“Redefining Democracy”

When we first started at Advocate, we had a rallying cry that we’d repeat over and over again to describe why we were taking on this immense challenge. “Democracy is broken!” we would scream to anyone who would listen to us. “Money has too big an influence in politics. We will fix it!” It made us feel good to be angry about the current state of things and, quite frankly, it gave us the juice we needed during those early six-hour meeting marathons to persevere and to fight valiantly on. We were knights, protectors; and knights always need a cause, a crusade so to speak, to get you through those days of endlessly marching to the battle.

As the days went by and weeks turned into months, we educated ourselves more and more about the political process. We interviewed campaign managers, consultants, politicians, and pundits; basically anyone who would talk to us about the current state of politics and what we found really surprised us. We heard over and over from those who know more than us that while money did play a huge part in helping candidates and campaigns win elections, democracy was, in fact, not broken.

Democracy is alive and well, thriving even, and without our help. Believe whatever you will about certain issues like allowing gay marriage and legalizing pot but they were in fact shining examples of our democracy and the broader constitution as a whole at work. In fact, the system was, and for the most part has been, working just the way our fore fathers intended it to work. No matter how much money is introduced into politics, the United States (conspiracy theories and our silly Electorate College aside) still works on a one-person-one-vote basis, meaning if enough people vote for one person to win an election or for or against a certain issue, that person wins the election barring a runoff and the winning issue prevails.

Imagine our surprise when we, the honorable knights of Democracy, realized that our cause was more quixotic than anything. “So if Democracy isn’t broken” we wondered, “then why doesn’t it feel like it is working?” And therein lies the problem of current state politics. To supporters and citizens oftentimes it feels broken even though it is working as it was intended. I think to that we can blame the growing influence of money but I also think that politics has gone from being the tasteful thing you politely talk about at the water cooler and tea parties (couldn’t resist) to the now always-on media yelling at us from screen to screen in our homes and flamewars that permeate our social media feeds. People are more passionate, more divisive, and yes, even angrier than before and maybe that is because of the current state of things or maybe these new and numerous communication channels are just putting us more in touch with each other to see these feelings. Either way there is no channel or platform that exists to channel that fervent passion into something positive and from that thought Advocate was born.

Being so wrong about our initial hypothesis was truly humbling, to say the least, but like most good entrepreneurs we pivoted and so, instead of Advocate being this tool that was going to fix Democracy, we would create a digital platform that would help Democracy flourish in the digital age. Our new mandate was now to take all the things that work in our current system — engagement, passion, communication — and amplify them and hopefully reduce the things we see as detractors — money, entitlement, indifference, jerks — out of politics. We still have a ways to go and are probably many more iterations of this thing from truly getting to our end state, a place where politics is always on, modern, and truly a connector/integrator between the supporters and citizens and the campaigns and representatives.. The good news is that now we feel confident that we are closing in on something wonderful and transformative and hopefully you will agree when Advocate is ready.