Grassroots energy and GOP civil war in Georgia
Grassroots energy and GOP civil war in Georgia
The coup attempt, crazy GOP mobs, and distrust in the electoral system are scary, but...
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
Hard to believe that this week is Thanksgiving — I guess that’s what happens when you hardly leave your home for eight months. Two quick notes about this very unprecedented Thanksgiving:
By now we all know at least a little bit about the uglier truth of this holiday’s history, but this article is an especially interesting look at the backstory of the events and Native American politics involved.
For months now, the lines outside food banks nationwide have been stretching for miles and miles, with struggling Americans looking for help and the government entirely abdicating its responsibility to provide it. If you can, consider making a donation to a local food bank ahead of Thursday — you can search through thousands of them and give directly right here.
I’ve got a big newsletter for you today, with an interview with a grassroots leader in Georgia who has a new initiative for the crucial Senate runoffs, Biden’s cabinet, what the future of labor law in this country looks like, and much more.
But first, thank you to our GoFundMe donors: Matthew, Susan, and David!
Organizing Georgia to Win in January — and Years Beyond
Conspiracy theory-addled goons have fully taken over the Republican Party, egged on and enabled by cynical and opportunistic politicians, greedy corporations, and shady billionaires.
But I have good news… or at least a silver lining.
Trump’s narcissistic and noxious attempt to override democracy is a true crisis, but it also provides us something of an opportunity, at least in these upcoming elections. As I’ve predicted, Trump, who only cares about himself and maybe his daughter Ivanka, is stoking a new civil war within the Republican Party. Because they’re opportunistic weasels, GOP leaders didn’t seem to recognize that Donald Trump screws over anyone and everyone he can, and now he’s got an army of zombie cult members willing to go to war for him against any Republican deemed not loyal enough to the most selfish person in the Western Hemisphere.
There is a multitude of reasons why Republicans surged in many places this year, and plenty of Democrats deserve blame for running bad campaigns, but much of the GOP’s turnout goes back to Trump himself. They showed up for him, which is why even good analyses like this one underrate just how much the Republican Party, not just “traditional” conservativism, is threatened by the increasing intraparty tension. And in Georgia, which in January will host two Senate runoff elections of existential importance, we’re seeing an early preview of how this massive uprising of uncaged lunatic hate-banshees, with Trump’s encouragement, is going to reshape and perhaps split the GOP.
(It’s not just their voters, either — there are plenty of Republican lawmakers who are unbelievably racist and maniacal.)
It would have been incomprehensible even a month ago to hear Republicans accusing Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the architects of some of the largest voter suppression schemes of the last decade, as not being sufficiently right-wing and inappropriately partisan. The state’s two Republican senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, are so desperate to harness their energy and stay on Trump’s good side that they’ve been attacking Raffensperger and backing increasingly brazen attempts at overturning the votes of millions of people in their own state. Loeffler, in particular, needs to stoke the base, given the firehose of revelations coming out about her of late.
And yet, if Trump doesn’t win (and he won’t), it may not be enough. Trump’s dullard deputies are transmitting the message to the masses and finding some very receptive ears:
In fact, the knives may be out for Loeffler already. And if base Republicans who worship Trump are told not to support Loeffler and Perdue, many of them are liable to listen, which will obviously be a huge boon to Democrats in the runoff.
(Long-term, a batshit insane takeover of the GOP and the party’s attempt to undermine democracy are massive problems, obviously, but we can only control how we respond.)
Still, just relying on Republicans to implode is about as wise as counting on a significant number of them to see the light and reject Trump (which, to be clear, did not happen on Election Day). So again, as Republicans melt down, it’s our job to rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up, creating a more progressive and populist version that will motivate voters and deliver for them, too.
In Georgia, Fair Fight and New Georgia Project, both founded by Democratic hero Stacey Abrams, have been rightfully showered with donations since it became clear that there would be runoff elections come January (we’ve raised over $40k for them alone!). Still, there is an entire constellation of non-profits and activist groups working to register voters, build local power, and get people to the polls. One of the newest organizations, Save Our Senate, was co-founded by Nabilah Islam, a former Congressional candidate and local organizer who oversaw much of the Gwinnett County’s Democratic Party’s successful GOTV program this year.
Gwinnett, which sits on the outskirts of Atlanta and is the state’s second most populated county, swung further to the left this year, giving Joe Biden 58% of its votes, electing Democrat Carolyn Bordeaux to Congress, and flipping a number of important county seats.
I spoke with Nabilah a few days ago to talk about how Georgia flipped blue for Biden, her new organization, and the gameplan for winning the runoff elections.
Gwinnett Democrats had a very successful Election Day, despite plenty of voter suppression in Georgia. What did your team do to make that happen?
We recognized early on that if we wanted to run up the score in Gwinett, we would have to create a local organization that did electoral work and could work on behalf of candidates. So we did it through the county party. We put together a program and raised over $150,000 for it. It focused on chasing absentee ballots and sending out a voter guide with all of our down-ballot candidates, which we sent out to over 100,000 low-propensity voters. We did a five-figure digital ad buy that had over a million impressions in Vietnamese, Korean, English, and Spanish.
We also ran a robust election protection program. On Primary Day, 20% of precincts did not have machines that worked the morning of, and 80% of those precincts were Democratic precincts. So we not only did we do voter education and mobilized the voters, we also worked really hard to protect everyone's constitutional rights to vote.
The way it works in Georgia, we have a Secretary of State and every county has an election board and a supervisor. We have a county commission that approves the budget for early voting precincts and whether or not they're going to decide to send everyone an application for a ballot. There was a lot of suppression so we did a lot of fighting.
The first day of early voting was disastrous; we had lines between eight and 11 hours long. And that was because like the checking system was crappy, we didn't have enough people checking in folks, and the Secretary of State hadn’t expanded the bandwidth. We also only had nine early voting locations, while Fulton County, the most populated county, had 30. So we just had to be very vigilant and kept fighting for to make our elections more accessible.
And getting people their ballots for the general election was a challenge, too, right?
Gwinnett County is the only in Georgia that is federally mandated to print ballots in two languages, because of how large our Hispanic population is. So the whole state printed their ballots from one vendor, but we had to print from somewhere else, because our ballots ended up being longer. That’s 100% valid, but many never made it to people.
I had people who would DM me and say that they requested their ballot in early August, and if you went to the Secretary of State's website it would say it was issued on September 18, but they’d yet to get the ballot and it was suddenly one week from Election Day. A ballot being issued didn't mean it was received in that person's mailbox. We're watching what our election board does for these upcoming runoffs, because we don't want the same thing to happen again.
Did you do door-to-door campaigning? I know many county and state parties were told not to do that.
We didn’t go door-to-door. We did mail and digital. And then we did texting and phone banking. We send out hundreds of thousands of text messages. We were in a state where our governor didn't know that asymptomatic people were contagious. We were just very conscientious of not getting folks sick. But for these runoff elections, we definitely have to engage in some form of direct voter contact and do it in a safe way.
I think Democrats do well when we run a real ground game. It’s going to take grassroots organizing, especially when a lot of our voters come out during a presidential year and they otherwise do not vote. We have to put the elbow grease in. We have to run a real canvassing programs, showing up at people's doors and engaging with them.
So what’s the plan for Save Our Senate, both now and in the future?
We’re mobilizing voters on behalf of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock and turning them out to come vote in the runoff elections, which Democrats historically have not done well in. We're building on the successes that we had in Gwinnett County and we're scaling it out to the whole state. Focusing on low-propensity voters, focusing on Black and brown voters, and communicating in different languages. And we're going to have grassroots mobilization, so we will be knocking on doors in a safe way. And then and also have a form of digital mobilizations, so we’ll be communicating with voters through that medium.
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News and Notes and Things to Read
Lock Them Up: We’re continuing to receive reports that many Democrats, including potentially President-elect Biden, aren’t keen on holding Trump or any other Republicans accountable for the rampant crimes that they have committed over the last four years.
The notion that letting Trump’s crimes slide would help the nation heal and unify the country is laughable — just see the above story about the far-right’s dangerous mass delusions and hissy-fits. They’re bailing white supremacist murderers out of jail, not looking to hammer out a bipartisan bill to increase access to healthcare. If Democrats don’t investigate and throw the book at these monsters, it would in effect normalize and condone some of the worst corruption and malfeasance we’ve ever seen in this country.
It would also be a remarkable political blunder. The Obama administration’s refusal to bring charges against the Wall Street executives who fleeced and foreclosed on tens of millions of Americans and caused a global economic collapse helped lead to a populist revolt that put Donald Trump in the White House. Going easy on Nixon didn’t work for Gerald Ford, either.
Democratic Debates: I’d have hoped that Democratic leadership would have learned those lessons, but it looks like a lot of the same toxic voices that turned the party into a watered-down Republican caucus in the ‘90s and gave President Obama some of the worst advice he received in his eight years in office seem to be ascending again to positions of power.
Last Monday, Biden appointed lobbyist Steve Richetti as a top advisor and Rep. Cedric Richmond, the Cookie Monster of oil lobbyist money, as his climate liasion. Then, word broke that Biden is considering naming DLC co-founder and budget hawk Bruce Reed as head of the Office of Management and Budget at a time when the government will likely need to provide several rounds of massive economic stimulus. Even scarier, perhaps, is Rahm Emanuel’s push to become the Secretary of Transportation.
And then there is the Lincoln Project, which is taking undue credit for Biden’s win (Republicans voted for Trump at a higher rate this year than in 2016!) and now trying to sabotage potential progressive cabinet picks. Thankfully, some Democrats are pushing back, including some very mainstream centrist ones.
Even if we do win the Senate, the fight is just getting started.
What Comes After Prop 22?: Speaking of internal brouhahas, the fight over who will run the Department of Labor and what policies it will pursue looms unusually large. The Trump administration has pulverized workers’ rights over the last four years, while the Obama administration fell short on a lot of promises it made to organized labor. Biden, however, fashions himself a champion of working people (did you know he’s from Scranton?) and has close ties to union leaders, who plan on having more sway in this administration (or pushing hard until they get it).
Regardless of who gets the nomination to run Labor, there will be an abundance of challenges to evening out the playing field. Beyond the GOP’s potential (likely?) hold on the Senate, workers now have to contend with the dishonest success of Prop 22 in California and how it will embolden big businesses to pursue similar referendum across the country. Veena Dubal, an academic who was one of the loudest critics of Prop 22 (and received plenty of death threats because of it) co-wrote this piece about what the referendum’s passage means going forward for workers everywhere, especially gig workers:
That the treatment of workers is now top of mind in public discourse on the gig economy is thanks in large part to these organized workers. As Gig Workers Collective put it in their statement on November 4, “when GWC members first started to organize in 2016, gig companies were considered to be exciting startups. … It was hard to get anyone to understand that this was all at the expense of the worker.” The labor to change this narrative and cut through the technophilic hype that painted exploited workers as “entrepreneurs” and regressive business models as “innovation” has taken tremendous effort and faced significant resistance from these companies.
Another piece worth reading is this dissection of a renewed debate over whether corporate consolidation or an economy with more diffuse, smaller businesses provide more favorable conditions for organizing workers.
And speaking of gig workers:
Two other worker reads:
Amazon is lobbying to make sure that it can continue to enjoy the spoils of China’s enslavement of Uighur Muslims.
This story, about immigrant teenagers working in factories through the night to pay back debts to human smugglers is as heartbreaking and infuriating as it sounds.
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