What I Learned from a Trump-Supporting Clean Energy Advocate

Raise your hand if, in the last three months, you’ve found yourself in a room where 99 percent of the people around you shared your political views.

Your hand is raised, right? So is mine.

Last month I attended a conference where the vast majority of the participants were not fans of Donald Trump.

Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being around like-minded people every now and then. After all, the conference was for folks who run strategic communication campaigns mostly on behalf of progressive causes.

But to make progress on most of our causes — climate change, health care for all, gun control, you name it — we need the support of people who don’t identify as progressives.

How do we win over non-progressives? How do we message issues so they don’t shut down? Where can we find common ground?

It’s difficult to answer these questions without any conservatives in the room.

So when Tory Perfetti showed up to speak on the last day of the conference, I was thrilled.

Two facts you should know about Tory:

1. He supports Trump.

2. He helped organize a grassroots coalition of solar energy supporters in Florida to defeat an anti-solar bill backed by the mammoth utility industry and the Koch brothers.

A Trump-supporting clean energy advocate who rallied conservatives and liberals to beat the utility industry? I couldn’t wait to hear his story.

Here’s the summary.

Last year, on the same day Florida voters helped send Trump to the White House, they rejected a bill aimed at stifling solar energy in the Sunshine State. The bill, sponsored by the utility industry, would have prevented solar companies from selling energy directly to individual homeowners or businesses.

The bill was poised to ride to success on the coattails of Republican victories statewide. But instead, it failed. Why? A grassroots coalition of the unlikeliest allies — including liberal groups like the League of Women Voters and the Sierra Club, and diehard conservatives like the Christian Coalition and the Tea Party Network — beat back the measure.

(You can get the full political story from Grist here and here.)

What do the Sierra Club and Tea Party Network have in common in Florida?

They both back solar energy, albeit for different reasons. This is what Floridians for Solar Choice, a grassroots coalition led by Tory Perfetti, recognized early on. And that’s why the utility industry’s amendment was defeated.

Though groups with extremely different politics comprise the organization, Floridians for Solar Choice didn’t lose a single member during the fight to shut down the utility industry’s amendment. They retained the Bernie supporters, the Trump supporters and everyone in between. And they succeeded in getting Florida voters to back a policy that will help bring more clean energy to their state, which will benefit people, the economy and the environment.

In an era when people are unfriending each other on Facebook for having different political opinions, what lessons can we learn from Tory and Floridians for Solar Choice? How can we bring together diverse people to do what’s best for a group of people, a city or a state?

According to Tory, there are a few rules to follow:

1. Do no harm.

Floridians for Solar Choice committed to do no harm to any of its members. They remained laser-focused on one issue — solar energy. This ensured that its members, from the Christian Coalition to the League of Women Voters, were able to maintain their street cred — the trust and respect they’d built up over decades — with their members and activists. Floridians for Solar Choice never asked groups to forsake their sacred values (which were quite different for each organization) in order to support solar energy. This leads us to lesson number 2…

2. Understand the partisanship of your partners — and respect it.

Tory and the other leaders of Floridians for Solar Choice deeply understood and respected the beliefs and values of each of their partners. (This started, of course, with listening to each partner’s concerns and priorities.) They were then able to use their understanding of each group’s partisanship to ignite passion for their issue among diverse audiences, using different methods to get voters to reach the same conclusion: that the utility industry’s amendment was bad for Floridians. This brings us to lesson number 3…

3. Don’t change your beliefs midstream.

Floridians for Solar Choice wrote their original beliefs, which clearly stated the coalition’s objective, in a formal document (a draft amendment). This document helped them gain the trust of partners with differing political perspectives. They never wavered from those initial beliefs. They stated at the beginning, “This is what we believe in. This is what we’re asking you to sign on to. We’re going to fight for this together.” Their approach wasn’t rigid — but their beliefs and objective were. This allowed them to maintain the trust of all of their partners, and allowed their partners to keep their street cred (which leads back to lesson number 1).

It’s easy to make a list of lessons learned. It’s much harder to do the actual work of policy change. So Tory is careful to note that he’s not sure if this same approach will work in other states or with other issues.

But what he does know is that multi-partisan coalitions will never accomplish their goals if they make members trade off or surrender their values. That’s the key reason, he believes, that Floridians for Solar Choice was successful.

Floridians for Solar Choice has set a new bar for how people on the right and left can push through policies that work for their communities.

As much as I enjoy hearing from fellow progressives, I think I’ll remember the lessons from Tory’s talk for much longer. His story gives me hope that we Americans have more in common than we think, and that we can unite to do what’s best for our communities.

Check out Tory’s full frank talk!