**This is a sample chapter from the book “Nine Secrets for Getting Elected” available at Amazon.com**
Winning elections and governing are distinctly different skills.
Most people who seek public office already have the aptitude and talent necessary to govern. The ability to understand budgets, communicate effectively, and deal with people are things most people do in their everyday lives. The nitty-gritty parts of the job once in office are rarely discussed, and they tend to take a back seat to the sexier big-picture issues of campaigning. But whether one is running a household or a hedge fund, these basic day-to-day managerial skills are more directly transferrable from private life to public.
Political campaigning, on the other hand, is a unique skill. Like fly-fishing, playing golf, or yoga, everyone has the potential to be good at campaigning, but most people can’t just wade into the middle of a Montana stream, walk onto the first tee at Pebble Beach, or unroll their mat at the local studio and be proficient without ever having held a fishing rod, driver, or pigeon pose. Practice develops skill, and practice takes time. And unlike fly-fishing, golf, or yoga, most people don’t spend their weekends or vacations practicing electoral politics.
As you enter the world of politics, recognize that it is vast and as infinitely detailed and nuanced as any community. Also understand that most elections are won or lost at the margin. This is true from Barstow to Belfast. More often than not, the gap between winning and losing will be just a handful of votes. In the 2004 Hermosa Beach city council race for example, the difference was just eleven votes.
If you’re in a close race — and you will be — do everything you can to make sure those eleven votes are on your side of the ledger. A professional campaign manager can help make sure they are.
You may have campaigned on a platform of cutting unnecessary spending in the waste management sector, for example, but when you get into office, the discovery that waste haulers are your city’s biggest franchisee may take you by surprise. You may be even more surprised by the reaction of certain segments of your community to proposed changes related to your city’s trash and waste hauling.
You aren’t expected to know everything right off the bat, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. And just because you don’t know something doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.
How Much Do You Know About Your Trash?
In 2012, the City of Hermosa Beach put its contract for waste disposal out to bid. Waste collection is the largest contract in the city, and we estimated its total value to be around $15 million over a seven-year term. (Why seven years? That’s how long it takes to amortize the cost of a trash truck.) For a little city like Hermosa Beach, $15 million is a lot of money, and whenever we reopened the trash contract, all the big, national waste haulers responded.
In Hermosa Beach, the selection of the city’s waste hauler had historically come down to one thing: cost. If the city council awarded the contract to a waste hauler who cost more than the previous hauler, the city council chambers would be packed with angry residents as soon as they got their new, higher trash bills.
I said historically because this was how the process worked prior to 2012. But in 2012, a large, growing segment of Hermosa Beach’s population believed that mitigating environmental impact, not cost, should be the primary determinant for awarding the city’s trash contract.
In response to this vocal constituency, the city council commissioned a citizens’ group called the Green Task Force to develop a list of priorities and environmentally friendly requirements for consideration for the new trash contract.
The one big idea to come out of the Green Task Force was that people should pay for their trash. They called the proposal “pay as you throw,” and it meant each household’s bill should be commensurate with the quantity of refuse put out on the curb each week. Some people in town recycled or reused everything (so-called zero waste households); why should they get the same bill as a neighbor who filled their rubbish bins to the brim every week? The city didn’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to water, electricity, or gas bills. Why have one for trash?
Perhaps more important, pay as you throw incentivized people to decrease the volume of waste they generated. The less trash the city produced, the less trash went to the region’s landfills, which were scheduled to close within the next few years. When they did, most Los Angeles county trash would be shipped by rail to a remote landfill in the desert — and like moving anything in volume by rail, that process was expensive. The transportation costs would be passed on to the households in our city, which would see their bills rise.
The pay as you throw proposal took these factors into account and hit the sweet spot of public policy where economics, common sense, and practical environmentalism converged. The Green Task Force’s plan successfully aligned economic incentives for every actor in the process with socially beneficial outcomes. It was a public policy home run.
The city council adopted the Green Task Force’s recommendations, and as part of the new contract we instructed the new waste hauler to make different-sized trash bins available for our residents. Each household could choose one of three different-sized receptacles; the smallest was the cheapest, the largest the most expensive.
Ah, but what about recyclables? someone asked. We still need the blue bins for plastic, newspaper, and glass. What should we charge for those?
Then someone else asked, And what if people purchase the smaller container but use their recycling bin for excess garbage? How should we deal with the free-rider problem?
No worries, said the waste hauler, who promised that the recyclables would be sorted regardless of how they were delivered to the processing plant. The waste hauler that won the contract used what they called a single-stream process, which meant everything that showed up to their facility was sorted at once.
During the bidding process, I toured the various waste haulers’ facilities and saw how the single-stream process worked. The collected waste from the garbage trucks was emptied into the trash hauler’s facility and different recyclables were blown off a huge conveyor belt by a computer-operated camera directing robotic jets of air. There was a section that puffed off plastic bottles and another where computer-guided electronic sensors identified and blew cardboard off.
The high-tech, single-stream process was dramatically better than the old-fashioned method that employed lines of people who hand-picked recyclables from a never-ending stream of trash. The waste haulers told us the process recovered more recyclables than the manual method did. And because it was more efficient, less trash would have to be shipped by rail to a landfill in a desert.
The waste haulers told us the blue bins were part of the old-fashioned process used when workers had to separate trash by hand. The bins for recyclables helped workers on the line because residents performed the first level of separation by bundling their newspapers and removing bottles and cans from other refuse. The contents of the blue bins went onto one conveyor, and the rest of the trash from the black bins went onto another. The blue bins meant less hunting-and-pecking by the manual laborers.
With the single-stream solution, residents no longer needed to worry about separating plastic, paper, and glass from their eggshells, soup cans, and coffee grounds. And there wouldn’t be a free-rider problem because there wouldn’t be any blue bins.
The single-stream process and the new contract would give Hermosa Beach residents more pricing options, and the results would be more effective at preserving the environment.
Economically and environmentally, everyone was a winner.
Well, not so fast.
The Big E
Hermosa means beautiful in Spanish, and for the people in Hermosa Beach the word environment means our beautiful beach and ocean. Broadly speaking, everyone who lives in Hermosa Beach, regardless of political stripe, is here for some combination of the same reasons: surf, sunshine, and sand.
But as I got into local politics I soon learned a growing number of people in Hermosa Beach and Southern California believed that another environment was even more important than a clean beach and pollution-free ocean: The Big-E environment.
The Big-E environment is the one Al Gore famously identified in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, and it embodies more than the 1.4 square miles of Hermosa Beach. It’s bigger than Los Angeles, or even the state of California.
The Big-E environment includes Amazonian rain forests and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. It encompasses oil drilling off the Malaysian coast and pollution in the Ganges. These problems are important and interconnected, and the common denominator for all of them is the excess consumption and exploitation of Earth’s resources. Sadly, according to Mr. Gore and his Big-E environmental disciples, the United States is the primary culprit responsible for the spoliation.
The growing flock of Gore’s disciples, many of them people who lived in places like Hermosa Beach, heard the message and wanted to do their part. And although they might not be able to save dolphins from barbarous Japanese fishermen, they could save the delta smelt (an endangered species of small fish) in the wetlands north of San Francisco. And if they couldn’t do that, they could save old growth trees from being cut down in the Hollywood Hills, or institute Meatless Mondays at their kids’ schools.
Wait, you’ve never heard of Meatless Mondays?
In 2006, the same year as Mr. Gore’s movie, the United Nations identified cattle as the greatest threat to the planet’s climate, wildlife, and forests. According to the UN report, cattle and livestock are responsible for generating more greenhouse gases (the ones that cause global warming) than cars, planes, and all other forms of transportation put together. The people who consume beef perpetuate this ruinous practice, and their high-protein Western diets are responsible for the acceleration of global warming. In fact, in 2016 the California Assembly passed a bill regulating greenhouse gasses produced by cattle and other farm animals.
The governor and the members of our assembly believe that California’s cows have their hoofprints all over the global warming problem because they produce environment-killing amounts of methane when they belch, pass gas, and make manure.
Accordingly, preserving the Big-E environment requires that we wean ourselves from the environmental evil of cheeseburgers and barbecue. Hence, Meatless Mondays in public schools.
Although Meatless Mondays, preservation of old-growth trees, and saving the delta smelt are important, that doesn’t mean the deepest green California Democrats have abandoned their traditional party canons about the primacy of public employee unions, a woman’s right to choose, or gun control. They haven’t. But it’s hard to get overworked, wealthy Hermosa Beach residents to show up for a rally supporting minority voting rights. It is entirely possible, however, to turn out a thousand people on a Saturday morning to hold hands on Hermosa Beach in symbolic opposition to oil drilling.
It is no exaggeration to say that while Democrats in Fresno are worried about unemployment, failing schools, and spiking crime rates in their communities, their party brothers and sisters in Hermosa Beach are more concerned about delta smelt and polar bears.
By the end of my tenure on the city council in 2013, the Big-E environment had risen in importance to the point that it received equal billing with the city’s nuts-and-bolts services, including public safety.
An example: Hermosa Beach’s most prominent Big-E environmentalist and Self-Appointed Guardian of the Earth (SAGE), was a shaggy-haired, ’70s-era hippie who owned a multimillion-dollar three-story home two blocks from the beach. The SAGE was prominent in local Democratic politics and an influential member of the increasingly liberal Beach Cities Democratic Club. In a state known as the breeding ground for liberal Democrats, the Beach Cities Democratic Club were capital-L, Berkeley-grade liberals. In 2006, the club had become so virulently left-wing they refused to endorse six-term incumbent Congresswoman Jane Harman (also the top-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee) in the Democratic primary election because she’d cast a vote in favor of sending troops to Iraq.
One particular night, the SAGE was upset with a line item in the city budget for the police department to purchase a conventional, combustion-engine police car. The police needed the car for undercover investigations and naturally wanted one with a souped-up engine and special modifications.
The problem, according to the SAGE, was that a turbo-charged V-10 failed to meet even the most generous standards of environmental responsibility.
Couldn’t the police use a Chevy Volt or Prius? the SAGE asked. Battery-powered cars accelerate just as quickly as gasoline-powered ones and are quieter, too, which is good for undercover work.
From his vantage point on a green, environmentally friendly soapbox, the SAGE couldn’t see any reason for the city council to buy the police department a gas-guzzling behemoth when a nimble little electric car would do. This is the same mindset that measures the US military’s effectiveness by how many gallons of oil it burns per day.
The police officers who were in attendance listened with amused disbelief. Was this guy serious? Did he really think a Nissan Leaf was going to work for undercover police work?
For one thing, electric cars were too small for all the gear and equipment they needed to carry, and the large batteries that powered them made the cars hard to modify.
As the officers in attendance at the meeting argued, sometimes investigations take longer than the battery’s useful life, and they might have problems finding a place to plug in. The cars required hours to recharge, which would mean putting an investigation on hold while they got more juice. The extension cord was also a dead giveaway on stakeouts.
Electric cars are also conspicuous, the police told us, because some of the neighborhoods where they did undercover work were not known for having environmentally conscious cars parked on the street. A brand new Prius would stick out like a sore thumb.
But most important, in the case of an emergency like an earthquake, a situation in which there would be no available power, an electric car would be useless as soon as the battery died. A gasoline-powered car would run regardless, and could be refilled manually.
The SAGE listened to the officers’ explanations, but remained thoroughly unconvinced that they were sufficient to justify the damage a turbo-charged V-10 and the fuel that monster consumed would do to the Big-E environment.
Unable to counter the officers’ operational arguments, the SAGE resorted to a more fundamental challenge to their planet-hating selection: How much undercover work do Hermosa Beach Police really do anyway? he asked.
Thankfully reason prevailed, and the city council approved the department’s purchase of the car they wanted to do their work — big, rumbling gasoline engine and all. But the SAGE’s questions were telling. They revealed that there was an increasingly confident group of environmental activists who were going to measure everything — government and private sector alike — with an environmental yardstick. Their yardstick. Police work and public safety were no exception.
These types of debates became increasingly common. The Girl Scouts, who used to report on the progress of their annual cookie sales, now advocated for a citywide ban on plastic bags. Students from UCLA came to city council meetings to offer evaluations of our environmental programs and recommended things we could do to enhance them. Presumably, political activism was part and parcel of these students’ course of study at UCLA, which says a lot about what Big-E environmentalism really is. (By contrast, I don’t ever recall seeing political science or government majors at city council meetings.) I often wondered where students with degrees in environmental science would find jobs after graduation, other than in government.
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“Hot” issues, and the cast of colorful characters who promote them, may catch you by surprise. The SAGE and his moralistic plea that we purchase electric police cars certainly surprised me, and I was a grizzled veteran of Hermosa Beach politics.
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When You Don’t Know What You Need to Know
The key to success is to see these things on the horizon, and the only way to do this is to work with someone whose job is to identify this stuff. In politics, as in business and in life, it’s always important to know what you don’t know, and political consultants often can help you do that. Hire someone who’s already been through this, someone who knows the city’s political history and knows where the minefields are.
Before you get started with your campaign, there are some specific things you’ll need to know:
- How many votes will you need to win? Voter turnout can vary depending on the season. The traditional time for voting is in November, but some cities have their elections in the spring, and run-off elections are never in line with the normal voting timetable. You probably won’t know how big the voter pool is until you or your consultant looks through past elections and works out the specific numbers, including the number of registered voters and their turnout history. Once you know the pool, you can figure out the baseline number of probable voters, and from there you can put together the number of votes you’ll need to win the seat. That number will affect your fundraising, your budgeting, how aggressive you need to be about walking particular precincts, and the number of calls you need to make.
Some percentage of the registered voters in your district will be high-propensity voters, meaning that they turn out for every election. Target these voters first, and make sure that your issues and their concerns line up. They always vote, so you need them to vote for you. Find out what they care about. Your consultant should be able to steer you through the math, so don’t worry too much about it now.
- Who are the major players in your city? Every city operates through the use of contracts with nongovernment associations, and these contractors can wind up being influential within a particular administration. Try to learn who they are and what they do before you get into office. Trash haulers, for instance, are big in most cities.
Some cities are home to large businesses: Skechers in Manhattan Beach, Honda in Torrance, or Disney in Anaheim. Making contact with them before you run is important too.
- Does your city have a SAGE? A SAGE is a local historian, influencer, or community activist. You’ll want to forge relationships with them because they can be incredible sources of information. Sometimes known as “the Chattering Class” thanks to their fondness for talking amongst themselves, they know the city’s political history, they know what the candidates are doing, and they know everyone’s background. Take them out for coffee. Ask their opinions on the issues currently facing the city, and you’ll get back a knowledgeable, in-depth answer that can inform your own positions.
As you’ll soon see, had I asked someone involved in our schools what they thought of the blue bins issue, they might have shrugged off the question. Whereas if I had asked a parent if they were okay with us getting rid of the blue bins, their opposition to the proposal would have been immediate and forceful. I could have accounted for their concerns and adjusted my position to accommodate it.
One of the most useful things you can do on the campaign trail is sit and talk amicably with people who know the lay of the land. I used to have a list of people in Hermosa Beach whom I would make a point of calling every week or so, just to find out if there was anything bubbling up in their sector of the community.
Reporters are another good source of information, so if you’re friendly with the local reporters, lob them a call every now and again. You need to be able to take the pulse of your community, and talking to these sages is the quickest, simplest way to do that.
Hollow Symbolism
In September 2012, the city council decided to ban polystyrene. You might know it better as Styrofoam. You are probably only aware of it when you take food out of a restaurant, and this, of course, was exactly what the ban was aimed at.
Not wanting to pick a fight with the deep pockets and tax revenue generated by big grocery stores, the Big-E environmentalists carved out exceptions in their ban for polystyrene used to package raw meat, fish, and dairy products. More people buy raw chicken or a gallon of milk contained in plastic each week than get takeout from the local restaurants, but that was beside the point. It was much safer to take a symbolic stand by directing the ban at the city’s small restaurants than it was to pick a fight with well-funded corporate grocery stores like Vons or Ralph’s. The local hole-in-the-wall restaurant wasn’t going to challenge the ban, because paying lawyers would cost more than just buying new paper takeout containers. The corporate grocery stores on the other hand, would resist.
But effectiveness was a footnote, because the Big-E environmentalists would be able to claim a leadership role in protecting the city, complete with the self-congratulatory press releases and speechifying. Never mind that the ban did not make taking polystyrene onto the beach illegal, or that the largest source of the material was still being used in bulk by our grocery stores. Hermosa Beach was taking a stand, and that’s what was important.
The symbolic stand the Big-E environmentalists took, however, had real-life consequences for Hermosa Beach’s small businesses. As sympathetic as the local business owners were to the small-e environment, they told us the alternatives to polystyrene for packaging food were not good, and that their customers complained. A paper container full of leftover pad thai from the local Thai place was soggy and seeping onto the back seat before it got home. It disintegrated into a puddle in the refrigerator by morning. A local fruit smoothie shop said it was losing customers to neighboring cities because they were forced to use paper cups that leaked in people’s cars.
The ban, while symbolic to the Big-E environmentalists, was costing local small businesses real money.
Perhaps the worst part of the ban was that nobody without a degree in chemical engineering could be sure what it was we had outlawed. Here’s the first sentence of what we made illegal in Hermosa Beach: thermoplastic petrochemical material utilizing the styrene monomer including but not limited to polystyrene foam or expanded polystyrene processed by any number of techniques, including but not limited to fusion of polystyrene spheres, expandable bead polystyrene, injection molding, foam molding, extrusion blow molding, extruded foam polystyrene and clear or solid polystyrene.
A gold star for you and your high school chemistry teacher if you can distinguish expandable bead polystyrene from extruded foam polystyrene.
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A good political consultant will tell you to watch out for the impulse to ban something that people complain about.
Bans are hard to enforce, and once the enthusiasm for symbolically ridding your town of secondhand smoke or plastic bags wears off, the reality of it can quickly become ridiculous. Giving in to the clamor can feel like you’re accomplishing something, but don’t vote for things you don’t believe in just because a vocal group bays for it at your council meeting. Your voting history will follow you from position to position. Remember why you’re running in the first place. Are you running just to win a title? Or are you running to make your community a better place? If you want to change your city, you’ll need to accept that sometimes you may find yourself on the unpopular side of an issue.
And that’s okay.
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Hermosa Beach is the most fertile kind of place for thoughtful, meaningful environmentalism to take root, because the residents are all small-e environmentalists. Pay as you throw is proof there are effective, practical solutions that don’t require coercion or wasteful expenditures of taxpayer money.
As columnist Peggy Noonan wrote, “Explaining what you believe involves trusting people to hear and consider; it assumes they will respond fairly and even with their highest selves. In this way, you develop a relationship with people, an ongoing conversation between your articulations and their private thoughts.”
During my time on the city council, communication with the public was almost always done post hoc. A conversation between the government and the public requires both sides to have something meaningful to say. But in Hermosa Beach, the Big-E environmentalists rarely did.
Which brings us back to the blue bins.
The Big-E environmentalists were adamant that we needed to have them. The bins were critically important. Not because they increased the efficiency of the city’s recycling efforts or reduced the amount of trash our city sent to the landfill. We needed the blue bins because they were important to the children.
What’s the connection between the blue recycling bins and children? Well, for years, people have been teaching kids to separate their recyclables from other trash. In Hermosa Beach’s grade school, there is a class dedicated exclusively to recycling and the environment (really).
Hermosa Beach students are taught to put their food scraps into the trash and their paper and plastic into separate recycling bins after lunch. These lessons are instilled early and often, with the idea being that children take the lessons home and incorporate them into their everyday lives.
Without the daily ritual of separating plastic bottles, newspaper, and other recyclables from the trash, we would communicate to impressionable young minds that it was acceptable to haphazardly throw things away without consideration of the Big-E environmental consequences. According to the Big-E environmentalist logic, the blue bins were symbols necessary to counter this moral decay, regardless of their actual impact on the effectiveness of recycling or the environment.
So the city council succumbed to the pressure and kept the blue bins. Each week the residents of Hermosa Beach perform the symbolic gesture of putting out two separate bins — a black one for refuse and a blue one for recyclables, even though the second bin is completely superfluous.
It would have been just as meaningful to write into the city’s contract that instead of a blue bin, the waste hauler must provide green balloons to each household that they could tie onto their mailbox on trash day to symbolize their commitment to the Big-E environment. The green balloons would have been just as effective as the blue bins. Cheaper, too.
