Connect! Unite! Act! is a weekly series encouraging the creation of face-to-face networks in each congressional district. Groups meet to socialize, support candidates, get out the vote, and engage in other local political actions that help our progressive movement grow and exert maximum influence on the powers that be. Visit us every week to see how you can get involved.
Connect! Unite! Act! is a weekly series encouraging the creation of face-to-face networks in each congressional district. Groups meet to socialize, support candidates, get out the vote, and engage in other local political actions that help our progressive movement grow and exert maximum influence on the powers that be. Visit us every week to see how you can get involved!
As we get closer to Election Day, our democracy needs you. It needs you badly. We can look back at 2010 and realize exactly how badly our democracy needs you, and why your commitment this weekend can mean everything.
Before Election Day in 2010, a friend called me to tell me that he believed the Republican Party could pick up 44 seats. He felt confident it was possible. I didn’t want to believe it, but I acknowledged that anything was possible and I would respect the results come Election Day. That is certainly more than Republicans are offering to do this time around. In 2010, the first midterm of Obama’s presidency, we lost a record 63 seats. In 2014, another midterm, we lost nine Senate seats. Both were body blows, and that doesn’t even count what happened to state houses around the country.
Part of what happened is that too many were turned off the process. They believed that their vote didn’t matter. They were jaded as to the outcome and what it meant to them. Why bother participating when they didn’t see something that impacted them directly? No, Republicans wouldn’t have a direct impact on them, and it just wasn’t worth getting involved.
After 2010, I sat the next day and thought of the Paul Simon song “Only Living Boy in New York”:
Half of the time we're gone
But we don't know where
And we don't know where
Half of the time when it comes to elections, Democratic voters are gone. Voter suppression is preventing so many from showing up, and that makes it even more critical that those who can show up do show up. When you know that voter suppression is in place in your state and you are in a position where you can vote, if nothing else, make an extra effort to make sure you do vote and that those who can do. It is the least we can do for each other to battle the suppression that stops so many from participating.
This weekend is all about voter participation, and we need you. In 2010, the Thursday before Election Day, a local conservative I know took time to call me. We can be on opposite sides of most issues, but we worked on information technology business frequently. “You’re going to lose 44 seats,” he told me. I doubted it. After all, Obama had just won convincingly in 2008. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it. It turned out that he had not just been right about the losses, he had estimated far lower than the actual loss of 63 seats. From Simon:
Tom, get your plane right on time
I know that you've been eager to fly now
Hey, let your honesty shine, shine, shine now
Here is where I get to get honest, brutally so. I hope I am wrong, but I look daily at the numbers and I know we are a long way away from turning out all the voters we need to in order to seal this election. In fact, I see a lot of potential problems if we believe in the idea that I had in 2010 that things would “turn out okay.” If we want to save our nation, we have to be part of the process. Daily Kos has worked to help make that possible, and I’m asking you to take these last few days and put some of your hard work into doing anything you can to help get voters to the polls.
Here are some of the things I’m asking you to consider doing this weekend:
This next section, to me, may be most critical. Roe v. Wade has been overturned. Student debt forgiveness is underway. Marijuana penalties have been removed. The Biden administration has advanced more of the initiatives sought by young voters than any president I can remember. If young people don’t turn out to support it, the case will quickly be made by others that the party as a whole should have remained entirely focused on much older voters. We need to prove that wrong. Right now though, we need to do more to hold up our end of the bargain.
We don’t think about this enough, but many of our most important voters struggle with transportation, they don’t own high-end cell phones, and they are the people who most need representation in government.
This election is critically important. It will determine whether or not there will be an ongoing attack on reproductive rights, LGBT rights, the rights of the disabled, and global stability. Republicans are already talking about siding with Russia over Ukraine and bragging about taking down social security. Should Republicans take the senate, President Joe Biden will be shut out of nominating to the federal bench as Republicans will thwart every judge nominated, and many positions that desperately need to be filled elsewhere won’t be. We will be dealing with a radicalized party at the helm.
We can stop this, but it takes all of us. This time in 2020, I don’t want to find myself calling my friend after the election and saying, “Damn, you were right.” I’d much prefer to spend the day after election thinking that we did everything possible and Republicans found themselves running head-on into a fired up Democratic base that was ready to turn out.
Are you with me?
.jfif)
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