Grassroots and Grasstops

At WSJ, Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins report on the outside game of grassroots and grassroots lobbying.  Things really took off in 2011 when Google and other tech companies pushed back hard against IP legislation.

Today’s most effective corporate lobbying no longer involves wooing members of Congress with Chateau Margaux, five-star meals or tickets to professional sporting events. K Street’s elite now works in secret to influence lawmakers with the help of an unlikely ally: you.

Though appealing to the public has long been part of the lobbying playbook, it has taken a much more sophisticated form in the years since lobbyists were banned from using the traditional tools of their trade to curry favor with elected officials. They recognized that, given the new restrictions, the best way to influence members of Congress was through the people who sent them to Washington in the first place.

In 2021, the focus was on proposed tax hike.

The oil-and-gas industry killed their proposed tax increases by getting voters in Texas and Louisiana to tell their members of Congress that the tax increases would kill jobs back home. Lobbyists for tobacco companies and convenience stores worked to persuade Black Americans that a new $100 billion tax on tobacco products would drive up illegal tobacco sales and increase the likelihood of conflicts with the police, like the violent encounter that led to the death of 43-year-old Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014. Black lawmakers responded by striking the tobacco taxes from the bill.

The private-equity industry, meanwhile, got even more creative. Months before Biden proposed a $1 billion-a-year tax increase on private-equity investors, its lobbyists quietly launched a public-relations campaign to convince a few dozen centrist Democrats that increased taxes would lower the amount of money invested in small businesses and real-estate development in their states. A key target of the effort was Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.

To win her over, the private-equity lobby identified her top political advisers, staff and campaign donors. The industry purchased advertisements on Twitter and Facebook pages targeting this inner circle, stating that higher private-equity taxes would lower investment and jobs in her state. “Private Equity is directly supporting 138 small businesses in Arizona,” read one social-media post from the industry’s Washington trade association. The lobby also paid for advertisements in Arizona that encouraged voters to call Sinema’s office and urge her to oppose the tax increase.

Industry lobbyists contacted Arizona business leaders and got them to sign opinion pieces in local media outlets to catch the senator’s attention. Most of the pieces were written by lobbyists, according to one of the private-equity strategists involved in the campaign. “Raising taxes on individuals and small businesses who contribute funds or sweat equity to a project will diminish the incentive to take on risk,” read one piece.

Facing pressure from her constituents in Arizona, Sinema came out against the tax increase, and it was dropped from Biden’s plan before it was called up for a vote.

When The Wall Street Journal reported that industry lobbyists had persuaded Sinema to oppose the tax increases, her spokesman said it was impossible because the senator never spoke with any lobbyists for the industry. But the private-equity lobby didn’t have to speak to Sinema. They spoke to her constituents back home.

 

Brobilizing

Caroline O'Donovan at Buzzfeed:

Unlike the neighborhood bakery that wants customers to add their names and addresses to a petition for expanded outdoor seating, tech companies typically already know who and where their users are. It means startups can mobilize — or brobilize — thousands of people via a simple email or push notification to blast targeted messages to their elected officials, often with just a few clicks. It’s like astroturfing for the always-on, location-aware era.

Bird — which has also tried to brobilize customers in Milwaukee, Culver City, and Boston— did not invent this method of getting startup customers to help fight regulation. Uber texted its customers in Texas when the city of Austin was trying to force drivers to undergo more stringent background checks. Airbnb has done it in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, where hosts participating in a political campaign called Airbnb Citizen have lobbied legislators by phone, in the street, and in public hearings. Just this week, delivery company DoorDash set up a website where its delivery workers can ask California lawmakers to override a court decision that would make it harder to continue classifying those workers as independent contractors.

These click-to-lobby efforts have been ramping up for a few years now as elected officials get more serious about regulating tech (or more cognizant of the political value of appearing to do so) and startups increasingly ask their user bases to defend them in response.

Guns and Interests

Steve Friess writes at Buzzfeed:

The National Rifle Association has rallied gun-owners — and raised tens of millions of dollars — campaigning against the threat of a national database of firearms or their owners.

But in fact, the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of already exists, despite having been assembled largely without the knowledge or consent of gun owners. It is housed in the Virginia offices of the NRA itself. The country’s largest privately held database of current, former, and prospective gun owners is one of the powerful lobby’s secret weapons, expanding its influence well beyond its estimated 3 million members and bolstering its political supremacy.

That database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun-safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines and more, BuzzFeed has learned.

The result: a Big Data powerhouse that deploys the same high-tech tactics all year round that the vaunted Obama campaign used to win two presidential elections.

Roll Call reports:

[The] lobbying firm of Shockey Scofield Solutions LLC registered late Sunday night to lobby on behalf of the American Silencer Association, a trade association of manufacturers of firearm accessories. They will lobby on funding for the National Firearms Act Branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which maintains the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. The Branch also processes applications and notices associated with the manufacture, registration, transfer and transportation of National Firearms Act firearms.

John Scofield, former communications director at the House Appropriations Committee, and Jeff Shockey, former staff director at the House Appropriations Committee, will be the lobbyists.

Lemann on Journalism

Journalist's Resource features an interview with Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Columbia journalism school (h/t John Sides):

JR: Our site has been rolling out a new feature on scholarship that relates to the 2012 election. You have done a lot of in-depth political reporting. What are your thoughts on how political reporters can do deeper, more-informed journalism? What should they be thinking about a little more?

Nicholas Lemann: First of all, there’s the fairly standard but true complaint that politics is covered too much as a horse race story, like a sports story. Coverage of specific candidates and how their campaign is doing just takes up a lot of bandwidth. So there’s way too much election politics and way too little policy. There’s very little spelling out what difference it would make depending on which candidate is elected. The press has gotten somewhat better on this over the years, but it’s still an issue.

I think the press is way too focused on media strategies — both as they say in the business paid media and earned media — and way too little on grassroots organizing and the so-called “ground game” of politics. Interest groups get under-covered tremendously. There’s also kind of moralism in political journalism; that there are good guys and bad guys; that people are being tested on character; that they are being caught doing bad things or are innocent of doing bad things. There’s a tendency not to understand larger forces — to use a kind of “great man theory” of history — and not to understand politics in the way that political scientists generally do: as a realm where interests come to contend and try to run societies either peacefully or not. Interest groups tend to be treated as illegitimate actors. Compromise tends to be undervalued. Legislation tends to be undervalued. Within political coverage, there tends to be too much focus on the executive branch and not enough on the legislative branch.

There’s not enough cost-benefit analysis applied. A good example is the Arab Spring, where a lot of the press coverage — as with Iraq — had a degree of personalization. It’s the equivalent of horse race coverage, in the sense of, well, “If so-and-so is the dictator of a country and he’s a bad guy, when we take him out then good guys will reign.” It has a sort of narrative logic. There was a rejoicing over people like Gaddafi and Mubarak leaving their jobs and not a lot of analysis of what, if that happens, what will happen next. Will things be better? Will things be worse? What are the contending elements? There’s a tendency to understand things — countries — too much in the form of individuals and to fail to see any action inevitably as having both good and bad consequences, rather than only good consequences.

Grassroots, Astroturf, and Speed Cameras

In our chapter on interest groups (p. 289), we talk about "astroturf" -- "grassroots" activism that has support from professionals. In our chapters on mass media and political participation, we also discuss ways in which activists are using blogs and social media. A story in the Lutherville-Timonium Patch illustrates both themes:

Sarah Dennis started the Facebook group "Slow Down for Baltimore County Schools" in January because she and her friends support more speed cameras in school zones.

"I just figured I'd put it up on the web," said Dennis, a Rodgers Forge mother of two and a special education teacher for Baltimore County Public Schools.

The group quickly attracted 357 “likes” from people who support a County Council bill that, if approved Monday, will authorize an unlimited expansion of the county’s current network of 15 speed cameras.

But the grassroots effort to win council support has a powerful friend not found on its Facebook page: ACS State and Local Solutions, the company that holds the county’s speed camera contract and stands to financially benefit from the pending legislation.

Kearney O’Doherty (KO) Public Affairs, the politically connected strategy firm hired by ACS, has helped Slow Down for Baltimore County Schools communicate with County Council members and expand its base of support by establishing a separate website that sends e-mails to the elected officials and drives more “likes” to the Facebook page.

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Unlike with disclosure rules for lobbying groups, nothing prohibits political strategy firms from working behind the scenes to align the interests of grassroots groups with those of their corporate clients.

But political observers say public awareness of such activity is important so that elected officials and citizens know when a company with a financial interest in pending legislation is backing a grassroots group with a public interest in the bill.

“It’s information people should know,” said Paul Herrnson, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for American Politics and Citizenship and a professor of government and politics. “It’s not unusual for a company to try to get its way.”

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In Maryland, groups like the Maryland Jockey Club and Penn National have financed anti-slots community groups — not because the companies were against expanded gaming, but because they wanted to influence where the machines were placed, said Matthew Crenson, chairman emeritus of Johns Hopkins University’s political science department.

The practice of companies helping grassroots groups "is so common they have a name for it — 'Astroturf democracy'"—as opposed to “grassroots,” said Crenson, who did not comment specifically on Kearney O'Doherty Public Affairs’ involvement in the speed camera issue.

"For every public group there is a private or corporate organization that has an interest in their efforts," Crenson said. "In a way, it's good. Small public groups get access to consulting and support services they might not otherwise have. They're getting access to the political system that they wouldn't have had otherwise."