Welcome to Louisiana Lefty, a podcast about politics and community in Louisiana, where we will make the case that the health of the state requires a strong progressive movement fueled by the critical work of organizing on the ground. Our goal is to democratize information, demystify party politics, and assist the coalition building we need to win.
On this week's episode, my conversation is with North Louisiana organizer, Candice Battiste, about the recent work in Georgia that led to a Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, and the similar organizing work happening right now in Louisiana.
Okay, so, Candice, thank you for joining me for the podcast today. Would you be willing to give an introduction of yourself? I'll start just by saying that you and I first worked together, if I'm not mistaken, on the Unanimous Juries project, where we worked to pass Constitutional Amendment 2, that got rid of the non-unanimous juries that said in Louisiana, one of only two states left in the country where you could be convicted of a felony without a unanimous jury charging you as guilty. So that was our first work together. And and what was great about that, is that it was sort of one of those Coalition's or statewide patchwork of groups, routes that we're going to talk about. But before we get into that, I just love for you to share who you are with us.
Yeah. So I was so excited, now, you know, when I look back on it, that that was my first real introduction to organizing around an issues campaign. And thank you for, you know, your leadership with that coalition, and all that was involved, because it was my first time, you know, really organizing and specifically being able to organize up here at home, it just, it opened up my entire world. And it opened up my eyes. I knew that there were issues, I knew that we had to make sure that we got information across to people. But that particular campaign was sort of, you know, that was the beginning of my journey. And so, I am a graduate of the Southern University Law Center. I spent almost 10 years living in South Louisiana. I'm in North Louisiana girl, I was born here. And in Haughton, Louisiana, which is a small town right outside of Bossier Parish. And usually the claim to fame is that Dak Prescott is the one who's also from Haughton. But I'd like to think that I put us on the map in some ways, too. But yeah, love Haughton, nd love North Louisiana. It has my whole heart. But I spent quite a few of my formative years down in South Louisiana. I'm a graduate of LSU. And then, of course, you know, the Southern University Law Center. And that's where I started really getting into policy work and understanding that my seriousness of purpose, which is the motto at our law school, was to come back and make sure that my community had all the information needed to keep up with the rest of the state and to even, you know, help push Louisiana forward. And so when I came back home, you know, I worked at a law firm, for about a year or so before I transitioned full time into the political realm. And my first organizing job was with Unanimous Juries Coalition. And I had just came off of working on the mayoral campaign. And so I saw that there were vast differences between running a candidate versus running, you know, issues. And both of them, definitely, you know, necessary for pushing forward, wanting to make sure you have good candidates wanting to make sure that you're behind the right issues, all of that's important, but it got me really involved. I've done a lot of volunteer work regarding, you know, not just voter registration, but also voter protection, and voter mobilization. And so those are the things that I'm most passionate about in removing any of those barriers that can get in the way of people being able to register, being able to exercise their right to vote, even being able to be candidates themselves, one day if they choose to. So I'm all about just making sure people have all the tools they need to be engaged, because there's nothing that I'm doing that anyone else shouldn't shouldn't be able to do. And so I want to help remove the barriers for other people to get just as involved.
I know right after Unanimous Jury Coalition, and passage of that constitutional amendment, you you did some work on voter ID stuff, right?
Yes. And so here you know, Louisiana has an interesting voter ID requirement in that you can have a specialized... we allow... we're one of the few states that you can go get a voter ID specifically for free. However, there are so many barriers in place to even being able to get that a lot, of people also don't know that if you show up and you don't have an ID at all, you can fill out an affidavit. But when you don't have some of those other necessary documents with you to prove identity in another way, you're still back at square one. And so yes, I worked with Spread The Vote, where I was state director, where we went statewide, helping people get those IDs and taking care of all the costs associated with it. And you would be surprised to learn how difficult it is for so many people to even get something like a social security card or birth certificate so they can get the ID to be able to vote. We think voter registration is just sitting behind a table and filling out a form, but it is so much more than that. And it's one of those basic rights that is not afforded easily to everyone. And so that's what I saw, you know, as I was going up and down the state, you know, helping people get those IDs, registering them, making sure they knew about upcoming elections. So much of it isn't really apathy. It's, you don't know what you should know. And if you don't know it, you're not going to be interested in it. So yeah, that was that was really cool. I'm now the North Louisiana organizer with the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, doing incredible work statewide. I have to, of course, shout out Ashley Shelton, who has just, you know, this is year five of the Power Coalition being in existence. And even though I'm fairly new, I'm coming up in my second year, we still all work together, even with the Unanimous Juries Coalition, some of the best organizers in the state were a part of that coalition, and have helped me become a better organizer. And so I'm just super excited that I get to keep in contact with people like you, Lynda, and others throughout the state by working with the Power Coalition. And we have quite a few people at our table that, you know, help push Louisiana forward. And so it's been exciting. It's been great. I'm also on the board of the ACLU, where, you know, on the other side of things, we are taking care of the criminal justice angle, and I say the other side, they all work together. But progress is progress. And so there's different paths to progress. And so I'm happy to be a part of all of those.
Well, I did want to continue a conversation we started earlier this week, where we talked about, because we had the Georgia elections that ended up going well for us, and not without Herculean efforts, to be honest. But what came out of that a lot in Louisiana, and I maybe tried to answer the first couple times I saw this, and then and then I was just like, I can't just go answer... so many people were asking: Can Stacey Abrams come to Louisiana? Where is Louisiana's Stacey Abrams? And you know, it's a fair question. And at the same point in time, you know, my response to that is, well, nobody knew who Stacey Abrams was 10 years ago and we probably already have those people (side note, I say we do already have those people) working in Louisiana. So I really kind of want to have that conversation with you by first starting to talk about... and I think my comment to you earlier this week with Stacey Abrams was not built in a day, nor did she organize Georgia alone. So you had a string of Georgia organizers you were kind of referring to, if you kind of want to talk a little bit about that.
You know, in full transparency, I have to say this Stacey Abrams is my my idol. I think she is, you know, definitely someone who was putting the blueprint out there for what we can do to push Louisiana forward. And while that's the name everyone knows, it is so important to know that she did not do it by herself. And that's important because we don't want any of us to think: okay, I can sit back on my laurels, let's just locate or figure out who our Stacey Abrams is, and then we can chill and we don't have to do anything more. That's not how that works. LaTosha Brown with Black Voters Matter, you have people like the Working Families Party and Fallon McClure, who have been getting people trained on canvassing, I mean, that's all they did was make sure canvassers were well trained, and knew what to do in preparation for this election. And then you have Black Voters Matter, who, like the name says, made sure that black voters understood the significance of this race. And of course, you know, Stacey Abrams with Fair Fight, she had a years' long plan in place, this isn't something that started a few months or a few weeks before the election, there was a plan in place, and she is a fundraising juggernaut. And so that's one thing I want people to understand. You cannot do this without money. And it doesn't have to come from, you know, corporations. The microdonation thing - you know, people can make $2 to $3 a month - could really help with a lot of change. But money is a big part of it. And I think sometimes we want to shy away from that reality, for whatever reason, but her ability to fundraise as well as she has, was a huge part of this success.
And look, I definitely want to give her her props. So I shudder to think someone would, you know, mistake what I'm saying as not thinking she hung the moon. But she also -you know, classic overachiever, right? - she also started the new Georgia project, and then kind of passed that on, so that she could focus on Fair Fight and the governor's race. And I assume she'll run, sounds like she'll run for governor again, which would be great. And then look for this particular election, I know, one of the things they were telling us as we were listening to the requests for help from Georgia is we really don't want you coming here. You know, first of all, there's a pandemic. But secondly, we have people here, if you can send us some money and give us some remote help, we've got this. We have people all over the state. And then you know, what I even saw, Sierra Club was, you know, they were working with their people on the ground there. They had folks all across the country, making calls, sending texts, sending letters. Vote Riders were targeting first time voters. So they have people all across the country, making calls, you know, doing all the things, trying to make sure first time voters knew what kind of identification they needed to vote. And if they didn't have that identification, telling them how to get it and helping them with the funding of that if they needed the funding, sort of the same kind of stuff you were doing. There was Latino Victory and Hispanic Federation, were doing some work with some of the Latino voter groups on the ground. And I know the Democratic Party of Georgia was doing both Latino outreach, AAPI outreach, all the bases that we need to cover in this state, were being covered there. And even though it was a huge victory, you look at it and look how small the margin of victory was, it was thin. So all that effort, it took all that effort with these vastly superior candidates. I mean, there's just no question. And the mood of the country as it is, it still took all those efforts to win those two seats.
Absolutely. You name some incredible organizations. And I think what people need to know is that coalition's have to come together every single cycle, we can't wait until the perfect issue comes up. We can't wait until the perfect candidate comes up. Because as you see, if they would have just stopped after the presidential election, then we would not have gotten control of the Senate. And so this is something that, you know, when I'm talking to people about the importance of voting and being involved, we don't have the privilege of saying we have any off years, every year is important. And I noticed that there were also - I think they're called Unite Here, I think I have that right - but it was a combination of hospitality workers. I mean, when I think of Louisiana and our hospitality industry, the culinary unions and... they had all of those people engaged. And I think that's something that, you know, we can we can take some notes from that. There is no union, there is no organization too small, or... everybody needs to be involved. And I think about one of the most recent elections in New Orleans, with the librarians and how they came together, and I'm just thinking to myslef: the librarians! But of course, who else knows, you know, more what people need than those people who are constantly seeing the general public day to day. And so, you know, we have to make sure we are taking down those silos, and we're working together. And importantly, you know, as someone who's lived in both South Louisiana, and is from North Louisiana, uniting our state... I get the jokes all the time about how anything, you know, north of I-10 is basically South Arkansas and East Texas. But we truly are one Louisiana and we see what we can do, when you think about the gubernatorial race that we had, and the necessity of all of these different parishes, we have progressive anchors in the north, and in Central Louisiana, and of course, in the south, but it's going to take all of us working together, and understanding that this has to be one state on one accord, whenever we start talking about what we want to see. We've got to be okay with the boring stuff. Redistricting efforts are what is going to be, you know, it's going to determine the next 10 years of the political landscape here in Louisiana. And you know, I say that, but really, when you start looking at it, it might be boring to some people because they're like, "Oh, you know, some maps," but when you start seeing where your neighborhood is on those maps, and that it's possible that your neighbor could be voting in a different district than you are, and that is on purpose, because gerrymandering is totally a thing, you start seeing that we don't even have the privilege of being able to sit back and say, "well, that's not interesting to me," it needs to because the next 10 years of our state depends on how these maps are drawn, and how the people you vote for are going to be able to utilize that. There are people who decide that they're not going to run in a district and they need to be running in that district, because they represent that district well, because they look at the maps and they say there's no way that I could win here. And so you know, those types of things are important. So it goes beyond just the organizations and the people. We've got to make sure that we're up to speed on the subject matter as well.
That's right. And that was one of the things that I thought was so great about the Unanimous Juries campaign was that it was so complete, like it had the communications piece, you know, we had done our, and I use the term, "we" pretty liberally here, the campaign did its homework, by polling by finding out what messages and messengers worked for which communities. That's not to say that we would change messages entirely. It's just a matter of how you frame the same conversation with different communities. So we were able to kind of do that work upfront, and then have the right messengers go to the right spaces. And I think that was really important. But then at the end of the day, it was that ground game, that organizing, it was some of those same organizations really, that we saw come back into play, and come together in 2019, for the governor's re-election, and sort of saw the power that they had by maintaining those connections together. And, frankly, I wrote a piece for the by you brief on that called Ground Game, that was not every person... I mean, there were too many organizations to write about all of them and too many little ad hoc community groups organizing, but I wrote about a large number of the people that came together just to give an idea of the amount of work and the amount of different efforts it took to win that race.
Right. I think there's something to be said about there being so many people involved that you can't name them all. Right? That's a win. That's success, when there are so many people dedicated to the work that some of them are going to naturally be - not left out - but you can't possibly name all of them because there was such a united effort for everyone to be involved. And again, look at the narrow margin of victory there, even when there was this overwhelming support statewide, which goes to show that anything less than our absolute best isn't going to work here. We shouldn't see that as a deterrent, but as a challenge that we can rise to, and that we have before. And there were people, especially in my age group, who didn't know that there was a time when Louisiana has voted for a Democratic president. And it was really cool to remind, you know, my peers that this isn't impossible. We've done it before. We did it with Clinton. And they were like, "Oh, wait a minute. We did." And so you know there's something to be said about reminding people of the work that we have done, so they know that this isn't something new. We can replicate a win again. We just have to make sure that we're taking those lessons and applying them, and we need to make sure that we're always encouraging the next generation of organizers, the next batch of future candidates, and making sure they have what they need and the support they need. And we need to, you know, frankly, start looking at the state party infrastructure and figuring out what are they doing in Georgia, that we could also, you know, do here. And even on the nonpartisan front - you know, I'm an organizer with a non partisan organization - voter education is something that regardless of what your party affiliation may be, you have to know who's running, why those seats are important. I think of the DA's races that happen throughout the state, and, you know, helping people connect the dots between the protests that we, you know, we went out in mass after George Floyd's death, and getting people to understand that the person that has the power to open some of these cases back up and say, you know, "Something's not right," is an elected official. And if they're not willing to do what it is that their constituents are out in the street demanding, then you don't have to reelect them. And so you know, just helping people connect the dots is so important.
I think that's really important, too, what you're saying, is bringing up the next generation of organizers with us. I talk all the time about, you know, replicating yourself, creating more of yourself. Because at some point, and I tell this to people all the time, at some point we all want to retire. Now, I will say this, I am greatly moved and inspired that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Lewis did not really retire, right? So there's a part of me that has made that realization that, okay, maybe maybe there isn't a retirement. The work continues in some form or another. But none of us can, you know, have the same energy that younger people have as we age. So it is good to make sure that we have people coming up with the energy to do all the things.
And the innovation, you know. I think about how some of the, you know, younger organizers that even I know, in light of COVID not being able to do the things that I'm used to doing with in-person meetings, and how they have just been so awesome and innovative about like, doing TikToks to get the word out, and, you know, making Instagram reels, and getting people involved where they are. And so I just think about how that type of innovation wouldn't necessarily have been there. I just got to TikTok like two months ago, but, you know, my younger nieces are like, "Yeah, this is gonna get people to get out and vote because everyone likes to have a good time." And so you know, just, again, the innovation behind it, and understanding that as the world changes, and things come up that we couldn't have possibly predicted like a pandemic, there's still a response that can be ready, if we include everybody, and we make sure that there's a seat at the table, you know, for everyone.
Very, very good points. So, what are the best ways for people to support the efforts that you're involved in?
There are so many different ways. I would say, first, get involved in a way that is comfortable for you. If maybe doing something in person, if you're a little anxious about speaking in front of people, we always need people who are willing to text. If you're someone who just wants to do something by phone, we have a script ready for you if you want to do some phone banking, where you're actually calling folks and reminding them about issues campaigns that are happening, giving them you know, voter education about the dates and where they should be going to vote, reminding them that there's even an election. And also be on the lookout for, you know, people who may be willing to even mobilize voters and getting them to the polls. If you're someone who doesn't want to just be on the phone or texting all day. We need folks who are willing to take people. I just have to shout out the volunteers and those who always show up and are willing to drive people to the polls, my heroes, because it doesn't matter how much work we do educating folks if they can't get to their polling location to actually vote. And so I'm super appreciative of those efforts. You can also... just sharing a post, you know, helping people understand that there is something going on that they should be aware of, it doesn't always have to be necessarily about a an election. It could be, "Hey, something's going on in our district, and they'll be talking about it at our next city council meeting. We need people from my district, they're shining in and listening." That's something that's big, it has actually turned the tide on decisions made whenever those people from specific districts show up and show that they either support or don't support something that their councilman or councilwoman is doing. Get involved in a way that, you know, personally affects you. It's okay to be selfish about this at times. But politics is personal. And, for example, I think of the hospitality workers here, and how they are the ones who came to me and the American Heart Association to say, "We don't think it's fair that we have to go to work in an environment where people are still smoking inside, they were able to get rid of it in New Orleans, they were able to get rid of in Baton Rouge, why can't we do it here?" And I'm thinking to myself, "You're right, there's no reason we can't do that here." And we did. But we would not have been able to do that if we didn't have the support of those people who were personally affected. And so I say the best way to get involved, find out what's something that's personal to you that you see happening in your community and figure out "How can I change this or how can I make it better?"
Well, Candice Battiste, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate your sharing some of your time with me, and you've given us some great information and great tips and great ways for people to engage. And I'm sure that I'd love to have you back again at a later date because I'm sure there will always be more information to share.
For sure. Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for listening to Louisiana Lefty. You can connect to Candice's work with the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice at powercoalition.org, and follow them, as well as Louisiana Lefty on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Tune into our next episode to hear more about organizing in Louisiana from the Power Coalition's Executive Director Ashley Shelton. Thanks to Ben Collinsworth for producing Louisiana Lefty, Jennifer Pack for our Super Lefty artwork, and Thousand $ Car for allowing us to use their swamp pop classic, Security Guard, as our Louisiana Lefty theme song.
