No, Ezra, nonprofit leaders are not to blame for the 2024 election…
A rebuttal to the post-election effort to throw my field under the bus by Ezra Klein and other pundits.
In a set of recent podcasts, Ezra Klein has made the case that non-profit advocacy groups’ pernicious influence led to VP Harris’ demise, and should be neutered moving forward. This picked up momentum on X, with a specific focus on a 2019 ACLU survey answer about trans & immigrants rights that was weaponized by the Trump campaign. Klein is both mistaken on how much influence these groups have and wrong about the role they play in politics.
First, let’s talk about the infamous 2019 ACLU survey, in which Harris committed to protect the rights of trans immigrants in prison. As someone who has been on all sides of election questionnaires - as a candidate, advocate, and the staffer who actually fills out the endless surveys, advocacy groups have the right to ask whatever they want, and a disciplined campaign should know how to answer. I’m sure it’s tougher when your candidate lacks solid convictions, because then you have to put your finger up to see which way the wind is blowing. As for why the ACLU asked it; I was at the ACLU at the time, and I had colleagues litigating and organizing for trans people and immigrants in very difficult circumstances. This wasn’t an academic exercise for them. Either Harris believed in her survey answers, in which case she should fight for those beliefs and stand by them, or she should have been more disciplined in how she answered them. The ACLU has taken on tough causes for 100 years, it’s not their job to give presidential candidates protective padding.
Zooming out further, Klein bemoans how much nonprofit advocates (or “the Groups”, as he refers to them) dominate campaigns, administration policy, and Democratic politics in general. This is wildly inaccurate. Take an issue I work on, criminal justice. As a candidate in 2020, Biden promised to reform the pardon system - there have been over 10,000 pardon requests backlogged since the Obama administration. Like most promises Biden made on criminal justice, he never put an ounce of effort into this one. The White House never replaced their criminal justice liaison who left in early 2024, so as of right now, we don’t even have someone to take our phone call on this issue. How’s that for access? (This line of attack is particularly galling coming from someone who has a direct line to the country’s leading politicians and news orgs.)
I’ve also seen follow-up commentary suggest that the nonprofit to Democratic job pipeline should be cut off, and replaced by a more corporate pipeline. I find this particularly amusing, because corporate lawyers have always had a conduit into Democratic Party politics, from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries to agency heads to Senate counsels.
Klein, or his pundit buddies like Matt Yglesias, would probably argue that seeking sentence commutations for old black men with crack convictions is bad 2026 politics for frontline House candidates. Why can’t we just shut up and let Democrats win, wouldn’t that help our cause more? Except that virtually no Democrat, locally or nationally, has ever led on criminal justice without significant organized pressure, and ultimately, in four years Biden will have done less to reform our prison system than Trump did with the First Step Act.
In another example, Klein talks about the environmental left’s harmful impact on permitting reform. I actually agree with Klein on policy here, and unlike Klein, am actively working on permitting reform legislation. My experience proves just the opposite of his point - hundreds of lefty green groups lined up against Sen. Manchin’s recent bill, and it sailed through the Senate committee, with only three Democrats voting against it. If the nonprofit left were so powerful, why couldn’t they even control their own party’s committee votes? It’s actually the pro-permitting reform coalition (again, which we are a part of) that is mainly composed of technocratic think tanks, rather than base building groups that represent real people. Klein is just upset these reforms haven’t happened yet, but he’s wrong about why.
Klein also bashes nonprofit advocates culturally, suggesting we are some out of touch management class, which is pretty rich coming from someone who makes his living interviewing Ivory Tower intellectuals. (Do you know he’s lived in New York City AND San Francisco? He’s talked to real people, and boy are they upset about crime!) I’ll admit that 25 years into my professional career I am reasonably comfortable, thanks to a combination of privilege, luck, and hard work, and that is true of some of my peers. But not only did most of us start more humbly than, say, Ezra Klein, who was able to blog for a living straight out of college, but more importantly, we remain much more tethered to the real America.1
The people I work with on a daily basis struggle with employment, rent, parole, and devastating family tragedy. Politics is not a game to them, or our directly impacted staff. Policy is not a thought exercise. When we push for the EQUAL Act (to equalize the legal treatment of crack and powder cocaine), it's not because we want to be edgy, as Klein implies, but because a little girl had to grow up for 30 years without her father after he was caught with a middling amount of crack on him in the 1990s, a story multiplied tens of thousands of times over. That's why we push for these policies, that's why we have expectations when Democrats win a trifecta that they’ll do something about it, and that’s why we will never stop pushing candidates and elected officials to be better. They can ignore us if they want to or say no if they want to, we are pretty used to that! But don't blame us if their opportunistic lying hurts them in future political campaigns.
Look, the blame game isn’t even constructive so early after the election, but if we’re going to play it, where is the mea culpa from Klein, the Pod Save America bros, and others? Klein, whose podcast is one of the most prominent in politics, platformed a right-wing guest three weeks before the election to provide a reactionary “law & order” frame, basically soaking Klein’s progressive audience in Republican talking points on crime, one of their main election issues. (Klein nodded along the whole interview and offered little pushback.) Was that a savvy political move?
I get that right now Klein is probably reeling on a personal level, as so many of us are. My friend Billy Wimsatt reminded us in a mass email that people tend to lash out at those closest to them, and perhaps Klein’s nonprofit left-bashing is just easier than admitting a podcast sponsored by Goldman Sachs shouldn’t be lecturing Democrats on having an insufficiently populist economic message. Maybe he should take a beat, process what happened on November 5th, and come back ready to work in the spirit of collaboration rather than hostility.
For brevity I’m focusing on Klein here, but the same analysis could go for the Pod Save America bros, Yglesias, Michael Lind, and other mostly white, rich pundits who have been saying nonprofits are out of touch post-election. Lind went so far as to slam black and brown nonprofit leaders for not understanding what issues mattered to their races.