A Tale of Two Labor Candidates
East Bay State Senate primary sets up rematch between big money and DSA-backed Beckles
In late October, 2018, East Bay DSA members and other progressives organized a pre-election rally at a Berkeley High School auditorium. A wildly cheering crowd of several thousand came to hear Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Barbara Lee. Welcoming everyone to the event was 34 year old Jesse Arreguin, who was backed by Sanders when he ran for mayor of Berkeley two years before.
On the platform with them was Jovanka Beckles, a former Richmond City Council member then running—with backing from DSA, Sanders, and Lee—for a State Assembly seat against a corporate Democrat named Buffy Wicks. As the SF Bayview reported, Arreguin’s “repeated mention of Jovanka’s name evoked prolonged chants and a standing ovation for JO-VAN-KA!”
When the two appear on stage again this fall, Arreguin won’t be leading cheers for Beckles. That’s because they are now competing to represent Senate District 7, covering 850,000 residents of Berkeley, Oakland, Richmond, and smaller East Bay communities.
That contest to replace State Senator Nancy Skinner has already become one of the most expensive in the state. Super PACs funded by Uber, Lyft, PG&E, McDonalds, associations of builders, realtors, and landlords, plus the Correctional Officers union spent millions on mass mailings and TV ads to insure Arreguin’s March 5 primary victory.
In an East Bay echo of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic presidential primary positioning versus Sanders, Arreguin attributed his first-place finish to “a track record of not just being a strong progressive advocate, but getting things done. My approach to leadership is to be progressive and pragmatic.” (emphasis added)
As CR noted in its last issue, Richmond—Beckles’ home base—is “the only city in the United States with a DSA-endorsed city council majority,” thanks to twenty years of grassroots electoral work by the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA). So EBDSA volunteers joined forces with RPA, other community groups, Our Revolution, Teamsters Joint Council 7, the ILWU, and ATU Local 192 to build a small donor-based grassroots campaign that raised $170,000 for its candidate.
Labor Candidate Competition
Currently an elected member of the AC Transit Board and a retired Teamster, Beckles placed second in a field of five Democrats and one Republican. (Arreguin got 32% of the vote, while she received nearly 18%.) Among those who lost were Dan Kalb, an Oakland City Councilor, who raised twice as much as Beckles, and Kathryn Lybarger, a heavily-funded first-time candidate little known outside labor circles.
Lybarger is president of the 2.3 million-member California Labor Federation and top officer of a big UC-system campus workers union affiliated with AFSCME. The latter spent a reported $1.9 million on her disappointing fourth-place finish, while other AFL-CIO unions, along with SEIU, generated nearly $500,000 in direct donations for her. (Despite his own $200,000 worth of building trades donations, Arreguin had the chutzpah to complain about this “special interest” spending on Lybarger by other unions!)
According to multiple sources, Lybarger’s campaign relied too heavily on local union officials, their paid staffers, and a controversial political consulting firm. Its founder is a Sacramento lobbyist who has worked not only for unions but also for Chevron and other foes of California property tax reform. (This bad move was reminiscent of Wick’s campaign use of a San Francisco consultant whose past clients have included Airbnb and, in 2018, the city’s Chamber of Commerce.)
In the East Bay, some young workers like Antonio Gomez decided that Lybarger was not their preferred labor candidate. Gomez first got involved in electoral politics as a community college student in Stockton. After moving to Oakland to be closer to a job in Walnut Creek, he learned about Beckles’ campaign from social media posts by the EBDSA electoral committee. Even though not yet a DSA member, he liked what he saw on Jovanka’s website and decided to canvass for her throughout the district. “It was a scramble,” he says. “Everybody else spent all that money. But, at the end of the day, it’s knocking on doors that gets results.”
That’s an opinion shared by Beckles’ campaign manager, Otto Pippinger, who coordinated a crew of well-trained and highly motivated volunteers like Gomez. “Progressive campaigns don’t come easy,” Pippinger says. “They depend on tireless outreach—in countless personal conversations at the doors and on the phone.”
A Rematch Against Big Money
The SD-7 primary outcome sets up a re-match between Beckles and some of the same corporate interests whose unlimited spending prevailed six years ago in AD-15, when Beckles lost to Wicks by a 54 to 46 percent margin. A former director of Hillary Clinton’s Super-PAC, Priorities USA Action, Wicks now represents AD-14 and favors Arreguin. For more on the $3 million worth of independent expenditures (IEs) and direct donations that enabled big business to buy an Assembly seat for Wicks in 2018, see this still informative EBDSA website, https://buffywicks.money/.
Pundits from Politico to local commentator Steven Tavares agree that in, the latter’s words, Beckles “faces an uphill battle against Arreguin, who will have nearly every aspect of a campaign on his side—endorsements, fundraising, powerful IEs, and most unions.” By that Tavares means more conservative labor organizations—affiliated with state and local building trades councils and the Northern California Council of Carpenters. They’ve already spent heavily on Arreguin, along with employers in their industry.
The Berkeley mayor comes with his own family ties to organized labor, via the United Farm Workers (UFW). He is the son of farm workers and was mentored, as a ten-year old, by legendary UFW leader Dolores Huerta (who has endorsed him). By age 20, Arreguin was an elected member of the Rent Stabilization Board in Berkeley. Four years later, he was elected to the city council. At age 32, he beat a business-backed candidate for mayor by portraying her as someone “in the pocket of developers, real estate interests, and landlords.”
Ironically, that’s how local critics view Arreguin today. As Jack Kurzweil, a retired engineering professor at San Jose State and officer of Berkeley’s Wellstone Democratic Club told me: “Jesse’s become an obstacle to everything pushed by the progressive community. After getting elected, he did a 180 degree turn on development and housing. He went from extremely conservative NIMBY politics to becoming a conservative YIMBY in the blink of an eye.” (Arreguin prefers not to use such "pejorative acronyms,” he told Business Insider three years ago when interviewed about his evolving views on housing.)
A Fighter from Richmond
Working in Beckles favor, Tavares believes, is the fact that she’s “a fighter and hands-down more progressive than Arreguin.” Ten years ago, running for a second term on the Richmond City Council, Beckles and her fellow RPA candidates (one of whom is now mayor) overcame $3 million in corporate spending against them and in favor of a pro-Chevron slate. That media blitz was funded by the city’s biggest employer, its building trades allies, the Richmond police and fire-fighters’ unions, a story told in Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City.
After the SD-7 primary in March, Beckles was endorsed by former State Assembly member Andre Swanson from Oakland, the only other African-American in the race. In early April, she won the backing of U.S. Representative Ro Khanna, a House champion for labor law reform, Medicare for All, and the Green New Deal, who is a leading critic of corporate PAC influence in politics.
Within the labor movement, Beckles is seeking to expand her base of support by signing up more small donors, volunteers, and individual endorsers here. She is also wooing the local unions and central labor bodies that backed Lybarger in the SD-7 primary or, in the case of NUHW, remained neutral. Most of them—like the UAW, CNA, SEIU, CWA, CFT and CTA—endorsed and donated to Beckles general election campaign against Wicks six years ago.
Lybarger’s own AFSCME Local 3299 was among those labor allies then. At the time, she hailed Beckles—a Panamanian immigrant and fellow union member—as someone “strongly aligned with our values and so representative of our members…We are utterly confident that she will continue to fight for us when she gets to Sacramento.” So far, AFSCME has yet to make a similar post-primary endorsement of Beckles in this year’s senate race. (Lybarger did not respond to several email requests seeking comment for this story.)
An Under-Represented Working Class
Whether a labor candidate rises like Lybarger, from being a UC-Berkeley gardener to statewide union leader, or remains a rank-and-filer, like Beckles did, during her career as a child protection worker for Contra Costa County, winning election to public office is not easy.
Successful candidates for the legislature tend to have professional, managerial, or ownership class backgrounds, with accompanying personal affluence or ties to others with greater wealth. They leverage their law, business, consulting, or incumbent office-holder connections to build big campaign war chests, filled with contributions from industry associations, corporate PACs, and wealthy individuals. With far greater ease than any blue-collar or service sector worker, they can take time off to campaign, particularly if they’re already on the public payroll as an “elected.”
Due to class and race-based disadvantages, only 116 out of 7,400 state legislators in the entire country come from working class backgrounds, according to a recent academic study. Just 2% of the Democrats and 1% of Republican legislators “currently or last worked in manual labor, service industry, clerical, or labor union jobs.”
Amanda Litman, who recruits young progressives to run for office, says this data confirms “it’s really hard for people who aren’t already rich—or already independently wealthy, have rich partners or rich families—to enter politics. And the gatekeepers at the state level have typically recruited candidates who were safe bets, which is a candidate who can independently raise money.”
Uber’s Safe Bet
Business-backed front groups—with names like JobsPAC, Housing Providers for Responsible Solutions, and the Keep California Golden Ad Hoc Committee—definitely view Arreguin as their safest bet in Sacramento. While these corporate funders were demonizing and drowning out Lybarger’s pro-worker message, some also paid for unauthorized mailers touting Beckles, on the apparent theory that she would be a weaker general election opponent against Arreguin.
According to Tavares, a veteran political reporter in the Bay Area, Arreguin’s corporate funders conducted “a master class in negative campaigning that bordered on character assassination,” One of their main smears against Lybarger involved public safety. A glossy mailer from the JobsPAC, a “Bi-Partisan Coalition of California Employers,” painted her as “too extreme” for the East Bay because she “put the community at greater risk” by “calling for defunding local police.”
According to this hit piece—paid for by Uber, McDonalds, the California Building Industry Association, and other big donors—Arreguin has a “blueprint for safety” that involves “work[ing] with law enforcement to keep families safe” and better reflects true “progressive leadership.” Anti-union Uber alone spent at least $250,000 on pro-Arreguin messaging like this, while buying $800,000 worth of negative ads and mailers against Lybarger, according to the San Jose Mercury News.
Healthcare and Housing Differences
To counter a similar propaganda offensive against her this Fall, Beckles will try to shift the debate to voter concerns about healthcare and housing (which Arreguin cites as his “number one issue”). To make medical coverage universal and more affordable, she has long supported a single payer system. Arreguin is backed by the Political Action Committee of the California Medical Association, which does not favor replacing job-based medical insurance with a government-run universal healthcare program of any type.
The candidates are also likely to clash over rent control, given Arreguin’s backing by the California Apartment Association and California Realtors Association. The Tenants Union in Berkeley, which endorsed Beckles in the primary, argues that the mayor is “a danger to tenants, affordable housing, and every progressive issue.” In contrast, Beckles will have the chance to champion a ballot initiative that would, among other reforms, abolish current state-wide restrictions on the ability of cities like Richmond, Berkeley, and Oakland to expand the scope of their existing rent control measures. (Arreguin did not respond to a CR request for clarification of his position on this.)
In early April, Beckles joined housing activists at a two-day strategy session in Los Angeles that included Sanders, Khanna, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and Michael Weinstein, whose AIDs Healthcare Foundation (AHF) helped get rent control expansion on the ballot again. (It was defeated in 2018 and 2020.) "There are 17 million renters in California—that's 45% of the population," Weinstein reminded the group. He called the Justice for Renters campaign “a battle for the poor and working-class people” who find housing in the state increasingly unaffordable.
Beckles is also the candidate most opposed to the Biden Administration sending billions of dollars to the Israeli military at a time when there are so many unmet social and economic needs in the East Bay. Throughout months of turmoil on the Berkeley City Council, Arreguin has blocked passage of a pro-cease fire resolution—quite a departure from the city’s past official stances on controversial foreign policy issues.
Looking ahead to November, Beckles sees the general election in SD-7 as a contest “between a corporate-free and a corporate-funded candidate”—with her campaign being labor’s only hope of stopping big business from buying another seat in the legislature. It will be up to Beckles’ supporters who belong to unions—which bet heavily on Lybarger and lost—to remind their leaders that the fight is not over. Otherwise, organized labor in the East Bay will be handing a second-round victory to arch-enemies like Uber.