How to make grassroots political change (w/ Katie Fahey)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. When you're a little kid, there is a lot of talk about how you can do anything if you just put your mind to it. You want to be an astronaut? Work hard, dream big, and you can get blasted off into outer space. You want to be president? Make sure you study, eat your vegetables, and you'll be moving into the White House before you know it.

Now, as adults, I think a lot of us can get jaded about what is actually possible because realistically, it's probably impossible for me to become either an astronaut or the president at this point, no matter how much I study or how much broccoli I put on my plate.

But sometimes being too realistic can close us off from imagining possibilities and from understanding our real capacity to make change. Today's guest, Katie Fahey, is not a billionaire or a Washington insider. She's a regular person who became the founder of a grassroots campaign called Voters Not Politicians and later became the executive director of The People.

Katie is a smart, dedicated, energetic person who dared to believe that she could make political change. And on today's episode, she's going to tell us all about how she found success and how you can too, no matter who you are or where you live. To get started, here's a clip from Katie's TED Talk where she explains where her whole political journey started. When the Flint water crisis happened in Michigan, I was already feeling pretty disillusioned with the state of the world.

I was 27. I had an hour-long commute to work. I worked in the recycling industry, which I liked, but I spent most of my day crawling around in garbage cans. And I would listen to the radio on my hour-long commute and hear about how there were all of these bills that the people of Michigan wanted to see passed, yet our legislature wasn't doing anything about it.

And I found out that the reason they weren't was because of a thing called gerrymandering, which basically meant that when voting districts were being drawn, our politicians would pick and choose which voters they wanted voting for them to all but guarantee that they were going to win the election or that their political party was going to win an election. I kept thinking, like, how is this the world we live in?

Kids don't have clean water. Politicians aren't doing anything and aren't afraid of our vote. Like, doesn't anybody care? And why doesn't somebody do something about this? Katie was not going to settle for doing nothing. Right after this break, we will talk about what she did, how it started a chain of events that she couldn't have ever predicted, and what that means for all the rest of us who'd like to see the world be a better place. Don't go anywhere. We will be right back.

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Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. Comparison rates not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. These days we're surrounded by photo editing programs. Have you ever wondered what something or someone actually looks like under all the manipulation? I'm Elise Hugh and you might know me as the host of TED Talks Daily. This October, I am giving a TED Talk in Atlanta about finding true beauty in a sea of artificial images.

I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. Today, we're talking with Katie Fahey about how to organize, find consensus, and make lasting political change.

Hi, I'm Katie Fahey, and I'm the executive director of an organization called The People. Well, first of all, I'm personally really interested in your work, both because I believe it's so important to have civic engagement and regular people be involved in politics, but also because I grew up in New York, but my whole family is from Michigan. My dad grew up in Berkeley and my aunt and uncle live in Troy. And so it's cool to see, like, have a direct personal connection to the place where you've really changed how politics works. Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. Yeah.

If you can remember, what first started your passion in being involved in politics and in civic engagement? My dad was a veteran and he was part of an organization called the Disabled American Veterans. And so from a pretty young age, I was kind of like around a lot of veterans and people who had disabilities.

given up a lot for our country. So I think there was like a basic civic duty of like, hey, we live in this really in this country where we have a lot of freedom, but also a lot of responsibility. And so I always felt like voting was important and getting involved in like knowing what's happening locally is. But I actually was a little disappointed

shy of politics directly. I really didn't like the us versus them, that it felt like politics constantly was like, if you vote one way, you're evil, or if you vote the other way, you're evil. That part wasn't the part that excited me. It was more like, how can we come together to make change and look out for making like a better future for ourselves, but also future generations? Yeah, that's one of the things that I'm always struck by when it comes to politics is even in the most

places, it does seem like there is so much that is bipartisan and nonpartisan. There are, of course, really big, important issues that do have a clear ideological divide, but there are so many issues that...

It is pretty much everyone who actually believes in like things like I would like to have clean water when I turn on the tap. I would like to be able to breathe the air outside my house. I would like to have like a good, meaningful job. You know, obviously you can find ways to spin them into partisan issues. But when you actually talk to people on the ground, I feel like.

No one thinks of them as like, well, this is a controversial issue. Totally. That's what I continue to see and experience all the time is just that, like, there is so much more we have in common, especially when it comes to like, how could we improve things and try to make things better? But our political system is designed in a way where.

Our politicians aren't incentivized to focus on that common ground. If anything, they're actually incentivized to find the division so that you feel like you can only vote for them or you should only try and reelect them. But it's really in contrast to how a lot of us actually feel and what our communities actually need. With that in mind, what gets you excited about the work that you're doing right now? I...

I am constantly inspired by the number of people who actually want to make a difference in the world.

I think a lot of people can talk about apathy or talk about how people are too lazy or too busy doing whatever, watching Netflix or something instead of actually wanting to get involved. But I see the opposite. I see that right now people know about more issues than they ever have, both locally and globally. And they're concerned about more issues than they ever have been. And I think that sometimes we forget

that we ourselves, the people who are worried or who are concerned about these issues can be the actual ones who decide to do something different or make a difference when it comes to these really big issues facing our communities and world. For people who aren't familiar, can you walk us through the success that you had through voters in Michigan, through voters, not politicians? In Michigan, we're a pretty purple state. And what I mean by that is about half of us vote for Democrats, about half of us vote for Republicans. But

who got elected wasn't anywhere close to 50-50. Basically, because of political gerrymandering, how our district lines were drawn, you would, depending on which

political party had gerrymandered you might have up to 70 of the seats going to one party even if they only got 50 or even 49 of the vote and so you didn't see a lot of bipartisanship happening you didn't you kind of just had one side steamrolling their thoughts and policies and it was pretty extreme measures compared to where the average person in michigan was and so

It felt like until we could deal with that and make politicians more accountable and reflective of the will of the people, every single fight, whether it was about roads or education or food or elections, was always going to be an uphill battle because it wasn't actually reflective of the people. So...

I went on Facebook, not thinking that it would lead to much, but I made a Facebook post that said, "Hey, I want to end gerrymandering in Michigan. If you want to help, let me know." Smiley face. And it turns out a bunch of other people wanted to do that, like thousands of other people. So we started organizing and figured out in Michigan, we have this process called the Citizen Ballot Initiative process, which meant if we could come together and

write a law, write constitutional language, then we just needed to gather a bunch of signatures for us for 2018. It was 315,654 registered Michigan voter signatures in 180 days. If we could do that, then we could actually put this bill that we had created together up on the ballot for people to vote on. So the legislature couldn't mess with it. They couldn't try and change it. It was a way kind of to bypass the legislature and have

the voters decide what do we want for our future. And so we ended up doing that to create an independent citizens redistricting commission, which means for the redistricting process, instead of gerrymandering, where you have politicians getting to pick and choose which voters they want in their district, actually the people of Michigan would decide that in an open, fair, transparent process that involved millions of people instead of just a couple politicians.

I mean, not only did this work, but it actually did become law and change the way that elections and districting happens in your own personal district, but also across the state of Michigan. Yes. So we passed that law and then the independent commission went across the state and it was really exciting. In 2022, that was the first election these new maps were used and how people voted was an exact match

for who got elected. So 51% of the state voted for Democrats, 49% voted for Republicans, 51% of the seats went to Democrats, 49% went to Republicans. It was literally like a one or two person majority, which now meant that like every bill that was being passed actually required bipartisanship in order for that to happen, which hasn't been the case for literally decades in Michigan. So it's really exciting to see our policymakers having to act

actually be much more reflective of who the people of Michigan are, what we actually think and what we look like and wanting to see compromise and just solutions that are focused on the majority of people in our state, not a minority of like extreme partisans.

There are people who listen to this podcast and who will hear this interview who don't live in the United States, who live all over the world. And I think that there's still a lot of relevant lessons for them to learn, even if the exact process that you took isn't the process that they would take. So can you maybe draw out what you think are the universals in your experience for someone living in India or in Cambodia or somewhere else? Right.

I think understanding what are people frustrated with and what is the root cause of that frustration. So in Michigan, we had a lot going wrong. There is a crisis that happened called the Flint water crisis that on the surface doesn't seem like it would have anything to do with gerrymandering, but it's really rooted in a law that was only passed because politicians could ignore the will of the people.

And so a lot of people were concerned about, I literally don't have clean water in my community. But if we wanted to prevent future water crises, we really had to get to that root cause, which was for us redistricting. But that might look different in any community, but really trying to figure out what is the one or two things we need to change to actually start making progress.

Related to that, I think also understanding like what are the values of why you're fighting for that thing? So for us, it was really fairness. It was wanting to make sure our democracy was actually living up to what a lot of us think it should be, which is being actually for, by, and of the people, meaning voters have their vote

counted. We wanted transparency. We were really sick of the government acting in a way that wasn't transparent, that wasn't letting people into the process that was secretive. So that was one of the values we were fighting for. And just general fairness, like being able to treat everybody, regardless of who they vote for, the same, having their vote count equally. And the last thing I would say is really figuring out what is that action you can take. It's funny that we started online on Facebook because I tend to think of that's where like

People go to just argue and not actually solve anything. And what we did different is we said, OK, we're going to carve out this one little part of the Internet and actually only be action oriented. For us, we had a process where we could write a law, gather a bunch of signatures and then have the citizens directly vote on that.

It might look different. It might be a campaign that you can do that's an education campaign. It might be an actual law that you can pass. It might be raising money or awareness for a candidate who's actually going to fight for those political promises. And so make sure that what you're focused on really can lead to change and that it's really clear for people to understand that if you do step one, step two, step three, it can lead to this kind of outcome.

You know, it feels to me like the process part of it and the results all are built on a very simple, in some ways, almost obvious idea that I think that I at least forget all the time, which is that all of these structures are built of individual people, right? That like government is not some sort of like outside entity. Government is just constructed by all of these people making decisions. And that if you break it down to the atomic level of a single person, you can

make a person to person connection and change what people do. And that can have a giant change down the road. Totally. I think actually I myself needed to relearn that lesson. Like I thought I was like one of the only people who actually cared about gerrymandering. And now look, I've connected to all these strangers who do. I did have kind of that moment like, wow, there are, I think, hundreds of us kind of sitting around caring about this issue, but all feeling hopeless, all feeling like there's no way I can make a difference. And

And at the end of the day, we had to be the ones driving that change because the folks in the political system had no incentive to change it. It was keeping them in power. It's how they already got elected. So unless a bunch of us just everyday regular citizens who don't normally do political stuff had decided to make this change, I think we'd still have a much more broken government in Michigan. I think that one of the things with any group of people, especially people who don't already know each other, is when you start this work, you're having to

build structures, whether they're formal or informal, to let you communicate. So how do you start creating a system where you're not all just spinning your wheels? Because you did this really effectively. So what worked? I think one of the first things we had to do was help people understand what the purpose of this group would be. This started online at

on social media. So a lot of people were at first coming to this group to kind of complain or to try and place blame on either one party or one candidate or whatever. And I said, you know, there is every other part of the internet where you can go and do that, but not here. Like here, we need to figure out what is the way that you want to contribute and what are the tasks that we need to do in order to make change? Because we just don't have time to be distracted by all these other arguments. So really first trying to make sure people understood like what,

the goal was and what that meant, like what the work would then look like. And then kind of by chance, I was working in corporate America at the time. So I thought like, okay, if we structured this like a business, like let's make departments. And I just guessed like what you would need for a political camp.

So I was like, we probably need communications. We got to raise a lot of money. So like a fundraising department, we've got to educate people on this. So like education, we got to write a law. So we need like a policy team or some kind of legal team. And then we had a couple other ones, like a supply chain one and like an internet tech help one. And it evolved. But from each of those, we then had people start to think about like, if you want to help contribute to this, what would that look like? And a lot of people didn't know.

Because they, for a lot of people just like me, they had never actually been involved in a political campaign. And so we asked folks kind of, what are the skills that you have or just the interests that you have?

from those committees or departments. We formed like a leadership structure and each of those had different meeting styles. And eventually once we started getting a lot more people, we would created regional teams across the state too. So that we had kind of like our national coordination, but then like geographically, locally to where your city is or county or township, whichever level, you could actually have other people that you knew that you were like working as a team. And I think the biggest thing was thinking about like, how do we make sure everybody understands

who they can go to give feedback and like ask questions. And we really tried to be really,

open with how people receive that information. And we had a leadership team that would listen to that and try to still make the best decision going forward and come back to everybody and explain the decision we made and why we made it. It was kind of multifaceted, kind of like smaller working groups that could help make sure we were being actionable, but also like for a lot of the big key strategy decisions, making sure we actually created a space and place for people to give feedback.

We're going to take a quick break, but we will be right back with more from Katie.

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There's also engineered air mesh on the upper side of the shoe that provides the right amount of stretch and structure. It'll turn everyday miles into everyday endorphins. That sounds good, right? Let's run there. Visit brooksrunning.com to learn more. And we are back. When you're working with so many people, especially people who have different ideological viewpoints and maybe even think about

values or at least the language of values differently. How do you unify a message with so many people involved? How do you build consensus with everyone? I think you've got to find the simplest way to describe what you're fighting for first. So for us, coming back to like our name, we were fighting for voters and not for politicians. We were fighting for voters to be at the center of our government instead of politicians. And it allowed a pretty big tent for people to be like, yeah, that's what I want.

One of our core values was like that we were going to work with people who vote differently than you. And so getting back to the values and taking time for people to explore themselves, we had this training called your nonpartisan introduction. And it was literally designed so that people could explore why they were actually fighting for this, because sometimes it just felt like a like because those people are bad and that's why I'm fighting for it.

Once they started diving a little deeper, it came back to fairness. It came back to wanting a better future for people. It came back to feeling like the issues they cared about weren't being addressed by our Congress or State House or Senate, those kinds of things. And then the last part of that, I think, is actually allowing some flexibility. So have your core message with those core values of flexibility.

why this is important to fight for, but let it be regionalized. People could talk about their personal district and their personal history with voting way better than I could if I hadn't grown up in that community. So like making the space for people to tell their own story was helpful in that way. When you're working on something really big like this, how do you not give up? How do you actually push through the slog, which is inevitable? Yes, the slog is real. And I'd also say for us, there are so many naysayers. I think whenever you're trying to have

change something, especially something really big, everybody's going to tell you a million reasons why it's impossible or not worth it or why you could be spending your time a different way.

And I think one of the keys is finding those smaller milestones of success, taking the time to reflect and really appreciate that what you're doing is hard and worth celebrating in that way. I mean, how many people have attempted to amend a constitution? Like now we can say thousands of people in Michigan. Yeah.

You know, we started this in November of 2016. The bill didn't even get passed until November of 2018. That's two years of really hard work on top of day jobs and families and stress and all that kind of stuff. And I think every step of the way,

as we broke down those really big steps of write constitutional language, gather signatures, get people to vote on it. Every step of the way, there were so many smaller things that happened. So even like the smaller milestones of gathering your first signature, we had individual counters for every single person who gathered signatures. So you could see how many you had done and how many you had reached or even the rate and how you were gathering them just to give people feedback on like, wow, look, even if it is just the one that you've done, like that helped contribute to our bigger goal more than none.

And look now there's thousands and hundreds of us being able to do this. Having people take pictures and celebrating doing these things and then sharing that in a community in some way or having people share their personal experience on how something happened, even if it didn't go well, it just creates more of community around these kinds of things that I think can be motivating. And when you might feel like tapping out, you get reminded, look,

There are hundreds of other people fighting for this change, too. And I think that's important to remember. How do you keep your energy and your enthusiasm and your fuel up as you keep going? There's one moment during the campaign that I...

especially in like the hardest times I think back to. So I'm trying to do this on top of a day job, going through personal struggles. I had a family member who was in hospice that I had just driven like two hours there to visit right before they passed away. And then two hours back, I get pulled over by a cop. I get a speeding ticket, even, or, you know,

Yeah, I think it was speeding. I don't know. Some kind of ticket. And I just it was like two in the morning and I have to go to work at 8 a.m. And I'm exhausted. And I just felt like this is the worst. What am I doing? Everybody says we're going to fail. And I'm like in this parking lot crying. And I just started to then think about like how a couple months earlier.

I didn't have all these amazing people in my life. And now that now I could think about literally like every part of our state and think about one of the volunteers that I was working with who was dedicating their time, energy, creativity, their money, going and talking to their friends and family about civics instead of fun things, even though it was

All odds were kind of stacked against us, but they were spending all of that time fighting not just for themselves, but for each other. And that there were hundreds of us and ultimately thousands of us. And just remembering that you aren't actually in it alone. And there are really good people who want to make a better future too, who are willing to put in that much time and effort. It just was really...

helpful to remember in that moment, like, I'm not alone. And there are like a lot of really good people in the world. And then one of the other things I think I try to remember is the Michigan Constitution, Article One, Section One says all political power is inherent in the people.

And I had read that at a time when people were saying, like, you're 27. You don't know what you're doing. You're going to screw this up. Why are you doing this? And I was like, you know what? Actually, like the whole founding and purpose of our government is for us, the people. I am one of the people. And this is our inherent power. And if we aren't the ones fighting for this, like we're not going to have a better future. I'm totally sold. But I imagine there are skeptical people out there. And I think one

version of the skepticism that I can imagine you hear quite a bit is that you talk about this being nonpartisan, but actually in the US, voter access and fair voting is not a nonpartisan issue right now. That there are large chunks of the political establishment that

do not want votes to accurately translate into results. How do you deal with the desire to be nonpartisan when there is at times a concerted effort to not actually want elections to be fair and free? I think sometimes, especially with all the attention paid to the parties and on the politicians themselves, it becomes really easy to say, well, anybody who votes for that must be

or not like, not want to compromise or not believe in, or only believes in voter suppression. But what I have come to experience is that it's so not the case. That if you talk to everyday Americans, basically everybody doesn't think the political process

process and system works well and everybody wants to see a change and they might blame somebody different, but so many people just want a process that actually works and is fair and that they can trust in. And so I think if you can go back to engaging people on that level on saying, how do we create a system together that's going to work?

you start to open up that space to actually hear and see and experience that people do want your vote to count just as much as theirs. You could say, we're going to make sure that we're getting payback for the Democrats, or we're going to make sure that Republicans can't do this. But...

That's the easy thing to do that riles people up and keeps them divided and taking the time to be more nuanced and explain what do we mean by nonpartisan can be an invitation for people to act better and have a little bit of hope again in us being able to work together. I have heard some people who are in similar fields to you get really excited about the idea of actually moving beyond partisanship.

by having some of the wonkier but very effective innovations like ranked choice voting, where maybe it doesn't matter as much because you're not choosing Democrat, Republican. You're instead picking the top three people you like. Are you excited about those kinds of things that could also move us away from polarization too? Completely. I think there's so many different

innovations, renovations, whatever word you want to use, but ways that our democracy can catch up to the 21st century. It was designed to evolve and for us to be able to make change and figure out how do we keep it about the people. And I think there's a lot of exciting ways that we can do that. And I think there's a lot of ways, unfortunately, that our democracy is falling short.

Independence is the people registering as independent or not affiliated is the highest growing quote unquote political party in the country. And yet there are several states where they aren't even allowed to vote in the primary. So the only way they get to determine election is once it's actually election day and you only have two choices instead of real competition earlier on. Those kinds of things seem like common sense changes that.

Right now, the politicians in office, again, unfortunately, don't have a lot of incentive to change themselves. So it is going to come up to us, the people, everyday people, helping stand up and fight for these changes to be happening. One of the other things we're doing that I think is exciting in New Hampshire, we're holding a citizen assembly, which is a pretty common practice over in Europe, but where you bring a representative group of everyday citizens to New

reflect on a topic like how do we improve our government and have them help write policy and decide, you know, what would we want it to look like? And I think those kinds of things changing up how we involve people in the political process can start creating positive experiences that make people want to stand up and continue to get involved.

I think Michigan is such an interesting state because it is it contains such multitudes, right? You have one of the largest Arab American populations in the United States. You have an extremely dense urban center in Detroit. You have the youpers in the Upper Peninsula living in like rural, very rural and forested areas. You have farmland. You have all sorts of different you have wildfires.

really wealthy suburban communities. You have a lot of different places. When you're thinking about representation, there's the kind of like the district lines that are drawn, but there's also the like real block by block places where people live. And some of that is the product of long historical forces, redlining, prejudice, all sorts of stuff like that. So I'm just wondering how you think about

the vast diversity of forces that are also at play in a place like Michigan, too. When it came to the campaign, we wanted to celebrate that. When you have political systems like gerrymandering that are looking at representation and who's going to represent you in your state capital and who's going to represent you in Washington, D.C., like theoretically,

It sounds really great because you're like, yes, I have somebody who can hold me accountable. And there's somebody thinking about like my little tiny part of the state and my little tiny community. And they're actually fighting for us. But redistricting and gerrymandering means that the politicians are drawing those maps only trying to group voters based on who they vote for, whether they're Democrat or Republican. But so many of the issues that they're supposed to actually be dealing with, like roads and water infrastructure, schools are local and transcend that partisanship.

there's more commonality when it comes to like how do we want our school to look and yet the communities then become like literally carved up in ways that do not make sense you have a representative trying to represent 13 pieces of different cities rather than like three whole cities that are actually intact that have a lot of shared interests so when we created the redistricting commission one of

One of the criteria we use is a criteria that's really common in other independent redistricting commissions, but it's called communities of interest. And a lot of people like to say like, oh, redistricting, just get like an algorithm to do it and they'll draw it fairly.

computers certainly can help, but algorithms can be biased. But also like when it comes to representation, the people being impacted really hold the most truth to like what they want their future to look like and how they are or aren't being represented right now. So that communities of interest criteria method,

our commissioners had to travel around the state and actually listen to people talk about what are the boundaries in their community and why do they think they're important to stay together? Why do they think they have shared interests? So for example, you could have the cherry farmers up in Northern Michigan, Traverse City area say, we haven't seen our industry actually being paid attention to in the last 20 years. So we want to keep our farms together so that we can go and have at least somebody in our state house and state Senate trying to fight for us.

We have a lot of lakes in Michigan, a lot of great lakes you might have heard, or if you look at a map, you'll see them. People who live on the shoreline, like shoreline erosion is a huge problem. Like we have homes falling into the lake. So they have a shared interest that is beyond Democrat or Republican that they probably want somebody fighting for money and funding to come to their community for. But if they only have two houses in a district compared to being able to have like 50 houses in a district, that politician has more or less incentive to actually pay attention to them. So I really think that

letting people have those conversations, which aren't always easy, trying to be able to prioritize to like, well, what's more important, keeping our school district together or keeping this, you know, farmers market that supplies 70 jobs to the Hispanic community? Like, which one's more important? Well, people need to have those real conversations. But what's really exciting is now they actually can.

That's the type of conversation that is focused on in Michigan now when determining these lines instead of, oh, how do we cram as many Democrats or as many Republicans into here to make sure that we can get elected next time?

Well, Katie Fahey, thank you so much for being on the show. It's an absolute pleasure talking to you and the work you're doing is so important. And also just you make it so that I know people are going to feel inspired to take this on in their own lives as well. So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for having me. And thanks to everybody who's focused on being a better human.

That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Katie Fahey. Katie is the executive director of an organization that's called The People. You can find out more about them at thepeople.org. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find out more about me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com.

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