S2E4: Byron Hobbs and Jonathan Hogstad on taking on the corporations funding voter suppression in Michigan

In this episode, we’ll hear about how several Black-led Michigan basebuilding groups responded to the January 6th 2021 revolt and ongoing attacks on voting rights in Black communities. Byron and Jonathan describe the process of researching the corporations that funded election-denying politicians (23:16), and then going after those corporations to create consequences for funding voter suppression (19:12), including a successful campaign against statewide utility rate hikes (40:54). 

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge, and an article Byron and Jonathan wrote about it.

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: Welcome to the Craft of Campaigns. I'm your host, Andrew Willis Garcés. In this podcast, we go behind the headlines and hashtags, inviting movement storytellers to share lessons from social justice campaigns. Campaigns are a series of collective actions, focused on winning a concrete demand, beyond one-off mobilizations or election cycles. They have villains and heroes, teams that make plans to win, and activate people on the sidelines. In each episode, we explore one campaign, through firsthand interviews, for key lessons, principles, and practices for organizers today. 

One principle of campaigning that resurfaces across our episodes is go after your opponent where they’re weak and where you’re strong. I experienced this when living in Austin, TX, where returned citizens sought to ban employers from asking about criminal records on job applications. Elected officials and a powerful business lobby strongly opposed them. But, through power-mapping, the organizers figured out that city council candidates, eager for endorsements, were more likely to support their demands in the form of campaign pledges. By targeting candidates eager to differentiate from incumbents, organizers began to undermine the political consensus on the issue, and advance their policy demands.  

Today’s episode is a master class in cutting an issue and attempting to identify our opponent’s weak points. Too often, our campaigns seek to take political or corporate opponents head on, trying to shame or overwhelm them with the fury of our opposition – at exactly the places they’re best prepared to defend against our attacks. This isn’t to say we should never try to disrupt their corporate headquarters or a key legislative hearing, but our protests alone are never sufficient to dislodge a tough opponent. 

In a nutshell, the Defend Black Voters campaign was formed as a response to the continued efforts of Michigan Republican lawmakers, even after January 6th, to overturn the 2020 election results. A number of statewide and local Black organizations were involved, supported by Community Change and a few other national groups, who we’ll hear from later on (along with an update about how, in February 2024, the campaign evolved to focus on a new demand, building on leverage built during this first phase). 

To understand how the organizations involved decided who to target with their many direct actions and mobilizations over 2021 and 2022, think about a triangle, maybe one of those triangle magnets with which my five-year-old likes to build pretend princess castles. You can sit that triangle-magnet upright on one of its sides. This is like the traditional view of power – that it flows from a small point above us, in the hands of a few elite power-holders, down to the many of us below. But another way to look at it, is that their power rests on our support, which we can withdraw at any time, causing them to topple. The upside-down triangle is a more accurate representation of how movements change the status quo, which is sometimes called the social view of power. A status quo is unstable, it rests on the support of specific constituencies. CEOs need the support of their shareholders, their board, their employees, often the financial industry press, sometimes they deeply rely on the support of specific elected officials or other government ties. As I’m recording this, Starbucks executives have decided, after several years of a militantly anti-union status quo, that their support is getting shakier, they’ve been losing contracts on college campuses, their brand has been damaged probably to the tune of millions of dollars in negative publicity, and they would rather negotiate towards a more pro-union status quo than wait for a pillar of support to fall completely. 

In Michigan, Defend Black Voters wanted to change the status quo, which was the ability of Republican state lawmakers to try to overturn elections after January 6th, which took the form of both opposition to certifying election results, and a larger effort to disenfranchise voters by passing a statewide referendum that would restrict voting rights. Those lawmakers were the primary target – the ones who could give in to their ultimate demand, which was to stop supporting efforts to overturn elections and silence Black voters. The campaigners knew they didn’t have any leverage with the lawmakers themselves, so they looked at their individual pillars of support, also called secondary targets. And making a list of these legislators’ largest campaign donors, six stood out as being especially vulnerable to the coalition’s strength around mobilizing pissed-off voters in key urban areas. 

The first two were DTE and Consumers Energy - utility companies regulated by a three-member commission appointed by the Democratic governor. The utilities had to request permission to raise their rates – a place they could be vulnerable. The public service commission became the tertiary target; the campaigners wanted the board to oppose a proposed rate hike, as a way of pressuring the utility companies into agreeing to no longer donate to candidates who advocated overturning elections. 

The next two, BlueCross BlueShield and Delta Dental, are health insurers with billions of dollars in contracts to provide health coverage to local municipalities and public universities – and between the local elected officials and university trustees appointed by Democrats who approved those contracts, another pair of potentially vulnerable targets. Those local elected officials and university trustees were the next set of tertiary targets, and they were asked to adopt responsible contractor policies that would ban localities from contracting with health insurers who provided political donations to election deniers.   

And then Ford and GM, two of the state’s largest companies, were the final pair. One way to size up a target’s vulnerability is to look at their past behavior under pressure, and the campaigners had noticed that back in 2020, when GM was called out for not advertising with Black-owned media outlets, the company had quickly offered to negotiate. So, the Defend Black Voters campaigners thought they might be similarly vulnerable to a public pressure campaign calling them out for indirectly supporting Black voter suppression. As you’ll hear in the story, this ended up being a weak assessment. 

This story demonstrates, but doesn’t fully explain, how sophisticated campaigns often identify secondary targets. In our second episode this season, we heard about how a union used corporate research methods to identify the most important office building owners in a given downtown, and then identified secondary targets like union pension funds and City Council corporate tax breaks. This campaign identified their six corporate targets using many of the same methods. And in this case, all six companies sponsored a right-wing policy conference in June 2022, which Defend Black Voters used to spotlight the Republicans enabling election denial efforts. All six also fit criteria the campaign borrowed from Community Change’s strategic campaigns model, which the organizers mention in our interview. This campaign also reflects how we often test out potential targets with our actions, looking for a reaction that would indicate weakness, and moving on if necessary, as this campaign did with Ford and GM. 

But overall, Defend Black Voters’ assessment of their targets’ vulnerabilities was spot-on. In approaching decision-makers with leverage over BlueCross BlueShield, the coalition pointed out that the company had called on Republicans to stop election interference efforts in early 2021, but still went on to donate nearly $700,000 to party committees supporting election deniers. Democratic elected officials in the state’s largest county responded quickly after the organizers pointed out that taxpayer dollars, through contracts to BlueCross, were probably making their way to the campaign funds of candidates trying to suppress democracy. The Wayne County board passed a resolution calling on the companies to change their behavior just a few weeks after the direct actions at the policy conference mentioned earlier, in July 2022. By November, four other cities and counties passed their own resolutions. 

The coalition had simultaneously taken aim at another secondary target, DTE, which had also contributed over $700,000 to an election denial effort called “Secure MI Vote.” Rather than protest DTE directly, the coalition targeted the state’s public utility commission, which is appointed by the governor. A direct action in June inside a commission meeting featuring a gospel singer had won them a first-of-its-kind public hearing on a proposed rate increase, which was held in August. Three months after that packed public hearing, featuring testimony from dozens of the coalition’s members, for the first time ever, the commission denied 92% of the

increase the company asked for, depriving DTE of a projected $388 million. You have to wonder if the company regretted that $770,000 in donations to vote-suppressors and election deniers. 

In this interview, you’ll hear more about how organizers picked their targets, and how they won on the rate increase issue. Even though Defend Black Voters put real pressure on the utilities by blocking the rate increase, those companies have not, as of a year later, agreed to stop financing right-wing lawmakers. This led to the newest phase of the fight, launched in February 2024, after we recorded this interview. The new campaign, called Taking Back Our Power Michigan, seeks to pass legislation to join other states like Georgia and Connecticut that ban corporations seeking government contracts, and regulated industries like utilities, from making political donations. 

You can hear more about the considerations the half-dozen organizations used to diagnose targets, choose tactics, and build leverage in the full interview. 

Byron Hobbs is a Senior Strategic Campaigner at Community Change/Action and an organizer with over 20 years of experience. Previously, he led organizational infrastructure and capacity-building work of Community Change’s Black-led partner organizations. He has also organized with SEIU and faith-based social justice groups in Chicago, where he is based.

Jonathan Hogstad is the Director of Strategic Campaigns & Research at Community Change/Action where his department builds strategic campaigning capacity in the grassroots movement through training and joint campaigning. He was previously Deputy Research Director at SEIU Local 32BJ and a capital strategies organizer at SEIU. He’s based in NYC.

Andrew Willis Garcés: So Byron, can you give us the trailer for this campaign story? Everyone's about to hear. 

Byron Hobbs: I want to maybe take folks back to shortly after the election of 2020, where Michigan was one of 19 plus states where Republican controlled state legislatures across the country were trying to pass voter suppression laws in response to the outcome of that election.

Black voters played a key and critical role in places like Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, to name a few. We saw the Republican response to how Black voters showed up was rooted in the attempt to create legal barriers to make it harder for Black voters or to suppress Black voter turnout going forward.

As a result of that, Community Change, working with five of our Black-led social justice partners in Michigan, came together to build off of the elect the electoral victories that happened in Michigan, but also to pave a path forward to where Black-led organizing would be at the center of a progressive agenda in the state of Michigan.

The Defend Black Voters campaign was born. It was launched in the fall of 2021. At its core was the beat-back or fight-back against the voter suppression efforts that were being led by extremist lawmakers in the state legislature in Michigan. We did a deep analysis around 

corporations and their role and their culpability and voter suppression efforts in the state of Michigan in particular. Part of the reasoning was that it would make no sense to go after a Republican-controlled state legislature to lobby, convince, or try to organize them to act in ways out of their self interest, was a waste of time. 

So we pivoted to what we call the secondary targets, which were those corporations that were, frankly, just giving tons of money to Republican lawmakers via political contributions. These are some of the same corporations that came out publicly against voter suppression, that came out publicly in support of Black Lives Matter, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.

The Defend Black Voters campaign, in a lot of ways, was really about calling out that contradiction, calling out the hypocrisy. For the largest, most profitable, most powerful corporations in the state who, behind the scenes, are fueling or funneling political contributions to those lawmakers that want to make it harder for Black voters to vote, but at the same time standing publicly, supposedly, in support of Black Lives Matter and against voter suppression. 

AWG: As I understand it you both are with a national organization called Community Change, and there's a story about how y'all end up getting connected and being part of this campaign. And there's also a story about local organizations on the ground in Michigan and how they identified this as a campaign opportunity and who some of the heroes of this story are, who some of the villains are. 

We have this unity coming out of the election, I assume coming out of January 6, 2021 and really wanting to hold these companies accountable. The sense was, they were the ones driving this behind the scenes. They weren't in the headlines. It wasn't like these companies were being portrayed in, I assume, in Michigan's media as the people backing an attempted coup. But, what happens once there is this unified pointing the finger at this is who's responsible? 

Jonathan Hogstad: The businesses weren't necessarily -  I don't think we had an analysis that said they were driving it, but they were benefiting from it. They'd been supporting the elected officials and the party committees that were putting hundreds of thousands of dollars, and cumulatively millions of dollars, into this right wing extremist politics. Whether they were saying, go out and do X, Y, Z, they were standing back and continuing to give money while this really nefarious, thinly veiled initiative to make it harder for Black folks to vote. And they were benefiting from it because they knew that if these Republicans go into power or stay in power, they are known to pass pro rich, pro corporate, anti worker legislation. And that's where they're trying to make money. And we're saying you can't. You can't do it this way. You can't say one thing out of one side of your mouth and then another thing out the other side of your mouth.

AWG: So there was this analysis about who is benefiting as you were saying, and you identified, I think six companies especially as benefiting. It would be helpful to know, why these six companies? How were they connected? How did you see them benefiting? And why did you think that focusing on them would benefit Black voters across the state and the larger theory about building power after the 2020 election?

JH: We knew that the Republican legislators did not care about our base. The whole premise of this thing is that they are trying to find thinly veiled ways of just making it harder for Black, brown, working class people to vote.

That's not who puts them in office and they'd rather just make it harder for them to vote than actually do what we want them to do. Because it was a Republican controlled legislature with a Democratic governor; the very weird loophole in Michigan is that even if you've got a Democratic governor that will veto this type of legislation, they can start what is ostensibly a ballot initiative process, collect a certain amount of signatures, from a small percentage of the population. Then, instead of it going to a ballot initiative where people actually vote for it at the polls, the legislature can take it up on a majority vote, a veto proof majority. And with 50% plus one votes, the governor doesn't get to veto it and it becomes law.

And so we saw this as a sort of ticking time bomb as opposed to other places like in Georgia, where there was a Republican control legislature and a Republican executive that just passed it all through really quickly. They had to go through this other process to move it through this loophole, which took longer.

And so we thought we had at least a year to organize around this. And we knew the Republican majority wasn't going to do what we want by direct engagement. We could get out there, we can be loud. A lot of times that can just like even build credibility with their base, because folks like us are going after them, they must be really doing a good work, if you're in this right wing populist culture war sort of a framework. 

So what we did was we were like, okay, wait a minute. We just saw that there was this national moment that kind of crystallized through a lot of great work in Georgia, where companies, not just in Georgia, but across the country were like stumbling over themselves to to make a BS, pro voting rights, anti voter suppression position, but none of them were actually putting their money where their mouth is.

A lot of this legislation moved forward anyways. So the theory was that there is actual vulnerability with the corporations. They're out there saying these things for a reason, even though their money's been going to these other places. They want to get out of the crosshairs. 

The other part of the theory is that they have power over the primary targets, the primary target being the right wing extremist legislators. So we have these secondary targets that are the corporations that we want to get to put pressure, not just like writing a letter because they had already done that. And the Republicans just didn't listen to them. But actually saying, if you remain committed to this we can no longer contribute to you. Or, if we can't get any corporations to do that, we want to make them think twice about having such different publicly stated values versus what they're funding with their political dollars. We wanted to create consequences around that. 

What we wanted to do is look at the top givers and sort of understand their business models, understand where there's actually reason to believe that a company is going to actually move or they're going to feel consequences for their hypocritical actions.

There were six targets, six corporations that we found that were top givers that were also, we thought, movable for various reasons. The top PAC giver was Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. And along with Delta Dental, they received - at the state level, it's Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan - over a billion dollars in contracts. And that doesn't count, all the county, state, public university, city contracts that they have.

We didn't think that all of these Democrat controlled cities, counties, states, that actually were put - these elected officials that were actually put in their positions by Black voters - we thought they should be responsive to the public money their constituents’ money going towards disenfranchising their constituents, Black voters. That was Blue Cross and Delta Dental. 

Where I'm coming from in the labor movement, we call that a sort of procurement strategy; these big procurement contracts. The DTE and Consumers Energy were number two and number three in the top contributors to the right wing extremist lawmakers.

Again, both had made a Black Lives Matter statements, all the performative activism that they did when the pressure was on during the uprisings. We looked at them and were like, oh, actually there's this three person utility commission called the Michigan Public Service Commission. They were all appointed by the Democratic governor. We see the things that they say, the sort of values that they say they hold: we're mostly wanting to do more for the environment, wanting to support rate payers, but they just hadn't gone nearly far enough to actually hold them accountable and actually do what needed to do to kind of correct what had become a really slanted playing field between utilities and the rate payers in Michigan. 

We realized that Michiganders pay the highest utility rates in the Midwest for the worst power outages. I can't tell you how many meetings Byron and I were on where one or two people were on a phone instead of Zom in a dark apartment because their power was out. It was just an incredibly agitational issue. And it's really like, they've become so unaccountable and so expensive because they've been dumping so many millions of dollars into Lansing to make sure that they're not accountable.

Then the last two corporations that we named were GM and Ford. These are companies that market to Black communities. They'd all like done the performative Black history month thing and the Black Lives Matter statements and all, all of that. 

If you're buying a car, and you're choosing between a Lexus and a Cadillac, and you remotely care about civil rights or your fellow human beings and can understand that in this framework you don't want to be thinking about your dollars going towards harming people that you care about either your own community or community that you care about. And so those emerged as six of the top givers and three different strategies for why we thought they would care about this or why we thought we could move people to care about it, that these companies care about.

AWG: So you mentioned those industries and those companies. Can you tell us more about how you all decided that those were the industries and those were the companies in the context of the campaign? Like, what was the moment of discovery where you were like, Oh, this, this is why, these people are why?

BH: Speaking frankly, we relied upon high level strategic research. We worked with folks who know how to do that and do it well. I think it started with, well, who are the largest players, right? Who are the biggest, baddest actors who's given the most money? And then from there, let's

double click, if you will, on each one to find out what are the specific sort of vulnerabilities, points of leverage, to where we can exploit the contradiction, the hypocrisy. But then also employ those tactics that are meaningful into where these, hopefully these corporate targets will, you know, do the right thing by the campaign.

And so I'll lift up a few examples. Within the utility industry, we targeted DTE Energy, the largest utility service provider in the state of Michigan. What the research revealed and told us, Andrew, is that DTE is one of the largest contributors to Republican lawmakers. They charge the highest utility rates in the Midwest. They have a not so good reputation in investing in the infrastructure to provide reliable utility service. And then they also were in the midst of seeking a 9% rate increase that would have netted a $388 million profit, right?

And then lastly, perhaps most importantly, by the way, they're making it harder for you - as Black voters and as their customers or consumers - to vote. The long and short, Andrew, is that luckily these utility corporations can't arbitrarily just raise rates for people. They just can't have your bills go up. There's a regulatory body, government run, that ultimately decides whether or not utility companies can raise rates on customers. 

And so we saw that as an opportunity to engage the Michigan Public Service Commission, which at the end of the day will decide whether or not DTE energy could net $388 million in profit by raising rates by 9 percent to a place like Detroit and its customers. 

Research also identified the healthcare industry as a campaign target, and specifically it was Blue Cross Blue Shield Michigan. What was interesting is that Blue Cross Blue Shield, Michigan, they hold contracts with a number of municipalities, counties, state government, major universities in Michigan to essentially provide health insurance coverage to those public sector employees. 

The way it works is that these elected officials of these various, you know, entities, these public sector entities determine who they want to be in relationship with contractually as it relates to the healthcare insurance coverage being provided to their employees. 

AWG: So that's the overview. Where, where does it kick off and in that first act? 

BH: So in the fall of 2021 we had a day-long strategy meeting with our partners in the state of Michigan. We brainstormed, we strategized: what are the ways in which, or what are the tactics that we want to use to expose the contradictions by these corporations? From there, we continued to have conversations and we publicly launched the campaign, I want to say, in December of 2021. 

At the center of the campaign, and in ongoing planning meetings and conversations, is that the campaign approach would be one of creating escalating pressure, right? Or what are the tactics that we were using to where these corporations will ideally feel the heat and be compelled to act. And that act being basically stop giving money, stop giving political contributions to Republican lawmakers, backing voter suppression. 

Maybe to unpack that a bit further, a lot of organizing can be about, and rightfully so, about actions, events, public meetings, calling out the targets to do the right thing or to give into the campaign demand. While there was a lot of that in this campaign, I think our view was that every action that we take, is it one that's creating that escalating pressure that's applying more and more heat right to the corporate target to where they are grappling as to, what do we do? This is not some campaign that's going to go away. It's not some campaign that we just have to ignore in the moment. But there's like an escalating arc to the tactics that they're employing for us to give into the demand of the campaign.

To that point, we identified three industries, five corporate targets, which served as the largest political contributors to these Republican lawmakers. We landed on the healthcare industry, we landed on the utility industry, and we landed on the automotive industry as those corporate targets that we're going to run a sophisticated strategic campaign where we are applying the necessary pressure to win.

AWG: I learned a lot even just hearing you talk about it, but the idea, something I hadn't thought about before, that our counties and city governments all over the place have contracts with companies like Blue Cross Blue Shield and Delta Dental. And that therefore voters, taxpayers, might be able to influence local elected officials to then put pressure on companies like Delta Dental to then put pressure or change their policies in terms of, are they giving money to Republican legislators? Are they demanding that they issue statements, that they change their practices? There's a real source of power there, even in the unknown, unseen contracts just for providing basic health and dental insurance to city and county employees. And you all seized on that and said, I think we can move these companies because we think, cause we're pretty sure we can move local elected officials; get them in motion because of where our base is. 

I'm curious about how you decided that Ford and General Motors could be movable in a similar way by activating maybe Black consumers or otherwise. What was the lever there, because there are a lot of us who have been involved in big corporate accountability campaigns on huge companies where we didn't have as much leverage. So what was your assessment of, we think we can move them, also in terms of how they're participating in upholding right wing legislators?

JH: I can answer that, but with a grain of salt. GM and Ford, we probably did the least on. At a certain point in the campaign we had to make a sort of bandwidth decision about what we can pursue properly, versus, maybe taking some things off the table, and GM and Ford, we ended up engaging with less.

The theory though, was that they do so much of the marketing. And that is really a sort of consumer facing issue. Color of Change ran a big petition that got, I can't remember what they ended up with, but several thousand or more signatures around GM and Ford. We were looking at that as a national level sort of engagement, instead, with the rest of the companies looking more narrowly in Michigan and the points of accountability were more local than for the other companies.

From my experience in the labor movement, there's campaigns where you're throwing a lot at the company. A lot of resources are going into it. You're going for a lot of time and the company will just do their best to pretend that it's not happening for a long time before you start to break through. What we've seen around when companies are getting sort of directly asked, which side of this do you stand on, they'll immediately react.

Specifically when we looked at GM, there was a one-page advertisement, that had been taken out by Black-owned media kind of during the uprisings or a little bit later in 2020, that was criticizing GM for spending such a tiny amount on Black-owned media versus their overall advertising budget. And they reacted very quickly to it and came to the table with that organization. There was both a specific marker for us, to make us think, oh, this is a company that actually cares about their image, specifically for the types of constituents that we organize. And so that was one data point that made us think that they could be in play. 

AWG: Thanks for sharing already some of the lessons learned and the realness around, well, we thought we thought this, and then we tried this and then we had capacity. And so we focused on the targets that we felt like we could double down on and get more results with. And I think most of the story we're going to hear about actually is about the Blue Cross, DTE, those targets. Thanks for sharing about sort of what happened with some of the other of the six that you named. 

You have your analysis, you have a clear demand. You have your primary targets at the top legislature, you have secondary targets, these six companies, and then underneath those are going to activate other targets and points of leverage to move them.

Getting into act two here. What's really making this fight lift off? But also, can you tell us just a little bit about who you are, and what role you played in getting the strategic campaigns model and alignment around that in this campaign fight>

JH: I'd worked at SEIU and SEIU Local 32 BJ driving research and driving strategic campaigns. Coming into this setting, working with grassroots organizations, Byron and I both come from SEIU, so it was easy to start working together. We spoke a lot of the same language. We started to formulate what's become the Strategic Campaigns Model. Campaigns are incredibly context specific, but there are fundamental ways that power works universally.

It's a set of tools and frameworks for digging through these seven pieces of the model, these seven pillars that help us overcome the failure points on campaigns. The failure points, where campaigns falter, looks very similar. So we've gathered these tools and brought them together under one cohesive model to facilitate campaign decisions in a campaign team or coalition context where so much misalignment is possible.

And that's what we used for helping facilitate the strategy with this group of organizations that had been working together, but not necessarily working together in a campaign context. Especially in this very ambitious, very experimental campaign to go after companies for their political spending, which we hadn't seen done quite in this way before.

I'll just add that it's important to keep in mind, you know, Byron and I are talking a lot about strategy and we're saying “we,” but that is a very collective we. We had no idea how hot button topic the power outages were and DTE specifically we just brought them on a list and they were like, oh yeah, oh my god. Everybody hates DTE. Like, let me tell you about DTE. And we’re like, oh, let's look a little bit more there. And so it was very much a back and forth and building the strategy together with partners. 

AWG: You got alignment, you got a plan, a demand. Clear targets, especially DTE being already I think people are fired up around. How does it start? How does DTE start feeling the pressure, and their secondary targets, too?

JH: There was a couple of turning points in the campaign. In June of 2021, DTE, and actually like all of the targets and corporations that we've named, they were all sponsoring the Mackinac policy conference. Which is very like opulent, high class. It's at this historic hotel and little island in between the upper and lower peninsula. It’s about as far away as you can get from Detroit where the Black voters are, we’re the largest majority Black city in the country. Blue Cross was the number one sponsor there. We engaged them by land, sea, and air. We did this banner drop off of a lighthouse. We had the boat out too, we had a contingent do a march on the grand hotel where it was being held. And we were flying an airplane banner with naming all the companies and saying, stop funding the attack on Black voters. And so we got a lot of attention from that. Made a lot of noise for our Blue Cross clients that we were engaging as well as setting the table for DTE as well.

Meanwhile, we were also engaging the Michigan Public Service Commission in a very diplomatic way, connecting, saying our piece, understanding what their piece is. We're doing the diplomacy also. Meanwhile, we're engaging rate payers at the doors. Just straight door knocking.

That is sort of happening during the election season door knocking that has to happen anyways. It gives us two ways of engaging voters at the door, and also getting to this immediate economic pain point, this pocketbook issue that we were organizing around. So then people are starting to send these emails, we had a “click to email” EveryAction page set up for all the partner organizations to engage their base and engage new members. 

And so the Utility Commission is also starting to hear from them. We're having a little bit more engagement, but then we get to a point where we had requested, along with a lot of other environmental justice organizations and some like utility reform organizations, had requested that they hold a rate case hearing specifically on the DTE rate case. They had told us no. We found that as a key transition point for us to say, okay, now we can like start to turn up the, the temperature a little bit more 

AWG: and you were especially trying to get, which secondary targets of DTE or Blue Cross to do what, during this stage of escalation of direct action? And how did you start to find out that it was working? 

JH: So both these things were kind of happening at the same time. For Blue Cross clients, the first engagement we did was we were actually both engaging the mayor of Ann Arbor and the Wayne County Commission at about the same time. And both these things actually culminated publicly at, I think the same exact day. 

We had moved the mayor of Ann Arbor to send a letter of concern that he then shared publicly talking about, from mayor Christopher Taylor to the CEO, Dan Lepp, of Blue Cross, just speaking from a client perspective. Like how is this aligned with the values that you've told us around valuing democracy, and so that was like one level of public scrutiny.

And then at the same time, we're able to move at the Wayne County commission, the first contractor accountability resolution that calls on the contractors of Wayne County. Wayne County is the largest county in Michigan and where Detroit is located. Basically calling on county contractors to make sure that their political spending dollars are aligned with their publicly stated values.

We made it clear in the press that this was all about Blue Cross specifically. We started to get some action there. Ultimately, we passed five of these contractor accountability resolutions at Wayne County, City of Detroit, Ann Arbor, Washtenaw County, and City of Ypsilanti.

But then around the same time, you know, we're sort of parallel campaigning with also at the same time with the utility commission. Utility companies apply for a rate hike. Basically they say we can justify X amount of dollars. In this case, DTE was saying, we're arguing that we can justify $388 million. 

In general, when we've looked historically, they tend to deny 20% to 60% of that, that has been historically where they've landed. We moved them to deny 92% which was the highest in at least decades, as far back as the records go that we can find.

AWG: If I'm remembering this correctly, because we're now in the summer and fall of 2022, right in this story in terms of where you all are at. So this is also election period, getting people out for the midterms in Michigan. Some of the organizations are, whether it's partisan or nonpartisan, civic engagement work, they're engaging voters also. There was a huge storm, it sounds like on September 1st, that left tens of thousands of people without power. And now you have canvassers on the doors asking people to reach out to the Public Service Commission to deny the rate hike, maybe at the same time as they're reaching out about the elections or not.

But this is all, like you said, culminating at the same time. And also where you have simultaneous targets on local county commissioners and Blue Cross Blue Shield. But this is all happening at the same time, I assume, because you all feel like if you have a bunch of pressure around this one demand hitting at different times, that's going to have more of an impact.

JH: We didn't choose to have peak escalation happening at the same time as election season,  as the lead up to election day. That is generally not ideal for bandwidth purposes and organizations. What they called the “Secure My Vote Initiative,” what we call the “Suppress My Vote Initiative,” - it was this signature gathering effort. They had told us in the summertime, they had made an announcement that they have enough signatures to file. We were anticipating that they were going to file at any day.

And then there was like a sort of few week period where they would have to go through the agency approval and everything, before it can get to the legislature to take a vote. And so we were needing to deal with the reality of, we don't exactly know when this is going to hit, but we

have these things that can't wait till after election season to start doing this. We think it could happen during the lame duck session. We were sort of building to peak escalation towards election day because we wanted to be in a good position if it were to hit the legislature during lame duck period in November or December. 

In July, we had this really really fun direct action. We worked with this gospel singer, Corzetta Renee. Basically, we just signed Corzetta up for public comment at this regular meeting that the Public Service Commission was having in Detroit. Our base was more accessible to it. And, we rewrote “which side are you on” - the coal workers / civil rights anthem - to be about which side are you on, talking to the regulators: Are you on the people's side, or you're on these corporations’ side.

During public comment, she was the one to give a little preamble and then break into the song and 40, 50 activists, DBV members and leaders, got up and sang along with her, like a whole bunch of people in the room that weren't even with us were just joining along. The energy in the room was incredible.

We came out of there. We knew they felt accountable, even though they hadn't made the commitment. And then, a few days later they contacted us to let us know that they're actually changing their position on the demand that they could respond to.

They couldn't tell us whether or not they were going to approve or deny the rate hike, at what percentage, because legally, they had to wait till a certain point in their sort of quasi judicial process that formal process that they have, but they could tell us whether or not they were going to have this rate case hearing.

And so they did. That was the end of August where they did that. Rashida Talib was out there with us speaking powerfully. We had a rally out there, we had hot dogs for community members -get whatever means necessary to get folks out. Along with other environmental justice organizations that were active around the hearing, we packed the room. It was basically at standing room capacity, I think it was like maybe a 300, 400 person room. 

That was seen as successful. Two of the three local networks covered this thing, all of a sudden, in a way that they had never covered it before. All of a sudden people actually have an idea of who this three person utility commission is.

It's not DTE that's raising their rates. It's actually these three people. And so it's raising the accountability in a way that felt really palpable. And then a few days after that, there was this massive power outage. I think the one that you're talking about, Andrew. The timing, it was just so relevant. We had just been talking about how the Michiganders already pay the highest rates 

for the worst power outages, the utility commission needs to do the right thing, hold this company accountable and to actually deliver services before any further rate hikes are considered.  

Also, at the same time, we had already started political canvassing. This was a great topic because voting can be abstract, but, how much you're paying for food you've had to throw out from your refrigerators because it thawed when the power outage happened and went bad, it's such an agitational issue.

And so we were using that as a conversation starter. Mobilizing people to activate and engage the utility commission and also vote in general. Obviously there was a lot that contributed to the flipping of the legislature, but we were trying to use that as one of many things to just energize people to take action and to vote and to hold this company accountable.

AWG: You got momentum coming into September. You guys have done these dramatic direct actions. You've packed rooms and that's on DTE and really pressuring them around this rate hike. And then also I think simultaneously have campaigns around Blue Cross. What else happens in the lead up to the election?

JH: That was an intense stretch of time. We had separate plans for each of the Blue Cross clients because they're each a unique set of decision makers. We want to make sure we're actually moving with a plan that's going to work in each of those settings. At Michigan State University, they're extremely large and they're like 70,000 employees, one of the biggest Blue Cross contracts. We had received a commitment from five of the eight trustees, the Democrat trustees on the board, to put this contractor accountability resolution on the agenda. 

We were getting ready to go with that. We'd even put together social media toolkits to make the announcement the next day on when it was actually happening. But then like at 7 PM the night before, a conservative commentator, conservative columnists in the Detroit news basically printed a column on our contractor accountability resolution.

It contained a threat from the Senate majority leader, Mike Shirky, that said he was going to defund public universities if they pass this. This guy was also one of the main recipients of Blue Cross funding through his leadership PACs so obviously he was moving in his direct self interest and just made a bolt, just a straight threat to defund universities if they pass this. 

Unfortunately the chair of the committee pulled it, that put us on a little bit of a back footing. We came out saying that they shouldn't have done that. And four other trustees actually came out and said really powerful words at the meeting. We raised some ruckus around it, but we were put a little bit on our back footing because the universities went from, oh yeah, this is not right that this is funding disenfranchisement through these elected officials isn't necessarily what our mission statement is as a university. But then once a threat happened to funding, they backtracked. But then, we started moving a resolution with the Ann Arbor City Council. We started getting public commitments from the Washtenaw County commissioners.

Three days after, we did this really creative Halloween action, it was called Voter Suppression: A

Horror Story. Big, like street theater, civil disobedience thing that was a whole other story, but in the three days after that we passed the contractor accountabilities in Washtenaw County, city of Ypsilanti, and the city of Detroit, within 48 hours of each other. We had gotten a little bit on the back footing, but then really were able to push forward despite the threats that were made.

And then with the utility commission, that action that we led - we being Defend Black Voters as a coalition - was really set it up to move the utility commission to actually approve the rate case hearing. The rate case hearing raised the level of pressure that seemed unprecedented. But then I think it was three, four days after the election they made the announcement that they

were denying 92% of the rate increase. At the same time, there was a voting rights ballot initiative that we were all supporting - sort of on the side - that enshrined voting rights, that was another way of stopping the Voter Suppression Initiative. We had said from the outset a year and a half earlier, when we're like, we want to support that, but we also want to pursue this corporate accountability just in case, because there's so much that can go wrong with a ballot initiative.

So fortunately that was successful, but we were in a position where we thought we, if that wouldn't have passed, we were in a good position to push the corporations further. And we certainly created consequences that these corporations didn't think we had the juice to create. I can kick it to you, Byron, to talk through, like, how the coalition was feeling after, after all of that, kind of the energy that was in the room.

BH: Thanks, Jonathan. After the campaign started to wind down, there existed amongst the coalition, what I would call good tension, in that, okay, what's the next phase of the campaign? And not fully taking into account, ourselves included, okay, what does that really mean to wage an ongoing campaign against these corporate targets? The campaign was what, 16, 17 months and victories, successes along the way, as Jonathan just laid out. But we created, I think, sort of the energy to where partners wonder when to commit to an ongoing fight. 

AWG: Can I try to summarize then also sort of what y'all think are some of the big wins and value of doing this, the way you're doing it. Material conditions changing, the defend the vote ballot initiative basically was just a clear win it seems in the sense that this is going to protect a lot of Michiganders rights to vote, period. It was also very motivating, got probably some people out who otherwise might not have resonated with other parts of the campaign.

Beating back a proposed significant rise in how much people would pay for electricity, for power, huge victory going to help so many. I'm sure who knows how many millions of people get to keep money in their pockets that they needed, especially after the 2020 election.

And probably also just really blunts this giant electric company's power generally that they got beaten back so hard by appointed elected officials. That seems like, especially could galvanize utility company organizing around the country to say, look, they did it in Michigan. These companies are not undefeatable.

And then you had all these local wins around these responsible contractor policies. Designed to 

put pressure on companies like Blue Cross, which probably also changed the relationship. These are big companies that often have overwhelming quasi monopoly power. And your goal was to change how they related to corporate giving, in particular, like political donations.

So as far as that goes, have you been able to see a difference in how a company like Blue Cross shows up politically? Or sort of where is that at now?

JH: I would say we haven't really gotten into the data to track. What we've seen in our analysis is that corporate money will fundamentally back Republicans if they can, because that is the party of corporate interests of wealthy elite, of anti-worker, race-baiting, gender-baiting divisions.

That is where their bread is buttered. That's where they make profit. They will expediently support Democrats when they're in power, because they want to, basically they've been the financial backbone of the right, and then they've surfed to the democratic left by throwing corporate money into the democratic party.

Another thing that we've learned from this is that this is how capitalism works or, or certainly this economic system with unfettered corporate political contributions. Corporations are throwing money into politics when they see a cash return coming back.

We really started to understand how this system works. The top three corporate donors in Michigan are Blue Cross Blue Shield, DTE Energy, and Consumers Energies. The biggest health insurance company in the state, that wants to stay dominant in their field, that collects billions of dollars in state contracts in addition to county and city level contracts. They wanna be the one that people go to. They wanna make sure that single payer healthcare reform doesn't pass. That would cut them out of a chunk of market share. It's a pure in dollars to dollars investment, the same thing with DTE energy and consumers energy, they're trying to avoid accountability. And there's no reason why we should allow them to actually have that kind of influence over our democracy, to have this outsized voice. 

Citizens United is a Supreme Court decision that creates a lot of challenges to directly regulating corporate political contributions. But there's actually some states out there that have passed “pay to play” legislation. Connecticut and Hawaii have particularly strong pay to play contributions. Pay to play laws on the books that basically stop regulated monopolies, like the power companies, and state contractors, like Blue Cross Blue Shield and several other of the top 10 political contributors for making further political contributions. And then basically it's just a common sense way of diminishing corruption, putting more hands in the power of the citizens and less hands in the power of corporations. But we realized that most of our targets that we're looking at - Blue Cross, Delta Dental, DTE, Consumers, they were all there because they were just dollar to dollar investment to extract. And there's actually policy mechanisms that can just get them out of the mix. They're welcome to lobby. They're welcome to do whatever they want, to have the conversations that they think they need to have. But they don't need to have so many dollars behind them. In relation to what citizens are able to have a voice in those spaces. 

AWG: Out of curiosity about more of the lessons here, thinking specifically about this was a campaign that was oriented towards putting pressure on secondary targets, not actually your 

primary targets directly, which is different. There's a long tradition of this, but more often you'll see groups say we're going to go after DTE specifically, not the people who regulate DTE, or we're going to go after Blue Cross and try to shame them, not the local elected officials who have contracts with Blue Cross that is the source of their revenue.

And I'm curious what you all saw as the value of that for the on the ground organizers, for the campaign overall. If there were specific benefits, if there were specific challenges with going after secondary targets, what would you all say as your reflection on that?

BH: Going after secondary targets was certainly revealed in the research, right? The strategic research and shaping the power analysis. And I think early on we came to the conclusion that 

going after primary targets would have been a waste of campaign time and resources. Keep in mind, the Republicans control both houses of the state legislature. A slew of voter suppression bills have been not only introduced, but passed. And yes, they were vetoed by a democratic governor. And so to run a campaign, a lobbying campaign, a legislative campaign, a direct action campaign to force extremist Republicans to act in ways contrary to their self interest just would have been wrong.

The strategy to go after secondary targets, I think we felt gave us a greater likelihood or an opportunity to put pressure on those secondary targets and then ideally, or in turn, put pressure on the primary targets and so out of that secondary target engagement - a number of victories.

I would just to summarize it, I would say, yes, it was a result of the power analysis. And so it does not make sense to go after the primary targets in this case, but let's go after those corporations who need to be held accountable to their public positions in support of Black Lives Matter, against voter suppression, but are funding behind the scenes the voter suppression efforts led by Republican extremist lawmakers .

JH: I'll just add that we have this strategic campaigns model that we've been proselytizing on. The fundamentals of it is around power analysis, developing your strategy through a theory to win, campaign planning, which really gets into like escalation and escalation calendaring, like how you move from diplomacy to, to increasing, increasing tension that moves them to the table.

And then, internal decision making and implementation and goal setting and metrics to chart the path to victory. There are basically seven pillars in there that work. But the very foundation of it all is power analysis. That's so extremely important because we don't want to run our members into brick walls of campaigns. It could be a righteous fight, but if we, if we run our organizations that are memberships into a brick wall without really thinking, is there a crack in this wall? Where exactly since we only have so much power and we need to be putting our force to where there's actually going to be movement.

In the corporate campaigning world, there's a common approach of naming and shaming, but there's often not a more sophisticated analysis about why that would work or who's the decision maker worried about, do they care about their reputation? What is their business model? Where do they get money from? And what's gonna be a crisis for them that moves them to do the right thing?

AWG: And sounds like, implicit in that is, you think that that is a lesson for organizers more broadly. What are others, if any, that you feel like, especially coming out of this campaign and looking at our movement moments that we're in, our ecosystems, is there another lesson or two or wish that you have that you all feel like showed up, especially in this campaign that we should take more seriously?

BH: We certainly raised the awareness and ideally or hopefully the skillsets of organizers who were new to corporate accountability campaigns. A lot of organizers out there, they have sort of the experience and are trying to move an elected official. So whether that's lobbying and the 

state legislature or trying to move policy within the county or the city. That's in some ways it's common practice. And if you think about, at the end of the day, elected officials, if officials care about winning reelection and if organizers or organizations don't have the power to get in the way of that self-interest of elected officials, all they have to do is sort of like weather the storm, right?

I think a key or critical lesson in this campaign is that organizers were able to see a pathway to moving a powerful target that was not an elected official. And a level of understanding or awareness into the complexity or the intricacies between how corporate power and how they influence our economy and our democracy in a much more practical and meaningful way. I think this campaign allowed for the staff that were assigned to see the importance of like the regulatory bodies that are overseeing the utility industry.

So there's a way in which they can actually be moved and how people power can influence whether or not the utility industry actually profits to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Or everyday citizens in a particular municipality, over a period of time, could ideally have some real say as to whether or not their elected body that they elect - who that elected body actually is in business with.

Going forward organizing around the transparency that does exist in terms of like, you know who the clients are as it relates to a Blue Cross Blue Shield or other clients, but organizing the power to have some say as to whether or not it makes sense for you to be in business with that particular client, given their perverse values, which may be in contradiction with ours and certainly yours.

So it's a Yes/And, it's not an Either/Or. It's yes, we have to do our due diligence on the legislative side, but we need to take into account the role that these corporations play.

JH: Along the lines of some of what Byron mentioned, I think the campaign did a really great job with escalation. It's one of those words that 10 different people in the movement will use and mean 10 different things. But we took a really disciplined approach to escalation.

We have these slides that we created to engage with as a coalition to kind of align around a common definition of escalation - of creating an escalating crisis that moves at the decision

maker to do the right thing now, before the crisis gets worse. So that also means not just hitting them hard, but actually hitting them soft first. And asking the question, even if we know we're going to get told no, but just moving through all those discipline steps that allow you to go into

the really fun high profile actions that aren't effective actually until you've laid the diplomatic groundwork to get told no enough times to sort of make it sort of morally, defensible to escalate. The high profile stuff is the fun stuff that we talk about, but actually that groundwork that we did to make those actions actually effective was just as important.

AWG: And speaking of sort of the groundwork and the backstory and the buildup, I just want to make sure we get some time to more clearly say, where the groups on the ground are, what were any other takeaways? If you haven't shared them yet for those groups, but also how has this campaign positioned what they're doing now, and what the 2023 2024 agenda is for continuing to build base, build power? What's that look like for those groups?

JH: I would say we're still in active coalition process where we're exploring as a group. Where we're going with this. I can safely say there was a lot of energy around the groups, including us, felt really good about what we did together. We ran a really strong campaign that took on corporate power at a very fundamental level of corporate power over our democracy that disproportionately impacts low income people of color. We're exploring exactly what that could look like. 

But the biggest thing that is sticking out to us right now is these pay to play laws that could actually, they don't limit all corporate spending. But they limit a lot of the biggest corporate spenders. And so we are discussing what it could look like to expand the coalition to all of these cross cutting interests. You can imagine how many issues that the biggest corporations in our states are opposing, whether it's a single payer healthcare reform that I mentioned before that a company like Blue Cross is fundamentally opposed to because it opposes their business model as middlemen, environmental justice, environmental regulation, tax cuts, or like taxing the wealthy to pay their fair share and taxing corporations. We're exploring what it means to convene a larger coalition that can take on some of this extremely important corporate political spending issues.

And in a way that sort of clears the way for a whole bunch of different progressive issues and progressive legislation that we need to pass. We've really moved towards a power analysis that's not just like that -  one, we're building our own power. Everything that we're doing is base building everything. We're helping our members gain a sense of their own power that needs to be integrated into everything. But also we're looking at our opposition and really understanding the fundamental basis of their power and how do we undermine that power that has been inappropriately corrupting our democracy.

BH: I would just add just real quickly that all of our partners in Michigan are embracing the model and there's a commitment to move forward in their campaign work, using the strategic campaigns model. And what that's looked like is that there's been a number of trainings. Post campaign, I think we've held like what, two or three follow-up trainings where all of our partners, committed staff, and leaders to be a part of those two day trainings. In one case, a day-long

training, in another case there's another training that's coming up, I believe in October, one of our partners in the state wanted us to come up and do a full two days for a good chunk of their staff.

And so I think that's hugely important in that after campaigns are over, as we all know, people get busy. They go back to doing what they know best or what they do best. I think the desire and the commitment to continue to implement this model in their ongoing campaign work, as individual organizations or as a coalition, as Jonathan described. It's actually a big deal. It's huge. The ongoing trainings and the support that we can provide, I think it’s important if this approach is going to be able to be sustained.

AWG: Thank you for offering those. Is there a final offering or wish you have for organizers listening who are learning about campaigns, maybe trying to think about how to run corporate campaigns, anything that we haven't shared yet?

JH: It's all about the rigor and discipline. We have the tools, we have the approaches and the framework. We need to be much more disciplined in the language that we use with each other, really come to shared definitions, shared understanding of how we can move together, what type of crises we need to make for decision makers that move them to do the right thing. 

We're out here pushing what we're calling the strategic campaigns model. We think the more organizations, the more people, that use this language, the easier it is for us to build with each other. Whatever language it is we just gotta come together around it and we think this is a  good model. But the fundamental problem is that we, as a movement, we're just on way too many pages and it's really hard to build with each other with those kinds of circumstances. 

BH: I would just say briefly, corporations tend to regroup, right? They weather the storm. They have a lot more resources than we have. I think it's worth thinking through, what does a multi-year corporate campaign look like? With Defend Black Voters, it was 16 months, but, and there's some ongoing work as we've talked about, but what does that look like three years from now, five years, maybe 10 years? We went after these corporations on their culpability around voter suppression but that's not the only issue that people care about or cared about in relationship to DTE, Blue Cross Blue Shield. 

While we learned a lot and I think we did a lot of great work and we had some victories and successes along the way, at the end of the day, folks should be giving thought to like, what does it look like to really target these large corporations and actually reduce their power over over a period of time?

AWG: cool. Thank you guys. Thank you both for being here with us today.

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