With elections just week’s away, Maryland’s gubernatorial debate between Democratic incumbent Governor Wes Moore and Republican challenger Dan Cox took place on Oct. 6. In a special, post-debate Town Hall—hosted on Oct. 7 at the The Real News Network studio in Baltimore and co-organized by Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle—TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez moderates a panel discussion about the bankruptcy of politics-as-usual and the need for building “grassroots governing power” today. Panelists include: Charly Carter, political strategist and founder of Step Up Maryland and Step Up to Lead; Dayvon Love, LBS Director of Public Policy; and Andy Ellis, Green Party candidate for Governor of Maryland.
Credits:
- Studio Production / Post-Production: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So we’re here at the Real News Network Studio in Baltimore, and I am really grateful to be sitting here with an incredible panel of folks who are going to help us think through and respond to the Maryland gubernatorial debate that we watched yesterday, October 6th, between Democratic incumbent Governor Wes Moore and Republican candidate Dan Cox. So a lot of us watched that debate either live or afterwards. There was a lot to be furious about. There was a lot to think about in terms of like, okay, these are the candidates we have on offer, but also these are the things that our political parties think are important to us. And so I think a big way that we’re going to address tonight’s discussion is by talking about the issues and voices and perspectives that were not represented on that debate stage last night and that are just not represented in the dominant politics that is determining all of our lives.
And so I could not be more excited to be here at the Real News Studio to talk about these things with all of you and with our three panelists. Please give it up from my farthest end over to me. We’ve got the great Charly Carter, political strategist and executive director of Step Up Maryland. Give it up for Charly.
We’ve got Dayvon Love in the middle, director of public policy at Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle. Give it up for Dayvon. And thank you to Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle for co-hosting this great and important event with us. And last but not least, we have to my right, Andy Ellis, Green Party candidate for Maryland governor. Give it up for Andy, everybody. Okay. So here’s how I kind of want to start things off, gang. So like we said, we all watched the debate. I want to just go to the tape for a second and remind us that the debate opened up with 60 second statements from each candidate, Cox and more. And in Cox’s statement, the message, the narrative that he’s selling is pretty clear. Property taxes, rents and electric bills are too high. We’re paying more, but getting less is a direct quote. Maryland is the second worst economy in the nation.
This is all because of dangerous spending, mismanagement and absentee governor Wes Moore. And his pitch boiled down to, we need to lower our car registration fees immediately, cut taxes, cut the fees, control spending and bring back affordable energy and housing for all. Now more on the other side was doing what I think we’re going to see Democrats do for the next two years, which is tie everything to Trump, tie it like an anvil over their neck. And that’s exactly what he did. This guy loves Trump. Dan Cox says he supports 100% Donald Trump’s agenda. While they’re focused on the wealthy elites, I’m focused on working families. And Moore touted his record saying that Maryland has had among the fastest drops in violent crime anywhere in the United States. Teacher vacancy rate in Maryland is down 60%. Math and reading scores are at a five year high, yada yada yada.
So that is how they open their statements to us to ask for our votes. That is how our political discourse shaped the whole discussion of last night. So I want to ask you three, starting with Charly and working back down here, what are we not talking about in the way that that whole framing of the debate limits us?
Charly Carter:
Well, thank you for having me here tonight. I have to say after watching that debate, I wondered whether either candidate had been in the state of Maryland for the last nine months because I’ve been here for 20 years, a little over 20 years, and I’m seeing more activism in the community now than I ever have previously at a higher rate. People who’ve never been involved before are involved, protests sprouting up all over the state. And I didn’t hear anybody really addressing those issues. None of them really addressed the real concerns that people have over data centers. Nobody really talked about the amount of money that’s been taken out of education that’s concerning people and people’s just ability to afford things. Cox touched on utility bill rates, but then he didn’t really give any information about what he would do about them. And I think the things that I’m seeing people really upset about now is about the skyrocketing utility bills, the data centers and what they’re going to do to our communities and people’s home values, and then revenues to continue to invest in education and in other programs that help our community.
Dayvon Love:
Yeah. I would say that the debate yesterday really highlights the limitations of the two party system. I think most people’s assessment of the debate is that it wasn’t quite substantive. And I think what is clear, the purpose of a debate is to provide the audience with an opportunity to see a rigorous test of people’s policy positions. And so part of the challenge with the two party system is that there are certain perspectives that are not going to be present in the conversation that will be helpful to the general public to get a sense as to what is actually at the heart of the policy agenda of each of the candidates and their respective parties. And so just as a couple of examples, and I start as a revolutionary Pan-African nationalist, I’m very clear that black folks are a captured elector of the Democratic Party. So that is the posture where I start in terms of analyzing the discourse between two parties.
And so then evidence of that that I’ll just give to start with is even the conversation about juvenile justice where what the Democrats won’t do is the Democrats will not talk about the ways that the system of the criminal justice system is weaponized against the humanity of people of African descent and that the calls for stricter juvenile justice laws is not about accountability. It’s about continuing to be complicit in an attack on the humanity of black people, particularly black youth. And it would’ve been helpful to have someone like Andy on the stage to be able to press the Democratic Party to go further than what I describe as tough on crime light, which is what the Democratic Party essentially is. And so as a result of not having that kind of perspective, a person that is fiercely defending the fact that we have a system that automatically charges youth as adults and 80% of them black, which means you have kids spend 180 days in adult prison, that is something that folks in our community care about, but in the two party system, in the duopoly, we’re not going to hear a defense of the humanity of people of African descent.
And so again, I just think the debate yesterday was an example and we can give more examples as we have had this discussion, but just as a preliminary thought, just an example of what we don’t get because of the duopoly and the limitations, particularly as black folks being this captured electorate of the Democratic Party.
Andy Ellis:
Yeah. My name is Andy Ellis. I’m the Green Party candidate for governor. I’ve spent the last four years traveling across the state and we’ve been to fairs, festivals, we’ve been to library meetings, we’ve been to church meetings, we’ve been to protests, we’ve been to hearings, we’ve been to all sorts of places and we’ve talked to a lot of people. A lot of people are really frustrated with the way that things are working right now. They don’t think that the government is working for them. They think that the politicians are serving their donors, their national narratives and their party bosses. They don’t think that they’re listening to people and they don’t think that they hear the real pain that people in Maryland are feeling across the state. And I think the debate operated in that fiction where the politicians don’t hear that type of thing. And I think both of them acted as if we existed in a world where their two party system still had hold on the imagination of most people and most people still believe that that system actually works.
I think more and more people have decided and agreed that that system doesn’t work because they’ve seen year after year after year of politicians promising them to do things in debates like that and not actually doing them. The UNBC poll came out yesterday right before the debate and it showed a couple of things. One, it showed that Wes Moore and Dan Cox are at the lowest points they’ve been at in the polls since they both won the 2022 primary. People know who both of them are. They know what the record is and they don’t like either of them. Dan Cox had 24% support in that poll. That’s the lowest that I can ever remember a major party candidate having. And if Wes Moore weren’t running against Dan Cox, he may be in trouble in this election, but because he is running against Dan Cox, who is a MAGA aligned, sort of mediocre, no charisma politician, Wes Moore is going to probably win this election and he’s probably going to win it by double digits.
But the other thing the poll showed yesterday was that 25% of people don’t want either party and like 80% of people don’t trust either party. And I think that creates a real opening for us to do something different than what we’ve been doing up until this point. We have an election where there’s a 99% chance that Wes Moore is going to get reelected and all Dan Cox is trying to do is get out of the 20s so that he doesn’t get embarrassed. Dan Cox has sort of functionally turned the Republican Party in the state of Maryland into about as ineffective as the Republican Party is in Baltimore City or in Prince George’s County or in Montgomery County. And I think that that creates an opening to take the anger that people have and the grassroots uprising that people are having that Charlie is talking about in order to build a new kind of politics that is about grassroots governing power and not about the same old two party system.
And I think the debate was a perfect proof of that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, to kind of really bring that point to light, one of the questions that was directed to Cox was literally, do you support or oppose the federal eligibility changes for programs like SNAP or food stamps and Medicaid? The bar is so damn low that the question is, do you support kicking all these millions of people off SNAP and Medicaid and everyone who’s going hungry or going homeless because of it? Are you shitting me? That’s the level of question. Are you for or against this? So I don’t care what these people say to a question like that. I don’t care about their bullshit responses to a bullshit question, but there is a very non-bullshit problem here that Marylanders and people around the country are going through. So I wanted to talk about that more. They did not address enough what the effect of these cuts and these costs of living are on Marylanders.
What would you say about that if you were on that debate stage?
Dayvon Love:
Well, something that I want to say to the point that you raised about just how cookie cutter the questions and the debate is, it’s important for the general public to be clear that there’s an emergence of a consultant class, a political consultant class that exists within both major parties that profiteer off of the fact that every two years there are major election cycles where people are making a lot of money. And if you think about the corporate core of both parties, where they have a business model that is reliant on keeping folks within the confines of the duopoly. Well, what I think what we’re seeing though is that to Andy’s point is that there is record levels of dissatisfaction with both political parties. So even the question that you identified that was posed to Dan Cox is a very typical question as it relates to your traditional Republican Democratic Party discourse, social safety net and entitlements versus trickle down economics and austerity.
So these are very traditional, the kind of traditional polls of the Democratic and Republican Party discourse. And the challenge is that we’re at a place now where I think more people, this is to Charlie’s point about the increase in activism that exists, that people are just more informed and people now are demanding more of these candidates. But unfortunately what happens, and I think this is really important for people to be clear about, is that the emergence of the political consultant class in many respects, it’s really on its last leg, that if folks in the broader community continue to push, then it’s going to force the development of an emergence of different political formations. And so I think that’s really important for us to continue to say to the general public that it’s not futile. And I think that’s part of the concern that I would have is that people would see the lack of substance in that engagement and completely disengage from the political landscape as opposed to staying on the battlefield.
Andy Ellis:
Yeah. And I would say both Wesmore and Dan Cox have a class privilege that does not make them have to experience this type of thing. And for me, I’ve experienced it very directly. Last June, I was laid off from a company that I had worked for for 15 years with no notice, just sort of one day I got a call and they sent a box from my laptop and said, “It’s been nice knowing you.” I didn’t talk about that for a long time on the campaign trail because I was embarrassed, right? I shouldn’t be embarrassed. It wasn’t my fault. It was global capital and private equity and a company that didn’t care about people, but I was embarrassed. But when I started talking about it when I was on the campaign trail, I realized how many Marylanders are going through something like this. How many Marylanders have lost a job at the federal level or corporation that they worked at for a long time, how hard it is for them to find new work, how ineffective state services are, how low unemployment is because it hasn’t been adjusted by the Maryland General Assembly since the Obama era, how bad the other services are in the state.
And as I started to talk about it, I went from shame to solidarity on this because I was starting to understand that so many people are struggling in a way that the politicians don’t understand right now. And if the politicians can’t wrap their head around the way that people are struggling and get beyond this cookie cutter consultant class conversation that Davon is talking about, they’re going to face a kind of uprising that they’ve never faced before. And we are going to see this political system change. The question is, is it going to change in favor of the people or is it going to change in favor of the Trump fascists who are trying to push their corporate rule on all of us? And I think the key question that we have to ask in our politics in this election and over the next decade is which way that change goes.
For me, I hope it goes for the people, but I’m worried that it’s not going to. I think the only hopes that we have are to use every forum we have in order to fight back against it, in order to fight for the people who have been left behind, even though Wes Moore says he doesn’t want to leave anybody behind, a lot of Marylanders have been left behind. And I think we got to fight for those folks and I think we have to create a political reality that allows them to have the power to make the changes they need to their communities and their lives so that we can get different outcomes because if we don’t, I’m pretty sure Trump and his fascists are going to do their form of that and none of us are going to like that.
Charly Carter:
I agree with both what Davon and Andy have said. I think the missed opportunity in that debate was the opportunity to talk about big ideas, new ideas, something bold. What we saw, as everybody has said, is two parties and two candidates who could stay relatively safe within the bandwidth within their two respective parties. No one had to challenge, no one was challenged. They could just say, “Here’s my position. I’m for lower taxes.” And the other person can say, “And I’m against Trump.” And yet all of the other issues just completely went undiscussed. And I think that’s the importance for having third party and minor candidates in these debates because oftentimes they are coming from a perspective where they’re offering a big idea that is why they’re not part of one of the other two parties. So I think it was a really missed opportunity for voters to hear about big ideas, which is what they are seeking.
More the people who are changing parties, and I’m hearing it regularly about the number of people. I’m shocked, honestly. I’ve been a lifelong Democrat and I’m shocked with a number of people who are saying they are shifting from being a Democrat in the state of Maryland where they can’t vote in primaries to being independent because they just don’t see what they believe. They don’t feel like it’s being heard, what they want is being heard or that it’s being represented in the party here in Maryland. And just as a funny aside, when I first met Andy, we argued about, this is going back years, we argued about whether or not there could be a successful third party in the state of Maryland. And I was adamant, although I was charged at that time with starting the Working Families Party of Maryland, I was like, “It’s just too easy to take over the Democratic Party because they have no vision and they’re not inspiring to people.” And what we saw on that debate stage was really a lack of vision and inspiration.
And that was really from what… Wes Moore is one of the most popular Democrats in the country right now, and yet he had this perfect opportunity to talk about something that inspired people that gave people hope. And he just talked about the same very vanilla policies that he’s been talking about and, “Oh, I’m better than Trump,” without really talking about what we could be doing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. It’s like I hear a lot of talking, but the words don’t mean shit. It’s just like they never just address the thing that you’re begging them to address because you’re living it. It’s just such a bizarre spectacle that he just keeps being subjected to. I have a kind of follow up when it comes to the way that that comes through in their language and the responses they give. But before we move on from the question of the costs of living, straw poll. I mean, what’s hitting your pocketbook these days? The cost of gas is ridiculous. Rent keeps going up. What else? What else are people struggling with when it comes to paying for the cost of living? Everything. Everything is the main answer. Any others? Food? Yeah. We’re all working harder and our wages are staying the same while everything’s getting more expensive. What the hell?
That doesn’t feel like the American dream that we ostensibly were raised to believe in.
Dayvon Love:
And can I give an example?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Please.
Dayvon Love:
An example I think is really important is on the conversation around public safety that I alluded to in the beginning. If we’re clear about the nature of the way that the law enforcement establishment has interacted with black people, the law enforcement establishment being the Fraternal Order of Police, the Maryland State’s Attorney’s Association, the Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, these are entities that have advocated for the tough on crime policies that are responsible for mass incarceration. And in some contexts, Democrats will talk about pushing back against that kind of in a very cosmetic way. One of the things that we’re seeing is we’re seeing Sinclair Broadcasting and Executive Chairman David Smith who owns the Baltimore Sun. We are seeing those media outlets being used as a communications arm for the law enforcement establishment. And the real material impact of that, because Baltimore has experienced one of the most precipitous declines in homicides and non-fatal shootings of any city in the United States.
And I think there’s a large community consensus that has been the unprecedented investment in black-led grassroots organizations that have been the cause of that precipitous decline. It’s important if Democrats are serious about this issue, it’s important for them to talk about being in opposition to a force that wants to undermine and to diminish those black-led grassroots organizations. But I don’t hear the governor or the Democratic Party coming to the defense of those organizations that are being attacked. I suspect what that is because Democrats still want to maintain a level of proximity to the law enforcement establishment, which means that talking about the declines in violence as being based in the community being supported in doing so undermines the law enforcement establishment and the Democratic Party doesn’t want to offend the law enforcement establishment. So I just wanted to lay out… Tha’s a concrete example of something that folks have talked about in the community, in public discourse, people have talked about that, but the fact that that is not what Wes Moore is saying, that is an important part of what is happening in Baltimore says something about the limitations of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for our political interests.
Andy Ellis:
And can I add to that? So I think one of the interesting things about the way that that question got answered is Dan Cox got closer in some ways. Dan Cox said we need to invest in rec centers. We need to invest in community organizations. We need to invest in churches. Now he went on to say a bunch of other stuff that was not the right answer, but he was getting closer to making the argument about investing in the grassroots than Wes Moore was, which I thought was really interesting. It means he’s been listening, I think, to some folks who are trying to tell him some of those things, but he is not the right messenger and the Republican Party is not the right messenger for this stuff because they then turn around and talk about predator children and soft on crime laws and things like that.
So they’re getting part of this message, but they’re not getting the rest of this message. I thought it was really interesting that Cox talked about that and Moore did not. It was a really interesting juxtaposition to me that Cox was the one who was talking about investing in the grassroots community organizations as a means of addressing crime and addressing public safety. Now, the rest of his package doesn’t work, but he was the one that got there and Moore didn’t say yes. Moore could have even said, “Yes, I’ve done that. That’s why we passed this initiative that gave a little bit of money to some of these organizations.” But he didn’t say that.
Dayvon Love:
He even said that the talking point of his administration has given record investments to law enforcement, to your point.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and the law enforcement question really centered around ICE, right? It’s close to home. Of course, it’s happening in our backyards, in our neighborhoods. We just published a report I did from Frederick right in front of the house where those ICE agents drove onto private property, beat peaceful protestors, terrorized the whole family and didn’t even take anybody. All that terror for what? It’s happening all… I’ve been in front of the Hagerstown warehouse. I used to work in warehouses like that. They’re not built for human beings to work in most times, let alone house them and incarcerate them. So they talked about ICE a bit, right? But to your guys’ point, the answers were very revealing for what they said and more importantly, what they didn’t say. But the question that I thought was really well put, shout out to Tracy Wilkins from NBC Washington. I thought she and Pamela Wood from the banner asked really great questions, even if they got really crappy answers most of the time.
But Tracy Wilkins was asking Wes Moore if it was a mistake to ban ICE detention partnerships or a mistake to how he’s handled ICE and the cooperation question of local law enforcement. And his answer was, “If you’re going after the worst of the worst and violent offenders, I will work with you.
But when you’re going after people like Pastor Fuentes in the Eastern Shore who has been here for decades and leads a congregation in the Eastern Shore and ICE detains him, then no local law enforcement will and I will not allow them to be deputized to do that type of work.” So that was something, but then Tracy Wilkins pressed him about if there’s going to be detention, should detention be happening in Maryland where people can have access to family and access to their counsel, or are you going to do anything to stop these Gestapo motherfuckers disappearing our neighbors and sending them to Louisiana or some third country? And his answer was boiled down to, “So I think there has to be a reconsideration about the way that ICE is moving inside of our communities all throughout the state of Maryland.” What the fuck does that mean?
That’s my question. What does that actually mean? As a citizen of Maryland, as a Latino, as someone with family members that feel very threatened right now, what do I do with that?
Andy Ellis:
I mean, I think what it means is there was some political pressure on him this year in order to move against ICE that there wasn’t last year. Last year when the 287 bill came up, it got killed in the Maryland General Assembly at the request of Governor Moore. There was some political pressure on it this year, and so he moved and he responded to political pressure like he always does. But I don’t think that his heart is in it because he sat up on a stage with Mark Wayne Mullen when Mark Wayne Mullen took over the head of the DHS and was all chummy with him, talking about how we need to have this bipartisan cooperation in order to do this the right way. I think that it goes back to the place that Wes Moore likes the police. He likes to give police resources.
He likes to be able to talk about how he’s tough on crime and then say, “But we’re not tough on all crime.” I like the framing of tough on crime light, and I think he is tough on immigration light. I think he’s responding to political pressure and trying to do everything he can to protect his political career. I’m not sure that he’s trying to do much to protect Marylanders. Because again, last year there was a bill in front of the General Assembly that would have banned 287. It wasn’t just last year. It’s been there for years and years and years and it’s gotten killed every year. Wes Moore, Bill Ferguson have killed it.
Yeah, great. They came around this year on it, but there’s a lot of families who got broken up and there’s a lot of people who got detained and deported that didn’t need to be because they didn’t have the political courage to do the right thing without the amount of political pressure on them in order to get them to do the smallest thing they could. 287 is great. Yeah, let’s address that, but that is not the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that we have a immigration policy at the national level that has been broken for decades because both parties refuse to give it up as a political cudgel to use against the other ones and refuse to figure out a way to deal with the millions of people who are already here without threatening to deport them or threatening to detain them.
It is one of the biggest failures of the two party system at the federal level that we have allowed this to get to the point where both parties can use immigrant communities As tokens and as chips in their political campaigns in order to try to maintain their power without doing anything to the very real effects on people’s families, on people’s communities, and people’s lives that happened from them being unable to figure out a solution to the problem.
Dayvon Love:
The Democratic Party, I would say over the last 10 to 15 years, maybe even longer, has been shifting in terms of the constituencies that it sees itself as being responsive to. That there was a point in time where the Black community was a really important base of support that the Democratic Party in many respects would placate, but at least put in the effort to invest in getting Black folks to be a strong base of the Democratic Party. What has happened, and I think this has accelerated after the election of Donald Trump the first time, is a shift and a focus on suburban voters in the place of focusing on the Black community because issues that fundamentally impact our community, and I would even add other folks of color, particularly immigrant communities, that the moving away from focusing on those core constituencies has created a dynamic where they’re talking to that suburban audience, avoiding things that might inflame or might cause some consternation of that audience.
And so in the context of this conversation, particularly about ICE, and I will put it in the larger conversation about the ways that criminal justice are weaponized against those of color. What we’re seeing, Trump was not unclear and the Republicans are not unclear about the fact that the language of these are violent criminals, these are Mexican rapists, these are the very same tropes that are part of the collective American consciousness that are weaponized to criminalize black people being deployed against immigrant communities. And the limitation of the Democratic Party, and particularly in the person of Wes Moore as governor of the state, is that the unwillingness to be direct and say that, the unwillingness to say that the attack against immigrant communities is consistent with the racialized criminalization of people of African descent, that has been weaponized to undermine our humanity and undermine the humanity of immigrant communities.
The unwillingness to say that is about the fact that they’re trying to appeal to a constituency that if we’re honest, is scared of black folks. They’re scared of folks of immigrant communities. And instead of actually addressing that directly, that he’s gesturing to it. He’s giving an individual story that’s heart wrenching and wants people to be brought in, but won’t talk about the overarching structure of racism and white supremacy that animates the attacks that ICE has been tasked with on behalf of Trump and the MAGA movement. And so again, it’s just one of those things that the answer indicates to me the inability of the Democratic Party to be a vehicle for the interest of black and immigrant communities.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I love the way you put that. The unwillingness to be direct is probably one of the things, it’s probably one of the most popular political complaints we all have. It’s like, just tell me straight, stop bullshitting me. Just give me a straight answer. And that’s what I really took away from the debate. And frankly, most debates I ever watch in this country is it’s a theater. It’s not a real debate. It’s a performance. And it’s a performance in not answering our most basic questions and finding a whole class of consultants, like we mentioned earlier, to help you bastardize language so that you can get around saying what people just want you to say. And there are examples that were just baffling to me. I though it was wild that even though, as you said, Andy, all signs point to more kind of winning this handedly, but he opened himself up to a few big right hooks from Dan Cox and the Republicans that it was like, “Well, if you weren’t so shitty, you wouldn’t be such a juicy target for that point.” When he wouldn’t just say, “I’m not going to run for president and leave you guys in two years.” He wouldn’t just say, “Will you commit to Maryland for four years?” And instead he said, “Yeah, he wouldn’t say it.” And the way that when Cox got him for it and it was a real deserved blow, Moore responded this way.
“Dan Cox seems to be more concerned about my future than he is about the future of the people of Maryland. “It’s like,” You piece of shit, don’t use us to shield yourself from this thing. “You know what I’m saying? So that’s an example of how it’s being done on the right. And here’s an example of how it’s being done on the left, here’s an example of how Cox was doing it. When again, Pamela Wood from the banner asked a really great question, which is,” Hey, you seem to be all in for Trump like everyone else in the Republican Party. How are Marylanders going to know that you’re actually here to serve us and not just your nut job like daddy in the White House? “And what he said is,” Well, absolutely. “Direct quote,” I am a Marylander first and last, and I’m an American first and last.
“What? That’s not how words work.That’s literally saying nothing and then just moving on as if he’s answered the question. So I want to talk about that. How do we reclaim a politics of just being real and just talking about the real shit and not violating that basic trust that we all feel has been violated so many times by so many people in the media and in the political world?
Andy Ellis:
Yeah, I’ll start with that. So part of the problem is the way the debates work right now. So in 1992, Ross Perot got on the debate stage and he was weird and he had his charts and he had all of that stuff, but he appealed to a lot of people because he was speaking truth that seemed to matter to them. And he got in that debate and he had a real impact. He went up in the polls, he probably cost George Bush that election by most accounts. He got 15% or so at the end of the day. It was real significant third party independent political work. After that, the two parties and the media corporations decided that they were never going to allow that to happen again. So they created a commission on presidential debates that locked down on the ability to hear independent voices on the debate stage.
Well, they got all the media networks to buy in with them. They pushed the League of Women Voters out who had been sponsoring debates for years. And then they went to PBS at the national level and said, PBS, if you ever want to host one of our debates, you need to start adopting these rules too. So PBS started adopting those rules and then they started pushing those rules down to their local stations like Maryland Public Television. So stations like Maryland Public Television now have a standard for who gets to be in statewide debates to say you have to have 10% in polls in order to be in… A third party candidate has to have 10% in the polls in order to be included in a debate. So they’ve had this standard for a while. No third party candidate for governor or senator has gotten more than 3% in the state of Maryland since reconstruction.
So they are setting the rules in a way they know is going to exclude people. They have another set of rules that are really arbitrary and really suspect that are things like you have to have substantial fundraising and many people need to show up when you come to an event and you need to have a lot of media coverage. And they don’t quantify those in the same way they quantify the 10% on the polling. So in this year’s debate, by the time they sent out the invitations, there was one poll that had come out and it did not include myself and Kathy White, but they said because we weren’t included in that poll and we didn’t get 10% in that poll, we wouldn’t be invited to the debate. I used the Maryland Public Information Act request in order to get some of their discussion about their other debates.
In the spring, they invited all nine Republican candidates to the debate stage, even though they didn’t have polls for them. And this included folks like Douglas Larcom, a guy who had raised no money and got less than a percent in the election. And the most notable thing that Douglas Larcom has ever been done is get charged with like 30 criminal charges a month after they put them on the stage. Things like stalking, real winner they put up on their stage during that Republican primary debate. So I asked them questions about this, why in the Republican debate they were willing to open the doors for other people, but in this debate they were not. They did not answer the question. They stonewalled, they stonewalled, they stonewalled. Well, one of the other things that came up in this Public Information Act request was a conversation that they had to a press release that I sent out and a bill that Davon and I were working on where they spent the whole day in email freaking out because I sent out a press release that said if I was the governor, I would double their budget.
They were like, if the governor finds out that this happened and thinks that we put Andy up to this, then the governor will cut our budget. So they all started scrambling to make calls to the people in the general assembly and to the governor in order to make sure that the governor didn’t think that Maryland Public Television called me and told me to put out a press release. It’s so nonsensical that when I say it out loud, it just doesn’t make sense. But they were so worried about it because a third of their budget comes from the general assembly and from the governor.
Imagine how freaked out they would think the governor was if they extended an invitation to me to be in the debate if they were that freaked out about me suggesting a doubling of their budget. And I say all of this to say that there has been a concerted effort by the two parties and the media corporations, including PBS, in order to make sure that the kind of directness that we saw in 1992 when Ross Perot was on the stage never exists again, because they know that if people hear options other than the two parties, they will listen to options other than the two parties. They will vote for options other than the two parties. So they have sanitized the discourse. They’ve excluded most of the voices that would challenge them and be direct and they have done it so that they can protect their power.
And we see where it is. We see where it is 30 years later. It is a terrible debate. Most people don’t watch debates anymore because they are consultants giving scripted ideas back and forth. They’re not engagement of ideas, they’re not engagement of arguments and they’re not reflecting of what the people want. So the reason we get a debate like this is because they made sure that we get a debate like this and not have a conversation like this.
Dayvon Love:
And what I’ll add, because so there’s the kind of front end structural dynamics that Andy is describing that impacts the political landscape. But if you go further upstream, Hupy Harry Harris in his book Negro in the Nation, he was a scholar during the New Negro movement and he was talking about the relationship that black people had to the structure of this society. And he argued that black people prior to the Civil War, our relationship to this society chattel slavery enforced by brute force. And then after the Civil War, wage slavery enforced by starvation, that our community is able to be starved into political submission. And that’s an important framing because part of the conversation about the way, particularly that black folks enter the political landscape, and you’ll hear this conversation about pragmatism or what’s practical, people who run for office, and I’m sure this is true anywhere for anybody, but black folks who run for office, they know what fundraisers to go to, they know what corporations to be in relationship with, they know what major figures to be connected to, what media companies to be affiliated with.
And so what ends up happening is that by the time many of these folks appear on our ballot, they’ve already been curated for us. We’re picking from who the corporate sector decides are viable candidates for our community. And that’s an important point because then when we see a Wes Moore on the stage and we talk about the limitations of his performance, in many respects, it’s not just about him as an individual. It’s about the political landscape that says that the only way for us to be viable in politics is to engage in politics in the way that a Wes Moore engages in politics. And unfortunately, so much of what we see around us affirms that as true when we think about those that get to elected office. So I wanted to put that framing there because some of the work is about the importance and emphasizing the importance of independent black electoral infrastructure that can actually engage in the kind of political warfare such that we can put people into office as opposed to hoping the people selected for us do what we want them to do.
And one thing I’ll add to that is because even like LBS’s political theory of change, I’m clear that all of these elected officials, even the ones I like, even the ones that I have good relationships with, I am clear that they don’t work for us because we’re not how they got there. So the best way for us to impact the political landscape is to, again, engage in the kind of political warfare necessary in order to make them do things they may not otherwise do. And a good example of that is Andy kind of ran down the policy record on immigration, where Westmore and the Democratic Party, they were made to do that. They didn’t want to do that. In fact, one of the things that the governor did was after the legislature passed the ban on the 287G program early in session, he actually issued a memo publicly to law enforcement to say to law enforcement, basically, “I don’t want you to think that we don’t want you to collaborate with federal officials.” A way of trying to have it both ways.
And again, because we’re told that that’s what it takes to be in position. And so I think we just have to be clear that we have to approach politics. We have to approach politics with the thinking of we need independent power that can engage in political warfare so that given the current landscape, we can make these folks do what we need them to do with the understanding that we need to do the parallel work of building political infrastructure outside of the two party system so that at one point and hopefully in the near future, we can produce our own candidates for office.
Charly Carter:
There’s a lot to unpack there. I think to what Davon said, yeah, there’s a lot of truth in that candidates are groomed to… Well, one thing I can say is the very first thing you learn as a candidate is how not to answer the questions that are asked of you. And that would be as someone who spent 20 years identifying training and electing candidates, the very first thing that I tell people do is you answer the question that you want to answer, you don’t answer the question that’s been asked of you. And I think we saw – As
Maximillian Alvarez:
An interviewer, can I just say damn you for being so good at your job? Because that’s one of the things that makes it so frustrating to interview politicians. But anyways –
Charly Carter:
No, no, absolutely. And it’s funny because as a voter, I look at that and I get so frustrated because I’m like, that was an easy answer. I think that people have gotten, candidates now have gotten so… It’s so ingrained in them to answer the question that they want to answer, that they miss the opportunity to really connect with voters and to really be authentic and to give actual answers that would actually get them more votes. And I think that we saw that in the debate yesterday. I think that there were a couple of times when Wes Moore really could have just given an honest answer and it would have connected more with voters than the answers that he gave. The second thing that I want to say is in direct response to what Davon says is it is very much true that when people are coming through, when candidates are moving up through the ranks, that you have to raise money.
And who has the most money are corporations and LLCs, that those are the ones who are writing the big checks. Those are the ones when it costs a million dollars to run for office, that the people, it’s a lot of $5,000 checks. Imagine if you were only talking about $50 checks, it’s all exponentially more people that you have to get in. So they are in rooms with the people who want to hear the PABLOM answers. They are in the rooms with people where they can’t be committal to issues, where they are saying, and we saw this recently in Prince George’s County, where APAC was saying jump and you had candidates who were saying how high? APAC being the American Israel Political Action Committee.
So I think that there’s a lot of truth in that, but there is a role for voters. I’m not willing to throw the baby out with the bath water. I think in this state of Maryland, we have seen where people, where voters have gotten and communities have gotten engaged and they have gotten in and elected people and it’s made a significant difference to the outcomes of their lives. And I will say in 2014, we changed 35% of the state legislature. We elected new people, people that we trained, people that were grassroots selected, people who they raised their money from the grassroots. And immediately when they came in, we got re-enfranchisement of ex-felons. We got a raising of the minimum wage. We got earned sick leave. We got automatic voter registration and same day voter registration, all happening within a four year period of being able to change that, of being able to change just 35% of the state legislature.
A lot of those people are now in leadership positions. Are their positions the same? No, they’ve kind of migrated to the middle, but I want to point out that it is possible to do that both within the two party system, but I think the Green Party and the emergence of the democratic socialists and these other progressive movements are really changing what is going to happen inside the two party system.
Dayvon Love:
And if I can add, I think that’s a really important point. One of the problems with our political culture is that we focus too much on the executive branch. If we’re clear about the science of how our government is structured, it is really the legislature that is really at the seat that produces policy and that wields power over the other two branches. And what’s important about that in terms of a strategic value to our community is that we can do more to a delegate or a state senator or a city council person than we can somebody that’s elected statewide. So I just wanted to add, I think that’s an extremely important point that we use the ability to impact those that are elected locally and have a strategy for engaging the legislature as really the greatest opportunity for black people to exercise true kind of independent black political power.
It has to happen through the legislature. Not that the other stuff isn’t important, but I think the media culture overemphasizes the executive branch.
Maximillian Alvarez:
If I could – So we’re running up on time only in the sense of halftime, right? I do want to let the community in here in a minute, so I think we will have more time to dig into this, but we are sort of rounding the final turn in this first half of the program. But I wanted to sort of build on that and hopefully give you guys a container to respond, right? But the thing that I think we should be addressing here, and I want to give everyone a chance to, is what are those core issues that it shouldn’t just be about these are the issues that a savvy politician should talk about if they want to win new election, but what are the issues that savvy regular working people should make politics about so that we win a better world and a better future?
Andy Ellis:
So the three issues that we’re focused on right now are banning the data centers, building an economy that works for the people and not the corporations, and moving past the two party system and the corruption of the two party system. And I think a bunch of people probably saw Shorty outside. He gave me his book and it’s all about how he sees corruption working in the state of Maryland. People should check it out. People should talk to him. I think that our position on this is that the system, the two party system is fundamentally corrupt because the amount of political power that goes into it determines the outcomes, determines who gets to run for office and determines whose issues get heard. So the reason that we have chosen the three issues that we have chosen is not because they’re the only three issues that matter, but they’re the three issues that we think we can use this election to most effectively put pressure on as we go into the general assembly.
The data center question is a place where a popular uprising has come around and has allowe
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