Podcast: Talk Policy to Me

The highly contentious Georgia Senate elections are right around the corner. The results will determine which party holds a Senate majority for the next two years. In this episode, we take a step back and examine the Senate as an institution in the current political context of hyperpolarization. Is it still functional as a mechanism of effective government? Maybe. Or, maybe not.

To help make sense of it all, we spoke with UC Santa Cruz politics professor and co-author of The Invention of the United States Senate, Dan Wirls, and senior contributor at The Appeal, Jay Willis, who has written extensively on the Senate filibuster. Both Dan and Jay discuss the most worrisome aspects of the Senate—equal representation of states and the filibuster as a mechanism for gridlock—as well as potential paths forward.

Read more

During the holiday season, food is often central to the celebration. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more people are experiencing hunger for the first time, and food insecurity has become a daily reality for many. Today, we’re talking about what some say is a practical solution to rising hunger—urban agriculture and the policies that shape and support it.

If you live in the Bay Area and are experiencing hunger this holiday season, check out these resources that may be able to offer help:

• (San Jose) West Valley Community Services (https://www.wvcommunityservices.org/)
• (Berkeley) Berkeley Food Pantry (https://www.berkeleyfoodpantry.org/)
• (Peninsula) San Francisco-Marin Food Bank (https://www.sfmfoodbank.org/)
• (Oakland/Alameda) Alameda County Food Bank (https://www.accfb.org/)
• (Richmond) Richmond Emergency Food Pantry (http://www.refp.org/)

If you live outside the Bay, you can visit https://www.feedingamerica.org to find your nearest food bank.

When shelter-in-place orders were mandated in cities across the US, city employees sprang into action to facilitate the transition. Day-to-day government happenings were instantly and radically transformed, but one thing that cities still needed to do? Community engagement. In the face of orders for folks to stay home and social distance, cities faced a reality where they needed to quickly and efficiently transition to new or unfamiliar modes of digital engagement. So… how’d they do it? 

In this episode, we hear from Meghann Lucy, a sociology PhD student who studied the transition to digital engagement in Boston this past summer, and Heather Imboden, an engagement practitioner and the founding principal of Communities in Collaboration in Oakland. Both Meghann and Heather discuss what cities are learning about how to meaningfully engage residents virtually, and how this moment is shaping the future of city-led engagement processes more broadly. 

Nothing in the US Constitution mandates or guarantees a two-party political system. Yet Americans are accustomed to understanding the political landscape as a binary of Democrats and Republicans; third parties are rarely taken seriously, particularly on the national scale.

Members and candidates of political third parties, like the Green Party, argue that this is bad for democracy. With an increasing share of the electorate -- particularly young people -- growing disenchanted with the existing parties, third parties represent an opportunity to re-engage independent voters in civic life by better representing their worldviews and preferences. That’s why the typical Green Party platform reads like that of a very progressive Democrat, calling for deep investment in transformative climate policy, an end to all wars, and major social safety net expansion, plus electrical reforms that make third party candidates more visible and viable choices in the voting booth. 

In this episode, which was written and recorded before the November 3 election, Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef spoke with Jake Tonkel, a biomedical engineer who ran for San Jose City Council as a member of the Green Party. Jake shared his perspective on the positionality of local and national Green Party candidates in the political sphere, the damaging narrative around spoiler candidates, and the Green Party’s theory of change. Jake also charted a course for elevating the profile of the Green Party, and other non-major parties, through targeted electoral and ballot access reforms. 

Related Resources 

• Video from Vox on the benefits of multi-party systems
• Article by Briahna Joy Gray on “Vote Blue No Matter Who” politics, and their costs to democracy 
• Document from the National Association of Secretaries of State detailing ballot access rules for every state
• CSPAN interview with Green Party Presidential Candidate Howie Hawkins
• Jake Tonkel’s campaign site

Read more

On November 3rd, California voters will decide on Proposition 22. The Proposition aims to allow app-based drivers to maintain their status as Independent Contractors by carving out a special exception to Assembly Bill 5. We talk to Goldman Alumna Rebecca Stack-Martinez and the Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center Ken Jacobs about the implications of Prop 22 on labor and the influence of money on the most expensive ballot initiative in California’s History.

• Gig Workers Rising
• Report- “The Uber/Lyft Ballot Initiative Guarantees only $5.64 an Hour,” Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich, UC Berkeley Labor Center

Talking: Election coverage—where’s the policy?

Hourly breaking news. An endless stream of push notifications. A backlog of political podcasts (but not this one, right?).

Today we’re talking about how the news media covers elections, and how voters can find real information within the sea of coverage in the final weeks before the election.

Welcome to Season 4 of Talk Policy to Me!

It’s been a whirlwind of policy news and happenings since you last heard from us (to say the least) and there’s a lot to catch up on. While we work hard on new episodes, we thought we’d pop into your feeds for a brief moment to introduce a few new members of the TPTM team and take a moment to ask one another: What media resources are you looking toward for grounding and clarity in the lead up to the November election? 

Feel free to share with us what you’re reading or listening to @goldmanschool and @BIFYA_Berkeley on Twitter and @GoldmanSchool on Instagram and stay tuned for forthcoming Season 4 episodes!
 

The brutal murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis Police Department officers, and the failure of the justice system to quickly prosecute the police officers involved, has triggered an explosion of activism across the country, and the world, in loud protest of police brutality against Black people. These actions vary dramatically along spectrums of intended impact and severity. And the response from media, police, and the public have exhibited the same variation.

Overwhelmingly, we’ve seen peaceful demonstrations and efforts to funnel money to bail funds, Black-led organizations, and Black-owned businesses -- both powered strongly by the social media organizing of young people. We’ve also seen the amplification of looting and wealth redistribution actions, used as justification for violent police and military response which have been stoked and authorized by the president. Finally, we’ve seen the chaos and anguish of the moment used to leverage the importance of voting in the coming Presidential election and unseating Donald Trump.

These renewed calls to vote coincide with two clear barriers to democratic in-person elections: shelter-in-place orders in response to the ongoing spread of Coronavirus, and local curfew orders beginning as early as 1PM in some cities, aimed at reducing protest activity.

In mid-April, Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef spoke with Dr. Sunshine Hillygus, Professor of Political Science at Duke University and co-author of the newly published Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes Into Civic Action, about the behavior of young people when it comes to voting and elections. At the time of the conversation, the Democratic primary had swung definitively in favor of Joe Biden, California had been under stay-at-home orders for over a month, and George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade were still alive.

Dr. Hillygus and her co-author Dr. John Holbein examine the personal and systematic barriers that stand between young people and the voting booth -- and the consequences of the vast disparities in voting rates between generations. In this episode, which is the last in Talk Policy To Me’s series on democracy, Reem and Dr. Hillygus discuss the damaging misconceptions about young people’s civic attitudes, and how these misconceptions are weaponized by conservatives in the service of voter suppression. Why is it so hard to get young people out to the voting booth? Who benefits when young people stay in on election day, and who pays the price? What is the role of the public school system in preparing young people to be engaged citizens? And how can state electoral policies support civic attitudes?

Dr. Hillygus asserts the importance of voting, particularly for those who want to see radical change in entrenched systems which seem broken beyond repair -- most notably, the healthcare and police systems. In the current moment, voting can seem like too small and too remote an action in response to the atrocities that have come to the fore in recent months, but which have been plaguing the Black community for much, much longer. And on its own, voting in November is too small an action.

The urgent challenges faced by the United States require direct action and local community, in addition to the long-term changes that could become reality if young people were proportionally represented in the voting booth.

Writing referenced in this episode is linked here:

• Stop Blaming Young People For Not Turning Out for Sanders by Ibram X Kendi
• An Excitingly Simple Solution to Youth Turnout For the Primaries and Beyond by Charlotte Hill and Jacob Grumbach

For more on the importance of voting for systemic change, check out the rest of Talk Policy To Me’s series on democracy:

• Talking Democracy in the Era of COVID-19
• Talking 16 Year Olds and Voting
• Talking Voting and Elections

For ways to support Black communities and frontline protestors in the Bay Area, please consider supporting the following organizations with your voice and/or money:

• The East Oakland Collective
• Anti Police-Terror Project
• People’s Breakfast Oakland
• National Lawyers Guild - SF Bay Area Chapter

The 2020 Census launched April 1st, 2020. With it comes yet another time where individuals have to distill their identities into check boxes with limited options. In this episode, we’re exploring how the race/ethnicity category options were created and how those available choices impact policy. Host Sarah Edwards talks with Cristina Mora, Associate Director of Sociology and Co-Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley. Cristina wrote the book “Making Hispanics”, which explores the creation of the Hispanic ethnicity census category. Cristina shares the challenges in race/ethnicity category creation, policy and personal implications, and why the census is so important.

To fill out the 2020 Census for your household, visit 2020census.gov.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought America to a screeching standstill, with most non-essential businesses shutting down, events being cancelled and postponed, school systems going virtual, and skyrocketing unemployment. And on top of it all, we’re technically in the midst of an election season, which has also been severely disrupted by the shelter-in-place measures implemented across the country. 

In this Q&A-style episode of Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef interviews former Labor Secretary and economic inequality scholar Robert B Reich on the subject of democracy in the era of COVID-19. 

In other episodes for this series on democracy, we discuss barriers to the voting booth and distortions in our electoral system that suppress the will of the people -- particularly black and brown people, and young people. In this episode, we dive deep into what happens when a pandemic is layered over these persistent issues. What happens when candidates can’t campaign? When polling places are shut down due to a lack of volunteers willing to risk their health on election day? When governors cancel primaries in the interest of discouraging big gatherings? When the sitting president demonstrates flagrant disregard for public health, and a single-minded goal of securing a second term? What happens if a candidate dies of COVID-19? 

Can we even call what remains a democratic election? 

This episode was made possible by the curiosity and generosity of members of the GSPP community, who contributed their questions and/or voices to this project. A heartfelt thanks to you all! Voices heard on this episode are: Larry Rosenthal, Molly McGregor, Lily Nienstedt, Mai Sistla, Justin Lam, and Maiya Zwerling.

For more on inequality, democracy, and Twitter beef with Elon Musk, tune into Professor Reich’s Youtube series, The Common Good.