On Monday, November 6, Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of The Fairness Project, was sitting in his car parked on a neighborhood street in Portland, Maine, catching his breath after a busy morning of knocking door-to-door, asking people to vote “yes” on Maine Question 2 during the election the next day. Formally entitled “An Act to Enhance Access to Affordable Health Care,” the citizen-led ballot measure enabled Mainers to vote in favor of expanding Medicaid in the state–something its Republican governor, Paul LePage, has vetoed five times previously. It passed overwhelmingly.
“Knocking on doors and talking to people, we’ve seen that they understand what’s at stake here—they can help expand Medicaid for 70,000 Mainers and bring in the federal dollars to make that investment and, in doing so, create 6,000 jobs across the state in the healthcare industry,” Schleifer tells Fast Company. Through a combination of direct funding, digital and social outreach, and strategic planning assistance, The Fairness Project partners with and bolsters state- and city-level ballot initiative campaigns that advance equitable causes. (Ballot initiatives evolve from petitions that garner enough signatures from registered voters to be brought to a public vote.) In Maine, TFP began coordinating around a year ago with the local grassroots organization Mainers for Health Care, which spearheaded the ballot initiative.
Out of the $480,000 Mainers for Health Care had raised by early October to campaign for the ballot initiative, $375,000 came from The Fairness Project, which used its national reach to field donations from out of state, and to bring in more volunteers for door-to-door canvassing efforts. The Fairness Project also helped to develop the social strategy around the ballot initiative, and the text of the initiative itself.
Maine’s Question 2 will grant coverage to around 70,000 residents who currently earn too much (generally, over 138% of the federal poverty level) to quality for Medicaid, yet earn too little to avoid individual plans. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have already expanded Medicaid to adults under the age of 65. Maine is the first to take the expansion issue to the ballot, but it certainly, Schleifer says, won’t be the last; similar movements are already underway for 2018 in Alaska, Utah, and Idaho.
Maine’s Question 2 was more straightforward: “Do you want Maine to expand Medicaid to provide healthcare coverage for qualified adults under age 65 with incomes at or below 138% of the federal poverty level, which in 2017 means $16,643 for a single person and $22,412 for a family of two?” In this case, voters knew what they’re voting for, and that’s a tactic The Fairness Project has been adept at advancing. Its work, and that of Mainers for Health Care, has been around reminding voters in Maine that other states, even Republican-led states like Ohio, that have expanded Medicaid have fielded nothing but positive results; in an editorial in the Bangor Daily News, the publication cited a quote from Ohio Governor John Kasich, who said that the majority of Ohioans who benefitted from the state’s Medicaid expansion find it easier to keep a job and afford necessities like food and housing.
Slow minimum wage hikes, attacks on healthcare–all of these signals from the federal government “go against what Americans want,” Schleifer says. By bringing these issues to the ballot, states and cities are exercising their recourse to raise their votes over the intransigence of their governors. “It’s really the only thing that folks can do now when Congress is as broken as it is, and when state legislatures are as broken as they are, to allow people to take up the mantel and control their own lives and organize in their communities to change laws that the legislatures or governors are failing to do,” Schleifer adds. “It allows them to take the resistance a step further.” With one success notched in Maine for Medicaid expansion via ballot initiative, TFP is already turning its sights to other states.