While Democrats are rightly focused on retaking the White House in 2020, they should not let the battle for the presidency distract them from rebuilding power across the states. Since 2010, Republicans have gained control of a record number of legislatures and governorships — and have used that control to steer state policy to the right.

Even as Congress remains gridlocked, GOP states have enacted a number of conservative priorities, including cutting union rights, reducing access to abortion, dampening efforts to raise the minimum wage, and stymieing implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

Progressives can learn from conservative success. But as I caution in a recent book, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation, progressives all too often take the wrong lessons from conservative victories. These misconceptions make it harder for progressive activists and donors to focus attention on the efforts that might yield payoffs in the future.

While the book debunks a number of these myths, in this post I focus on two of the most pervasive misperceptions, describing what they miss about the history of conservative cross-state mobilization and what progressives can learn from a more accurate reading of right-wing history.

Myth No. 1: conservatives united

This myth says that conservatives simply have it easier than liberals because businesses, right-wing activists, and conservative donors are mostly on the same page about what they want from government. By comparison, the left is made up of a more diverse coalition of groups — representing environmental and climate causes, gender equality, civil rights, and labor, to name a few. Given that fractured set of interests, the argument goes, it is harder for the left to fund and support organizations that might build cross-state power.

Without contesting the diversity present on the left, it would be a big mistake to assume conservatives are monolithic. As I document in State Capture, the right-wing organizations pushing conservative policy priorities — like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — initially struggled to marry private-sector businesses with libertarians and social conservatives.

Sometimes corporate executives were on the same page with small government libertarians in pushing for lower taxes. But in other cases businesses wanted more favorable regulatory treatment or subsidies that would expand the role of government. Libertarians, for their part, had to be convinced to make common cause with social conservatives pushing for greater government oversight of personal behavior. And controversy-shy businesses were initially wary of joining groups pushing hot-button social issues, like fighting gay marriage or expanding gun rights. In short, the right looked just as fractious as the left.

How did conservative organizations overcome these fault lines? The secret was coming up with organizational structures that minimized conflict and ensured that the interests most invested in a particular policy got to drive legislation in that area.

For instance, ALEC set up a system of task forces that decentralized policy proposal writing to the businesses and activists who cared the most about an issue; agricultural companies wrote model bills on environmental regulations while social conservative groups crafted welfare proposals. And within these task forces, ALEC established clear rules about which members would prevail when there were disputes: organizations that paid more would win. As I show in the book, after ALEC adopted these procedures they were able to attract more donors and build their presence across the states.

Just as importantly, my book shows how organization leaders helped the diverse conservative constituencies to agree on a common sequence of policy proposals. Although social conservatives might not care all that much about labor unions, ALEC made the case to its members that prioritizing cutbacks to union rights first would pave the way for later victories on other, nonlabor issues.

Indeed, as I have shown in recent research, states that pass conservative-backed proposals to hobble unions make it harder for Democrats to win subsequent elections — and therefore make it easier for conservatives to pass a range of other policies.

The lesson for the left is that diversity need not be a barrier to building powerful organizations with a presence across the states. Like conservative entrepreneurs did in the 1980s, progressive leaders need to construct organizations whose governing structures set common agendas. They also need to sequence policy so that early wins build political power for later victories.

Progressives do not necessarily have to copy ALEC’s “pay to play” model. But they do need ways to adjudicate between conflicting interests and set common goals. Strengthening labor unions, for instance, should be a Day 1 priority for newly elected Democrats to shore up progressive electoral and legislative clout.

Myth No. 2: it’s all about the (big) money

The second big myth about conservative success is that it is all driven by big money: Conservatives simply have more money and therefore the left can never truly compete. As I’ve documented in other research, it is true that networks of wealthy donors on the right (like the seminars organized by billionaire libertarians Charles and David Koch) regularly out-raise similar initiatives on the left (like the Democracy Alliance). But as I show in State Capture, the biggest difference between right and left efforts to build state power is not the money raised by the right, but where conservative organizations have directed those funds.

Liberal efforts to build state power have historically focused on states already friendly to progressive causes. By comparison, conservative organizations like ALEC made a conscious effort to build networks of legislators across a variety of states — not just traditional conservative enclaves but also purplish states in the Mountain and Midwest regions. This meant that these organizations were well-positioned to take advantage of wave elections, like in 2010 and 2014, that flipped control of legislatures to Republicans.

Another difference in spending involves duplication. In the book I focus on three right-wing state networks: ALEC, encompassing state legislators; the State Policy Network (SPN), coordinating state-level think tanks; and Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a federated advocacy group combining millions of grassroots volunteers with a large campaign war chest.

Although these three organizations are distinct from one another, they coordinate with each other quite closely: ALEC writes model bills that it encourages state legislators to support and pass, SPN think tanks pump out research reports, testimony, and media coverage in support of those model bills, and AFP’s grassroots volunteers help to elect politicians favorable to ALEC’s priorities and then lobby state governments to pass those model bills.

The close coordination is no coincidence: My book shows how the three organizations have deliberately established mechanisms to work together, like sitting on one another’s leadership committees or coordinating grants from wealthy donors across their networks.

Contrast this coordination with the left, where over the years a number of organizations have sprung up to organize state legislators and press policy ideas across state governments. These organizations — representing an alphabet soup of acronyms — frequently competed with one another for funding from progressive donors, sapping energy and scarce resources instead of supporting a common agenda.

The end result was that progressive cross-state organizations have historically been less than the sum of their parts, while the conservative “troika” of ALEC, AFP, and SPN acted as force multipliers for each other’s efforts.

The upshot for progressives today is that organization leaders and donors need to be more mindful of how new state networks will complement existing efforts. Instead of creating new organizations every few years, progressives would be wise to see what functions and strategies — like grassroots support, legislative research and idea generation, or communications — are well-represented among existing state-based initiatives and where such resources are lacking.

Then, and only then, should progressives consider creating new organizations to fill gaps, all while carefully considering how each effort reinforces their common agenda.

Learning from conservative victories and missteps

In his excellent history of conservative efforts to reshape American law, political scientist Steve Teles coined the felicitous idea of a “myth of diabolical conservative competence.” By that, Teles was describing how many accounts of conservative political mobilization focus on the successes that conservatives have enjoyed without considering conservative failures.

Such accounts — common among academics as well as journalists and political operatives — ultimately tell an incomplete history. Many of the myths I describe in State Capture stem from over-reading conservative successes while paying too little attention to their missteps, like divisions on the right or how conservative groups made use of their initial funding.

Progressives already face an uphill battle to rebuild their power across the states. They shouldn’t make it harder by relying on incomplete or wrong-headed lessons from their conservative rivals.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is an assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and the author most recently of State Capture.

Imagine your bosses tell you that a proposed law would be good for your company. They then push you to contact your member of Congress to lobby for the bill and support the politicians who end up voting for it. That could have happened to you — as it did to so many others — during the push to pass big tax cuts this past December. US companies large and small used town halls, emails, and calls to prod workers into telling their legislators that workers supported the tax overhaul.  

For a new book, Politics at Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers into Lobbyists, I surveyed workers and managers and interviewed dozens of top executives to show how these political calls to action have become a common practice for American companies. One in four American employees said in a nationally representative survey I commissioned in 2015 that they have received political messages or requests from their top managers and supervisors.

The United States is essentially the only developed democracy where employers can require participation in politics as part of employees’ day-to-day jobs — and where managers can reward or punish private sector workers for their political views and actions. This is a problem. Encouraging employees to be civically engaged is one thing, but political requests from bosses can veer toward coercion — regardless of whether bosses intend it. Workplace political recruitment also builds corporate power at a time when businesses already have an outsize voice in national, state, and local politics.

Why employers are increasingly talking politics with their workers

Of course, not all employers lean on their workers as heavily as others. Some employers merely remind their workers to register and turn out to vote (like Starbucks and Marriott). But in other cases, employers try to change how workers think about politics. The Midwest home improvement chain Menards, for instance, encouraged its 40,000 employees to take an at-home civics course that argues against government regulation and taxes.

Other employers endorse political candidates and causes. The casino giant Wynn Resorts has distributed voter guides to employees that encourage workers to cast ballots for Wynn-endorsed politicians.

And some businesses go even further. In one striking example, workers at Murray Energy were required to attend a rally (without pay) for 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Murray has a long record of pressuring workers to contribute to company-favored politicians, including, most recently, Donald Trump.

Politicians take employer mobilization seriously. It shows that a well-organized bloc of voters in their districts care about an issue and carries a lot of weight as lawmakers think about reelection campaigns. “Members of Congress want to hear from their constituents, the people they represent,” one company’s VP of public policy explained to the Wall Street Journal about employee outreach efforts.

As one of my corporate interviewees put it to me, recruiting employees to write to Congress “creates a heightened sense of importance of an issue” and permits their lobbyists to bring up those contacts in meetings in Congress. The lobbyists might say, “We have 3,500 workers in your district, and this is an important issue for them.” And if workers sent enough correspondence to Congress, it might even be the elected officials who asked the company’s lobbyists about the issue. One example of the concrete success of employee mobilization: Murray Energy’s “wish list” is now President Trump’s “to-do list” on coal policy, according to reporting from the New York Times.

Why unchecked employer political recruitment is problematic

Employer political mobilization of workers is clearly good for corporate bottom lines. But its effects on American democracy are more concerning. For one thing, my research finds that the workers who are most likely to respond to employer requests tend to be those who worry that their bosses might retaliate against them if they don’t comply. “There’s a lot of coercion,” lamented one employee at Murray Energy to a New Republic reporter. “I just wanted to work, but you feel this constant pressure that, if you don’t contribute, your job’s at stake. You’re compelled to do this whether you want to or not.”

The Murray employee’s concern is understandable. Many American private sector workers can have their hours or wages changed — or can even be fired — without cause, as long as it is not for reasons related to race, gender, or other legally protected categories. Contrary to popular belief, there is no First Amendment right to free speech in the private sector.

Public sector workers, on the other hand, do enjoy comprehensive political protections in the workplace. For one thing, public sector workers are employed by the government, so the First Amendment applies to them. In addition, many public sector workers are also protected from coercion by strict limits on permissible political activities in government agencies. An important Supreme Court decision in 2016 further extended these protections for public employees in election campaigns, with Justice Stephen Breyer arguing that “the Constitution prohibits a government employer from discharging or demoting an employee because the employee supports a particular political candidate.” Private sector workers deserve similar protections.

Loss of private sector workers’ right to free political speech and action is not the only issue with unchecked employer mobilization. At a time when people on the left and right think that big companies have too much clout, employer mobilization also bolsters corporate political power. The majority of Republicans and Democrats in recent polling report that too much power is concentrated in large companies. Allowing employers to recruit their workers into politics unchecked threatens to skew politics further toward big business.

New workplace political protections are needed

What can be done? Congress can add political views to the list of classes protected by the Civil Rights Act, like race and gender. That would bar employers from treating workers differently based on their political views or actions — a protection that workers in nearly all other advanced democracies enjoy. Polling I have done suggests that large majorities from both parties — perhaps some three-quarters of American adults — would support this change.

If Congress does not act, however, there is still much more others can do. States can pass legislation protecting workers from political pressure on the job. Several states, like California, already have such laws on their books, although, as I show in my book, it is unclear whether workers are aware of them and whether managers pay attention to them when crafting political requests. Any new state reforms thus ought to ensure that the laws actually change employer practices.

Barring federal or state action, investors and consumers can push businesses to commit to codes of conduct for politics in the workplace. Many investors already take into account the social and environmental records of businesses when making investment decisions, prioritizing firms that have more socially responsible practices. Investors could similarly avoid companies that do not set clear boundaries on their political messages to workers. Consumer advocacy groups could also help politically conscious Americans reward companies that abide by codes of conduct and boycott those firms that do not.  

The United States has long prided itself on a vibrant free speech tradition. But we lack free speech protections in one of the places that most affect our lives: our jobs. Americans shouldn’t have to give up their First Amendment rights when they come into work every day. Political voice — and pressure — at work should be a concern for anyone who cares about our democracy, both at the ballot box and in the workplace. 

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is an assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, the author of Politics at Work, and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.