We Used to Tell Them What It Cost. Then We Started Asking What They’d Do for Us.

Opinion / Black Political Power — REAL POWER.TV

In March of 1972, eight thousand Black people went to Gary, Indiana. Three thousand were seated delegates from all fifty states, filling a high school gymnasium because no hotel in that city could hold them. Socialists and Republicans. Panthers and preachers. Bobby Seale, Shirley Chisholm and Coretta Scott King under one roof, unable to stand each other’s politics.

They did not go to Gary to hear what anybody was going to do for them. They went to write the bill.

What came out was the National Black Political Agenda, and here is the part that matters more than any line item in it. That agenda was built to be the criterion for endorsement. Support it and you could have our vote. Do not, and you could not. They stood up a body to enforce it. That is a price.

It worked well enough that the number of Black elected officials in this country roughly quadrupled by the end of that decade.

A campaign comes through here. They book the church, bring the candidate, and the candidate stands up and tells us what they are going to do for us. Somebody says amen, somebody takes a picture, everybody leaves feeling like something happened. Then the vote comes, we deliver, and the thing they promised does not.

Fifty-four years ago we handed them the terms. Now we sit and wait to be handed a promise. We have run that play so many times we forgot it is backwards.

Let me be precise about who I mean, because this argument gets abused.

I do not mean Black voters. Black women went 92 percent for Biden. They have held up their end of every bargain anybody ever made in their name, including the ones nobody bothered to negotiate. Nobody gets to stand in front of that number and tell Black people they did not do their part.

I mean the layer in between. The brokers, the endorsement class, the organizations and operatives, and I am one of them, whose job it is to sit across from a campaign and say what our turnout costs.

Somewhere in the last thirty years that conversation changed. The agenda became a wish list. The endorsement became a relationship. The ask became access, a photo, a committee seat, a contract for somebody. The question we carried into the room stopped being what will you commit to and became what are you going to do for us. The first sets terms. The second asks a favor.

We traded the only leverage we ever had for proximity.

I have watched it happen at tables in this city. Somebody walks in with a demand and walks out with a title.

Democracy in Color’s 2026 SWAMP Audit counted the Democratic Party’s own receipts. White men hold 67 percent of senior leadership positions across its top campaign entities, and 100 percent of those positions are held by white people. Of $154 million paid to the top forty-eight consultants, 92 percent went to white-led firms.

In 2024 its six biggest spending operations put $1.33 billion into persuasion advertising and $64 million into field and mobilization. Eighteen to one. A vote costs about $200 through television and $33 at the door. They pay six times as much per vote for the method that does not require them to know anybody.

Read those numbers and you see racism, and you are not wrong. Look again and you see something simpler. Nobody is making them do anything else. You do not negotiate with a customer who already handed you the money. Ninety-two cents on the dollar is not just a closed room. It is an unbilled invoice.

Two decades in, I have almost never been the prime. The contract goes downtown, then somebody calls me in week six because that firm cannot reach the neighborhoods it already promised to deliver.

I used to take that personally. It is not personal, it is arithmetic. Nobody has to hire people rooted in this community, because nobody ever conditioned anything on it. If the endorsement carried a price, and that price named who runs the work, who holds the prime and what gets built here in the off year, the market would change. There is no market for Black operators because no demand stands behind us.

They do not buy infrastructure. They rent us in October, and we let them.

A community cannot set a price it never discusses in public. That is why REAL POWER.TV exists. Not to tell you who to vote for, but so that when somebody comes asking, you already know what your vote is worth and what you mean to charge.

Know the difference between infrastructure and rental. A television flight in October is a rental. You pay the rate card, the cycle ends, you own nothing. A Black-owned outlet that talks to Black Cleveland fifty-two weeks a year is infrastructure. It is here in March when nothing is happening, and it is what makes any ask land.

I have a stake in this. My firm competes for this work and this outlet takes sponsorship. I would rather say it myself than have somebody discover it and use it to dodge the argument. Those numbers were not written by me. They were written by people counting the party’s own books.

The audit calls for a Black Voter Initiative funded at 15 percent of party spending, and names Ohio as one of three states where it has to happen. A national report just told the Democratic Party that Ohio Black turnout is where the 2026 majority lives.

So do not wait on somebody to bring an agenda here in September. Write ours now, in public, and make support for it the condition of anything.

They filled that gymnasium with people who agreed on nothing except that nobody was getting their vote for free. We can do that again. Somebody just has to say the number out loud.

Kenn Dowell is founder and CEO of Strategic Resources Consulting and founder of REAL POWER.TV.

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