Editor’s Note: This is Part Two of a two-part series. Part One is here.

April 23, 2013

By John Hrabe

In addition to her victorious campaign strategies in 2012, California Democrat Party officials recognize Democratic Party Executive Director Shawnda Westly’s critical role in the state operation. “She gets it done,” said John Hanna, the co-chairman of the California Democratic Party’s Resolutions Committee, who also praised her ability to build coalitions. “Westly has the ability to see all sides of an issue and bring various groups within the Democratic Party together.”

Her ability to bring together interest groups is a necessity in Democratic politics. “[S]ometime in the 1970s, the Democratic Party became basically an ‘interests’ party,” wrote Neal Gabler, a senior fellow at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center, in the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “It stopped pressing government action as an overriding binding principle and began instead to appeal to individual interest groups: African Americans, Hispanics, women, labor, gays, youth and even Blue Dogs [moderate Democrats]. Anyone who hopes to make headway in the nominating process has to find a way to appeal to many if not all of them.”

Westly has built that credibility with Democratic interest groups through years in the campaign trenches. Before starting her own consulting firm in 2005, she worked for six years as the political director of the California Professional Firefighters.  Her consulting clients have included the Consumer Attorneys of California, No on 75 (the 2005 initiative banning mandatory union dues for political purposes), and numerous union-sponsored independent expenditures.

“When you are in a fight to protect consumers, families and working people, there is no one better to have at your side than Shawnda Westly,” said Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones, who worked with Westly in 2006 on the campaign against the Sacramento Arena tax. “Her extraordinary talent, energy, and dedication were a big part of California Democrats’ success in 2012.”

Westly, unlike many professional political consultants, doesn’t often take public credit for her work. She declined to comment for this story, a pattern reflected in the minimal number of press reports referencing her name. Nonetheless, Democratic staff members describe her as the kind of person that treats everyone the same, no matter their rank or importance.

She also expects everyone to pitch in. When you attend a California Democrat Party Convention, you won’t “see a lot of people standing around on the sidelines,” a frustration Westly expressed as a 19-year-old volunteer at an Orange County beach clean-up.

Proms

No one at the 2013 Grant and Lincoln High School proms, held at the same time and place as this month’s Democratic Convention, would think twice about buying a single ticket, or a pair of tickets, for two people of the same sex. In the 1980s, that wasn’t the case for Edison High School in conservative Huntington Beach.

“When I tried to buy prom tickets, I learned the school was only selling tickets to couples, one boy and one girl,” Westly recalled of her days as an Orange County honors student and varsity tennis player in a 2012 Los Angeles Times opinion piece she wrote. “When the school administration denied us tickets just because we didn’t have male dates, it didn’t seem right.”

The student senate voted to uphold the school’s ban on singles and same-sex dates. Echoing today’s conservative talking points on gay marriage, the student body president told the Orange County Register that the rights of individuals weren’t being restricted. “We are not denying her the right to go.  She is entitled to go with a member of the opposite sex,” the student body president said, according to a 1987 Orange County Register account of the incident.

“It was a stunning lesson for a 16-year-old: If you step even slightly out of line with tradition and acceptable norms, you will be punished,” Westly wrote in 2012. “I saw firsthand that society doesn’t just promote its traditions; it does all it can to enforce them.”

Students circulated petitions to support the ban. Anti-stag posters lined school walls. “My choice to go to the prom without a traditional date made the whole experience memorable for an entirely different set of reasons,” she wrote 25 years later. “It made me suddenly an outcast and a radical, a bomb thrower in a green taffeta dress.”

Ultimately, the bomb thrower won. The school principal reversed the ban because “individual rights are more important than keeping tradition.”

Westly added, “Besides, if some traditions weren’t broken, women would still be in home economics instead of the Senate.”

Women in politics

After Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, the list of high-profile California Democrat women is relatively short. There’s Attorney General Kamala Harris, Board of Equalization Member Betty Yee and Assembly Majority Leader Toni Atkins. Women in politics, even progressive politics, continue to face an uphill fight for recognition.

Just ask Molly Munger, whose Proposition 38 tax increase lost big last November after the good-old-boys’ Democratic establishment, led by Gov. Jerry Brown and party Chairman John Burton, lobbied against Prop. 38 in favor of their own tax-increase initiative, Proposition 30, which passed. Also passing was Proposition 39, by her wealthy contributor counterpart Tom Steyer.

Women, according to some feminist authors, don’t always recognize the achievements of other women. Case in point, House Minority Leader Pelosi’s Saturday address to the 2013 California Democrat Party Convention.  Intentional or not, in her 13-minute speech to convention delegates that repeatedly praised Burton, Pelosi omitted any reference to Westly, who no doubt deserves some credit for the party’s remarkable successes in 2012.

“In the past, women in politics have rarely gotten the respect that their quality of work deserves,” said Kathy Tavoularis, a Republican consultant who served as the executive director of California’s delegation to the Republican National Convention. “But the future shows great signs of this changing — politics is catching up with the business world. Both major parties in California are now run by accomplished professional women.”

Other prominent women in politics describe Westly as “one of the biggest champions of women in Sacramento.”

“Politics can be a cut-throat industry, especially for women who don’t have the traditional avenues of entry and advancement enjoyed by their male counterparts,” said Jaime Huff, the political affairs manager for Southern California Edison. “Shawnda Westly understands this and has become one of the biggest champions of women in Sacramento.”

Huff added, “Her sincerity to the success of women is not lip service — she actively seeks to promote, encourage and mentor women in politics daily.”

Brownley was the only speaker at Democrats’ “Red-to-Blue” luncheon that thanked Westly for her role in the November victories. The first Democrat to represent Ventura County in 70 years, Brownley attributed credit to the party’s detail-oriented executive director.

Editor’s Note: This is Part One of a two-part series. Part two is here.

April 22, 2013

By John Hrabe

The second night of the 2013 state convention earlier this month, California Democrats shared the downtown convention center with two Sacramento-area high schools hosting their junior-senior proms. It was probably just a coincidence. However, there are parallels between the two celebrations.

Both gatherings represent the culmination of a year of hard work. The Democrats’ convention mantra, “We’re just getting started,” could easily describe high school seniors preparing for the next stage in their lives.

And there’s one final parallel: both parties are due in large part to the work of some talented organizers behind the scenes.

Unprecedented success

Democrats in California are basking in unprecedented successes.

In November, the party helped secure the reelection of President Barack Obama and Sen. Dianne Feinstein. It picked up its first supermajority in both houses of the state Legislature in more than a century. It added six freshmen from swing districts to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s Democratic caucus. All the while, passing Proposition 30, Gov. Jerry Brown’s $6 billion-dollar tax increase, and defeating Proposition 32, which would have weakened unions’ political funding.

You don’t have to ask Democrats who gets the credit. Throughout the convention, delegates wore “Viva Burton” buttons to acknowledge the work of the party’s chairman.

“On every issue, at every turn, John Burton has been a force for solutions for our most pressing challenges,” Pelosi said in a minute-long homage to Burton during her Saturday convention speech to delegates. “We thank him, and I thank all of you, for all that you did in 2012 and before that for making California true blue California. Let’s hear it for our great state Chairman John Burton.”

But Burton, a media favorite due to his expletive-laden antics, couldn’t have done it without his right-hand woman, the party’s executive director, Shawnda Westly (pictured on the right of the above photo).

“She is the engine to the operation,” said Rep. Julia Brownley, D-Oak Park, one of six congressional freshmen honored at the convention’s Saturday “Red to Blue” luncheon. “The party this year played a much larger role in congressional races than they have ever played before.”

That larger role in congressional races, according to Democrat campaign literature, included the party designing and printing 124 mail pieces, logging more than 3.7 million knocks and dials to reach voters, 50 party field staff hired to setup the infrastructure for “Get Out The Vote” programs, 5.1 million pieces of campaign mail in mailboxes, and 607 staff working party canvass programs.

Onslaught

Westly’s overpowering campaign onslaught wasn’t a stealth operation. In April 2012, she predicted the party would pick up seats, and even suggested the two-thirds super-majority was achievable. “We have a real chance to pick up a 2/3 majority in both the Senate and Assembly, CA will play a major role in the battle for the House — its [sic] not a question of if we will pick up seats, but of how many,” she wrote in an online election chat hosted by the Sacramento Bee. 

Much of the groundwork started a year prior. In an April 2011 piece for the influential progressive blog, Calitics, Westly described why Democrats’ success “was no happy accident.” Among Westly’s highlights: a 25 percent cut in the party’s monthly expenses, an online database for every county party, 12 training bootcamps around the state, a full-time bilingual communications director, and monthly organizing calls with statewide officials.

Westly’s confidence in 2012 was also due to the off-year ground work running voter registration programs targeted to minority voters in traditionally Republican strongholds. “Democrats in California spent the better part of 2011 expanding voter registration and increasing the likelihood that minority voters would turn out on election day,” she told the Bee in the 2012 live chat. “Between our It Gets Bluer Latino voter reg program and our Operation Game Changer program to convert poll voters to permanent vote by mail voters, we expect to continue to see gains for Democrats among these communities.”

Numbers

Numbers don’t lie. In the past eight years, Democrats’ efforts are best reflected in two counties that moved from Republican ground to contested territory. In 2004, Ventura County served as the home district of conservative stalwart Rep. Tom McClintock and maintained a nearly 3 percentage-point Republican registration advantage. By 2012, it had turned to a Democratic county by 2 percentage points. The registration changes in Riverside County are even more startling. Since 2004, Republicans have lost a voter registration percentage point every year, dropping from a 12 percentage-point GOP edge in 2004 to just a 4 percentage-point advantage in 2012.

And the trend line shows no improvement for Riverside County’s Republicans, thanks to the state’s new online voter registration program, which took effect in January 2012. Capitol Weekly reports that, in Riverside County, “Democrats out-registered Republicans online by 46 percent to 27 percent.”

State Republicans credit Westly with the Democrats’ remarkable voter registration gains.

“President Obama might have won Texas with her help — if Shawnda wasn’t preoccupied with picking up a supermajority here in California,” said Ken Lopez-Maddox, a Republican who represented Orange County in the state Assembly. “Westly has dedicated her life to improving the lives of others.  She is honest in her motives and provides an example to all of us of what can be when we believe in something greater than ourselves.”

Part 2 is on how Shawnda Westly gets things done.