Richmond’s Progressive Alliance Has Won Elections and Made City Hall Better for 20 Years
October 17, 2024
By Steve Early
This article appeared originally in Social Policy. This is part one of two. Read part two.
On a Saturday evening last spring, Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) co-chair Claudia Jimenez hosted a high-spirited rally and party with 200 supporters of her re-election campaign for the Richmond City Council.
Jimenez is a forty-six-year-old immigrant from Columbia, who worked as an architect and community organizer before seeking elected office four years ago in her diverse, blue-collar city of 114,000, that’s eighty-percent non-white.
On the seven-member council, which includes an RPA majority, she has immersed herself in municipal finance questions, public safety issues, and the longstanding challenge of making Chevron, the city’s largest employer, more responsive to community concerns about its environmental impact.
Along with Mayor Eduardo Martinez, a retired Richmond school teacher, Jimenez backed a 2024 ballot initiative—dubbed the “Make Polluters Pay Tax,” which pressured the giant oil refiner into making a financial settlement with the city, that will add $550 million to its treasury over the next decade.
However, at her campaign kick-off last spring, she ticked off a list of accomplishments less dramatic than jousting with Big Oil or passing one of the first city council resolutions in the nation opposing “all existing and any future military aid to Israel,” because of its “collective punishment” of Palestinians in Gaza.
Instead, Jimenez reminded her audience of city council work on traffic safety, youth job creation, main library renovation, parks and recreation program improvements, pay raises for city workers, and reallocation of police department funds to pay for other public safety programs, including creation of a “mental health response team” that can respond to some 911 calls not requiring armed officers.
“I am running once again,” she said, “because I believe local government can be a force for good in people’s everyday lives . . . that public resources must be protected and used to uplift the community.” As an immigrant, working woman, and mother, Jimenez stressed that she was “very practical and goal oriented,” while remaining a “progressive dreamer.” As a Richmond city councilor (and its current vice-mayor), she pledged to “never stop dreaming about ways we can make this a better world!”
Part of Broader Movement
Jimenez is part of a growing “municipalist” movement filled with grassroots activists pursuing similar dreams and practical policy goals. They are waging reform campaigns for public office, at the local level, around the country, as part of electoral coalitions that are multi-racial, multi-generational, and working-class oriented.
The RPA is a rare long-distance runner among these “independent political organizations” (IPOs). Twenty years ago, Green Party members in Richmond, dissident Latino Democrats, socialists of varying stripes, and other local activists united against Chevron’s longtime control of city hall. Since then, RPA candidates have appeared on the ballot more than twenty times and won twice as often as they have lost.
At a municipal auditorium event September 21, the RPA will celebrate its twentieth birthday by highlighting its current three-member “Team Richmond” slate for the city council and paying tribute to its founding fathers and mothers. They include Gayle McLaughlin, a former two-term mayor of the city, who is stepping down from the council in January. McLaughlin has won five city-wide or council races since her first RPA campaign in 2004.
Twenty years ago, the term “municipalism”—which refers to local organizing or electoral activity aimed at revitalizing cities—was not yet widely used. Only the Vermont Progressive Party (and its antecedents) had a continuous record of municipal election success, based on year-round political organizing, which dated back to Bernie Sanders’ four terms as mayor of Burlington, VT. in the 1980s.
Relevant lessons, drawn from the experience of more than 1,200 municipal officials elected as candidates of the Socialist Party (SP) during its early twentieth-century heyday, were pretty much unknown or forgotten. Only recently have activists had invaluable historical guides like Shelton Stromquist’s Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers Fight for Municipal Socialism (Verso, 2023), cases studies on “radical municipalism” in Fearless Cities, abroad, or organizing tool-kits like Building Power in Place, just published by the Solidarity Research Center in L.A.
Learning the Ropes
Two decades ago, with the exception of some Richmond natives like community organizer Andres Soto, RPA founders had little local political experience, despite being well-versed on national and international issues. Like their working-class predecessors profiled in Claiming the City, they had to familiarize themselves with the workings of a local government that was long the domain of political insiders, and not very welcoming to “outsiders.”
From a vocal minority on a city council long dominated by the business community, RPA standard-bearers eventually became the driving force behind left-liberal majorities that helped Richmond become nationally known for its innovative public policy initiatives.
In contrast, some municipal reform groups in other places made initial breakthroughs but then struggled to achieve long-term stability. For example, in a city near Boston, one Sanders campaign inspired affiliate of Our Revolution (OR) succumbed to internal squabbling, set-backs at the polls, and/or election winners who abandoned their original identification with OR and cultivated a more traditional personal following instead.
Failing to deliver on every campaign promise, in a hostile political environment, has led to tensions and recriminations between some candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and local chapters that helped elect them. (See Bowman, Jamaal)
In Seattle, left intervention in municipal politics has been led by a single charismatic figure, backed by a disciplined “cadre organization,” able to mobilize other forces in the community to fend off re-election threats and win fights over key issues before the city council. Yet the catalytic role played by Kshama Sawant, who is stepping down this winter after a decade in office, has not been replicated anywhere else by Socialist Alternative, her primary support network.
Fortunately, DSA and a broad coalition called United Working Families (UWF) have achieved wider big city success in Chicago. Last Fall, UWF and its constituent groups elected former Chicago Teacher Union staffer, Brandon Johnson, as that city’s new mayor. Its fifty-member city council now boasts a six-member Democratic Socialist Caucus.
Nationwide, about half the 200 elected officials affiliated with DSA are members of city councils or commissions. Seven are mayors, including Martinez in Richmond and Emma Mulvaney-Stanek in Burlington, a former VPP co-chair who now presides over a Burlington city council on which Progressives have almost as many seats as Democrats.
About the Author
Steve Early is a former International Union representative for the Communications Workers of America who has been a dues-paying member of DSA since 1982 and the Richmond Progressive Alliance since 2012. He is the author of five books, including Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, published by Beacon Press.