C.’s education agencies and the Department of General Services to “conduct an annual survey to update information on the condition of each DCPS and public charter school facility.” The survey results “shall be disaggregated by facility, [and] made publicly available.”

The Council recognized that some charters might be resistant to increased data collection, so the PACE Act also authorized the mayor’s office to fine the Public Charter School Board up to $10,000 annually if charters failed to cooperate.

***

Several key drafters of the PACE Act tell City Paper there was no ambiguity at the time as to whether the legislation was intended to fill the well documented gaps in school facility data collection. The Council also felt it needed to more clearly understand charter facility conditions, as they’re nearly entirely funded by taxpayers. Unlike DCPS schools, which receive facility funding from the city’s capital budget, charter schools receive a “facilities allowance” for every student they educate, taken from the city’s operating budget. Today that allowance stands at $3,193 per pupil. However, charters are not actually required to spend their facility allowances on their school facilities, nor must they publicly document the conditions of their buildings.

Jump ahead to the summer of last year, though, and signs started to emerge that the process was breaking down.

In July 2017, then-Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer Niles sent a memo to all local education agencies informing them of the upcoming Master Facilities Plan. While Niles emphasized that participation would make the process more successful, her letter suggested that participation for charter schools housed in “non-District owned facilities” would be voluntary, and that if they do participate, their facility assessments “will not be shared directly with” the mayor or the charter board. In other words, the charters located in 70 privately owned buildings across D.C. would not have to share their facility assessments with policymakers.

Mary Filardo, head of the 21st Century School Fund, sent the mayor a letter in August 2017 raising concerns with Niles’ memo. “Without full disclosure and complete data on the facility condition, design, capacity and growth plans for charter, as well as DCPS schools, it is not possible to efficiently plan for projected child population growth, equitably allocate its public education operating and capital budgets, exercise appropriate oversight of the District’s budget … or engage communities in authentic neighborhood level planning,” Filardo wrote. She also noted that parents would not be able to make fully informed school choices if they lacked information about the safety and condition of each school.

When Niles sent a vague letter back on behalf of the mayor a month later, she didn’t respond to Filardo’s concerns directly. Instead she said that it’s her priority that charters are included in the Master Facilities Plan, and that her team was confident this would happen. “I appreciate that we both feel strongly about the need for comprehensive facility information and planning, and I look forward to further dialogue and feedback,” Niles wrote.

That same month, a group of D.C. education stakeholders convened to discuss implementation of the PACE Act, and why it appeared the mayor’s office seemed to be diverging away from its legislative intent. “It seems incomprehensible that the city would require 10 years of planning for public school buildings involving billions of dollars to be done in the dark,” said Filardo at the time.

Meanwhile, the mayor started missing PACE Act deadlines. The first was Sept. 30, 2017—when the mayor’s office was supposed to have assessed each DCPS school according to criteria that could allow for the objective prioritization of capital funds. That date was set so parents and community members would have ample time to weigh in before the mayor’s budget was finalized.

The next missed deadline was in December 2017, when the mayor’s office was supposed to submit its final Master Facilities Plan. The office first requested an extension for March 2018, but at an oversight hearing in mid- February the public learned the mayor wanted to push the report back even further. “You will have the report next August, August 2018,” said Niles. She said the delay was due to it taking longer than expected to fundraise for charter facility assessments in privately owned buildings.

The plan still hasn’t been released, and the mayor’s office now promises it sometime before the end of 2018—a year late.

At that same February hearing, Grosso, the chair of the Education Committee, said he worried the mayor’s office was delaying the completion of the Master Facilities Plan to bypass public scrutiny on its next budget. Niles denied this, but resigned three days later, after news broke that she assisted DCPS Chancellor Antwan Wilson in gaming the school lottery.

Two months later, at an April budget oversight hearing, Grosso grilled Niles’ replacement, interim Deputy Mayor for Education Ahnna Smith, on why so many components of the PACE Act were still not being followed, including the requirement to produce a detailed analysis of the modernization needs of each school, along with timelines for new construction, and cost assessments. Grosso said it appeared the mayor was just picking and choosing which items she felt like complying with. Smith said she didn’t have an answer to give him, but would confer later with DCPS and the Department of General Services to find out.

“I’d be more understanding if we didn’t go through a two-year public process writing this law, if the mayor didn’t actually sign it, and support it,” Grosso said at the hearing. “I think it’s disrespectful to the democratic process.”

***

Internal documents show the city working closely with charter-supportive organizations to keep charter facility data hidden—even from the city itself.

The Master Facilities Plan is built on what are known as “Facility Condition Assessments,” or FCAs. These are detailed evaluations of the capital needs of each school building, conducted by an outside civil engineering firm. These comprehensive school-level reports can easily exceed 200 pages each, and are aimed at determining maintenance requirements and costs for all parts of the building, exterior and interior, over a decade. The mayor’s office budgeted to fund FCAs in all DCPS schools and charters in publicly owned buildings, but at some point the mayor’s office began working with the Walton Family Foundation to fund optional FCAs for charters leasing from privately owned buildings.

Emails produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the D.C. Open Government Coalition, and shared with City Paper, show the topic emerging as early as July 2017, though it’s not clear when or how these discussions began.

The emails show the mayor’s office working hand-in-glove with Education Forward DC (an education reform grant-making organization), Ampersand Education (a consulting firm) and the Walton Family Foundation to figure out how to fund the FCAs. They landed on creating a new layer of bureaucracy to separate the data from the public: The Walton Family Foundation would fund Education Forward DC to contract the facility assessments, and Ampersand consultants would act as liaisons between the charters, Education Forward DC, and the contractor.

Most unusual was that the mayor’s office itself was pushing to ensure that the results of the facility conditions assessments would stay permanently out of public view. The Walton Family Foundation and Ed Forward DC confirmed to City Paper that the stipulation to keep the charter FCAs private did not come from them.

FOIA’d emails show that Alex Cross, the facilities officer for the deputy mayor for education, drafted a $750,000 grant application to the Walton Family Foundation to fund these facility assessments. But rather than submitting that application directly himself, he arranged for Education Forward DC to submit it under their name. A February 2018 email from Cross emphasized to an Ampersand Education consultant that when she begins her work on this project, she or Education Forward DC should specifically communicate to charters that the collected facilities data “will not be shared with DME, PCSB, or publicly.”

A document distributed directly to the charter schools reiterated that “none of the school-level data will be shared with the DME, PCSB, OSSE, or any other government agency or made public in any way.” (OSSE is the Office of the State Superintendent of Education.) The document, which City Paper reviewed, clarified that the Walton Family Foundation, Education Forward DC, Ampersand Education, the engineering firm, and the individual charters would retain access to the facility information.

City Paper asked the Deputy Mayor for Education’s office why it did not submit the grant to the Walton Family Foundation itself, as it was Cross—a city employee—who drafted much of it. City Paper also asked if prior to Education Forward DC submitting the grant, the mayor’s office otherwise attempted to secure funding to contract the assessments themselves.

The deputy mayor’s office did not directly answer these questions. “The Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education and this administration have worked hard to reach unprecedented levels of transparency and accountability throughout the 2018 Master Facilities Plan process,” said then-Deputy Mayor for Education Ahnna Smith in an emailed response. “For the first time in the District’s history, the Master Facilities Plan will be informed by facility information on both DCPS and DC public charter schools, as a result of work by this administration.”

Maura Marino, the CEO of Education Forward DC, the group that received the Walton grant, told City Paper that this arrangement may have been decided on to help maximize participation from charter schools that otherwise might resist facility inspections. She said that some charters in privately owned facilities could have landlords who oppose the idea of contractors coming in to assess their buildings. This way, if contractors did come in, the assessments would only be shared as part of an aggregated, anonymized summary. Marino also noted that complications can sometimes arise when private groups donate directly to government, and that foundations often prefer to avoid those risks by channeling funds through nonprofit intermediaries.

“I think we all have an interest in the Master Facilities Plan being as inclusive as possible,” said Marino. “In general our goal should be more information and the best information.”

Nevertheless, unlike DCPS schools and charters in publicly owned buildings, charters in privately owned facilities will not be submitting detailed building assessments for the Master Facilities Plan. City Paper has learned that of the 70 non-District owned facilities that house charter schools, 49 have opted for facility conditions assessments, though the public is barred from knowing which buildings those are, and which charter schools lease from them.

As an alternative to FCAs, charters were invited to fill out brief surveys with seven questions related to their anticipated facility needs over the next decade, and a separate 17-question survey on facility conditions. (The Public Charter School Board drafted the survey, with feedback from the mayor’s office and the Department of General Services, according to PCSB spokesperson Tomeika Bowden.)

The questions were general. One question asks: “Does your facility have known potential asbestos hazards?” and the answer choices are “Yes” or “No”—with the option to include additional comments. Another question invites respondents to briefly describe “the most likely renovations you would undertake” in the next 10 years.

In addition to data disparities, charter schools do not have to share their long-term growth plans with the public, despite the impact charter enrollment has on DCPS enrollment. Many parents have been asking how strategic planning can really work without this type of information.

City Paper asked the Public Charter School Board how it envisions using the results of the Master Facilities Plan in its charter approval process and was told, “we’re in the process of determining that.” The charter sector is not required to use the MFP data to guide the opening, closing, and siting of its schools.

City Paper went back to David Grosso to ask how the city could comprehensively plan for the future if school-level data for dozens of charters are not shared with the government and public.

In a statement that seems to contradict the language of his own committee’s 2016 report, Grosso said the PACE Act does not require the FCAs be made public, though he “believes it is the best interest of the families and schools to share information on the state of facilities so that everyone can make fully informed decisions.” He said it would be “up to the Deputy Mayor for Education” to incentivize charter schools to participate in the MFP.

And then, in what appears an even further walk-back from the Council’s 2016 position, Grosso said, “in the end, the PACE Act was designed to provide government with a useful tool to plan for the modernization and improvement of facilities in which it can invest capital dollars.” Because charter school facility allowances come out of operating budgets, not capital budgets, Grosso’s statement implied that knowing the conditions of charter schools is less essential.

Somewhere along the way, the mayor’s office and the Council quietly decided that the PACE Act, passed to improve citywide planning and data collection, would now have significant caveats, carve-outs, and exceptions.

“Things are much more complicated than people are honest about,” says Eboni-Rose Thompson, the chair of the Ward 7 Education Council, who attended both the April and August MFP public engagement sessions. “We have students living in areas that literally couldn’t fit into their neighborhood schools if they wanted to go.”

“There’s a huge flaw if DCPS is trying to do long-term planning around population and enrollment targets, but not in conjunction with the charter sector which affects DCPS enrollment,” says Petroshius, of Capitol Hill Public Schools Parent Organization. “If charter growth is essentially unlimited then the Master Facilities Plan is essentially meaningless.”

These cross-sector issues have been debated for at least the past five years. In 2013, D.C. resident Virginia Spatz was quoted in The Washington Post as saying, “Maybe we need an entire school system full of charters. But we need to have that after public conversation, not by accident.”

Valerie Jablow, a DCPS parent who writes about school issues on her blog education dc, says she worries that a future where all students are entitled to attend public schools near their home is falling further down the priority list for D.C. leadership.

“Without a commitment to a by-right system of municipally-run schools in every neighborhood as a foundational principle of public education planning and governance,” said Jablow, “leaders will never be able to ensure that the right to education in D.C. is guaranteed and secured equitably for all everywhere.”

Originally published in The American Prospect‘s fall 2018 magazine.

Thirty-six governor’s mansions are up for grabs this November, and Ben Jealous, the 45-year-old former president of the NAACP turned venture capitalist, is on a mission to reclaim Maryland’s for the Democrats. In theory, this shouldn’t be such a heavy lift. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1 in the state, and Hillary Clinton swept it in 2016 by 26 points. The election carries some symbolic weight as well: If Jealous won, he would become the first African American governor of this former slave state where Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman once toiled. Like his fellow black gubernatorial nominees, Stacey Abrams in Georgia and Andrew Gillum in Florida, Jealous could make some history this November.

But the media and most political observers remain skeptical of Jealous’s prospects. His opponent, Republican Larry Hogan, who previously worked as a real-estate developer, has governed as a centrist, avoided major scandal, distanced himself from President Trump, and boasts a 70 percent approval rating. Hogan’s fundraising haul also dwarfs that of Jealous. Pundits say his popularity and available resources should insulate him from any sort of blue-wave midterm.

But Jealous, a towering six feet, four inches, isn’t fazed—and certainly isn’t running to the center. He’s convinced that the path to victory doesn’t require courting the moderate Democrats in Hogan’s camp, but galvanizing the many thousands of Democrats who stayed home on Election Day four years ago.

Running on Medicare for All, ending mass incarceration, fully funding public schools, legalizing marijuana, a $15 minimum wage, public infrastructure investments, universal pre-K, and tuition-free college, Jealous’s platform is a grab bag of unabashed progressive demands. “If we’re unafraid to be Democrats, we will win,” he told me in August.

Jealous’s campaign presents an interesting test case, not only for the Old Line State, but for the Democratic Party writ large. Though he failed to win the endorsement of much of the statewide liberal elite during the primary season, he ended up carrying 22 of the state’s 24 counties, beating out the presumed frontrunner by 10 points in a packed field of nine candidates—all while refusing corporate contributions, something no other gubernatorial candidate in Maryland has ever done.

“We won overwhelmingly in a very crowded primary by a big margin precisely because Marylanders are eager for us to solve problems at scale,” he says. “They want us to stop nibbling around the edges.”

In 2016, Jealous endorsed Bernie Sanders for president early on, quickly becoming one of Sanders’s most vocal and important surrogates during the primaries. Now in 2018, Jealous has chosen as his lieutenant-governor running mate Susie Turnbull, a party insider and 2016 Clinton supporter, in the hope that the Bernie-Hillary divide can be overcome with the right team, attitude, and message.

For Jealous, Election Day will be a referendum on incrementalism—and a measure of just how potent the state’s progressive movement really is.

JEALOUS’S STRATEGY IS ROOTED in the numbers. The Democrats project that the state’s electorate will hit 2.1 million voters this November, and “if we turn out one million voters to the polls, we win,” he says. Republican gubernatorial candidates, he likes to remind the public, have never secured more than 900,000 votes in this blue state, and in 2014, a cycle with markedly low turnout, Hogan won with only 884,400 votes, beating out his Democratic opponent by a 66,000-vote margin. Four years earlier, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martin O’Malley sailed to re-election with more than a million ballots cast in his favor. Democrats are banking on 2018 looking a lot more like 2010 than 2014.

What went wrong four years ago?

“There just didn’t seem to be as much at stake,” says Mark McLaurin, the political director for SEIU 500, which endorsed Jealous in the primary. “In 2014, we still had President Obama, most core Democratic constituencies considered 2016 in the bag, there wasn’t a sense of urgency, and the Democrats just didn’t have a very robust field operation.” McLaurin, an operative who has worked in Maryland campaigns for the past 20 years, says he “never saw a quieter Election Day in Baltimore City than in the 2014 general.”

The Democratic contender that year was former Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, a relatively uninspiring candidate who waged a muted campaign. He still won Baltimore City and other reliably Democratic counties, but the number of votes was way down. Baltimore City was down 13 percent from 2010, Prince George’s County was down by 5 percent, and Montgomery County dropped by 9 percent.

“In certain parts of Maryland, there’s a feeling that the real race is the primary,” says Roxie Herbekian, president of the UNITE HERE local in Baltimore City. “With Anthony Brown, we worked really hard to get him to be the nominee, and after that everyone kind of relaxed, his campaign relaxed, and then it wasn’t until the last two weeks that we were like, ‘Oh shit, what the hell is going on.’” Herbekian says this year, “no one is taking anything for granted.”

Aside from awakening from 2014 complacency, the other major difference between that midterm election and the fast-approaching one is a man named Donald Trump. A poll released in June found that 46 percent of Maryland Democrats ranked “removing Donald Trump from office” as their number-one priority. While Hogan has tried to walk a careful tightrope as a centrist Republican who distances himself from the president or stays quiet on federal policy, November is the first opportunity most voters have to voice their opposition to the nation’s historically unpopular president. That, combined with the looming 2020 census and the fact that half of all legislators drawing the congressional redistricting maps in 2021 will be elected this year, makes this a higher-stakes midterm than the last.

Beyond riding the blue wave, Jealous’s campaign is banking on two strategies to improve Democratic margins: progressive policy solutions, and an aggressive voter turnout effort.

In 2014, the Democratic-coordinated campaign in Maryland had a total of 15 field organizers on the ground. This year, 27 Democratic organizers were hired by August, with near 70 active across the state by September.

Jealous also points to the political team he has assembled, which produced the turnout that led to O’Malley’s 2010 victory. In that year, Turnbull, Jealous’s running mate, was the chair of the state Democratic Party; his campaign manager, Travis Tazelaar, was executive director of the state party; and David Sloan, who is now running the statewide coordinated campaign for all Democratic candidates, was the state party’s political director. “The NAACP was involved too, and together we turned out more than a million voters,” says Jealous. Turnbull, Tazelaar, and Sloan pointedly did not lead the 2014 political effort, and Jealous had also left the civil rights organization by that time.

His team also hopes for some help from the many resistance groups that have sprung up since 2016.

Chris Pickett, a science policy analyst in Montgomery County, joined the national grassroots organization Indivisible after Trump won. He founded Indivisible Montgomery in December 2016, and says his group grew from 15 friends to 1,400 members in just six weeks. (With “Indivisible MoCo” and “Indivisible Montgomery County,” Pickett’s county actually boasts three separate Indivisible chapters, a reality he chalks up to people wanting to focus on different things, and a lot of natural leaders in the region.)

“For the vast majority of our members, this is their first time being an activist,” Pickett says, noting that he’s a newcomer to activism, too. Indivisible Montgomery generally steers clear of Maryland Senate and House of Delegates races, but has focused its energies on flipping Congress and the Maryland governor’s seat. “We sent a bunch of people down to Virginia for Ralph Northam; we had people go up to Pennsylvania for Conor Lamb; we phone-banked for the special election in Ohio,” he says. “We want to put a check on the federal government, and we recognize voting is the biggest way we can make our voices heard.” While Pickett’s chapter did not make an endorsement in the Maryland gubernatorial primary, he says his members have been eager to dive into the general.

The story is similar across the state. In Baltimore City, an Indivisible chapter formed after Trump’s inauguration and has met every two weeks since. In the beginning, according to member Jennay Ghowrwal, they focused almost exclusively on federal issues. But as time went on, Indivisible Baltimore decided to get involved in the Virginia election, and targeted a Republican state delegate seat in a district that Clinton won in 2016. “We organized carpools down there, knocked on 10,000 doors, and when the Republican lost in 2017, we all just realized how energizing that was,” she says. In 2018, they focused on passing automatic voter registration—something Indivisible Baltimore and other chapters managed to achieve in Maryland’s latest legislative session. (The policy will go into effect in 2019.) Now Ghowrwal says her group is ready to elect Jealous, someone they feel will do a better job than Hogan at standing up to Trump.

Martha McKenna, a Baltimore-based strategist working to elect Jealous, put it this way: “It’s not that I automatically think people are hooked into the governor’s race, but there’s a level of civic engagement in Baltimore and statewide spurred by the Trump administration and the school shootings and the Annapolis shooting that is very different than it was four years ago,” she says. “In a way, people have been feeling very anxious. The issues in communities feel scarier, more intense, and in many ways more political.”

BUT CAN JEALOUS, A first-time candidate who ran as an outsider, get the insiders in his camp?

In the primary, most of the state’s Democratic establishment lined up behind Rushern Baker, the outgoing county executive in Prince George’s County, who ran a campaign premised on the idea that he could win back some Hogan voters in 2018. Baker, a Clinton supporter in 2016, claimed endorsements from former Governor O’Malley, House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Senators Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin, and State Attorney General Brian Frosh. (The Baltimore Sun endorsed Jealous, while The Washington Post backed Baker.)

Jealous, on the other hand, says he’s not wasting his time trying to win back the moderate Democrats who will vote for Hogan, arguing that there’s simply not that many of them. (Although, exit polls found that 23 percent of Democratic voters cast their ballots for Hogan in 2014, and a poll released in early June found that 24 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they planned to vote for Hogan in November.)

In June, a few dozen Maryland Democrats came out with endorsements for Hogan, though most were older white men who hadn’t served in office for years. Others had received political appointments from the governor, or had records of supporting Republican candidates in the past. The only statewide elected Democrat to back Hogan was 84-year-old Melvin Steinberg, who served as lieutenant governor from 1987 to 1995. In 1998, Steinberg endorsed Republican Ellen Sauerbrey for governor, a candidate opposed to abortion rights and gun control.

“We’ve seen this before,” Jealous says dismissively when I ask him about Democratic endorsements for his opponent. “There’s literally nothing happening in the Hogan campaign that wasn’t happening in the [Robert] Ehrlich campaign, and Ehrlich was a one-term bird, and Hogan will be a one-termer, too.” Ehrlich served as Maryland’s Republican governor from 2003 to 2007, and lost his re-election campaign to O’Malley by 6.5 points despite commanding a 55 percent approval rating at the time. Jealous’s team says Ehrlich’s defeat is instructive, and should give confidence to those who hear about Hogan’s high approval rating. The 2006 election also featured the last Democratic wave, as popular disapproval of the Bush administration’s war in Iraq swept the Democrats back in control of Congress.

After the June primary, all the gubernatorial candidates quickly came together to back Jealous, though some other state Democratic leaders have been slower to voice their support. The long-serving state senate president, Mike Miller, initially offered only mild enthusiasm for Jealous, having praised Hogan for his bipartisanship work. The outgoing executive of affluent Montgomery County, Isiah Leggett, said Jealous’s support for a millionaire tax and redistributing more state funds to poorer school districts left him ambivalent about an endorsement. Senator Cardin and Maryland House Speaker Michael Busch gave Jealous their blessing, but made a point to highlight their disagreement with him on such issues as single-payer health care.

“We have to be clear about what happened here,” says Bob Muehlenkamp, chair of Our Revolution Maryland, the group that formed out of the 2016 Sanders campaign, which backed Jealous early on. “Not a single elected Democratic official came out for Ben in the primary, which means we defeated the established Democratic Party of the state of Maryland. What does it say about a party that will not unequivocally work now to throw out a Republican governor in the era of Trump?”

Muehlenkamp chalks the electeds’ reticence up to “how miserably corporate” the Democratic Party is in Maryland. “It’s a corporate-controlled party, and they can use all the dog whistles they want about how they think his policies can’t win, or he’s too far out on Medicare for All, or we can’t do $15 minimum wage right now, but the truth is they want Ben Jealous to lose, because he would disrupt their nice little in-crowd club, and they’d rather make peace with whatever governor there is—even in the age of Trump.”

McLaurin of SEIU 500 says the recent primary suggests it’s not that important how quickly or slowly the stragglers from the Democratic establishment decide to get on board, because the primary results indicate a new generation of progressives are poised to disrupt the party. Not only did Jealous sweep the state by a considerable margin, but a number of progressive challengers down-ballot also defeated longtime Democratic incumbents. Among those unseated were the chair of the state Senate Finance Committee and the chair of the Education, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee. “This is the kind of year where voters just aren’t taking the normal political cues,” McLaurin says.

JEALOUS ISN’T CAMPAIGNING on “making Maryland great again,” but he does talk a lot about “restoring the promise of Maryland.”

Jealous describes the promise of Maryland as one where his grandfather could attend a year of law school at the University of Maryland in the late 1950s for $200 in tuition. Today, Jealous says, if tuition had kept up with inflation, the cost for students would be about $2,600. Instead, it’s more than $31,000. “There’s nothing outlandish about saying we want millennials to get the same deal the Greatest Generation got,” Jealous said to a crowd of young political activists this summer.

The promise of Maryland, Jealous also likes to say, is one where a guy like him could have a mother born and raised in Baltimore public housing, who one day sends her son off to Columbia University and then to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

Jealous has long been an activist. In college, he led protests, boycotts, and pickets for such issues as preserving financial aid and homelessness rights. He was ultimately suspended for his rabble-rousing, and moved down to Mississippi to work as an organizer, later becoming a local reporter in Jackson. When he eventually returned to Columbia, he graduated with a political science degree, and went to study comparative social research at Oxford. He spent the decade after that leading an association of black community newspapers, directing the U.S. human rights program at Amnesty International, and doing a one-year stint training to be a priest.

In 2008, at age 35, he became the youngest person to ever take the helm of the NAACP. This was a controversial pick given his youth and lack of close ties to the movement. But Julian Bond, the longtime chair of the organization, pushed hard for Jealous, believing in his potential.

Under Jealous’s half-decade of leadership, the NAACP, headquartered in Maryland, helped pass the state’s DREAM Act, its referendum on gay marriage, and the abolition of Maryland’s death penalty. The Baltimore Sun named him “Marylander of the Year” in 2013 for his accomplishments.

Some analysts worry about Jealous’s uncompromising platform, which says Democrats can do it all, Democrats can do it soon, and Marylanders can afford it. (He regularly reminds crowds that Maryland has the highest median household income of any state in the country.) “This campaign is fundamentally about big ideas versus small ideas,” he tells me. “When times were darkest in this nation, FDR called on us to think big. He understood that we need whole solutions to whole problems.”

I asked McLaurin of SEIU if he’s worried that Jealous’s emphasis on issues like single-payer health care and ending mass incarceration might turn off white, moderate voters.

“What I will say is that most statewide officials—even your progressive ones—are very pragmatic, institutionalist,” he answered. “Even O’Malley was just an innately cautious politician who really wanted to put his finger to the wind, and he was not going to move on an issue until it was shown it would not be fatal to his own ambition.” To an extent he has never seen, McLaurin continued, Jealous has been “forthright in what he believes, even if it’s not always the safest thing. I think that authenticity is something the electorate is looking for.”

FOR ALL HIS BREAK-the-mold leftism, Jealous has consistently identified himself as a venture capitalist, touting his belief in market-driven social change. In the five years since he left the NAACP, Jealous worked at Kapor Capital, where he led investments in small businesses that target underserved communities. (One of his favorite companies, Pigeonly, slashed the costs of making phone calls home from prison.)

Jealous emphasizes his opposition to “crony capitalism” and to big corporations, those that pour their profits back into dividends and buybacks for shareholders. He’s criticized the way Maryland leaders have tripped over themselves with tax breaks to entice Amazon to build its new headquarters in their state. Jealous’s economic vision, he explains, is built on taking risks on entrepreneurs and small business owners, what he calls “community-based” capitalism. Early this year, Discovery Communications, a Fortune 500 company, announced it was relocating its Maryland headquarters to New York. Jealous pointed to this as evidence of the dangers of relying on big companies for economic security. Figuring out how to help small businesses thrive, like those at Baltimore’s Lexington Market, he says, is where there’s untapped potential for prosperity and job growth.

When I asked Jealous what he makes of the recent Gallup polling that showed 57 percent of Democrats viewed socialism positively, and whether he’s creating space for those who don’t see “socialism” as a dirty word, he didn’t directly answer.

“I’m just not interested in parlor debates about what we call ourselves,” he said. “I’m very intentional about building a big tent, and bringing in people who voted for Bernie, for Trump, for Hillary.”

But sometimes Jealous’s efforts to dispel notions that he’s a tax-and-spend radical can seem over the top. Over the summer, Hogan called Jealous a “far-left socialist” in a New York Times interview. A Washington Post reporter followed up by asking Jealous if he identified with the socialist label. “Are you fucking kidding me?” he responded brusquely. (He later apologized for his language.) And when the Republican Governors Association funded a TV ad featuring Jealous on MSNBC saying, “Go ahead, call me a socialist” but cut off the rest of his sentence where he had said, “it doesn’t change the fact that I’m a venture capitalist,” the Jealous campaign demanded that local stations pull the ad for being too false and misleading. (Stations refused.)

These sometimes too-rash reactions to conservative provocation hark back to an incident from 2010, when, as NAACP head, Jealous called for the firing of a U.S. Department of Agriculture official, Shirley Sherrod, after a viral Breitbart video showed her talking about discriminating against a white farmer. When it became clear the Breitbart video had been highly edited to misrepresent Sherrod’s remarks, Jealous apologized and retracted the NAACP’s statement. It was an embarrassing moment and he calls the episode the lowest point of his professional career.

ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, Hogan has accused Jealous of trying to “nationalize” the governor’s race. Critics also blasted Jealous during the primary for taking some $600,000 from wealthy liberals in California and New York, a level of outside spending typically unheard of in a Maryland gubernatorial election. Jealous dismisses both criticisms, noting his campaign had more Maryland donors, and smaller donations on average, than any of his primary opponents’. “To the extent that we had out-of-state donations, they tended to fill the hole that we created when we refused corporate contributions,” he says, adding that it’s Hogan who has nationalized the race, by failing to stand up to the Trump administration.

These rebuttals can land fairly awkwardly at times—Hogan has made more efforts than other Republicans to distance himself from Trump and the GOP-controlled Congress, and Jealous is running on a platform based partly on standing up to both.

But it’s true that Hogan’s distancing has also been inconsistent and sometimes tepid. When he failed to denounce the Muslim travel ban at the start of 2017, hundreds protested outside the governor’s mansion in Annapolis. Hogan dismissed the pressure at the time, saying he didn’t see protesting Trump’s policies as “his role.” Over the past year, however, as Trump’s polling hit the skids, he changed his tune. By June 2018, Hogan recalled Maryland’s National Guard unit (all of four soldiers) from the U.S.-Mexico border in protest of the president’s child separation policy.

Jealous is confident that as the general election heats up—as the spotlight starts shining more brightly on Hogan’s record, and voters get a chance to hear Jealous’s message—his campaign will grow more powerful. His campaign’s internal polling showed that as of July, one-third of Maryland voters, and one-quarter of the state’s Democratic voters, still did not know who Jealous was.

Some local political experts caution against reading too much into Republican Bob Ehrlich’s 2006 loss when it comes to analyzing the tea leaves for November. Mileah Kromer, a Goucher College political science professor, pointed out that Hogan’s lead over his Democratic challenger is much higher than Ehrlich’s was at the time, and that Ehrlich was also much more closely tied to President Bush and the national Republican Party than Hogan is to Trump. Todd Eberly, a St. Mary’s College political science professor, adds that Ehrlich was considered both a more confrontational and a lazier leader, a politician who made many unforced errors.

Does that mean Hogan is invulnerable? Polling has consistently shown the number of people who approve of the governor exceeds those who plan to vote for him. And the Trump factor could be very real. In 2016, Anne Arundel County, a longtime red region of Maryland, went for Clinton, the first time a Democratic contender won the county in more than 50 years.

In his own way, Hogan, no less than Jealous, senses that Maryland is moving left. This past July, he announced a new student debt relief plan, and declared he would not accept donations or an endorsement from the National Rifle Association. He took the NRA’s money and endorsement back in 2014, a year the group gave him an A- rating.

“I honestly don’t think Jealous could have won a Democratic primary four years ago,” says McLaurin, who describes Maryland as a wait-your-turn kind of political state. “With Ben Jealous, it was not his turn by any measure. He’s never been elected to anything ever, his running mate has never been elected to anything ever. But they say in politics, a lot of it is timing, and I think 2018 is the pairing of the right man for the right moment.”