This summer’s series of extreme wildfires, hurricanes, and tropical storms have made it more apparent than ever that the effects of climate change are here.

Limiting the damage caused by future disasters will require a whole-of-government approach — one not limited to what the federal government can do. There’s a host of ideas that states and municipalities could implement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in some of the world’s biggest polluters: American cities.

According to a 2021 study published in Frontiers, Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles have some of the highest per-capita emissions totals in the world. The study broke down cities’ emissions based on sector, using the most recently available data (from 2009 and 2010), and found a large portion of those emissions come from transportation.

Data from the EPA shows that the transportation sector is actually the biggest source of pollution in the US, and that light-duty vehicles (or passenger cars) are responsible for 58 percent of those emissions. Overall, the EPA’s research — and the 2021 study — reinforce the fact that the transportation systems of American cities over-rely on cars in ways that are not sustainable should the US actually want to approach its stated greenhouse gas reduction goal of 50 percent by 2030, a number it has to reach in order to limit global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius or less.

Reducing driving is difficult, however, because American cities, particularly those across the Southwest, are built for drivers. Biking and walking are often not options, and public transit, where it exists, does not typically serve trips that do not involve going from a city’s outskirts to its downtown or back.

“There’s really only one rational way to get where you’re going, and it’s typically not direct,” said Jeff Speck, a city planner and the author of Walkable City. “It’s typically organized around the assumption of driving as the only viable transportation mode.”

The greenhouse gases produced by this reality are not inevitable. They’re underwritten by federal, state, and local policy, from the initial construction of the interstate highway system to the recent bipartisan infrastructure bill, where the $39 billion in new funding for public transit is dwarfed by $110 billion for improving, expanding, and building new highways, bridges, and roads.

Transforming American cities to be more walkable isn’t easy, but there are measures local authorities can take to create a safer, more democratized transportation ecosystem that can positively affect the climate crisis. I spoke with several urban planners, transportation scholars, and advocates to learn about the most important strategies for curbing car reliance in cities. From those conversations arose the following solutions — all of which are implementable on the municipal level.

Make streets safer for bikes and pedestrians

Many of the car trips that people take are within biking distance — say, to dinner, or an activity like a movie theater. But people may choose to drive because riding would be dangerous. They might have to cross a highway or bike down roads where there are no bike lanes.

Places where bike ownership thrives — which can be as big as a city like Amsterdam, which has such a widespread bike network that cycling is favored over driving, or just a college campus — have prioritized bike and pedestrian safety over cars.

In most American cities, particularly in the suburbs, that’s not the case. And when the efficient movement of cars is considered paramount over the safety of any other mode, accidents and fatalities occur. The car-centric transportation system is contributing to a consistent yearly uptick in pedestrian casualties; they rose 21 percent in 2020, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA).

“The problem is, the minute you leave the local [road], you probably enter an environment in which it’s not safe to bike because the bike lanes aren’t separate,” Speck said.

By adding protected bike lines — separated from car lanes by a barrier for safety — biking becomes a safe, accessible alternative to shorter drives. Essentially, bike lanes have to be set apart by something other than “a scrap of paint,” said Ralph Buehler, the chair of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech. This is something that became clear during the first year of the pandemic: the GHSA found that 2020’s uptick in pedestrian deaths came despite traffic decreasing by up to about 42 percent at the peak of the pandemic. Reducing traffic alone doesn’t make biking and walking safer; the streets themselves need to be redesigned with safety in mind.

This sort of redesign also incentivizes walking and biking. Speck’s research has found converting 12- to 14-foot-wide driving lanes into 10-foot-wide lanes slows average car speeds from 40 miles per hour to 25 miles per hour and creates room to either add bike lanes or street-side parallel parking, which better protects the sidewalk from traffic.

And relatively inexpensive changes like turning one-way streets into two-way streets or lowering the curb radius so that cars slow down more when they make right turns are also proven to reduce crashes and injuries, Speck said.

Studies conducted in cities that have made such changes have found marked decreases in car use. Oslo has redesigned its roads in high pedestrian traffic areas, such that 91 percent have speed limits under 40 miles per hour, while expanding its system of bike lanes. It saw a 77 percent increase in bike traffic between 2014 and 2020.

There are American examples too. In Philadelphia, an investment in miles of protected bike lanes led to a nearly 70 percent increase in the number of people who biked to work from 2010 to 2017, even as congestion and public transit use worsened.

Buehler added that for such changes to be successful, there also needs to be connectivity across areas. If you’re taking a shorter trip to pick up takeout or grab a few groceries, much of it may be bike- or pedestrian-friendly — except for a critical highway juncture. To promote walking and biking, cities need to ensure that routes exist for human-powered transportation to every place the average person needs to go.

When I lived in Madrid, I could walk or take transit practically everywhere without ever crossing a highway that had no pedestrian infrastructure. I would take 30-minute walks home in the middle of the night from clubs, when the Metro was not running. Even in the dark, there were no crossings where I was unprotected as a pedestrian.

Examples of similar connectivity can also be found in the US, Buehler said, most commonly with respect to schools.

“There’s a safe-route-to-school program that tries to design safe routes to school,” Buehler said. “You can also think about that to community centers. The main point is designing networks.”

Safe routes to school are a start, but to really promote biking and walking, cities need to develop safe routes to other places, like drugstores and restaurants, as well. There’s a very large obstacle to doing this at the moment, however: zoning.

End single-family zoning to encourage mixed-use development

On its face, single-family zoning is a housing policy that creates quiet, uncrowded neighborhoods by restricting the development of apartments, townhouses, or any other dwelling that’s not a freestanding home. It’s incredibly prevalent in the US (75 percent of residential land is single-family zoned), and, as my colleague Jerusalem Demsas points out, it is incredibly harmful. It has had a racist impact, having been used to exclude people of color from certain neighborhoods, and it overall increases the cost of housing by limiting supply.

Another problem with single-family zoning is that it encourages car usage: In areas zoned for single families, there can be little development; the idea is people live in one area and then access workplaces, leisure activities, and stores via car.

“We zoned and created bento boxes,” said Brian Jencek, the director of planning at HOK, a planning and design firm. “Never let the gravy and rice touch. … Now we want stew, but we have to undo over a century of American planning.”

The best way to make that stew is to create mixed-use development, which facilitates what Jencek calls the 20-minute city, meaning you’re never more than a 20-minute walk from everything you might need, from jobs and schools to pharmacies and clinics to community centers and parks. In a mixed-use city, that’s possible. But in most American suburbs, single-family zoning does not allow for it.

Going back to my Madrid example, mixed-use development meant that nearly everything was within walking distance. From my neighborhood, I could walk to school, stop at a bakery along the way, get any beauty services at a salon on the way home, and meet my friends for dinner at night. I walked or took public transit everywhere.

Compare that to my grandparents’ house, in West Bloomfield, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. Due to single-family zoning, the only activity we can walk to is to see my cousins who also live in the suburb. Any restaurant, appointment, or shopping has to be a car trip.

Razing West Bloomfield and rebuilding it as a 20-minute city isn’t really feasible. But one change that could encourage the development of walkable cities over time, Speck said, is eliminating single-family zoning in areas that are within walking distance of transit stops. Doing so would encourage the development of commercial spaces, which would benefit residents in the area; and those not living near the new services would be able to access them via public transit, lessening the need for a car.

Upzoning near transit also means that homeowners could add accessory dwelling units, or granny flats — a detached housing unit — on a lot, Speck said, helping to situate middle- and low-income people near transit, easing the housing crisis and putting more people in walkable and transit-accessible communities.

While increased development is often associated with rising property values and gentrification, Jencek said mixed-use development, done with community input, can create the economic benefits of development without pricing people out. The end result of rezoning would look different in different neighborhoods but does not necessarily mean a complete overhaul of a community. It could just mean adding a one-acre community park to a neighborhood without recreation access or creating a network of safer, slower streets to invite restaurants to expand their outdoor seating.

The idea is simple: Add a new land use to a neighborhood, creating an activity or business site that is accessible without a car.

Make drivers pay the costs of driving

The first two solutions focused on making driving less necessary. But people don’t always drive because they need to — they often do so because it is convenient and cheap.

It’s true that the upfront cost of a car is high, and there is gas and insurance. But drivers’ other costs — road maintenance, traffic lights, and policing, for instance — are heavily subsidized. Speck said estimates place the subsidization of driving at $10 for every dollar a driver spends as opposed to $1.50 for public transit.

Much of that subsidization comes in the form of taxes, which people pay whether they drive or not, but there are a lot of indirect costs as well: In higher-income households, people use highways but do not have to pay for the noise and emissions in the low-income neighborhoods that highways run through, for example. And the climate costs of mass driving affect everyone, regardless of car ownership.

One solution to this is congestion pricing, where drivers must pay a fee to drive in high-traffic areas or during peak hours. Central London imposes congestion pricing, and New York City has plans to do so, though they may not materialize. Another idea is to increase the gas tax, so that actual drivers are paying the costs of car infrastructure rather than general taxation. Both of these price controls could disincentivize driving.

But many experts believe making driving less convenient would do more to limit car usage, and one easy way to do this is to reduce the supply of parking.

Every mode of transportation needs a terminal. Planes have airports and boats have seaports, both of which require travelers and companies to pay. But for cars, parking “is capitalized into the costs of the goods you buy,” Brian Taylor, the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, said. Think about your local grocery store — the parking lot is often larger than the actual commercial space, and it’s free. The grocery store is expected to pay for the parking lot through the revenue it generates from sales.

“We treat that as sacrosanct,” Taylor said. “The default is that the storage of private vehicles tends to get priority if you look at how we’ve allocated curb space. And that creates all sorts of problems.”

Delivery vehicles and rideshares that need to pull up on the curb have no space, so they halt traffic. Traffic is generated by people circling and looking for parking, knowing they can park on the street for free instead of paying for a garage. And because city governments mandate parking requirements for most types of development, commercial development — and therefore connectivity — is stunted by the need for parking.

Most American cities require parking minimums, meaning new apartment buildings and developments have to cordon off a certain amount of space for people to leave their car, either for free or for a rate much lower than the market price, considering how valuable that space is.

If cities removed their minimum parking requirements for developers, there would be far less incentive to provide free parking. A private developer would likely still build some off-street parking — but they would charge for it.

In Los Angeles, for example, Taylor said the real cost of an underground parking space might be $60,000. So a condo that costs $520,000, and comes with two underground parking spaces, could instead be sold at $360,000, with owners offering parking at its real cost of $60,000 per space. In that scenario, a family might forgo a second car and get an electric bike instead.

To disincentivize street parking, Taylor suggested municipalities raise the price at meters, manage curbs differently, or remove parking altogether in some areas and only allow loading, unloading, and scooter and bike traffic.

These are all strategies that would need to be rolled out in tandem with expanding connectivity, particularly with public transit. It is easy to imagine a situation in which gas taxes and expensive meters begin to primarily hurt low-income communities with zero access to public transportation, for instance. But once other options are in place, imposing the costs of parking on drivers would make driving more like going to a restaurant for dinner, Taylor said: You don’t do it every night, but it’s enjoyable when you do.

“If people were more responsible, in one way or another, for those costs, they’d be much more judicious of their use,” Taylor said. “Instead of being the default of every trip, it would be one among an array of choices that have advantages and disadvantages.”

What’s in the way of reducing car usage?

The free market did not create car supremacy by itself, though the government played a big role. The government has the power to change how city-dwelling Americans use their cars, but doing so on the scale needed to truly combat climate change isn’t easy.

City planners contend with regulations that promote driving, and politicians who want to change those are often met with pushback from constituents. In overcoming this, it’s important to remember that not every change needs to be a grand one — yes, a gas tax hike might help but so will more popular measures like bike lanes. And incremental advances, like new zoning regulations rolled out a few neighborhoods at a time, for instance, could have a large impact in the long run.

Also, a multimodal city does not mean cars will be obsolete. Some trips, like to a hardware store, will always necessitate vehicles, and there’s a role for ridesharing as well. But policies are needed to ensure other modes receive a fair shot. It’ll make us safer, maybe happier, and will give our planet a better chance of survival.

The first of the 2021 child tax credits hit parents’ bank accounts in July — but not for everyone. For many of the parents who need it most, accessing the money may be more of a struggle.

That’s because the IRS — an agency that knows little about the lowest-income Americans, who often don’t file taxes — has been tasked with distributing the money, up to $300 per month per child.

On July 15, the day payments first went out, the IRS said it sent $15 billion to 35 million families, 86 percent of which was sent via direct deposit. That suggests that the vast majority of initial recipients were from families who earned income and filed taxes, many of them middle- or lower-middle-income parents whose names, addresses, and bank accounts are on file from tax returns. 

More than 10 million children live in poverty, according to 2019 data from the US Census. Of those, the People’s Policy Project estimates that about 7 million live in non-filing households. (Because these families are, by definition, somewhat difficult to track, estimates vary: The Census Bureau says that 36 percent of children in poverty are from families that did not file taxes in 2019, including 55 percent of children in families in deep poverty.)

Most of these families haven’t signed up to get government stimulus checks, either, effectively leaving thousands of dollars from the government on the table over the past year. The IRS gathered information on an additional 720,000 children in non-filing households where the parents registered to receive stimulus payments.

But that still leaves millions of children whose parents are eligible for the child tax credit (CTC) but who are not on track to receive it.

Experts say the problem is fixable. But it will require creativity from the IRS, Congress, and tax help partners on the ground.

The government will need to improve its website, partner with state and local groups, and redouble its outreach to meet families where they are, either at schools or at state benefits agencies. In the long term, the best solution may be to make the child tax credit as automatic as possible, through solutions such as a sign-up at birth or distribution as an allowance.

So many people are covered, and the amount of the credit is so significant, that economists have estimated the money could cut child poverty by 40 percent. But for that to happen, the lowest-income families have to be able to actually receive it.

The problems start with the IRS itself

One big problem: The IRS does not think of itself as a benefits agency — because it isn’t one.

Federal agencies like the Social Security Administration — and state agencies that dispense federal funds like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — are set up to process claims quickly and streamline enrollment. (At least in theory; whether they work that well in practice is more complicated.)

But the IRS is fundamentally a collection agency. It knows how to take, and how to refund if it takes too much, but when it comes to doling out benefits like stimulus checks and child tax credits, the onus is on individual Americans to advocate for what they are owed if the agency doesn’t already have their information. 

That’s the case for many poor families. In 2020, a single parent with a dependent child had to earn at least $18,650 to be required to file taxes. Some households with lower incomes file anyway in order to claim the earned income tax credit, but about 20 percent of households eligible for the credit never claim it, and the very poorest families are not eligible for the full amount.

When it comes to receiving child tax credits, the IRS offers a portal for non-filers to submit claims. But the system is not mobile-friendly, and thus far, it is only offered in English. The IRS recently released step-by-step guides on using the non-filer tool in six languages, but instructions for accessing them are only available in English and Spanish.

Tax policy experts and community tax help groups noted both of those issues are barriers for their clients, who have had trouble navigating the portal.

“Right now, it’s a system that works really well and is super straightforward for moderate-income and upper-income families, and doesn’t work very well for lower-income families,” Elisa Minoff, a senior policy analyst at the Center for the Study of Social Policy and a leader of the Automatic Benefit for Children Coalition, said. “The North Star should be making this as automatic as possible so families don’t have to take affirmative steps to get the support they need.”

Non-filing families can struggle for a number of reasons — caregivers may be unaware that they qualify for the benefit or unable to figure out the technological component; families may not speak English or have consistent non-mobile internet access or, frankly, time in the day to figure the system out.

Graham O’Neill is the director of partnerships at the Campaign for Working Families, an organization that helps low-income people in Pennsylvania and New Jersey navigate the tax system and claim benefits. One of the biggest problems his clients have, he said, is when someone else — often due to a formal or informal shared custody arrangement — has already claimed the child as a dependent. They can appeal to the IRS, but doing so takes months.

“Life is complicated, especially if you’re a low-income person,” O’Neill said. “There’s a whole lot of situations in life that don’t fit neatly into the way the tax code structures a family.”

Kori Hattemer, the director of financial programs at Foundation Communities, a similar organization based in Austin, said she has clients who filed tax returns for the first time in 2020 in order to access stimulus benefits but have been unable to access them because of an IRS backlog. Many families have come needing help with completing the online portal.

“I feel like there’s a pretty low awareness about it,” Hattemer said. “If they make it permanent and it’s around for several years, it will become part of what people know and understand. But it’s very different than what people have done in the past.”

How can we make the child tax credit more accessible?

There is still time to close accessibility gaps, and to get distribution of the child tax credit right, or as right as possible.

While most parents will receive their credits in monthly installments of $300 per child for six months this year, and for an additional six months in 2022, parents can also receive the entire child tax credit during tax filing season if they sign up between now and then. That gives the IRS about nine months to bring non-filers into its systems.

Democrats are also working on a proposal to extend the child allowance, and they will have some benefits of hindsight as they do so. Filling the gaps that appear to be excluding non-filers can be done, but will take an all-hands-on-deck approach, involving Congress, the IRS, and local tax help groups.

One relatively easy solution would be to increase Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) funding so that local organizations can be as well-resourced as possible to help non-filer families. Democratic Senate aides told Vox that’s a solution they are exploring with the Senate Budget Committee.

VITA organizations can reach non-filers in ways the federal government might struggle to; for instance, O’Neill said his organization is working with the Pennsylvania state government to do child tax credit outreach at state benefit agencies, like TANF offices. Having in-person signups in the waiting rooms of SNAP, TANF, or WIC offices would put less onus on non-filer families.

Other researchers have suggested providing federal funding to have information or sign-ups at pediatricians’ offices and schools — particularly during back-to-school season.

Regardless of where contact with non-filers happens, Kris Cox, the deputy director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the IRS and local VITA partners need to be on the ground.

“The non-filer portal is really important for people who can navigate that type of form, but we know that there are families who will face barriers, whether that’s language, technical, fluency, disability, other things,” Cox said. “In-person assistance will be crucial.”

One idea advocates have thrown out is sending out federal navigators, much like Congress did with the Affordable Care Act, to get families registered. The IRS maintains zip code files to track who is receiving child tax credits, so navigators could be sent to areas with low disbursement rates. Another way to get more federal officials on the ground might be to increase funding for existing IRS tax system care centers, many of which have been shut down or are understaffed.

A third fix would be far less expensive but could require rethinking data privacy laws: mandating communication between benefits agencies like the Social Security Administration and the IRS.

A lot of non-filer families’ information is out there — it’s just in benefit agencies that do not communicate with the IRS, largely due to strict data privacy laws safeguarding tax information. But if those laws could be loosened slightly, or if benefit agencies could give families’ information to the IRS without receiving any information in return, then the IRS could send notices or register those families.

Senate Democratic aides said it’s a possibility they are exploring. In particular, they see potential to link CTC benefits to Supplemental Security Income benefits, whose recipients include low-income parents of children with disabilities. These benefits are sent out through the Social Security Administration but are only received by 1.7 percent of children. It’s not clear, however, that such a change would be able to pass into law and, even if it did, whether the IRS would be able to process all that new data.

“This is not a question of the IRS not having their heart or mind in the right place,” a Senate Democratic aide said. “It’s a question of capacity.”

The child tax credit expansion is new, so getting it to work perfectly will take time

Megan Curran, the director of policy at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, said other countries have had child allowances on the books for decades, meaning they have had time to streamline the process: Sign-up comes at birth, with an annual renewal form in public schools. The US could do something similar, offering a sign-up form at the hospital at birth, same as Social Security.

Such a process might also pave the way for making the assistance an allowance rather than a tax credit, through the Social Security Administration — something many experts believe would make distributing funds easier.

“When you look at other countries, they have really easy-to-use websites,” Curran said. “They have different access points, they’re in the communities face to face. Obviously, through the tax system, it’s harder.”

In the absence of a complete restructuring, experts say that for any future benefits, the top factor in increasing participation is just time.

Elaine Maag, an income support program researcher at the Tax Policy Center, said research from the earned income tax credit shows that participation rates take off in a neighborhood when just one family familiar with the EITC moves into that neighborhood and begins talking about it.

“If I’m living in an apartment building with many families with children, and they start talking about this child tax credit and how they just received a payment, I would expect more families to wonder if they might be eligible for this payment as well,” Maag said.

Time may improve the child tax credit program if it is renewed, but in the meantime, non-filer families — and the IRS — will have to overcome challenges baked into the tax system, and the accessibility issues that come with them.

When India Walton — the socialist challenger to a four-term incumbent mayor with deep ties to New York’s Democratic Party — won the Democratic primary for Buffalo’s mayoral race, the result was a surprise to nearly everyone but her campaign team.

Walton, a 38-year-old nurse and union and community organizer, had been discounted by many, including defeated incumbent Byron Brown, given Brown’s incumbent advantage and party ties. But Walton won last Tuesday, positioning herself as the likely mayor-elect in a deep-blue city.

If she wins in November — Brown is already marshaling a write-in campaign against her — then Walton will become Buffalo’s first woman mayor, the first successful left-wing challenger to an incumbent in the history of the Buffalo mayorship, and America’s first socialist mayor of a major city since Milwaukee’s Frank Zeidler left office in 1961.

In the wake of her victory, progressives are hoping for a much shorter gap between Walton’s rise and the swearing-in of the next socialist city leader.

“This victory is ours,” Walton said in a speech on election night. “It is the first of many. If you are in an elected office right now, you are being put on notice. We are coming.”

But success in this endeavor will be difficult, as evidenced by a mixed record for progressive challengers this year.

Walton had a major assist from New York’s Working Families Party, a progressive organization that supports both Democrats and runs primary challengers. And a number of other left-leaning candidates the party supported won or are winning the New York City public advocate and city comptroller races; City Council seats in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens; and the mayoral race in Rochester, where challenger Malik Evans beat incumbent Lovely Warren by running to her left.

But the biggest prize for New York state’s left — the New York City mayoral race — appears to be in the hands of the more centrist candidate Eric Adams rather than progressive Maya Wiley. And nationally, socialist candidate Lee Carter recently lost to the establishment-backed candidate in the Virginia gubernatorial primary while progressive Karen Carter Peterson was bested by the more moderate candidate in a Louisiana special House election. 

Amid these results, debate has emerged among Democrats about what type of candidates are best, with people like Adams saying Democrats need to emulate him to win, strategists like James Carville saying Democrats need to be less woke, and progressives like Walton arguing their victories suggest the opposite.

Wins like Walton’s help lend some credence to progressives’ argument — but also raise the question of whether such success can be a blueprint for progressive insurgent organizing or if each is a one-off propelled by the specific circumstances of the race. 

There’s compelling evidence to support both conclusions, but the organizational capacity and movement-centered policies that Walton embraced give credence to the progressive argument. They believe her win shows that when passionate candidates meet strong organizers, running to the left creates opportunities.

How India Walton won

While Buffalo is a unique city with its own set of issues and voters, several organizers and strategists Vox spoke with believed that Walton’s win is replicable, arguing that it hinged largely on her organization and visibility.

India Walton first launched her campaign with a staff of mostly working mothers who would facilitate team calls during their lunch breaks or in the evenings after work. She was well-known in Buffalo’s activist scene through her experience as a union representative for health care workers and as a community organizer with Open Buffalo, an anti-poverty and activist training group, and the executive director of the affordable housing-focused Fruit Belt Community Land Trust.

After participating in protests last summer over the murder of George Floyd and police violence perpetrated by the Buffalo Police Department, Walton wanted to convert the movement energy into electoral results.

“People really related to India, her story, and how she leveraged her lived experience,” Sochie Nnaemeka, the director of New York’s Working Families Party, said. “The team built itself around India. Because of her leadership, people already followed her. People already trusted her.”

Walton’s campaign touched on a lot of hot-button issues for Democrats, but she spoke about her vision in a way that was grounded in Buffalo’s reality, supporters said. Instead of litigating the popularity and definition of the phrase “defund the police,” Walton emphasized the ideas behind the phrase, advocating for a non-law enforcement response to mental health crises and discussing what budget opportunities would be available by diverting police funding.

As a longtime organizer over affordable housing, Walton’s pledge to implement the Tenants’ Bill of Rights and People Action’s Homes Guarantee, which promises permanent affordable housing for everyone through building, investment, and decommodification. 

That these policies were coming from Walton — someone who was known in the community and had the trust of many voters following years of union organizing and activism — helped make them extremely accessible, according to Amanda Litman, the founder of progressive campaign organization Run for Something and an endorser of Walton.

She spoke about policy in a way that was specific to her experiences as a native of the low-income, predominantly Black East Buffalo, as a nurse, and as a working mother who had her first child as a teenager. Even her messaging around socialism — a word often used as a point of attack — was clearly stated, with Walton often saying that the city already engages in socialism through tax breaks and public subsidies for corporations.

“This isn’t rocket science,” Litman said. “It’s not like India message tested or was polling her framing on the issues. She was talking about the problems that people were facing in a way that they could connect with, ‘cause she was one of them.”

Walton drew endorsements from a number of key Democratic constituencies — the Buffalo Teachers Federation, both the local and national Democratic Socialists of America, and the Elect Black Women political action committee.

But the March buy-in of the New York Working Families Party — which had endorsed Brown in previous elections — made a critical difference, marrying their campaign organizing experience with Walton’s vision and community connections.

Charlie Blaettler, NYWFP’s elections director, said the Buffalo mayoral race was ripe for investment. There was an incumbent who had rejected calls for significant change after a turbulent summer and a challenger who had natural organizing talent and a clear ideological vision.

Blaettler helped Walton raise $140,000, when the campaign had started with $11,000. The NYWFP trained volunteers in some of the basics — how to pull voter files, build the right lists, target voters, and do peer-to-peer texting as well as more expensive tactics, such as recording a robocall with Walton, producing a direct mail ad by designers who worked on Rep. Mondaire Jones’ (D-NY) successful campaign, and even creating a television commercial.

“This race turned out being a really good example of what the Working Families Party is about and how we want to operate,” Blaettler said. “It’s experts in campaigns who know how to run professional political operations and organizers on the ground who are deeply embedded in their communities, who are able to mobilize their friends, families, and neighbors around a cause.”

Having a candidate with a strong community presence, bold ideas, and the backing of electoral experts is part of Walton’s recipe for success that many progressives argue is transferable to other races. But there was one important part of her race that was a little more singular: As Walton and the NYWFP were campaigning, building a fresh political organizing class in Buffalo, Brown ignored the campaign.

In fact, it was only in the final week, when Brown, bolstered by $120,000 in spending from developers, lobbyists, and businesspeople, put out ads. He refused to debate Walton, ignoring the fact that he had a challenger altogether. The 21,407-person turnout this year represented just three-quarters of Brown’s 2017 primary reelection, where turnout was also abysmally low.

Walton had 150 poll watchers, including Bishop, who said many voters remarked on Brown’s campaign strategy.

“They were indignant about the fact that after 15 years [in office], their mayor didn’t even feel like he had to show up and talk to voters,” Bishop said.

Not every progressive candidate will have this advantage. But progressive organizers argue that other left-leaning candidates can give themselves the other advantages Walton enjoyed by leveraging their community roots and through careful organizing.

“The establishment can’t take us for granted,” said Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of Our Revolution — a progressive political action group made up of former Sanders 2016 staffers. “A serious candidate, with serious organization — they can’t ignore it.”

Progressives believe Walton’s win is just the beginning

Brooke Adams, the movement politics director for progressive political advocacy group People’s Action, said Walton’s win came on the strength of a decade of organizing by affordable housing activists in Buffalo, to whom Walton had strong ties. Her community organizing allowed her message to come across as organic and Buffalo-oriented.

“This race was really a perfect example of community organizing and movement politics at its best,” she said. “It’s a decade-plus of base-building meets democratic control of the economy meets a movement champion who’s really going to run on issues that matter locally.”

And many progressive strategists say Walton’s win is a symbol of how far the progressive movement — one that’s still relatively young given the founding of many groups occurred after the 2016 Democratic primary — has come.

Despite the progressive losses in New York City and elsewhere, Geevarghese said Walton’s victory is a major step forward for the progressive movement, given that it simultaneously expanded the number of progressive elected officials in the US. It gave the socialist movement a new face and spokesperson, may inspire future candidates, and expanded the pool of experienced progressive volunteers and campaign officials.

Having skilled progressive campaign workers is of particular importance. According to Geevarghese, the difference between the Buffalo mayoral race and that of a candidate like Lee Carter, a socialist who ran for governor in Virginia and performed abysmally, is the organizational capability that groups who have seen their power increase since Sanders’ failed presidential campaign can bring.

“Lee Carter was rhetorically powerful, but he had no organization at all,” Geevarghese said. “Our job in the progressive movement is to really marry both the messaging and the organization. And that should strike fear in the heart of the establishment.”

The progressive movement has also struggled to shake the narrative, true or not, that it is led by academics and graduate workers, and it is mostly popular among a highly educated, upper-middle-class white constituency — a theory pushed by New York mayoral candidate Eric Adams and that somewhat bore out in an analysis of his progressive rival Maya Wiley’s voters.

As a working-class Black woman, Walton disrupted that narrative and advocated for socialism as a result of organizing and personal experience rather than from an academic or theoretical perspective. And progressives believe that identifying other, similarly situated candidates would be a wise strategy.

“Regular folks are more likely to identify with a person from a similar circumstance than someone who went to a fancy Ivy League school,” Geevarghese said.

University of Buffalo political science professor Jacob Neiheisel was more reluctant to assign broader takeaways from Walton’s race given that had a lot of unique circumstances — including low turnout and an incumbent who did not campaign — though he did credit the genuine grassroots organizing Walton’s campaign did as a replicable strategy.

“There’s no magic formula that [Walton] suddenly tapped into,” Neiheisel said. “It’s politics as usual. You get people to the polls and have people more excited about you than the other person.”

And as recent races have shown, it is relatively easy to point to organized progressives with high name recognition that were unsuccessful. In New York, for example, the ability of progressives to challenge the establishment was notably thwarted in 2018, when actress and activist Cynthia Nixon got soundly defeated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York Democratic gubernatorial primary.

Litman, the Run for Something founder, said it is important to take into account that one of the biggest obstacles for progressive challengers is that most are first-time candidates, who, statistically, have low odds. As the bench develops, she believes Gracie Mansion or even the State Executive Mansion — and other states’ equivalents — could be in reach soon.

“In two, four, six years, it’s going to be an incredible field of at that point more experienced left-wing candidates,” she said. “We’re just at the beginning.”

Blaettler acknowledged the specific factors that were in place in Buffalo. But he still believes progressive candidates can successfully extrapolate strategies from the Walton campaign.

“[Brown] was probably more vulnerable than people realized or whatever, but this is not some unique set of circumstances that can never be replicated,” Blaettler said. “There’s an India Walton in every city, and we just need to support them and find them and invest in them.”