2020

December 8, 2020: What’s Next for the Anti-Trump Resistance?

Our sense of relief that Trump lost is still palpable and each day, as his rantings become more and more unhinged, that relief grows. The country and our democracy dodged a bullet. Repairing the damage caused by him and the Republicans is going to be a long, difficult process but we are eager for that process to begin.

For those of us who have been part of the anti-Trump Resistance, the prospect of Trump leaving brings up many emotions and thoughts. We look back and ask, how has this four-year journey changed our lives? We look ahead and wonder, what becomes of the anti-Trump movement without Trump? To better understand all of this, I turned to one of the leaders in New York of the Indivisible movement, Sarah Reeske.

Sarah, who had been the senior regional organizer for upstate New York, is presently the senior regional organizer for all of New York, upstate and downstate, until Indivisible hires a new downstate organizer. With about 100 Indivisible groups in New York, that is a lot of ground to cover but Sarah approaches it with her usual energy and dedication. You can read more about Sarah’s background in an article from the Rome Sentinel entitled, “The progressive passion of Indivisible Mohawk Valley’s Sarah Reeske.” In the article, she “describes her job as saving democracy and she couldn’t be more passionate about doing just that.” https://romesentinel.com/stories/the-progressive-passion-of-indivisible-mohawk-valleys-sarah-reeske,70804

Sarah, a divorced parent of two small children in upstate New York, has been the guest speaker several times for our East End Action Network (EEAN) meetings. Her energy and optimism are always inspiring. I thought if anyone had insights about the Indivisible movement, where we have come from and where we might be headed in the future, it would be Sarah.

I was right. In a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about how she got started with the Resistance, her work in New York and the future priorities of Indivisible.

What we did not get a chance to discuss was the results in her congressional district (NY22), since when we spoke on November 11th, they were still counting absentee ballots. But even though the absentee ballot counting is finished, the race is still too close to call. It is one of two congressional races nationwide that is still up in the air.

Democratic Congressman Anthony Brindisi, who progressive groups helped elect in the blue wave of 2018, was only 12 votes behind Claudia Tenney, the Republican challenger who he ousted in 2018. Not only does the narrow margin cry out for a recount, but there are several discrepancies over the way ballots were handled. According to The New York Times, “12 Votes Separated These House Candidates. Then 55 Ballots Were Found. ‘StickyGate’ is just one of the reasons for the uproar over the extraordinarily close race between Claudia Tenney, a Republican, and Representative Anthony Brindisi.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/nyregion/house-election-tenney-brindisi.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

This week, the case went before a judge with Tenney asking the court to certify the election. That request was denied and instead the judge ordered a district-wide recount, which could be beneficial for Brindisi. https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/house-new-york-election-democrats/2020/12/08/6c9b818c-38dd-11eb-bc68-96af0daae728_story.html

I reached out to Sarah and asked her in a follow-up email what she thought about the closeness of the race. “We expected the NY22 race to be close, but this is razor thin. If we would have been able to canvass, I believe Anthony would have seen a decisive victory. We weren't able to this time because of COVID and the need to keep people safe. There are so many implications for this district and the country if Anthony doesn't win. If Tenney wins, we'll advocate to have the state legislature break up NY22 in the redistricting process because no Central New York community or family benefits when she represents us in Congress."

Below is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our November conversation.

Before we talk about your work with Indivisible, tell me a little bit about how you got started in the Indivisible movement.

To set the scene a little bit, you need to go back to the Indivisible organization that came out of the Indivisible Doc, the Google Doc from four years ago and the reason why an organization was created was because there were so many groups that wanted to take the learning and make it local. Indivisible taught groups of people that they have constituent powers and how to use them effectively. So that model is still there. And then all those groups kept asking for help and that there were clearly these national moments that if groups all did the same thing, it would kind of add this new, amazing grassroots pressure on Congress. By investing in organizers like myself, a national organization was created.

I like to tell people that I have my dream job. I am a coach for communities that are saving democracy. We have about 100 active groups in New York and I get to help coach them on their goals, strategy, and tactics. I show them what they can do locally and then support them in what they decide to do. I show how they can join in a national movement moment, whether the Lights for Liberty or impeachment rallies or where there's things happening all across the state. There is also a lot of work we can do at the state level for our state legislature. One of my goals is to bridge that upstate, downstate divide. And that is long-term work.

So, we have developed an inside game and an outside game that covers all our bases in the Indivisible ecosystem. National has a lot of great resources. We have a policy team, we have committees, we have data. We have a big organizing department and that is where I come in because a group on Long Island or Upstate New York can feel like blue dots in a red sea in our state.

Many of the women I profiled in my book began this journey at the 2017 Women’s March. Is that where it started for you?

My catalyst moment was the Women's March but not by being there. I didn't know it was happening. I had been living under a rock. I got my start be seeing a picture from the Women’s March. All of this was unfolding on Facebook so like any good 30-year-old, I went to NPR.org and there I saw a slide show with pictures from Women’s Marches around the world. I stopped on this picture of the Women's March in Barcelona, Spain, and the camera was on the crowd and there's this eight-year-old girl holding a stick with a painted cardboard sign that said, "I march for America." And she's chanting and I thought, what does this eight-year-old girl in Barcelona, Spain know that I don't know as a 30-year-old American woman? And the message I got from that photo was American women, you do not have to be okay with subpar rights. Then I just mentally crumbled to the floor. I was a puddle of Sarah on the floor. But I put myself back together after seeing that and I said, that's it, I'm in.

Your children were very little at that point, even younger than that eight-year-old girl.

Very little. My kids were born in 2013 and 2015. When I got started, I had a 15-month-old and a four-year-old. It's interesting now looking back at Facebook photos and remembering a barbecue fundraiser where Holly, my daughter, was so little. Or the photos of us at protests together. Now, so much of my identity, of how I view myself, is as an organizer. I cannot shake this identity. As much as I am a mother, as much as I am a college graduate, I am an organizer. I cannot leave it now.

This is my life. I have a special ringtone for Congressman Brandisi, my member of Congress. I could text him, he'll text back. And it all started because of that photo of this girl in Barcelona, Spain. And that is one of the things I am always telling my kids, "You always have to show up because you never know who's watching you." That little girl had no idea of this ripple effect. Just like the old saying that says, smile because you never know who's going to fall in love with your smile. It's the same thing.

How have you juggled your activism with young children?

I always took my kids with me. In 2019, we canvassed for local candidates and Tuesday nights were our canvass nights. They would get a Tupperware container with their dinner, eating it in the car as we went to the neighborhood and we would go over the rules. “Don’t touch dogs. Don't touch plants. Ring the doorbell once then step back. We don’t sit on people's porches or run in the streets.” We would talk about all of this. It was good practice for Halloween!

I might only be able to do an hour and 15 minutes versus a three-hour shift on my own, but I needed to be able to show up and they needed to be able to see me and that this is quality family time. My kids came to meetings with me. They don't know exactly what I do, but they say, "Mommy goes to a lot of meetings. We help people vote and we win elections.” I’ll tell them, “This is one of our meeting friends or our protest friends." They know all of our protest spots. They know the rundown now.

So many times, I picked up my daughter from preschool and would say, "Holly, I’ve got a poster for you in the trunk. We're going to do a protest and here’s a granola bar to hold you over." And she would say, "Sweet, which location? What does my sign say?" This is my life. My mantra is, “Political activism, bite-size local fun and family friendly.”

It must have been difficult this year with the limitations placed on us by COVID.

This year was harder because of COVID. I can do canvassing with my kids, but it is hard to do phone banking from home because call reception in my area is bad and I do not want to be interrupted by,” so-and-so is putting their feet on me.” I took on other roles, such as offering guidance, but I didn't get to do a lot of direct voter contact this year because that is the one thing that is not as easy for me to do as a solo parent.

You mentioned how COVID limited your voter contact this year. What do you think was the impact for the Indivisible movement of us not being able to go door to door because of COVID?

The first word that comes to my mind regarding how COVID intersected with campaign electoral work is rage. I just raged at the universe when this was happening. “You put me here to help do this kind of work, to make sure that New York is an epic place to raise my children, that our country is a safe place for them to be proud of and grow up in, and then you can't let us even go canvassing.” For three and a half years, we worked hard to get people out of their comfort zone, to instead go into beast mode and knock on all the doors and be unapologetically enthusiastic about how conversations make a difference. We know that these conversations at the door are how you negate the negative television ads Republicans spend money on and then we weren't able to do that.

We obviously had to be adaptable and get creative. We need to always outsmart, outwork and outorganize the Republicans. And that is what I am committed to and what the campaigns were committed to as well. We did petitions with a timeframe that was cut in half. It was cold, but also because of COVID, it was not safe to go to the doors. We would rack our brains coming up with creative ways, but there was so much we couldn’t do.

This year was supposed to be a really great way for groups to continue to build some infrastructure of their own so that it's not just always relying on a campaign, because we need this infrastructure to go knock on doors for council races, for school board races so that we have a whole system no matter what. This year we would build on what we had launched previously, that system of “get your campaign literature, get your walk lists, take two hours and go,” so that boom, it's just plug and play. We didn't get to do that this time.

Not being able to canvass was a huge, huge loss because many people can’t phone bank. For example, people with hearing problems, with hearing aids, aren't really able to phone bank. They're not super comfortable phone banking, but they can definitely go with a partner to go canvass. We were left with phone banking and texting, which campaigns did not have right off the bat because a lot of people have already tried phone banking, and everybody had some kind of negative experience with it so we needed to do training to help them overcome that, but how do you do that without being at an office? Now we have to do it over Zoom. How do you make a Zoom phone party fun? This digital organizing was a whole new level and a whole new challenge.

The other thing is we didn't have a lot of the college kids here helping out. They were all home. We also didn't get to feed people. One of the ways that my Indivisible group liked to help out was just feeding all the volunteers, just making food for the field office volunteers. Here, again, is my motto to make political activism bite-sized, local and fun. I'm all about trying to find that cup that people are going to just pour themselves into.

The isolation made it very lonely.

We couldn't have that outlet for a lot of people to say, "I can bring food or I can drive a bunch of college students in my car and I'll park here while they go out with three walk packets.” We didn't get those kinds of amazing experiences that just stay with you forever and help you bond. How do you keep bonding in a digital space?

We also didn't get to see our candidate, Anthony, nearly as much. Normally there would be fundraisers everywhere where we can run in and talk to him. Those are like ad hoc Indivisible meetings in a lot of ways, where you get to see your friends.

My Indivisible group, Indivisible Mohawk Valley, is my family. So much has happened in the last four years of my life. They are now my family. One of the hardest things about this pandemic is I can't hug and see them. I can't hug them through Zoom. You have to stay back at a protest. I can't give hugs to my activism family. And again, it's Trump. I've had to explain to my daughter about why this is what kindergarten is for her. I said because of Donald Trump mismanaging the coronavirus, she is having to sit next to me and trace letters in this work packet while I'm on a Zoom call for a work meeting. We are all doing the best that we can, but it shouldn't have had to be like this, except that he has really shitty leadership skills.

I know what you mean about your Indivisible family. I feel that with my Indivisible group, EEAN. This year we focused a great deal of our efforts on the presidential race and swing states, but this bond really grew out of the Indivisible mission of getting to know our local government and zeroing in on our congressional district. Was that true for you as well?

Yes, we focused our efforts on our Republican congressperson immediately. I live in NY22, which is a top 10 district, and was again this year, just like it was in 2018. Claudia Tenney was a first term congresswoman who made herself in the image of Trump. She was Trump in pearls. We harnessed the grassroots power and organized day in and day out in support of the Democratic candidate, Anthony Brindisi. And pumping him up with positive energy and beating Claudia Tenney like a pinata every chance that we could. Initially we did protests in front of Claudia Tenney's office, just bashing her with negative media. We have a coalition in NY22 that's been together since April 1st of 2017, working month after month together. In 2018, we were part of the blue wave and Democrat Anthony Brindisi defeated Tenney. For the very first time in close to 60 years a Democrat had unseated a Republican taking no corporate money, focused instead on grassroots dollars. Claudia Tenney was on the Financial Services Committee so that she'd be in front of big banks to finance her campaign.

After you defeated Tenney in 2018, how did your approach change?

After 2018, our question became, “how do we support and keep Anthony elected while also having him as our vehicle for progressive change?” Progressive things such as wanting to vote for H.R. 1 and impeaching Donald Trump. We had flipped the district, now we needed to keep the district and that warranted a new set of goals, strategies and tactics.

With Claudia Tenney, we got zero out of ten of our asks. With Anthony, we knew that even though he's going to be more of a moderate to fit this district, even if we got six out of ten, it is better than zero. But it turned out he really voted the way we wanted nine times out of ten. Instead of being on the outside of an office, we were able to have private meetings with staff who would listen to us or actually meet with our member of Congress

We had two strategies. One was to keep Anthony electable. The other strategy was he is our progressive vehicle, our vehicle for progressive change. So those were the two lenses that we looked at every single one of his votes, everything that he did. Is he saying this in order to stay electable?

That is so smart. It should be a model for the nation, to be honest. You were very savvy about these two things that could be in contention, the agenda as well as to keep him electable.

So yes, we just leveraged our relationships. We had an Anthony Brindisi Advisory Committee made of people from all of the Indivisible groups. For a while, we were having a monthly meeting, like a closed-door meeting with them. We could then bring these concerns to the Congressman. “Here's the concerns that we're hearing from our group members. We want to bring them to you. Can you give us some of your thinking?” He's not going to tell that in a syracuse.com article, but he can tell us because he knows us, we go to his fundraisers, he comes to our meetings. The Indivisible groups were the springboard for him to get into every county. They hosted him in the summer of 2017 to get to know their members and then they brought in people and he got to get into the business communities in the counties, which is difficult to do since we have parts of eight counties in my district.

We don’t know the winner yet in your district. It is very close. But turning to the presidential race, were you surprised at the size of the 2020 turnout for Trump, both nationally and in individual districts?

Yes, I, along with millions of other people with progressive values were shocked that more people came out to vote for Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016. I was confident that Trump was going to have less of a turnout because he was never polling well with independents and the swing voters. More people were leaving his base than joining it and his base was a lot older. So I, like everybody else, was expecting to feel a lot of joy watching Donald Trump be removed from office, but because there was still such a level of support for him, I think the feeling settled instead on relief. It took away our joy, but still I will take relief rather than the terror if he had won.

Democrats need to get much better at messaging. The Republicans have invested 40 or 50 years and millions of dollars into their messaging. The thought that we are going to undo that in four years, that being on the right side of justice is so powerful that it's going to be like switching on a light, it can’t. This is long-term work.

As part of that long-term work, what do you think are the issues and priorities for Indivisible in New York starting in 2021? Do you think there's a chance of getting another election reform bill in New York?

I'm not sure, I think election reform bills have been put on the shelf. I'm not 100% sure about that, but it all comes down to funding because anything that we want to do costs money. And because of COVID, we are now tens of billions of dollars behind.

Our big issue now is to try to stop cuts to services. Cuomo is willing to do cuts to healthcare and education and other services in black and brown and poor communities instead of raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share. Those who profited the most from COVID in our state, he's not asking them because they fund his campaigns. So, the number one thing that we will be doing is trying to embolden Democrats to put up a block against Cuomo, to fight against any more cuts to education and healthcare. Either they should take out loans, which they're not going to want to do, or they need to find new revenue instead of cutting needed services. I think it may depend if Cuomo is trying to get a seat in the Biden administration. I don't know if he's enjoying being a governor, there's a lot of hard stuff going on. And a lot of change is happening in the state with progressives.

So, that’s a big priority, no more cuts to services?

Yes, no more cuts. All of this work is really is under the umbrella of something called the Budget Justice Coalition. We need funding for the departments, for the areas so that we need to focus on justice, racial justice, housing justice, economic and climate justice. We need to fund these bills. It's not enough to pass them. For election justice. If we need to cut down those long lines to vote we saw this year. What do Board of Elections need to fix that? One thing Indivisible groups can do right now is ask for a meeting with their county Democratic BOE commissioner to look at what happened, how long were the lines, where were they and what can fix that? Is it a question of just needing more equipment, more voting booths? Some places just had two booths. That doesn't cost much, but we need to come up with some concrete solutions and tell them how much it costs and then get it done.

Now, the other thing is the State Senate. They are counting absentee ballots but once that is done, do we have a super majority that can override Cuomo's veto? In terms of budget justice, we need a Budget Equity Act where the governor doesn't have so much power with the budget.

These types of things are wonky but Indivisibles like the wonky.

Those are great ideas. Will Indivisible NY give out those initiatives to the groups?

That's one of the reasons why I'm here. I'm not here to micromanage or be a project manager per se; I'm an organizer, like a coach. They are their own group but as I get to know groups, they can tell me what they like to do, what are some of their short and long-term goals. And then I try to do my best to help them be successful with that.

Some things that groups can be doing right now is thanking their members for all of their hard work and really honoring that, scheduling their next meeting so that everybody gets to debrief or celebrate or just come together. They can organize writing thank-you cards to the poll workers. Or write a letter to the editor for the local newspaper, thanking the poll workers.

You can go to kudosboard.com and create a virtual e-card that everybody in your group can sign. And then send it to the board of elections commissioner who can then maybe email it out to all the workers. Or you could be designing your own postcard program to reach out to Democrats in your own area, like a local Vote Forward program, to thank Democrats for voting in 2020 which will encourage them to turn out for upcoming elections.

There are local elections next year. You can be thinking about what kind of trainings would you like to see Indivisible provide. I would love to see Indivisible provide training on messaging. We have not done a very good job of that with Indivisible. I would also love to see voter data analysis. How do you look at data? Because every group can either get Indivisibles' VAN, the voter file or you can request a copy of it from the board of elections. But once you have the data, how do you sort through it? How do you see trends? That I think would be a really great skill if groups had people who were a little bit more data nerdy and wanted to make that their thing, to say, “this is the cup I want to pour myself into.”

Another thing is just letting members know that we need to get ready for a big push after the inauguration to pass democracy reform. This election has shown us how crucial that is. It needs to include passing H.R. 1., as well as statehood for Washington D.C., court reform and H.R. 4, the Voting Rights Act. Our democracy has been sick, it has been broken. That is what got us Trump.

That is the answer to what do we do with the Resistance after Trump. We are still resisting, but we are resisting Trumpism. Trump, as Ezra Levin says from Indivisible, "is just a symptom. A healthy body would have rejected him like a virus." We have a sick body, a sick democracy and it allowed him to come in. The Republican Party, which has made itself now in the image of Trump, is going to find and promote and put up more candidates who are like Trump and who are a lot smarter and more cunning than he is.

So, we are still resisting, but we are no longer the anti-Trump Resistance. We are the anti-Trumpism Resistance.

That's right. Indivisible started as an anti-Trump organization and now has to evolve because one day there will not be Trump. And that day will be January 21, 2020. So, it is really more of a save democracy pivot and that is going to be a long-term fight. Even if we do pass Democracy Reform, it's getting those reforms implemented at the state level. It's holding candidates accountable to not taking corporate PAC money and pushing that. We can't just say, "The Democrats are the good guys and they always know how to do the right thing." They don't. That's why we have to continue to show up and pressure them. Indivisible is not an arm of the Democratic Party, but it's the bandwagon where we can make the most difference. We cannot make a difference on the Republican side or try to move them towards doing good, because we can't. But we can try to move from the outside and also from the inside because a lot of Indivisible group members are also on Democratic Committees.

Let me go back to something you had asked, our priorities for next year. We discussed the local and state priorities but there are federal ones as well. The big six topics for 2021 will be COVID relief, democracy, immigration, climate, healthcare and economic justice. Those will be the big ones. Groups will be balancing the federal advocacy, the state asks as well as all of their local work, getting involved in town council races, where those candidates are not going to be as well organized or well-funded as congressional campaigns. Maybe if Joe and Kamala can try to nip this pandemic in the bud by June, we could be out canvassing in August.

The other thing that I'm thinking about is 2022. Schumer and Cuomo are up for election. What if we created a Vote Forward program for New York and Democrats across the country were to write to Democrats in New York to help turn out the vote? Primaries are low turnout and Cuomo and Schumer are going to plan, based off those numbers, but if we were to increase that turnout to 40% or 60% with powerful messaging to get more Democrats involved, then we might be able to get them to vote for the progressive challenger and have really competitive races. If Schumer wants to be attached to that progressive title, he needs to act like it.

I am also excited right now with the two runoff races in Georgia, at the possibility of Schumer becoming majority leader.

What do you personally think the odds are in the two runoffs in Georgia?

I believe the universe is on our side. I really do. The passion, the energy is on our side. I am sure there will be tons of dark money, just like we saw all the dark money that went into the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation. Mitch McConnell is going to go stump in Georgia. But I expect Biden and Obama and Kamala to stump for the Democratic candidates and that will play well all over the state.

The best thing that we in New York can do is support organizations like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight and Black Voters Matter, to just flood them with an abundance of monetary resources so that they can go and do their magic because they know how to do it. If they didn't have to worry about fundraising, imagine how much time and effort they can put into those transformational experiences that they give by registering voters and just being able to be everywhere because they have the funds to go into this county or this town. They could hire more amazing local organizers and change Georgia for years to come. We can help make that possible.

So, the message is that we still have a lot of work to do.

It just looks different, but we are far from done. We will continue to help triage the country from the damage of Trump. In New York, we can help triage through our constituent powers, pressuring Cuomo and Schumer. We have got to change this state for the better. There are tons of new organizing frontiers, such as redistricting, with new maps. If Claudia Tenney wins and Anthony loses, we would advocate to break up our district. There is a lot to keep us busy, so we can keep making a difference and keep pushing us forward.

October 29, 2020: Two Zeldins

Most of my blog posts have focused on the national election. This is not a surprise given the dire state of the country under Trump. But I have not forgotten about my own district. How could I when my representative is Congressman Lee Zeldin? Anyone who has read my book knows that Zeldin, a right-wing, Tea Party Republican, is one of Trump’s biggest defenders. We were crushed when we were not part of the blue wave in 2018 as Zeldin won reelection by a slim margin. He has not gotten better since then. So, this blog post, possibly the last one before the election, is about Lee Zeldin.

It has been more difficult this year to get-out-the-vote than in 2018 because of COVID. We cannot go door-to-door and I have missed the experience of canvassing and speaking directly to voters. But just as we have with the national campaign, we have used the tools available to us – social media, fundraising, postcards, phone calls, text messages - in support of our Democratic nominee, Stony Brook University professor Nancy Goroff. Former chair of the Chemistry Department, if she beats Zeldin she will be the first woman in Congress with a Ph.D. in the sciences.

The message must be getting through because the race is close. The only polling data I have seen has them in a statistical tie, with Zeldin ahead 49%-48% https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/new-york/. If this is correct, the margin is closer than what Zeldin won by in 2018 when he defeated Perry Gershon by only 4% and dramatically closer than his 16% winning margin in 2016. Trump won Suffolk County in 2016 by 4% (the presidential race is categorized by county, not congressional district).

Both Newsday and The New York Times endorsed Perry in the midterm election and endorsed Nancy this year. Both Editorial Boards not only praised Nancy’s background as a scientist but criticized Zeldin’s attachment to Trump.

https://www.newsday.com/opinion/editorial/congressional-district-1-cd1-nancy-goroff-lee-zeldin-newsday-endorsement-1.50036557

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/nancy-goroff-antonio-delgado-tom-malinowski-endorsement.html

The New York Times published an article this week about Trump’s declining popularity on Long Island and wondered how this might affect Zeldin’s reelection in CD#1 as well as the open race in our neighboring district, CD#2. “Trump’s Weakened Hold on Long Island Puts 2 G.O.P. House Seats at Risk: Peter King is leaving Congress, and Lee Zeldin could be vulnerable. The elections in the two districts will be ‘a referendum on Trump,’ a strategist said.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/trump-long-island-zeldin-king.html

Biden’s polling numbers in New York have him leading Trump by about 30 points. I have not seen specific polling for Suffolk County but given how we were slammed by the pandemic in the spring and how much harm voters are continuing to suffer from unemployment, food insecurity and the challenges of hybrid/remote education, it would not surprise me if the election in our county, like the rest of the country, will be a referendum on Trump and his mismanagement of COVID. And if it is, then it is likely that this will impact the congressional races. But if that is the case, then why isn’t Zeldin further behind in the polls? There are few congressmen who have supported Trump as slavishly as Zeldin.

The problem for Nancy, as it was for Perry two years ago, is that Zeldin is not an honest broker about his record. Even the Times reporter, Sarah Maslin Nir, did not understand this shell game he plays with his constituents. When she asked him “about the potential risk of aligning closely with Mr. Trump” she accepted his emailed response on face value: “I have been willing to work with anyone to find common ground however possible.” We who have followed Zeldin know that statement is laughable.

Just as he did in 2018, Zeldin has taken every opportunity to describe himself during this campaign season as bipartisan. In the two virtual debates with Nancy, in his television ads and his mailings, he likes to quote some obscure rating that says he is the “12^th most bipartisan member of Congress.” But if you follow his votes on major legislation (not minor bills, like renaming a post office), or listen to his rhetoric on right-wing media or endure a member of his staff screaming at you over the phone, then you know that Zeldin is one of the most partisan Republicans in Congress.

He must count on the fact that the average voter only pays attention right before an election. Since they are not aware of these two, different Zeldins, it is easy to mislead them. Election Zeldin says he reaches across the aisle, supports protections for pre-existing conditions, cares about the environment and works hard to get federal assistance for our district. But throughout the year, Real Zeldin accuses Democrats of being dangerous radical leftists, votes repeatedly to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), does not support federal regulations including those on the environment and defends every Trump tweet and policy no matter how harmful to the people of his district. Once you learn about the two Zeldins, it is easy to figure out which one is the mirage.

Probably the most diabolical of all of Election Zeldin’s lies is his vehement claim that he supports protections for pre-existing conditions. Just as he did in the debate with Perry two years ago, in the second debate with Nancy he read a passage from the Republican ACA-replacement bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), that states that people with pre-existing conditions are protected. But Zeldin knows full well that this is an empty statement because the bill would have allowed insurance companies and states ways to skirt that protection. The GOP knew they could never get away with openly cutting this popular provision so instead they kept it on the books but stripped it of any meaning. One of their many maneuvers that neutered it was allowing insurers to offer plans that eliminate coverage for all essential benefits. What good is having a protection on paper for a condition, such as diabetes, if your insurance plan is not required by law to pay for the treatment you need for that pre-existing condition? Zeldin voted yes on that bill, it passed the House, they all celebrated it in the Rose Garden, and it only did not become law because it failed in the Senate. Zeldin’s repeated claim that he has always stood for protecting people with pre-existing conditions is as hollow as the rule that he read out loud.

These are just a few examples. There are many more. Saying you are bipartisan does not make it so. The truth is that Real Zeldin, like Trump, will never do anything that would antagonize his right-wing base. A quick search on FoxNews.com reveals not one single article written by him or a media appearance by him where he advocates a bipartisan approach to governing or supports a bill to protect our healthcare or the environment. Instead, he is either accusing Democrats of coddling violent gangs, migrant caravans and looters or he is vigorously applauding every Trump policy and tweet, no matter how disgraceful. As the pandemic was hitting New York, when Trump was telling Bob Woodward that it was far more dangerous than the flu, Zeldin was not using his Fox News platform to warn us of the impending danger but instead was railing against New York’s bail reform law and defending Trump’s actions on Ukraine. Only when our neighbors started dying of COVID did he frantically work at getting more PPE for our district.

In both debates, Zeldin dismissed any criticism of his and Trump’s actions regarding COVID by accusing Democrats of playing “partisan politics” and of “Monday morning quarterbacking.” But facts are stubborn things and have no partisan bias. Many of us were pointing out how badly the GOP were botching management of the pandemic in real time, not after the fact. The Southampton Press published two letters I wrote in the spring, at the peak of New York’s fight with COVID, criticizing Zeldin and Trump and pointing out the GOP history of attacking our public health systems. The first letter from March 28^th is entitled “Where Were You?” and the second one on April 23^rd is “How We Got Here.” https://sites.google.com/view/theresistanceandme/in-the-media#h.p_TVS23usXg19c

For voters to truly judge Zeldin, they first must understand this shell game that he plays at election time, hiding his true self behind what he knows voters like to hear. It is up to us in this election to call him to account. The truth is if Election Zeldin was the Real Zeldin, he might deserve reelection. But he is not, and never has been. We must elect Biden-Harris, Goroff and every down-ballot Democrat because mirages won’t fix our problems. They just obscure the truth.

October 19, 2020: Taking A Deep Breath, Two Weeks Before Election Day

Maybe because I filled out my absentee ballot, right now I am feeling unusually calm. Seeing Donald Trump’s name on the ballot and voting against him and for Biden, felt like the culmination of the last four years. Finally, after all of the damage that Trump and the GOP have inflicted on our country, I had been able to cast my vote. With my mask on, I took it to the post office, walked inside and put it in the mail slot. It had two first-class stamps on it; I was not taking any chances. As soon as I placed that ballot in the mail slot, a feeling of relaxation came over me.

We are about two weeks from Election Day. There is a reassuring stability to the trend lines of the polls. If they are moving at all, it is away from Trump. Still, I don’t know a single Democrat who is complacent (2016 PTSD). We may be breathing a little easier, but voter outreach continues. I am still texting for the Biden campaign to voters in swing states, my preferred method over phone calls. And we are now finishing up our postcards, getting ready to mail them next week.

I am so proud of my family for getting involved, including my son, my sister, my sister-in-law, two of my nieces and their children. When we asked my 7-year-old great-niece what she understood the postcards were for, she said to ask people to vote for "healthcare, justice and clean water." She enjoyed adding the stickers as she helped decorate 20 postcards to Kentucky and then 40 postcards to Georgia.

At East End Action Network (EEAN), thanks to the organizing genius of member Sharon Adams, we collectively wrote thousands of postcards. According to Sharon, “Between Postcards To Voters, Postcards 2 Swing States, and Moms Rising we have written OVER 4,600 personal messages to voters for the upcoming election!!! This doesn't include the numerous letters that several of you have written for Vote Forward.”

We are working hard to get to 5,000. There are still some postcard lists to work on. “Postcards To Voters is currently assigning addresses for several down ballot candidates now that all the key campaigns are completed,” Sharon informed our postcard-writing team. “These elections are very important. It's the state legislators and judges that make the important decisions regarding voting rights and state voting procedures (gerrymandering is a big issue of course).” We have also started writing postcards for the Nancy Goroff campaign. To sign up for these last voter outreach methods, go to the campaign websites and sign up for training and then to get started. And if you have already been approved for Postcards To Voters, reach out to them and request a new list.

We have two more virtual events before the election, a Happy Hour we are calling Voterpalooza to come together and celebrate all we have done and support each other for the home stretch. It is on Thursday, Oct. 22^nd from 7:00 - 8:00 PM. The last Postcard Party where we will be finishing up postcards for the Goroff campaign is on Tuesday, Oct. 27^th from 7:00 – 8:00 PM. If you are interested in joining us, reach out to me to receive the Zoom links for these events at bwfloyd@att.net.

The Southampton Town Democrats (SHDems) are also powering through to Election Day with phone banking, texting, postcards and a letter-to-the-editor writing campaign, advocating for Biden-Harris, Goroff for Congress and all the other Democrats on the ballot. I am scheduled to submit my letter next week. To learn more about all of our candidates and how you can donate and get involved, go to shdems.org. Don’t forget when you fill out your ballot, fill in the bubbles for all our Democrats straight across the Democratic line.

I will have at least one more blog post before the election. It is good to take this deep breath moment because we must brace ourselves for what we might have to face in the coming weeks and months, even if Biden wins, which is why my feeling of calm is more than likely the “calm before the storm.” This is what is ahead of us: enduring the GOP confirming Barrett; whatever insanity Trump’s panic will try to whip up leading up to Election Day; the chaos and intimidation he and the GOP have planned for November 3^rd; the GOP onslaught on the voting results, potentially in the courts, in state legislatures and in Congress after Election Day. A Biden landslide revealed by November 4^th might forestall it, but even that might not. We must be ready to take this battle right through to the Inauguration and that might mean mobilizing protest marches that dwarf the size of the Women’s March and the Black Lives Matter protests.

And in the midst of all of this, we cannot forget that COVID cases are spiking around the country, leading us into winter and flu season in a dangerous public health situation. No matter Trump’s attempts at distraction, the pandemic is still with us and not going away any time soon. I got my flu shot last week. Don’t forget to get yours.

As part of this moment of calm, I went back and looked at a video from March of this year, before I knew anything about Zoom or had heard of remote learning, before I ever wore a mask, before nearly 220,000 Americans were dead.

The video was taken on March 7^th, 2020. I was the guest speaker at the monthly J.P. Spata Southampton Town Democratic Club breakfast. It is eerie that this was the last time we met in person this year and probably will be the last time for a while. Our President, Joyce Flynn, had invited me to talk about my book, my journey as a writer and what lessons we could take from the 2018 midterm into the 2020 campaign. A week later, we were in lockdown. In the chaos that ensued, I forgot about this video.

The video reminded me what a unique experience it had been. The room was filled with members of my family, EEAN and the SHDems, many of whom I interviewed for the book. Our second vice chair, Andrea Klausner, introduced me. You can see that we had all just begun to think about not hugging or shaking hands. On that day, we could not have known what was yet to come.

To present the video online, we have added a Resistance and Me YouTube page which you can link to through the website. Here is the link for the YouTube page: https://youtu.be/00diJmJcUo4

There is a second video from that day, of the Q&A period that followed the talk, and we hope to have that on the YouTube page soon.

I have spoken about the book twice since, both virtual events, and am grateful for those opportunities. The first was a book talk in June for Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor and just last week, I was interviewed by fellow activist, James Berstch. As James points out, this Resistance movement has been “an awakening for women” and it is this reckoning that will be the determinative factor in voting Trump out of office. The Facebook links for these two talks are below. (Fast forward the first 20 minutes into James’ video, skipping past all our set-up stuff, but don’t go so far that you miss the music he picked out to start off the event.)

https://www.facebook.com/caniosbooks/videos/983767798721737

https://www.facebook.com/james.bertsch.33/videos/811883049562262

The Zoom events are timelier and there is now a familiarity to seeing and listening to speakers in the close-up of the Zoom box. I hope you enjoy them. But in the age of COVID, the fact that the March 7^th talk was recorded on a camera sitting atop a tripod and not on Zoom, makes it special. At first it feels almost jarring to see someone at a podium as if we never lived a life of in-person gatherings before. But gather we did, and this talk reminds me of what we are all aching to return to as soon as it is safe. Electing Biden-Harris, Democrats taking the Senate and retaining the House, fostering a blue tsunami that sweeps Democrats into state houses across the country, these will be the first steps to taking charge of the pandemic. If we do, then maybe next year, we will get to meet in person again.

Working with Indivisible North Fork, who created posters with the same early voting information, we distributed the posters by asking business owners if they wanted to put a sign in their window. A few said no but given it is non-partisan, most said yes. I distributed four posters and each business owner was happy to have it. As I walked back to my car, I could see them putting the posters up in the store windows.

There is more information about all aspects of voting in Suffolk County on the Board of Election’s website. We also have detailed information, including essays about voting, on the Southampton Town Democratic Committee’s website. No matter where you live, you can go to https://iwillvote.com/ to get all of your voting questions answered.

For the swing states, we continue to work on handwritten postcards to voters in battleground states. Our last 2020 Virtual Postcard Party is scheduled for Tuesday, October 13^th. I am working on postcards to Democratic voters in Kentucky and Georgia for Postcards To Swing States. These postcards will get mailed around October 20^th. Miraculously, their postcard actions are completed but their website has suggestions for other mailing campaigns you can join. Postcards to Voters has a few campaigns left so if you are interested in doing these last postcards before the election, go to their website and sign up.

As the time to mail postcards winds down, it is time for all of us to start phone banking or texting voters. These last few weeks before Election Day are the most important time to reach out to voters. I have signed up for texting for the Biden campaign to swing states and plan on phone banking for Goroff. To get started, go to the Biden campaign website and the websites of your congressional and state candidates and sign up for training and then for a shift. If you are feeling unsure about reaching out to voters by phone or text, read my earlier blog post about these two forms of voter outreach.

As the country continues to reel from COVID, as Trump becomes more and more erratic, the importance of this election grows. Literally, our lives depend on the outcome. If we do not let up and keep our eyes on the prize, that Democratic tsunami is within our grasp. It helps that Biden rises above the Trump chaos and continues to exhibit a steadiness that is so lacking from the Trump administration. This week, he gave a speech about unity from Gettysburg, PA, site of a historic Civil War battle. https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/06/opinions/biden-gettysburg-address-campaign-best-avlon/index.html

In it he quoted Lincoln and explained how, together, we can tackle the virus. "This pandemic is not a red-state or blue-state issue ... it's a virus -- it's not a political weapon." Afterwards the media put the two images side-by-side: Trump on the Truman balcony without a mask, infecting others vs. Biden speaking of bringing the country together. In an election that was always going to be about COVID, the contrasts between the reckless virus spreader and the candidate calling for healing, could not be starker.

September 25, 2020: No Time to Mourn: A Conversation with Democratic Party Leader Robin Long

Life feels particularly hard right now. The blows just keep coming. Every day another 1000 Americans die from COVID, the pandemic Trump has mismanaged and continues to call a hoax. Our shattered economy teeters on an edge. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and immediately, Trump and the hypocritical GOP Senators announced they would rush to fill her Supreme Court seat despite their 2016 “principle” of not confirming a new justice in a presidential election year, thereby denying Judge Merrick Garland a hearing. Trump and Attorney General Barr openly make plans on how to stop voting and highjack the post-election period. Trump states he needs a new justice on the court because the Supreme Court might have to decide the election while in the same breath refusing to commit to a peaceful transition of power. Using the word autocracy no longer feels like hyperbole.

Journalists and academics have been sounding this alarm for the last four years. Recently, the sound of that alarm has gotten louder. The sound is deafening emanating from this week's cover story in The Atlantic, “The Election That Could Break America: If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?” Barton Gellman lays out a chilling scenario based on conversations with state GOP leaders where the will of the people is subverted by appointing Trump electors for the Electoral College vote.

In a September 13th article, also in The Atlantic, journalist Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, explored why the fake crises of cities on fire might have more political impact than the real fires that are devastating the western part of the country. She connected the wildfires and COVID and posited that an administration that does not reside in reality has made both more dangerous. She wrote, “The triumph of these fictional narratives would have consequences. Before Americans can fix our very real problems, after all—before we can prevent forest fires, or stop the spread of a deadly virus—we need to agree that they exist. We need to analyze reality before we can come up with proposals for change. We won’t do any of that if, staring at our screens, we are transfixed by the flickering lights of a fantasy world.”

Masha Gessen, the Russian-American journalist who has written extensively about Vladimir Putin, warned us in 2016 that Trump had clear authoritarian tendencies. Her new book, Surviving Autocracy, is a five-alarm warning that dissects how his administration has achieved these goals through contempt for government and abuse of power; demonizing immigrants, the free press and the rule of law; and deploying propaganda.

This is not the depiction of a future dystopian America. This is now. This is today.

When I was interviewing the women of the anti-Trump Resistance for my book, The Resistance and Me, Robin Long spoke eloquently in 2018 about the parallels she saw between Germany in the 1930s and America under Trump. This was her gut feeling though she hoped that her fears might be overblown. Going back and reading her words now, they are prescient. So, I knew the one person I wanted to speak with this week was Robin Long.

Robin is vice chair for three Democratic Party committees: Southampton Town, Suffolk County and New York State. There is no one I have met on this journey who knows more about Democratic politics than Robin. She was honored to be a Biden delegate to the Democratic National Convention this year. She said that while it was very disappointing that they were not able to gather in person, she was still thrilled to have had the experience of seeing her name on the ballot and to have participated in the virtual New York State events.

In a wide-ranging conversation, we discussed RBG, Trump and fascism, the danger the country is in and the impact all of this might have on the election. Below is a lightly edited and condensed transcript of our conversation. If was fitting that we spoke over the Jewish High Holy Days, because for Robin and myself, our history as Jews heightens our fears about a democracy moving towards autocratic rule.

You mentioned that you were watching the livestream of your synagogue’s Friday night Jewish New Year service when you saw the news about Justice Ginsburg on your screen.

You know how that alert comes up on your screen in the corner? It said, “Ruth Bader Ginsburg dead at 87.” Then every news alert that I have popped up. I started crying at that point. I don't even remember the last time I cried. I was trying to even recollect, when was the last time I cried, and I couldn't come up with the time.

I think for a lot of us, the tears were because it represented the death of everything. “Now the Supreme Court is done. The forces of evil are winning.” Being raised as a Jew, justice is everything. The books that we read, the Talmud and all the accessory treatises, it is all about justice. Justice and the law are everything. That's why it’s so easy for a lawyer to become a rabbi. My training as a lawyer allows me to look at issues and see what's fair. It's the core of who we are as Jews. We need to have justice. We lived through a period when there was no justice, and that was the Holocaust and six million of us were killed because there was no justice.

You went to the prayer vigil on Saturday and I was so moved watching the video from that on Facebook. You and Perry (Gershon) recited the Kaddish together.

I saw on the website that (activist) Lisa Votino was organizing a prayer vigil for Ginsburg and I said, "You know something? I'm going." The Kaddish is the only prayer for the dead that never mentions death. If you translate the Kaddish, it doesn't speak of death, it speaks of adoration of God, which is probably a better tribute. I was very touched to be asked to recite the Kaddish with Perry. So, Perry and I, in masks, led the Kaddish.

Listening to people at the rally, young, old, liberals, whites, blacks, it was just totally universal and it really hit home what she had done by being just who she was, nothing more, nothing less, not giving lip service, not trying to accommodate. If you read some of her quotes, you go, "Oh, my God. You really did say that? Whoa!"

I started to realize that my desperation and my mourning has got to end quickly. I will not have time to sit shiva, there's no time for sitting shiva, there is no time to mourn.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg decided to become a lawyer because of McCarthy. She saw what attorneys could do to bring justice and fight evil. It is so unjust that she died at this point. I look at everything Trump is doing, and I say to myself, "I have two options. I can die or I can hide, which is death for me to not fight. Or I can fight for what is right, for justice by believing that while we are in a period of darkness, we as a world have gone through periods of darkness before. So, what am I going to do? I must get up in the morning, like I did after Trump won, and get back to work.”

I look at my grandchildren and I know we can't stop fighting because the darkness cannot continue. We have an obligation. I know we are tired. I understand. We will sit shiva for a couple of days. And if we lose the Supreme Court seat, we lose the seat. We will have to figure how to fight another way. But we cannot lose this larger fight for the election.

When you and I spoke for the book, you spoke so insightfully about the 1930s and the rise of fascism and how Trump reminded you of that. That was in 2018. It seems far worse now.

Roger Stone did an interview with an alt-right outlet and said Trump should declare martial law. He should arrest newspaper owners, the head of Facebook, the Clintons, and all the troublemakers and declare martial law. Are we going to start burning books next? We are right there.

What Hitler did, and what happened in the 1930s, was this parsing and dividing of the country. “We lost World War I because the Jews did this. We had reasons for the economics that had to do with xenophobia, had to do with foreigners coming into the country, etc.” The country was parsed up. The thoughts of the people were parsed up. Everything was put into little boxes: enemy, enemy, enemy, to be controlled and maintained.

Trump said at a rally that if he is reelected, he's going to figure out how to stay for a third term.

Yes, and there will be nothing to control him, nothing to stop him, nothing to threaten him with. We failed on every attempt because we didn't bury him. I'm not talking about burying him physically, I'm saying we didn't bury his philosophy, we didn’t knock it out.

One of my concerns is that Trump will use the Supreme Court fight to take the focus away from COVID. He has been looking for a shiny object to change the conversation. I wrote a recent blog post that asked if this fight is now Trump’s October surprise.

In looking back over the Trump years, it has been four years of shiny objects. But rather than call it a shiny object, think of it as what a fisherman does to catch a fish. He puts the hook in the water, he puts on a fancy fly that dazzles the fish, knowing that if he dazzles the right fish, he can hook it. And while he is playing this game, we're not seeing the hook because we're chasing the outrageous comments, the horrible, outrageous comments, like saying that the Justice’s dying words were made up by the Democrats, you can't get more outrageous than that. Meanwhile he’s deregulating, appointing appellate judges, making plans to subvert the election. Don't chase it anymore! It's going to hook you. Stop, because we don't have any time for this.

I'm not saying we stop fighting or worrying about what’s going to happen with the Supreme Court but we don’t have the power to stop it. It's going to happen. We must keep the focus on COVID and healthcare. When we speak of the Supreme Court fight, we frame it in terms of healthcare. We say, "Mr. President, this is not an A+. 200,000 people died and you gave yourself an A+. What are you talking about?”

Number two, a vaccination is an irrelevance because whether people take the vaccination or not, it will not affect schools opening. Three, you do not have a treatment for this disease. I don't know if I can live through getting it because he never came up with any treatments. So, he doesn’t get an A+.

We keep digging in and digging in and digging in that 200,000 of our fellow Americans are dead and not allow him to lure us away from that. And here is the other crucial part of that message: if they dismantle the Affordable Care Act, the ACA, then COVID-19 will be the preexisting condition of 2021.

That is so true. He has had these lures, these hooks before. We can’t let him lure us away from healthcare, away from COVID.

In 2016, we had the wall. In 2018, as you eloquently discussed in the book, we had the caravan. Now, we've got the cities burning, right? The only thing that is burning is California and he hasn't cared about that at all. We in New York don't realize what the hell is going on outside the country. There are people everywhere in the country who have bought into everything Trump has said. Who would think that he could get 40% of Americans? Think about it. That means as you walk down the street, four out of ten people do not believe in our Constitution, do not believe in separation of powers, do not believe that COVID exists.

Even here in our district, if you go to the red areas of Suffolk County, they will tell you the same thing that they tell you in Texas. “COVID is ridiculous. It’s just hype. Look how fine it is in New York.” Well, you know why? Because we are all wearing masks. We have these same elements in our district. That is how Lee Zeldin got elected. That might be how he gets reelected. Because in many of these areas, they don’t care about COVID because the people that are dying are, for the most part, people of color. Those are the areas that got killed with COVID. Look at the COVID statistics in Suffolk County, by town: https://patch.com/new-york/southampton/s/h8uq1/suffolk-coronavirus-cases-by-town-46-017-confirmed?utm_source=alert-breakingnews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert

It is so terribly sad. So, for his blue collar, white male base, why care about COVID if it hasn’t hit his family. It is easier to then be taken in by the propaganda. What scares me is how deep the anger and resentment are and not understanding who we are as a country. I speak to Republicans about COVID. They say wearing a mask is an intrusion. I asked them, "Is wearing a seatbelt an intrusion?"

These are Republicans in our district, here in New York?

Yes, Republicans in our district. “We are killing business,” they said. And I said, "I don't want to kill people. I don't want to die. What is wrong with you? Why do you want to kill me?” I demand everybody wear a mask that comes into my office for a closing and I try to spread everybody out. I'm trying to keep the economy going, continuing to conduct house closings, which is a very important business out here, but make it safe. (Robin is a real estate attorney). And their answer is, “You're not going to die. It's the flu. What's wrong with you? Robin, you have to stop believing everything the Democrats are telling you.” Then they point the finger and say, "And you support those demonstrations. And you know what those demonstrations are doing?" I say, "Yeah. Not spreading COVID.” There has been no correlation between any of these demonstrations and spreads of COVID. But there are correlations between the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota and Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Republican Herman Cain, who was at the Tulsa rally, died of COVID.

My biggest fear is that I am going to hand a country to my grandchildren that is no longer my country. And I am very fearful there is going to be an insurrection in the streets. Let's say he loses. I'd rather start with that scenario, because it makes me throw up less. But he turns around and throws this country into insurrection. Look at the people he controls. Understand that he has militia going into peaceful demonstrations with guns. He is encouraging people with that. Our people are not there with rifles. But his people come in with the flags and the guns and nobody says a word.

I don't think people understand how close we are to a civil war in this country, an armed civil war. I don't know how much more we can take. I'm not being dramatic. Think about it for a second. 35% or 40% of the public are intractable, unchangeable for Trump. There’s no discussion with that group. So that 40% is done. Maybe 5% or 10% of the population are far-left and are not voting for Biden, because that left group is still thinking the only way out is Bernie. So, if 45% of the population is intractable, that means we are only talking to 55% of the population, which is why voter suppression could win him the election. All he needs to do is suppress maybe 5% of our vote.

So, we must do everything we can to get out the vote. I'm telling everybody to vote early and vote in person. It is safe. If you are 90 years old and you've always voted by mail, just continue voting by mail, otherwise get out there and vote in person. And the reason why is because being an election law attorney, I know what an election law attorney can do to jam up the vote post-election. Because what does this mean to democracy if Biden loses? We have got to focus on that. Are we handing them Roger Stone martial law? Does that mean if I leave New York and open my mouth the way I am now, does that mean somebody is going to attack me? Is it going to be dangerous to be a vice chair of a Democratic Party and be loud? What does this mean? How much more of the country has got to be silent?

The only thing that separates us from the rest of the world is our morals, our ethics, our Constitution, our division of the government with three equal and separate branches. We cannot sell out our Constitution.

One of the missions I did in Israel, we took a group up to the Northern border and we went to the place of the great tank fight in the 1973 war. We were up in that area with some military people learning about the battle, which was an incredible tank battle. If you ever get a chance, read the story of that tank battle and how outnumbered we were.

We were sitting in this little stone amphitheater and the general who was addressing my group was one of the generals from the battle, a hero in Israel. He was injured. He was talking about the fact that he felt that he would fight and win that battle so his son wouldn't have to, but then his son ended up in war. And then his son fought so that his grandson wouldn't have to, and now his grandson is still fighting. This was the discussion.

We're all sitting there listening to this man, starting to choke up because here he is in his 70s or close to 80, wanting to stop fighting and wanting to give a country to his children and grandchildren that would be free and without war. He said, "When you pass the flag of Israel, you must always pass it high. Do not let it hit the ground because once you drop it, you can't pick it up.”

I tell that story as an analogy for our country. Democracy is that fragile. I get very emotional about this. It is based on people being different, on people of color, on different religions, on waves of immigrants, of Jews, of Irish, of Italian, of Chinese, all these great waves we’ve had. We have brought people here in chains who did not come voluntarily, that’s our slave background and we should be ashamed of these things. We as a country should be big enough to say, "We did wrong. We've got to fix it." We are big enough of a country to do that. But we can't drop the flag.

That's a great analogy.

Democracy cannot drop. We have to say, "Okay, here is the line in the sand. No, Mr. Trump, we are not going to let you destroy the checks and balances. No, we are not going to let you destroy the Supreme Court. No, we are not going to let you destroy the judicial system. No, we are not going to let you destroy the press. You want to run an election? Run an election against me. Beat me, but you cannot destroy that which is my country. You cannot threaten me with martial law. This is America.” This is what my ancestors fought for. This is what people died for. This is what my children are in the military for. This is serious.

What more could activists be doing, do you think, beyond what we are already doing? We are phone banking, texting, writing postcards, but what more do you think we could be doing to get that message out there? The one you just articulated.

For one, we must not be ashamed to wave the flag. We as Democrats have got to be the ones to pick the flag back up. We've got to say, "This is my country. My country has a freedom of the press. My country has freedom of religion. My country has a strong military. My country should have police that follow rules and regulations. My country is a good place to live in." What we did at the convention. But we have got to get loud about it.

And in our district, we have to say to Mr. Zeldin, “You do not represent my country, you are not a patriot. You are not a patriot because you are attacking the press. You are not a patriot because you are attacking the separation of powers. You are not a patriot because you're allowing somebody to talk against our constitutional rights. I am an American. I have a Constitution. I am wrapping myself in that Constitution and then wrapping the flag around that. I'm not going to let you change the conversation.”

As a child growing up, I remember learning about the Holocaust and that drives a lot of who I am. I remember learning about the Holocaust and saying, "What would I have done? Would I have been gassed immediately? Would I feed somebody who wasn't? Would I have gone into hiding? Would I have joined the resistance? What would I have done?”

And I remember that fear. I had a fear and mistrust. I used to get scared going by churches. Churches scared me for a long time because churches were a place where Jews were killed.

I got past that fear. Now I get up in the morning and I have that fear again. I look at my phone to see what right is he going to take away today? What more regulations are going to disappear? How much more damage is he going to do?

Because here is the thing: we are not trying to beat a Republican, we are trying to beat a dictator, a demagogue, an autocrat, whatever you want to call him. And number two, after the flag, we need to keep the passion level up this year and that has been hard.

I know. My book is about the passion of the women in the anti-Trump movement. We are all still here and I believe that women are still committed, I have no doubt they are going to come out and vote, but it is hard to keep the activist passion level high when people are struggling with their kids and their families and their parents. Where do you think women are now this year, in terms of making sure that we get rid of Trump?

Now here is the opposite of everything I've said up to this point, because here is the hope. We, as women, are nurturers and we are family-oriented; we think of family first. Our children have been threatened. “You, Mr. Trump, are messing with my kids. What do you mean kids can't get it? There are children dying. What do you mean kids can't give it?” Now he is messing with the health and the schooling of our children. The answer lies with women because women are looking at this and saying, "You're messing with my kids now."

Now you're making me cry.

You're messing with my kids. I don't care about anything else about politics, but my children are getting hurt. I can't send them to school, I can't keep them home. I send them to college, I’ve got to bring them back and maybe I got them back with COVID. The women are the heads of the households. Maybe the men want to go out there and be stupid but this is how we chip into that 40%. We say to the women, “He didn't protect your children. He didn't give you clear knowledge of what to do with your children. He didn't help you get to work so that you can support your children. He has failed your protection of your children."

That's the message.

That is the message that will resonate, because then we become Mama Bears. And when we become Mama Bears, we can lift pianos or cars off our kids. Because we do have a superpower and the superpower is love that we have for our families.

We've got to keep that 200,000 people uppermost on our minds. It might double to 400,000 by January 1^st. It is about the health of our families. That's what we should be drumming home. That's your mother, that's your father, that's your sister, that's your brother. He could have masked this country. He could have protected us better. He is not the cause of the pandemic, but he is not the solution either. He continues to endanger the fabric of our families, our children and our parents. The one thing that unites all women is our love for our children and our parents. That is the direction, because there is no better fighter than a Mama Bear. We are unstoppable.

In addition, if we allow Obamacare, the ACA, to drop, if we allow it to get dismantled, if we allow protection for preexisting conditions to go away, it is not only just the cancer patients and all the people already who are covered with the protections for preexisting conditions, but this will also be the survivors of COVID-19. We don't know the number of people who will have permanent damage now as a result of living through COVID-19. They are the preexisting conditions of 2021 and that brings us back to the Mama Bears. We must keep hammering it and hammering it and hammering it home. I would like them to keep saying, “COVID is 2021's preexisting condition.” That should be the new banner.

Every campaign I've run, a week and a half before the end of the campaign, all of my candidates have attempted to undermine the philosophy of our campaign because the opposition has either hit them with something or something has come up and now they want to chase that shiny object. I say to them, "No, you're not changing the track that our campaign is on because it's what people have cared about up to this point. You cannot chase the fish hook. You can't change direction at the eleventh hour.”

I tell them, "I know we just got hit with a low blow. That was a terrible, negative piece of literature the opponent sent out or we didn't get the endorsement we thought from the newspaper or something happened in the last week.”

You need two days to sit shiva, and normally what I do in a campaign, is I have a little money put aside, so that if a candidate wants to take an ad or something to address whatever it is, that’s fine, but I will not allow a major shift in the campaign. If the candidate feels the need to do one more mailer to firm up something, we do that. We always have an emergency allocation left for the last minute.

The night before the election, when I'm running the campaigns, I get the whole staff in my office with the candidate and I go around the table, and I ask, "What asset didn't we throw on the table? Did we miss an asset? Did we miss something we should have done? Let it go. We are done. It is now in the hands of the voters.”

So, it is the same advice for the grassroots. Don't shift, don't chase the shiny object, don’t chase the lure. It is how every fish who gets hooked ends up on the dinner plate because they follow that shiny object right into the net.

September 19, 2020: Trump’s October Surprise: The Supreme Court

On Friday, I was ending what had been a pretty good week. Polls for the election were encouraging; Trump’s bogus law and order campaign was not gaining traction; I mailed 20 more postcards to swing voters; I did my first phone banking for the Biden-Harris campaign; and donated to two extremely fun events for the Wisconsin Democrats, The Princess Bride and the Parks and Recreation virtual reunions. I counted my blessings as I got ready to celebrate the Jewish New Year, top of that list being the health of my large, extended family. And then I heard the news that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away. Not only did I feel a profound sadness at the passing of such a champion for human rights, but my heart sank at the knowledge of how this might upend the election. I posted on Facebook, “This is bad on so many levels.”

McConnell immediately issued a statement that there would be a vote on the Senate floor for Trump’s nominee. It just deepened my despair. That night on the news, much of the discussion was on the question of how and if the GOP could ram through a hearing and a vote in such a short time. The obvious hypocrisy of even considering this less than 50 days before an election given they had refused a hearing to Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016, 400 days before an election, was obvious to everyone. And yes, I felt sick at the prospect of a conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court and what this would mean to the very fabric of our rights in this country.

But I felt more sick at what I think is the likely scenario. There will be a lot of talk of a vote but it won’t happen because not having a vote gives Trump more of an advantage coming into the election. And it gives him an advantage in two ways. First, he has been looking for some shiny object to distract the public away from his criminal mismanagement of COVID. The tantalizing possibility of a conservative super-majority on the Supreme Court does that. And second, all the evangelicals, moderate Republicans, conservative Hispanics and Catholics who had been moving away from Trump because of his corruption and vulgarity and the death of almost 200,000 Americans, will now come home to the GOP because of one message from Trump, which will be repeated every minute of every day: vote for me and you will get what you have been hungering for, the certainty of now overturning Roe v. Wade.

So, I do not believe there will be a vote before the election because if there is, Trump loses this leverage. He gains nothing if a new Justice is confirmed before the election. He might gain everything if he keeps this going through the election. In essence, the passing of Justice Ginsberg has now handed Trump his October surprise. The Democrats want to keep the focus on COVID, on the economy, on his lying to the country and how his craven self-interest has upended all of our lives from the pandemic. But this fight for the Supreme Court now puts the campaign smack into the culture wars, just where we don’t want to be.

Tonight I will mourn, both Justice Ginsberg’s passing and the impact this will have on the campaign. Then tomorrow I will get to work. More phone calls, more postcards, more text messages, more voter outreach to the swing states. We must keep the focus where it belongs and encourage voters, particularly women, to vote for the health and safety of their families by ousting Trump and the GOP. I still think we can do it. But it just got a lot harder.

September 9, 2020: Voter Outreach 2020 - It’s Time to Pick Up Your Phone

Learn About Phone banking and Texting to Voters

My first blog post about voter outreach this year was on mailing handwritten postcards to voters. This post is about the two other forms of voter outreach available to us in the time of COVID when we cannot go door-to-door to speak to voters. In a year when we cannot conduct in-person canvassing, phone banking and texting are the most direct way of communicating with voters. With the fall election campaign now heating up and early voting starting in key states, now is the time for you to jump in. ALL HANDS ON DECK ARE NEEDED NOW for this crucial election!

Every candidate’s campaign and every state Democratic Party has a website with a tab you can click on to sign up to be a volunteer for voter outreach. For example, on the website for the Biden-Harris campaign, click the menu icon in the upper right corner and when the drop down menu appears, click on the words "Action Center." From there, you will be taken to a page with all the different volunteer options including phone banking and texting.

To answer questions about phone banking and sending texts, I turned to a friend of mine who has more experience this year in both phone banking and texting than anyone else I know. Below is a lightly condensed and edited transcript of my conversation with her.

We know what we have lost this year not being able to knock on doors and meet with voters, but are there some advantages to voter outreach by phone and text?

One significant advantage of remote phone banking and texting this year is that you can do it from anywhere so you can focus on the important swing states. Although the Democratic Party is expanding the map to several other states, like Ohio, Georgia and Texas, there are six key swing states in this election: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona. If you live in a blue state like New York or California, you can call or text voters in these important swing states. Given that door-to-door canvassing isn’t a realistic option this year, calling and texting voters is the most direct way of engaging voters in conversations and getting their feedback.

What are the main reasons that this direct contact is so important?

Part of the process of phone banking and texting, of course, is persuasion. You want to persuade voters to vote for your candidate. But you also want to identify which voters support Democratic candidates and which support Republican candidates. This process refines the voter database to enable the Democratic Party to go after their voters to turn out the vote for the election. Phone banking is, in my opinion, somewhat better for certain types of persuasion conversations, where you're trying to persuade the voter to vote for your candidate based upon issues, because you can determine which issues will decide how the voter votes. Just by talking about the issues that are important to them and answering any questions, you can have these engaging conversations. Texting, I believe, is better for sending information to the voter that they may need about voting, such as how to apply for a mail ballot. You can text them the links to their state and county elections website where they can confirm or update their voter registration, request a mail ballot, locate their poll site and early voting sites and obtain contact information for their county elections supervisor.

Phone banking can be frustrating if no one picks up or if you have a bad conversation with a voter. What’s your advice for volunteers making calls to keep them from getting discouraged?

Some people who have tried phone banking get frustrated because they spend a lot of time dialing numbers and no one answers the phone. Or they get a machine or a recording that the number is out of service. A lot of time is wasted that way and it can be a frustrating experience. However, there are automatic dialer systems, such as ThruTalk or CallHub, where you log-on to the database on your computer and the automatic dialer makes the calls for you; this way, you don't get connected until a person answers the phone. Automatic dialers are much more efficient because they enable you to talk to more voters within a set time period and you don't have the frustration of continually dialing numbers with nobody answering the phone. For these reasons, automatic dialers are recommended and the Biden campaign and most of the state Democratic organizations use them.

As to anyone’s fear of phone banking, I tell myself that the person you're calling has no idea who you are. Worst case, if you have a panic attack just hang up. You don't have to use your real name. If you're calling through one of these automatic dialers, they don't see your phone number so they don't even have your phone number and there’s no personal ID.

You do have to be ready in the phone calls for people that are Trump supporters to hang up on you or in the texting to be profane. You just have to be thick-skinned about it and keep forging ahead like a warrior. You’re sitting in the comfort of your own home making calls or texting and I think we all need to get over any apprehension in order to win this crucial election.

So, I think everybody really needs to get to work because we're not going to have a landslide with voter suppression and possible cheating by the other side. And the GOP also has a very strong base of people who will never vote Democratic in a million years. We all have to push ourselves to do this because we don't want to be in a situation on the night of November 3^rd or whenever it's decided to say, "Oh, I wish I had done more." I've always found that when I start out making calls the first couple of calls may be difficult but the more you do it, you get into a rhythm and you get over your apprehension or whatever it is that prevents you from phone banking.

Do you think this apprehension is what makes texting more popular?

I know a lot of people who like texting better than phone banking, but I also know people who feel that phone banking is more productive because they want to have an engaging conversation with the voter and that isn't always possible through texting.

How do you know what response to send to a voter by text?

The campaign prepares both the initial text and scripted responses that the campaign would like you to use. Texting is quite efficient because you can send out hundreds of texts in an hour and frequently I send several thousand texts in a day. The initial text and the responses provide the framework for the conversation to develop. You’re trying to persuade the voter but also obtain information and input the voter’s responses into a survey. For example, if you send an initial text asking whether the voter intends to vote for Joe Biden and Democrats up and down the ballot and the answer is yes, you indicate that response in the survey and your next text asks whether the voter wants to vote by mail. If they say they want to enroll in vote-by-mail, then you send back a response with a link to the state elections website where they can request their mail ballot online in many states or obtain information on how to obtain a mail ballot. If they’ve already requested their mail ballot, our next response would be to ask them if they’d like to volunteer with the campaign to phone bank or text. If they want to volunteer, you send them a link to a volunteer sign up for phone banking or texting shifts and another link for a virtual training.

What if a voter, by phone or text, asks you a question about the issues and you aren’t sure of the answer?

Some of the campaigns have crib sheets on the issues that outline what you can discuss on the different issues. They don't expect nor do they really want you to get involved in an extensive discussion on issues, certainly if you're not familiar with them. If you don't happen to be familiar with a particular issue, you would just refer the voter to the candidate’s policy platform on the campaign website. The campaigns don't want you to try to discuss an issue that you’re not familiar with and you certainly don't want to be misrepresenting the campaign's platform. Basically you just say, "I'm a volunteer. I'm more familiar with some issues than others but I suggest that you go on the campaign website." But frankly I've never had that experience with phone banking where people have really interrogated me on issues. What I do find is, you have to be careful about being trolled in texting by Trump supporters who are looking to waste your time or upset you. They may ask you questions like, "Well, explain Joe Biden's position on every single issue." That person is just looking to waste my time and aggravate me. If they start cursing at you, you don't want to start cursing back at them. You just don’t respond and archive the conversation. You’re a representative of the Democratic Party and the candidate for whom you’re volunteering and must stay positive and professional. The same rule applies for texts as you’ve heard for emails – anything you write could be posted on social media. So it’s best to slow down and breathe instead of getting into a nasty text exchange with a Trump supporter who’s trying to egg you on. You have to be alert but it's really not that hard to identify the Trump supporters. Sometimes if they're subtle, it might take one or two exchanges, whether by phone or text, but you can usually identify them fairly easily.

What kind of responses are you getting from Democrats to the phone calls and texts?

For the most part, Democrats are very appreciative of the information. I've also encountered situations where I've initially texted somebody about voting information and it became cumbersome to talk by texts so I just asked them for their phone number and then I called them. Lots of these phone banking and text campaigns involve helping people with voter registration and applying for mail ballots. I made calls and sent texts to chase absentee ballots for the spring and summer primaries and will do that for the general election. Texting and phone banking also is great for recruiting other volunteers. I’ve personally recruited well over 100 volunteers that way.

Also, I think some people get intimidated because they think they have to sit and devote hours. In the course of your day, how do you organize your phone banking and texting?

Well, because I work, there are days that I can't do it at all or there are days that I might only have an hour or so. But on the weekend, I may make calls for an hour and text for a couple of hours. But you don't have to do it in large blocks of time; you can do it for 20 minutes and go back to it later. With texting, you get replies at all hours, someone may reply ten hours later, so you need to check and respond the next day. If you won’t be available to respond you can sign off your shift and your texting replies will be reassigned by the campaign to another volunteer. When you are on the automatic dialer you can only make calls within the hours that the dialer is available, which varies by campaign. There’s generally no calling or texting after 9:00 PM Eastern time, so you’re not calling or texting people in the middle of the night.

Everyone has to choose what they're comfortable with doing. I encourage people to try both phone banking and texting and see what they like. It really is a personal preference. Some people prefer texting and are apprehensive about phone banking and there are others who only want to make phone calls because they don't think you can really engage the voter with texting. I started out doing a lot more phone banking but right now I’m texting more because I spend a lot of time on the phone with business calls so texting is a change of pace for me.

I think one of the problems with voter outreach from home as opposed to when we used to go in a group and do it in a location, is it can get really lonely. Does the campaign stay in touch with you? Do they have virtual events so that you feel that you're not so alone in doing this?

The campaigns very actively stay in touch with you. You'll get an email from them whenever you've signed up for a shift and another email reminder the day before the shift. You’re asked to confirm your shift or, if you can't do it, you can cancel. Some campaigns have virtual events at four o'clock or five o'clock where volunteers can hop on a Zoom call to share their experiences and to ask the staff questions.

Also, each campaign has its own Slack workspace for staff and volunteers to exchange information including the schedules and the script for phone banking and texting campaigns, FAQs for ThruTalk and ThruText and other information. Slack is an online communications platform used by Democratic campaigns and it’s very helpful for volunteers to be able to get help with any technical issues, plan their phone banking and texting schedules and ask any questions about voting rules and campaign issues. With the Slack platform, you might say that you spoke with somebody or texted somebody who had a question about something, and you can ask it in the Slack channel, get an answer and then get back to that person. So, if you're phone banking and a voter has a question and you don't know the answer, you can say you’ll call them back. And then you can ask on the Slack chat and then call the person back. Or if you're texting, you can ask the question in the Slack channel and then text back when you have the answer. Some people also use it as a place to commiserate, like, “It was a rough contact list today, a lot of Trump supporters,” or to celebrate by posting a dancing emoji each time they sign up a new volunteer.

This is great information to help people get started. You have covered everything so beautifully. I think my only other question is about how the phone banking and texting feels for you. I know I am more tired than I was in 2018. I think we all feel a bit hollowed out by the pandemic, the economic crisis, the racial reckoning crisis and by Trump, but despite all that, the volunteering helps to keep me grounded so that my own anxiety and despair don't overwhelm me. Do you find a similar thing for you, that it’s giving you something important by doing this work?

Absolutely! Not volunteering is not an option for me. I would be too frustrated and would be far more despairing if I didn't do this. By volunteering I feel that I'm contributing towards electing Democrats and I see concrete results. I’ve helped voters by providing information on voter registration, early voting dates and locations, and vote by mail requirements. Educating voters this year is more important than ever because people really need to plan how they’re going to vote during a pandemic and a lot of voters don’t know the various options available to them. I’ve connected many voters with volunteer opportunities for the Biden campaign and for Democratic state parties and given them information on becoming a poll worker or poll observer. And actually I get a lot of positive feedback through the exchanges with people, which is energizing and a continuous reminder of how many people want to get rid of Trump. I’ve had some great conversations with people, not just on the phone but also through texts. Sometimes people will rant and rave about how we have to get rid of Trump and then you can segue into talking to them about volunteering. A lot of people, I'd say certainly at least half the people, don't realize that they can volunteer remotely. When they think of volunteering, they think that it's door-to-door canvassing and I explain that this year that isn't what we're doing. And then you can recruit volunteers that way. I spoke with a Florida resident recently who lived in a deep red district that she can't stand so she's in the process of moving to a Democratic area and she wants to meet other Democrats and volunteer. I connected her with one of the leaders in the local Democratic Party there, who I know through phone banking with her group.

It feels really good that you can contribute in this way and you just have to be somewhat thick-skinned about not letting hostility from Trump supporters bother you, which everybody should do at this point. Making phone calls or texting from home is pretty easy and the least we can do. We will not win this election without a volunteer army and it’s important for everyone to do their part.

September 1, 2020: Biden Deploys FDR’s Winning Message: Help Is on the Way

The Republican Party has evolved from alternative facts to alternative universe. At their convention, Trump is the COVID savior, the immigration advocate, the rescuer from the dastardly Obama economy and it is Biden and the Democrats who are corrupt, racist and incompetent. Psychiatrists call it “projection” but I fear that this complete rewriting of recent history coupled with fear of the dangerous “other” will be effective. We all watched how the George W. Bush campaign turned the world upside down and instead of being the commander-in-chief of an administration that had lied us into a war that they were badly mismanaging, he rode to reelection on the myth of a strong leader running against a traitor to his country, despite John Kerry’s Vietnam War service and Bush being AWOL; truth and facts be damned. Can the GOP do it again?

When Joe Biden gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, it reminded me not of 2004 or any recent election but of a message I remembered learning about in school many years ago. So I went looking for the parallel to it online. When I found Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s acceptance speech from the 1932 Democratic Convention on www.fdrlibrary.org, I knew that was the one. Reading about that election reminded me that the similarities between then and now go beyond the words of that one speech.

FDR, then governor of New York, accepted his party’s nomination for president on July 2^nd, 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression. Roosevelt was running against the Republican incumbent, President Herbert Hoover, who despite all evidence to the contrary, continued to maintain that the federal government had no business tackling the economic collapse that was devastating Americans. With no federal plan, no federal assistance, the crisis deepened. In his speech and his promise of a “new deal,” Roosevelt told a frightened and weary nation that better days were ahead:

Never before in modern history have the essential differences between the two major American parties stood out in such striking contrast as they do today. Republican leaders not only have failed in material things, they have failed in national vision, because in disaster they have held out no hope, they have pointed out no path for the people below to climb back to places of security and of safety in our American life.

Throughout the nation, men and women, forgotten in the political philosophy of the government of the last years look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.

On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.

I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage. This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in the crusade to restore America to its own people.

The parallels are almost eerie, including the personal parallels between Roosevelt and Biden. Both long-standing, experienced politicians, neither viewed as a progressive firebrand by the left yet decried as radical socialists by the right; believers in good government who both endured almost unspeakable personal tragedies. On one level, one cannot compare the hardship of the Great Depression to today, when 25% of the workforce was unemployed with no social safety net; those policies would come later under Roosevelt. But on another level, the challenges this year might be steeper than in 1932. For one, our economic crisis is entwined with a global pandemic; and two, no one doubted that Hoover would leave if defeated. Hoover, for all of his deficiencies as a leader, never tried to destroy the post office or solicit foreign interference to cheat and win the election or pretend that the crisis was a hoax.

Just as Roosevelt did, former Vice President Biden in his acceptance speech gave the country a north star to guide us over these next months. For me, watching Biden’s speech gave me a feeling that I am sure was similar to what Americans felt in 1932 as they listened to Roosevelt on the radio or watched him later in newsreels. I felt hope.

In times as challenging as these, I believe there is only one way forward. As a united America. United in our pursuit of a more perfect Union. United in our dreams of a better future for us and for our children. United in our determination to make the coming years bright.

Are we ready?

I believe we are.

This is a great nation.

And we are a good and decent people.

This is the United States of America.

And there has never been anything we've been unable to accomplish when we've done it together.

Finally, I could see a light at the end of what has felt like an endless, dark tunnel, a tunnel I have been in since Trump was elected. Like so many Americans, that night is seared into my consciousness. Fear for the country and bitterness that an eminently qualified woman had been beaten in the Electoral College by the most unqualified man who ever ran for the presidency, pushed me into a state of mourning. What gave me a purpose began with a Facebook post from one woman advocating a women’s march on Washington. The result was the 2017 Women’s March. That day the anti-Trump Resistance was born as was my new life as an activist.

Through the Women’s March and Indivisible, millions of women, like myself, found conduits to organize protests, create grassroots organizations, stand up for immigrants and issues we believe in, call our representatives, send letters and postcards, fight to save the ACA, register voters and knock on doors to get-out-the-vote. We made friends and gave each other shoulders to cry on. We were Sisters in Resistance and Stronger Together. The movement gave us a voice and we learned how to use it, “to “strengthen the spines of the Democrats and weaken the resolve of the Republicans.”

From the 2017 Women’s March through each protest since, we chanted, “We’re not going to go away.” We are not only still here but we have joined with other grassroots movements, such as the fight for tackling climate change, the March for Our Lives for gun reform and the protests for Black Lives Matter. We know it will not be easy. We have obstacles Roosevelt never had to contend with: right-wing media and the Russian misinformation campaign amplifying the Trump/GOP message of fear and hate; unprecedented voter suppression; a hollowed out Republican Party that no longer stands for anything but perpetuating Trump’s lies; a lawless incumbent who will do anything to win. But the Biden-Harris ticket has something that Roosevelt could have only dreamed of: it has us, a grassroots army with a proven track record of electoral success. In 2018, we helped to generate the largest voter turnout for a midterm election in 40 years, resulting in a blue wave that gave the Democrats back the House. We have not gone away and we are all dedicated to getting-out-the-vote this fall.

The choice this November is as stark as it was in 1932. Does the country reelect an ineffectual president and party that have neither the honesty or polices to face the multiple crises facing this nation, crises that they have furthered? Or do we end this American carnage and turn away from the Orwellian darkness towards the light? Maybe, as in 1932, a simple message, that “help is on the way,” is what the country will embrace. It is now up to us to carry that message through Election Day and, just like in 1932, power a historic landslide for the Democratic Party.

August 19, 2020: With The Economy in Serious Trouble, Kudlow Gets It Wrong Again

Mitch McConnell and the Senate left town without considering the COVID-19 economic aid package the House sent them months ago. They have allowed the additional federal unemployment compensation to expire even though many states are experiencing dangerous spikes of COVID-19 cases, keeping businesses shut and consumers at home. Consequently, we are now staring down the barrel of an economic calamity the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Depression. It never had to be this bad. Leadership, sound policies, learning the lessons from history would have prevented both the spreading of the virus and the depth of the economic pain. But just like Trump’s delusional statements about the virus, what we are hearing from the guy in charge of economic policy at the White House is unrealistic happy talk.

In a recent Vanity Fair article, entitled, “Wall Street Isn’t Sold on Larry Kudlow’s Economic Delusions,” the author William Cohan writes: “Has Larry Kudlow, Trump’s director of the National Economic Council, finally lost it? That’s a question many people on and off Wall Street have after his seemingly inane, overly optimistic predictions, on national television, about the direction of the U.S. economy.”

The article recounts, in great detail, the long line of ridiculous comments Kudlow has been making about where the economy stands. For example, “I don’t think the economy is going south,” said Kudlow. “I think it’s going north.”

GOP talking points is Larry Kudlow’s stock and trade. It hasn’t changed. I know because I interviewed him a number of times, decades ago, when I was a producer on a business news show. One episode, in particular, is a perfect example of this. Coincidentally, it was during another recession and another presidential election.

Before becoming a regular talking head on CNBC, Kudlow was at Bear Stearns from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. During that same time period, I was a business reporter in New York City, first for magazines and then for television as one of the producers on the national, weekly PBS business show, Adam Smith’s Money World. In April, 1992, I was working on a show comparing the economic policies of President H.W. Bush and the presumptive Democratic nominee, Governor Bill Clinton. The show would examine their policies in regards to the top economic issues of the day. To determine those issues, we hired a national polling company, the Roper Organization, to conduct a poll and determine what three economic issues voters were focused on.

The poll indicated that the number one issue of concern was the recession, accompanied by a growing sense of job insecurity. The country had slipped into a recession the year before and it was certainly having an impact on Bush’s reelection campaign. As we all remember, the James Carville mantra for the Clinton campaign was, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Healthcare was second. The rising costs of healthcare, which were taking a bigger bite out of people’s income, were a growing concern for most Americans. The third issue was taxes, specifically a feeling that too much of the tax burden was falling on the middle class. It was no accident that both candidates that year spent a lot of time talking about the need for a “middle-class tax cut.”

The first part of the show featured an interview with the editor-in-chief of the Roper Organization, explaining how the poll was conducted, as well as other interviews and graphics that described the Bush and Clinton policies on these three issues. I had conducted these previously recorded interviews. The next section of the show would be an in-studio discussion between our host, Adam Smith (real name, George Jerome Goodman, who went by the name of Jerry) and two economists, one from each side of the economic point of view. The show would end with Jerry speaking to a political reporter from The Wall Street Journal who would analyze each campaign’s effectiveness at communicating their message on these issues to the public and which message was likely to resonate more with the voters. I would pre-interview these guests, help craft the questions for the interviews and book them for the in-studio taping with Jerry.

On Adam Smith, each producing team had three weeks to complete their story, from the initial story idea to broadcasting the show on Thursday evening at 8:00 PM EST. Things were falling into place nicely on this show – the research, working with Roper on the poll, the taped interviews, man-on-the-street interviews, designing the graphics to help illustrate the two campaigns’ economic policies. The “liberal” economist was booked. I had tried for Dr. Paul Krugman, who was a regular contributor to our show, but he was not available on the day we needed to record the studio interview, so I turned to the highly- regarded Dr. Alan Blinder, from Princeton University, and was thrilled when he said yes. My only problem was I kept running into dead ends trying to book an economist from the conservative side.

I knew Larry Kudlow, from Bear Stearns, was available. I had booked him on the show many times before. His background included the Federal Reserve in New York and working for the Office of Management and Budget at the Reagan administration. But he was a financial analyst, not an economist, and this was a show about macroeconomic policies not Wall Street. He had neither a Masters nor PhD in economics, which meant he had never done graduate-level research in economics. Even his undergraduate degree was in history. Also, his answers in interviews were largely Republican Party talking points.

Dr. Blinder, even then, was an economics heavyweight. If you are not familiar with his work, Google his name and take a look at his credentials because they are too lengthy to list here. For the kind of substantive discussion I envisioned for this show, I wanted to pair Dr. Blinder with a thoughtful, respected conservative economist. But I was striking out finding that person. I called up Dr. Krugman to ask his advice. When I explained I was having trouble finding the person I needed for the show, he said, that’s because “that’s an oxymoron.” He did give me one name of an economics professor who he thought came close to what I was looking for but he was not available.

We were getting dangerously close to our scheduled studio session. Running out of time, I called Kudlow’s office and booked him for the recording session. I was lucky he was still available. If it had just been an interview between Jerry and Dr. Blinder, it would not have been fair to the Bush campaign.

Even while I was watching the studio interview from the broadcast booth, I was struck by the difference between the specificity and nuanced economic analysis of Blinder’s answers versus Kudlow’s boilerplate GOP point of view. But I had little time to dwell on it since finishing any broadcast story is a whirlwind of final editing and making sure you meet the deadline. Then it was quickly onto the next story idea and the next three-week turnaround. But looking back now at the transcript of that show, in light of Larry Kudlow’s career since then, it is striking how every one of his 1992 answers are the same mantra that he and the GOP are still pushing today, despite the repeated failure of these policies. They didn’t work for that recession, they didn’t work in the Great Recession and they are not going to help lift us out of the economic emergency we are in now. But that doesn’t stop the GOP in general and Kudlow in particular from continuing to push them.

Here’s just a few of Kudlow’s answers from that 1992 show: “large government programs are not what the country needs right now”; “the country needs to get government out of the way of private enterprise”; “Bush is trying to promote a pro-market competition (for healthcare) through the use of vouchers and tax credits”; “why not unlock capital by lowering the rates on capital gains?”; “more regulatory burdens under Clinton would damage the economy.”

The Clinton administration and his policies helped generate one of the longest periods of economic and job growth in our history, leaving the government with a surplus rather than increasing the deficit. Yet when the George W. Bush administration came in, these same GOP economic policies came back. We all know how that ended. Then a repeat of the same cycle: prolonged economic growth under President Obama, followed by what is shaping up to be an even deeper downturn under Trump, where the word depression is now being seriously discussed.

In the Vanity Fair article, a banker who worked with Kudlow at Bear Stearns is quoted as saying, “Over his entire career, I can’t recall a single forecast he made that was accurate.” In the same article, economist Dr. Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan said, “There’s never been an economic adviser who more closely resembled a used-car salesman, both in demeanor and honesty.”

How tragic that, just like with the virus, we are getting political public relations from the administration rather than serious, economic analysis of what we need to do as a country to not slip into a deep and prolonged depression. Having a non-economist who always gets it wrong at the helm of economic policy is as terrifying to me as Trump’s inane recommendations to use bleach on ourselves to ward off the virus.

August 10, 2020: Your Facebook Page is Under Attack

On the show AMJOY on MSNBC this weekend, they did a story about how Russia uses our diversity to attack us on social media and that their platform of choice is Facebook.

https://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/russia-attacks-america-via-diversity-on-social-media-kumar-says-89816133862

This had special resonance with me because I have been battling this kind of attack on my Facebook page for the last month. The bots didn’t find me in 2016. But my life and my social media presence are different now. I have been part of the anti-Trump Resistance since 2017 and the Russians are determined to help Trump get reelected. We are standing in their way. Compromising our communications and using us to spread misinformation to help Trump is obviously part of their plan.

It started for me during the Black Lives Matter protests. Due to COVID and my age, I didn’t feel comfortable joining the in-person protests, but I did sign up with several groups on Facebook, pledging support and posting information about the protests across my social media world to grow the audience for the movement. That world has become quite large since 2016. I am a member of multiple grassroots anti-Trump groups, in particular East End Action Network (EEAN), as well as a member of the Southampton Town Democratic Committee (SHDems). I am also a journalist and published a book about the anti-Trump Resistance, The Resistance and Me and how it powered the blue wave in the 2018 midterm election. This year, my website and my blog are dedicated to providing information to volunteers about voter outreach for the 2020 election. In other words, I am far more visible on social media than in 2016.

When I first started getting friend requests from people of color, I assumed these were new contacts through these BLM organizations. All the photos with the accounts were of people, men and women, who were African-American. To be honest, at first I was thrilled because expanding my social media world has been a goal of mine since the beginning. Without thinking, I confirmed the first friend request, from a young woman who said she was a BLM organizer. In my excitement to show my support for the young activists of this movement, I had been careless, breaking my own rules about friend requests. My son and my nieces had taught me, when I first joined Facebook, to never confirm a friend request if we did not have mutual friends and to look closely at the person’s profile to make sure it was legit. I was negligent and did not do that.

Almost immediately after confirming this request, I became besieged with a flood of new requests, sometimes five or six a day. Something about the requests struck me as odd because each of them only had one mutual friend, and it was the person from that first friend request I had confirmed. I had given them a way in and now they were taking advantage of it. Because even a cursory examination of all of these accounts revealed immediately that none of them were real. Most accounts had either no friends or just one friend, that first name I had confirmed. None of them had any personal photos, albums or personal information. If they did have photos, they were pictures of landscapes or stock photos of generic people. All of them had Black Lives Matter logos. On even closer examination, many of them listed countries in Africa as their home residence and many were littered with misspelled words. All of them were fake, including that original account I had agreed to be friends with.

I immediately blocked that first account and deleted all of the other requests. More requests continued even though they no longer had any mutual friends, and I deleted all of them. This went on for weeks and then stopped. Maybe the algorithm of the bots finally got the message. But I am keeping a close eye on my account because I have no doubt they will try a different tactic to find their way in.

I can’t tell you what misinformation they were going to spread on my account because they never got a chance to send me anything. How sad that they are using the BLM movement as their conduit for their insidious mission. If the messages were going to be “Black Voters for Trump” that wouldn’t have been very effective and no one I know would have shared it so I am guessing it was going to be more subtle than that.

It is possible that the photos were real African-Americans whose accounts have been violated and their photos stolen. It is even possible these were their real names. I should have reported these fake accounts to Facebook. In my haste to delete them, I didn’t. If it happens again, I will follow these instructions from Facebook how to report fake accounts: https://www.facebook.com/help/306643639690823?helpref=related

We all need to pay close attention to what’s on our social media platforms, to not let the bots in and to not spread misinformation. Only through cheating and voter suppression can Trump win reelection. We have to be vigilant to not let that happen.

July 18, 2020: Voter Outreach 2020 - Postcards To Voters

Turning Out The Vote In Battleground States Will Decide This Election: Learn About Handwritten Postcards To Voters (the first in a 3-part series on non in-person voter outreach)

Over the July 4^th weekend, in two speeches, Trump laid bare the blatant racism and divisiveness that are the underpinnings of his personality, his presidency and the rationale for his reelection campaign. No dog whistles, no code words, no nuance. It was deeply disturbing. He wants to bait us into a race war where, he believes, he will emerge the winner. He has no interest in uniting, no interest in soothing the frayed nerves of an anxious nation. That was left to Vice President Biden in his comments on the meaning of Independence Day in 2020. The choice between the two men could not be starker.

The weekend heightened my own sense of urgency about the 2020 election. And it reminded me of the message President Obama conveyed on the virtual fundraiser for Biden a few weeks ago: “Whatever you have done so far is not enough.”

I have been muttering this sentiment to myself since election night, 2016. I didn’t do enough to help elect Hillary. I should have done more to flip our district in 2018. And now, stuck at home, how the heck am I going to get-out-the-vote for Joe Biden this year?

Trump and the GOP know there is only one formula that leads to him winning reelection. He deployed it in 2016. Trumpism does not have the support of the majority of the country. He can only win if he suppresses the Democratic vote, through outright voter suppression and by smearing his opponent, and then he has to rile his base to such a fever pitch that nearly 100% of his 40% of the country cast their ballots. That is how he eked out an Electoral College win in 2016 and that is his plan for 2020. In 2016, he used immigration as red meat to inflame his base; this time he is using fear of our fellow Americans. It may be disgusting, but if Democrats don’t vote, then it could succeed.

In my book, The Resistance and Me: An Insider’s Account of the Two-Year Mission to Stop the Trump Agenda and Take Back the House, the reader learns, just as we learned, the incredible importance of speaking directly to voters. Across the country, in-person canvassing helped to power the blue wave. We cannot meet voters face-to-face this year, making turning out the vote just a little bit harder, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have weapons in our arsenal, other ways of reaching voters that will boost Democratic turnout. I implore each of you to learn about them and start using them because whatever you are already doing, it is not enough.

There are basically three forms of non in-person voter outreach: snail mail with letters or postcards, phone-banking and text-banking. Over the next few weeks, I will focus on each of these. Each method can be done from your own home, each is available to everyone. You can try them all and choose the method that you are most comfortable with; you can do a combination of two or three. Once you learn about these initiatives, my hope is you will be ready to get started. None of us want to wake up on November 4^th and have any regrets, or say to ourselves, as we did in 2016, if only I had gotten more involved. Because the truth about Trump, the truth that was there for us all to see in 2016, is he is unfit for this job and the combination of incompetence and corruption that mark his administration is literally killing us. We will not survive a second term.

To begin, this blog post will take a look at handwritten postcards to voters. I first got involved in mailing postcards to voters for the midterm election with my Indivisible group, East End Action Network (EEAN). We hosted a lot of activities for the midterm election, including one-on-one interviews and debate forums with the primary candidates as well as get-out-the-vote door-knocking weekends. But probably our most popular general election events were a series of postcard-writing parties, in conjunction with the campaign of our Democratic congressional nominee, Perry Gershon. They provided the postcards and the mailing lists of Democratic voters’ names and addresses and together with other grassroots groups who did the same, thousands of handwritten postcards were mailed out to voters in CD#1 right before the election. The idea is that when a voter receives a handwritten message about voting that it cuts through all the noise and clutter to make an impression. The goal is to create a card so engaging, so colorful that it will go up on a refrigerator door.

In my book are descriptions and photos of our 2018 postcard parties. People who wanted to get involved but were not comfortable going door-to-door or even phone-banking, were thrilled to participate and really enjoyed the experience. EEAN provided all the markers and stickers to make the cards creative and colorful, and everyone brought food and drinks to make it a party. Our master at organizing these events is leadership member Sharon Adams, a retired elementary school teacher.

Already this year, Sharon has organized two postcard-writing events for EEAN, both of them virtual. The first was for Common Cause to alert New York voters about their options to vote in the primary and the second was our first event reaching outside of New York, to voters in a battleground state. We have known that 2020 would be very different than 2018 because we would be adding involvement with the presidential election along with the congressional. Unlike our congressional race, the presidential race will not be decided by who gets the most votes, but by who reaches 270 electoral votes. Trump lost the popular vote, but won the presidency by small margins across a few states. Most states, including New York, are already in the red or blue column which means that voters in a handful of states, called swing states or battleground states will decide the outcome of this election. Given that, it is crucial that we reach these voters and encourage them to vote for Biden.

In researching the different groups that are involved in sending postcards to battleground states, we chose Postcards To Voters (PTV), https://postcardstovoters.org/. This was an easy decision since Sharon was already very familiar with how PTV works because she has been involved with PTV from its inception. Alongside all of the activities she is involved in for our district, she explained why being an active volunteer with PTV has been important to her.

“Volunteers feel that the stakes are so high that they have to do something to assure that our democracy will survive,” she said. “Volunteering to write friendly handwritten reminders to targeted voters has become a movement thanks to Tony McMullin, who founded Postcards to Voters in 2017. I'm proud to have been a part of this grassroots group of volunteers since its start.”

Founder Tony McMullin goes by the nickname Tony the Democrat. The website has a photo of Tony, along with an explanation of how his background led him to create PTV:

Tony was first bitten by the campaign bug when he quit his job to volunteer full-time for Howard Dean’s campaign in the 2004 presidential election. There is a great profile of Tony on the website New Faces of Democracy, a group that spotlights many of the grassroots activists who are part of the anti-Trump Resistance. https://newfacesofdemocracy.org/spotlight-tony-the-democrat/.

You can also read about Tony and PTV in a 2018 article in The New York Times entitled, “Writing Postcards Brings Voters Back From the Edge: ‘It’s Sharpie Therapy’.” According to the article, “In the big data era of politics, where campaigns are betting millions on software that can harvest hundreds of pieces of information about a single voter, Tony McMullin is making a decidedly different wager. He is trying to show that elections can be won through the persuasive power of a plaintive handwritten postcard. It is a battle of quaint vs. quant.”

The home page on the PTV website is warm and welcoming and filled with photos of colorful and creative postcards. Here is the description on the PTV site of how it works:

Postcards to Voters are friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast.

What started on March 11, 2017 with sharing 5 addresses apiece to 5 volunteers on Facebook so that they could mail postcards to voters in Jon Ossoff’s race grew in one month to 1,200+ volunteers nationwide and over 51,000 postcards mailed.

Now, we consist of over 75,000+ volunteers in every state (including Alaska and Hawaii) who have written over 9 million postcards to voters in over 200 key, close elections.

We use an interactive texting service (Abby The Address Bot) to assign addresses to our trusted, returning volunteers. For new volunteers and those organizing postcard parties around the country, we use a commercial Help Desk system to streamline and automate email requests.

Another commercial business intelligence package crunches the numbers so we always know who our top volunteers are by campaign, a heat-map showing where the postcards are being written by zip code around the country, and other essential dashboards to manage an operation that now averages 15,000 voter addresses assigned daily.

How It Works

1. Sign Up

o We’ll send you an email with instructions

2. Become an Approved Writer

o Write a practice postcard and email us a photo following instructions in the email

3. Approval

o Approved -We’ll send you addresses and information on how to obtain additional addresses

o Not Approved – You will receive an email detailing why and how to fix it

4. Request Addresses

5. Keep up with Current Campaigns

o Facebook

o Twitter

We felt this group was perfect for our postcard action and we were eager to write to voters in a battleground state. Because all our meetings and events have been virtual since March, we could not provide tables of volunteers with materials as we did in 2018, but our founder, Rebecca Dolber, explained in our weekly newsletter how a virtual postcard party would work. Members were asked to RSVP with Sharon if they were interested. Sharon then followed-up in an email to those members who signed up:

Thank you for being the first group to volunteer this week to write Postcards To Voters. (PTV)

I started writing with this awesome organization when it started in 2017. There are now over 75,000 volunteers in every state that have written close to 8 million postcards to voters. (Now you're really excited to be part of this movement!).

Postcards To Voters are friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast. After you become an approved writer you may be able to choose the target group you want to write to (depends on the addresses available) and you choose how many cards you want to write (you are usually given 3 days to complete/send). I like to do 5 or 10 at a time. Aside from that, you are given everything you need. There are only 3 MUST HAVES for each card, tons of extra ideas, background information and of course the addresses.

I'm going to give you the link to get SIGNED UP and then you'll receive an email with exact instructions. On the website, https://postcardstovoters.org/, go to JOIN in the menu. After you've sent the photo of your practice postcard and been approved, you'll receive additional instructions on how to request addresses whenever you feel the urge to write. I am here to help with any questions. The website is awesome! It's very complete, so take some time to explore the site.

Please let me know when you've been approved and are ready to start writing. Keep a tally of how many cards you write please.

Facebook and Twitter have PTV accounts that are fun to follow. There is a whole community of writers across the country that share on social media. (I even get excited when followers like my postcard designs) #PostcardsToVoters

So...you will need postcards, postcard stamps and art supplies. As you will see on the website, it's supposed to also be a fun activity. We can share our creative designs, sources for preprinted cards and fun new stickers or markers. I am fond of using colorful 81/2" x 11" card stock that is cut to 4 pieces. This is the cheaper way to go, but I also have a variety of printed cards. If you need ANYthing, please just ask me. The PTV website has great options for buying postcards, 100 for $15.

Due to the pandemic, most of the writing groups that formed across the country are not meeting in person. We would like to have a virtual writing party on June 25^th if everyone is approved and ready. We are flexible. Again let me know when you're approved and we'll plan from there.

One last note...a postcard writer from Colorado commented on a photo I recently posted on twitter of my completed cards. He commented that his goal is "to ensure that the cards he sends will be looked at." Let's get our cards on those refrigerators, my friends!!!!

If you go to the PTV website and click on the tab for “results” you will see the list of campaigns that PTV has been involved in. The action that we participated in was postcards to registered Democrats in specific Florida counties with information on how to enroll in vote-by-mail. Turns out, much to my surprise, that Florida has a wonderful vote-by-mail system that enables a voter to enroll and for two federal election cycles, they will automatically be sent a mail-in ballot for every election. I wish New York had that. Given the pandemic and the fear that people will not feel safe going to the polls for in-person voting or, like in several primaries around the country, many polling places were closed due to staff shortages, all of this confusion in November can be avoided if people have signed up for vote-by-mail. Our cards gave Democratic voters all the information they needed to enroll in this program and ended with the tag line, “When FL Dems vote-by-mail, Dems win!” And needless to say, few battleground states are as important as Florida.

We all ordered postcards and stamps, signed up on the PTV website, created our sample cards and got approved and started working on our address lists. Our virtual Zoom Postcard-Writing Party on Thursday, June 25^th would be a social gathering to schmooze together while we all worked on our cards. Some folks had already finished several lists and others were just starting. Some members preferred to finish and mail their postcards without joining the Zoom, which was fine, while others looked forward to the group interaction.

For those of us on the virtual party, the event was a lot of fun and it was wonderful to catch up and share the time together. It was also gratifying to have younger women with kids at home join us. It is one of the ironies of this pandemic that being forced to go virtual has opened up our meetings to more members, particularly younger members with children at home.

“The pandemic has actually affected my activism in mostly positive ways,” said leadership member Lisa Marrin. “Stay-At-Home orders have given me much more time for postcard writing, Zooming and learning more about the history of party politics in the nation. Since so many of my children's activities were cancelled and I am working from home on my own schedule, I have been able to meet more often with the EEAN leadership committee and we have developed a great framework for our upcoming actions. I have committed to three different postcard projects and have just finished training on phone-banking. I am excited to engage in this way. The downside of political action during a pandemic is the lack of face-to-face contact with like-minded individuals and my reluctance to join in-person protests. As I try to put the health of myself and my family first, I just have not been able to bring myself to attend. Luckily, I can take satisfaction in my virtual activism and the fact that I am able to participate in those ways on a larger scale.”

Lisa’s friend, Stacie Coppola, is a new member who also has children at home and was able to join the postcard party Zoom. It was so uplifting to watch them participate and to hear how Stacie turned it into a teachable moment for her son and daughter, who are 12-year-old fraternal twins.

“I'm so grateful to have this opportunity to help out and to use it as a way to teach my children about the importance of participation,” said Stacie. “My children and I ended up having a really great discussion about the struggle that women and African Americans have had in getting the right to vote and how important it is not to squander that right. COVID-19 has really driven home the fear I have that my children will be facing a very different world than we all have. My husband usually expresses hesitancy about introducing them to the heaviness that comes with political topics but we both realize that this next generation will be facing challenges that will make it impossible for them not to be ‘political.’ Working on the postcards allowed them to see that participation, even on small levels, can be fun and comforting. The women at East End Action Network have a kindness of spirit that is very motivating and has encouraged me to take the edge off of my anger at where our country is and just get to work.”

At the end of the Zoom, everyone held up their cards so we could see all the amazing designs. I was blown away by the creativity of some of the designs and there was no doubt in my mind that Florida voters receiving these will take notice of them. Here are a few examples:

It is our hope that members will continue on their own requesting lists and mailing more postcards to Florida voters since no group activity is necessary to get more address lists. Once approved, when you finish a list, all you have to do is text the word “hello” to the mobile number and another address list with instructions for what to write on the card is emailed to you. Even once we start writing postcards for our Democratic nominee in CD#1, we plan on continuing our work with PTV. (Due to the large number of absentee ballots that needed counting, we have only just gotten the results that Stony Brook University Chemistry Chair Nancy Goroff has won the primary and will be the Democratic candidate to take on GOP Trump-clone Congressman Lee Zeldin in the fall).

The PTV system is user-friendly, interactive and fun. I was so intrigued by PTV that I reached out to Mr. McMullin to learn more about him and about PTV. He was open and friendly, exactly what one would expect from someone called “Tony the Democrat.” My first question was about the vote-by-mail action to Florida. I had assumed it was because of COVID. Turns out it wasn’t. They started this action with Florida voters in 2018.

“I don’t remember how it came to my attention,” he said, “but in Florida, you can enroll in vote-by- mail simply by making a phone call, only one phone call needed, and you are locked into automatically receiving a ballot by mail for every election. This is a powerful incentive for a volunteer trying to figure out how to spend their time and postage, because with an enrollment process as easy as a phone call, the likelihood of a positive outcome is much higher than with a different state where you have to request a ballot application, fill it out and mail it back, then fill out the ballot and mail that. All those steps reduce the number of people who will complete that enrollment. When I pitch to volunteers that I need their help to do this action, I want to give them an action that has the biggest chance of success. I hear from people why don’t we do this in Michigan or Arizona and the answer comes down to the ease of enrollment and the length of the term which can’t be matched by any other state. I can’t in good conscience ask our volunteers to spend the same kind of postage when there is a much lower success rate of enrollment.”

Tony also explained that having worked on this initiative over several years, it helps the county supervisors process these vote-by-mail requests. “This way they are not inundated, not flooded with requests which would happen if we held onto the postcards and mailed them all at once, then they would get swamped with new enrollments and their office staff would be beleaguered. That also would not serve the voter as well. By our volunteers writing and mailing them along the way, we are good partners and give the county supervisors an easier time.”

It is serendipitous that Florida has an excellent vote-by-mail system that makes it worthwhile for the time and expense of his volunteers and at the same time is arguably the most important of the battleground states. “We have known for a long time,” said Tony, “that Florida can be the firewall because there is no path for reelection for Trump without Florida. If Florida turns blue, that is all we need to stop Trump.”

There is another added benefit of vote-by-mail that extends beyond the presidential race. “Once Democrats are enrolled, they then get ballots for every election. Every study proves that if you are mailed a ballot automatically rather than relying just on voting in person, that this increases turnout throughout the state at every level of government.”

This connects so nicely to what Dr. Lara Putnam, historian at the University of Pittsburgh, talks about in my book, which is the need to create an ongoing progressive ecosystem that begins at the local level. I mentioned Dr. Putnam’s analysis to Tony. “I have goose bumps listening to you describe focusing on local elections. This is what I tell our volunteers, that their efforts with the postcards will help change behavior and strengthen the voting habit. It is hard to make voting a habit, we are talking about people with two jobs, single parents, people burdened with elder care issues and so they could be forgiven for missing a special election for county commissioner. But now, if they can get the ballot in the mail, it is just inevitable that they will participate at a higher rate.”

As good as Florida’s vote-by-mail system is, Tony explained to me that it used to be even better. No surprise, the change came once Republicans took over the state legislature. “Florida has a lot of pride in their vote-by-mail program, which used to be permanent. You would always get a ballot as long as you lived at the same address. Then when the GOP took over, they modified it to make it expire after two federal election cycles, generally four years. But to show that they really have no fundamental problem with voting by mail, they really just want to make it harder for everyone to vote, they grandfathered in those already enrolled so that they would still be permanent. At that point, the GOP had an advantage in vote-by-mail enrollments. It was an insidious way to game the system.”

But thanks to all the efforts to enroll Democrats in vote-by-mail, that GOP advantage is gone. According to a recent article in Politico, entitled, “Florida Democrats Gain Vote By Mail Advantage,” Democrats now hold a significant lead in vote-by-mail enrollments. “Democrats have opened up a 302,000-voter advantage over Republicans in vote-by-mail enrollment, an edge that could pay big dividends in President Donald Trump’s newly adopted must-win state.”

Helping Florida turn blue is so crucial, that Tony told me PTV will continue to focus on vote-by-mail this summer. “We are going to continue for the next couple of months, hopefully with another 600,000 postcards,” he said. After that, they will point their army of volunteers towards helping candidate campaigns. Right now, he can’t say which campaigns they will be helping. “I can’t know in the beginning of July which campaigns we are going to be writing for. I have some guesses based on conversations with people leading multiple candidate efforts in different states, such as Ohio and Texas, but it is a fluid situation and different campaigns sign up every week.” There is a web form on the PTV site that campaigns can fill out. “But the more volunteers we have, the more campaigns we can help. People are signing up and writing over 15,000 postcards a day, which is terrific. We try to forecast our writing capacity and I have a spreadsheet of different campaigns. We have 76,000 volunteers; think what we could do if we could double that size by November. And we are ready for that. We have the technology and the infrastructure to do that. In 2018, we did 1.9 million postcards in September and October. I think we could do 4-5 million this year if we have enough people involved. Really, I have to thank our volunteer writers, they are the backbone of this work and they recruit their friends and family. We don’t have a marketing budget. When we grow, it is because the volunteers are happy.”

I asked if the Republicans had a similar operation. “I have seen a handful of specific GOP campaign postcard activities, but nothing close to our volunteer base or to broad campaigns, that is one of the things that we have an advantage,” he said. “Imagine what it would take for another group to start what we do and build that volunteer base. If another group is just starting up, they will have a long road to get to where we are.”

I thanked Tony for taking the time to speak with me and for all he is doing to reach voters. I only had one last question. I was curious to know if any of the sample postcards ever get turned down. “It doesn’t happen often,” he said. “When it does, it might be because the writer didn’t pay close enough attention to the rules and then we tell them what they need to do to fix it which most people are happy to do. Unfortunately, we do occasionally hear back from people that this is too picky for them and it’s not a volunteer activity that suits them. But that is pretty rare.”

PTV was an activity that ideally suited our group. Our virtual event was a success and our members had enjoyed participating. And we were especially pleased that members were continuing to ask for more lists on their own and continued to mail more postcards. We will be planning more PTV parties this summer, virtual and possibly in-person with social distancing. And just maybe PTV could help us in our fight to unseat Zeldin.

For Sharon, who started with PTV on her own in 2017, she said it has been gratifying watching PTV grow. She also said it has taken on an even more meaning for the volunteer writers after watching Trump double down on his divisive and racist messages.

“I'm very impressed by the incredible amount of volunteers, all across the country, who are so seriously invested in Postcards To Voters,” she said. “On this fourth of July weekend, one volunteer shared on social media that they're using their postcard writing as ‘a distraction from the horrible speeches being made about America.’ Another writer felt ‘this is the most patriotic thing I could accomplish today.’ Volunteers stated they will save their celebrations for November. As the holiday weekend unwinds, I've just completed another ten postcards which are headed to Broward County to encourage vote-by-mail. I'm looking forward to our next virtual writing party or possibly an outdoor writing party with masks and social distancing guidelines a key factor. “

Go to the PTV website and give it a try. If you are part of a grassroots group or a book club, you can add a virtual event to your postcard-writing. But it is also an easy action you can do by yourself. I like writing and designing my cards at the end of the day while I sit and watch television, a good antidote to the news. You will find the time of the day that works best for you. And if you need a guidebook to show you how to integrate grassroots volunteerism into your daily life, read my book and meet the women who did exactly that. The book is available on Amazon.com and at Canio's Books (631) 725-4926. A book talk hosted by Canio’s Books can be found on the following link: https://www.facebook.com/caniosbooks/videos/983767798721737/

Speaking of my book, I have set up a fundraiser with the book as a way to say thank you to Tony for all he is doing for voters. PTV stays afloat from donations and to help them in that effort, I will be sending a signed copy of the book, free of charge, to the first 20 people who donate to PTV in response to this blog post. To help PTV track those donations, please add $.46 (46 cents) - in honor of the 46^th President we are all working hard to elect - to whatever amount you would like to donate. Here is the link for the donate tab on the PTV website: https://postcardstovoters.org/donate/. Follow the instructions to donate either with Paypal or by mailing a check. And don’t forget to add the 46 cents so that I know to mail you a copy of the book. Let’s grow their army of volunteers and make 5 million postcards for November happen.

In my next blog post, I will focus on phone-banking. There are many opportunities to phone-bank. Every candidate and campaign has phone-banking for volunteers. You can go right now to the Biden campaign’s website at https://joebiden.com/take-action/ and become a volunteer. You can also go to the campaign of any candidate in your district. All campaigns will set you up to phone-bank.

But like PTV, there are also groups conducting phone-banking to battleground states for vote-by-mail. The Florida Democratic advantage in vote-by-mail enrollments is being created not just by the postcards but by phone-banking as well. There are some advantages and disadvantages of each. With postcards, you have the advantage of working on them at any time of the day that is convenient for you. Your whole family can get involved and designing and coloring the postcards is fun. By contrast, phone-banking is a solitary experience and setting it up is a little more complicated than mailing postcards. But phone-banking offers one big advantage, the ability to directly interact with the voter, enabling us to answer their questions and help them get enrolled in vote-by-mail. For this reason, at EEAN, we decided to do both.

To get us started, EEAN leadership member Alex Margolis who is a powerhouse when it comes to voter outreach, both with postcards and with phone-banking, offered to give us a presentation about the phone-banking she has been doing. She has been working with a Florida Democratic group, FL Dems, who have organized a phone-banking outreach to enroll registered Democratic voters in Palm Beach County (PBC) in vote-by-mail. The action is called PBC VBM. They have a Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/GrassrootsPalmBeach/

Alex, who is a corporate attorney, told us about PBC VBM on the postcard party Zoom, explaining how this initiative works.

“There's really a unique opportunity in Palm Beach County, because the election supervisor though a Republican, seems to be pretty good and is working with the Democratic Party to facilitate enrolling voters in vote-by-mail. These calling list are all Democrats and it's a very easy phone call. You're not asking for money. You're not asking for support for a candidate. You're just asking if they're enrolled in vote-by-mail and stating that we want to help them enroll if they are not signed up for it. If they say ‘yes’, you enter that and it is automatically communicated and the supervisor will follow up with this voter to get them enrolled in vote-by-mail. I'm doing postcards also but with the phone calls, you're actually signing them up.”

We discussed that many of us are still a bit squeamish about talking to voters on the phone. But, as Rebecca pointed out, the nature of these calls should make it easier.

“What I find so alluring about this is that you're not asking people for money. You're not asking them to give you information that maybe they don't want to talk to you about. You're calling to provide a service for them, which in these times of everything being so confusing, I could see people really appreciating it,” said Rebecca on our Zoom call. “I also keep saying to myself, if I'm not going to do it now for this election, I'm never going to do it. This is the election to do it.”

We all agreed that if ever we were going to push ourselves out of our comfort zones and commit to phone-banking, this is the time to do it. And Alex said it is true that, in her experience, many voters she spoke with were appreciative. “This one guy, after I asked him if we can count on him to vote for Democrats this year, he said, ‘I'd vote for a tuna fish sandwich before I'd ever vote for Republican again.’ This other call was with a veteran and he was great. He said, ‘All women should be elected. Women should run the world. It would be so much better.’ Then on another call I spoke with some younger voters who really want to volunteer to help out. Some of these conversations have been really uplifting.”

Many of us signed up with PBC VBM as well as a training session with Alex who will take us through the process step-by-step. In my next blog post, I will be able to bring you this hands-on information about how it works. Hopefully that will help you get past your own reservations about phone-banking. Then, for the last blog post on voter outreach methods, I will focus on text-banking. In the meantime, sign up with PTV and get started on your postcards!

June 19, 2020: Canio's Book Talk

Thank you to everyone who joined us on June 16^th for a Zoom Book Talk with Canio’s Books. Special thanks to Maryann and Kathryn of Canio’s for hosting the event. I appreciated the opportunity to discuss the book as well as the lessons I learned from the experience of being part of the Resistance and from writing the book to the moment we are in today, particularly the Black Lives Matter protests around the country and the challenges to voting in the election this fall.

If you didn’t get a chance to join the Zoom or watch on the Facebook livestream, below is the link to the video of the book talk. If you have questions or comments about the book talk, you can reach out to me through the options on the Contact page here on the website.

Also, as I mentioned at the end of the book talk, I will be posting in an upcoming blog different actions we can all do from home to reach out to voters, particularly voters in the battleground states. These actions are to the six battleground states that will decide the Electoral College. These actions are postcards to voters, phone banking and textbanking. And the immediate actions right now are to states, like Florida, to advise voters how they can vote by mail, what may be an essential avenue due to the pandemic for voters to safely exercise their right to vote this fall. This blog will include not only the links for volunteers to join in these actions, but descriptions of how these actions work so you can feel comfortable trying them and excited to get started.

https://www.facebook.com/caniosbooks/videos/983767798721737/UzpfSTEwNDAwNDM3MTIxMDk2NDoxNDc1MDk4MzAxOTM3NTE/?modal=admin_todo_tour

May 7, 2020: The Grammar of Politics

I met Shivaji Sengupta, Ph.D., for the first time on March 7^th when I was the guest speaker at a Southampton Democratic Club breakfast in Hampton Bays (see a previous blog post about this event). It was a book talk and a book signing for The Resistance and Me. It was the first in a planned series of book talks but remains the only one because everything shut down shortly afterwards due to the coronavirus. (We are working on editing the video from this talk and will soon have a link for it here on the website).

During the question-and-answer period at the end of the talk, Shivaji stood up and introduced himself and said the loveliest things about the book and our grassroots activism and expressed his desire to become more involved in the fight to save our democracy. Before saying good-bye, we exchanged business cards and from that beginning, a pen-pal correspondence has blossomed which includes sharing each other’s letters to the editor before submitting them to hopefully be published. In fact, last week, our two letters to the editor were side by side in our local newspaper.

One day he surprised me by sending me not a letter to proofread but a review he wrote of my book. I asked him if I could put it here on the website. I also asked him to send me a short bio about himself as an introduction to the review. He said yes to both.

So, to begin, here is a little bit about Shivaji, in his own words:

Shivaji stayed in the United States and made it his home. He continued at Columbia University and received his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature. He and his wife raised three daughters, two of whom live in New York City. After a long career as an educator and administrator at Boricua College, he recently retired from his position as Vice-President of Academic Affairs. According to the college website, “Boricua College is a private college in New York City. The college was designed to serve the education needs of Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics and was founded by Victor G. Alicea and several others.” Shivaji is one of those founders.

He is also a prolific writer and has a regular column in The South Asian Times. His recent article, entitled “Comparing and Contrasting Corona Response by US and Indian Leaders” is a fascinating exploration of how these two countries have handled this pandemic. For both countries’ leaders, their concerns were more about themselves than public health.

https://thesouthasiantimes.info/comparing-and-contrasting-corona-response-by-us-and-indian-leaders/

Needless to say, that he would choose to cast his intellectual eye upon my book is an honor. The title of his review is “The Grammar of Politics.”

The Grammar of Politics: Barbara Weber-Floyd's The Resistance and Me and Jeffrey J. Harden's Multidimensional Democracy

I look forward to our exchanges of emails and phone calls and his ever-present encouragement to keep going. It isn’t easy to carry on the grassroots work of the Resistance in the age of COVID-19. For Shivaji, it became even harder when one of his closest friends died from the virus. Jose Israel Lopez, a Dean from their shared college, Boricua College in New York City, passed away on March 28th. They had last seen each other in January. Dean Lopez became ill and went downhill very fast. In an email, he described their relationship to me. As always, his poetic writing captured the emotions of the shocking news.

April 23, 2020: How We Got Here

(an edited version is featured in The Southampton Press at https://www.27east.com/southampton-press/how-we-got-here-1695833/ )

The news media has accurately reported how Trump’s mismanagement of COVID-19 has exacerbated this global health crisis. But Trump’s damage to our public health goes back to the beginning of his administration and for Congressman Lee Zeldin and the rest of the Republican Party, their culpability starts much earlier. It begins with the universal Republican vow to eliminate the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and is compounded by their ideological orthodoxy to starve every federal agency of funding, including those agencies that are charged with public health. Like every Republican, this was the platform Zeldin ran on in 2014 and this is how he has voted as a member of Congress. But these dual GOP missions – repeal the ACA and reduce the size of government – have directly contributed to the disastrous federal response to this crisis.

The ACA, while primarily concerned with health insurance access and patient protections, also focused on public health issues through the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). In 2010, the ACA established the Prevention and Public Health Fund (PPHF) at the CDC. With a dedicated budget, the PPHF, in coordination with other CDC programs, supported a public health mission that included the “early detection of and response to health threats.”

The GOP could not repeal the ACA while Obama was President, but once they took over the House after the 2010 election, largely on the strength of campaigning against the ACA, they worked hard to consistently weaken it, including weakening the PPHF. Then, in 2017, with the inauguration of Trump and complete control of the federal government, they went full-steam ahead to repeal the ACA and reduce the size of all federal agencies. The CDC and the PPHF were no exception. First, Trump and the GOP directly cut the PPHF budget as part of sequestration. Then they targeted the funding as part of their ACA repeal bill, the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which would have cut $1B from the PPHF. While that bill failed in the Senate and did not become law, that didn’t stop them. In early 2018, Trump signed the budget bill that cut the PPHF by $1B over ten years. Later in 2018, Trump eliminated the global health security office within the National Security Council (NSC) and made further cuts to public health programs by diverting money from the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his policy to detain migrant children. Public health experts at the time warned that such drastic moves would harm the country’s ability to respond to and contain outbreaks of disease.

Trump and Zeldin are now working overtime to bury this history. To deflect blame, Trump insists his name be stamped on the stimulus checks being mailed to desperate Americans. In a similar vein, Zeldin recently announced how he alone got much needed medical equipment rushed to Suffolk County. They would like you to forget how we got here.

Despite his incompetent record on public health, Congressman Zeldin is a member of the Congressional Coronavirus Task Force. Recently Trump appointed him to the White House Task Force on Reopening the Economy. But Zeldin’s economic record, such as opposing raising the minimum wage and supporting corporate tax cuts, is no better for working people than his record on public health. It is like appointing the arsonist to now come put out the fire.

April 8, 2020: Zoom Time

I am not sure why, but for the first time, each day this past week found me on multiple Zoom conference calls. Each of these was for a different group that I belong to, from my local Southampton Democratic Club to the national grassroots women’s group, SuperMajority. It is as if we all collectively woke up to the reality that this lockdown is going to be a long haul and this is the new normal not just for a few weeks but for a few months.

Like everyone, I am shaky with anxiety over this pandemic, worried that the people I know and love could become a statistic of this disease. I live in the suburbs outside of New York City where we have our own rising cases, though nothing like the five boroughs of the city. I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for 25 years and my heart is breaking for what I will always consider “my city.” But my worst, chest-tightening moments of panic come when I think of my family members who are nurses on the front lines of this crisis. How can it be that in the United States, a healthcare provider is now taking his or her life in their hands just going to work? Every single one of these heroes deserves more than thanks from a grateful nation, they deserve wartime hazardous duty-pay. In lieu of that, the least this government can do is have their student debt wiped off the books for the job they are doing, risking their lives to save ours. We need to all start a movement to make this a reality. What would be a great hashtag for this mission, #thanksarenotenough?

Two weeks ago my anxiety reached a maximum level when my husband, son and I all came down with a cold. How surreal that the common cold induced frantic days obsessively taking my temperature and sleepless nights of pure dread, kept awake by coughing that I could not determine if it was wet or dry. It was hard to get through to the primary care physician’s office, the line was always busy, but once I did speak to a nurse my question was, “at what point should we worry?” Since there was no fever, chills or shortness of breath, she told me it was probably exactly what it appeared to be, a simple cold, but if any of those three symptoms appeared, to call right back. Call right back, I thought? It took me hours to get through this time when I didn’t have fever, chills and shortness of breath. But each day the cold lessened and by week’s end had passed as colds are wont to do. But this simple cold left a residue of fear in its wake that made me reluctant to even go outside for a socially-distant walk.

So, I have asked myself if in the midst of this once-in-a-century public health and economic crisis, should I take a break from politics, if only to help maintain my sanity? On our Democratic Club call the focus was on how can we reach out and help those in our township who are really suffering because they can no longer afford to buy food. It felt good to be helping out with something that was not political. I also gave up watching my MSNBC line-up at night. I listen to music while riding my exercise bike rather than watching Rachel Maddow. Some nights we watch movies, particularly movies that make us laugh. I still read the newspaper each morning but I skim through a lot and I have tried not reading headlines on my phone all day. It has helped quiet some of the panic.

But even digesting a much lighter diet of news, I cannot escape one undeniable fact, that this crisis, all of it, from the number of infected and dead, to the dire shortage of personal protective equipment for our healthcare providers, to the shuttering of businesses and skyrocketing unemployment, to the food shortages for low-income families, every bit of this trauma the country is now enduring, has been made much worse by the incompetence, selfishness and corruption of the Trump administration. And this inescapable fact sits in the pit of my stomach and emits a rage so white-hot that I can’t ignore it. And because of that, I can’t stop worrying about politics and in particular, the election this fall.

The Washington Post put together a complete accounting of just how much of a mess the Trump administration has made of our preparedness for this crisis. The April 4^th article is entitled “The U.S. was beset by denial and dysfunction as the coronavirus raged: From the Oval Office to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded through the system and opportunities to mitigate the pandemic were lost.” It is a big, investigative deep-dive into the dysfunction. It is gut-wrenching and infuriating but maybe the most important article every single American needs to read.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/04/04/coronavirus-government-dysfunction/?arc404=true

On March 30^th the Editorial Board of The Boston Globe, put the blame for this failure of leadership squarely where it belongs. The title of the editorial says it all: “A President Unfit for a Pandemic. Much of the Suffering and Death Coming was Preventable. The President Has Blood on His Hands.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/30/opinion/president-unfit-pandemic/

To quote the editorial: “As the American public braces itself for the worst of this crisis, it’s worth remembering that the reach of the virus here is not attributable to an act of God or a foreign invasion, but a colossal failure of leadership.”

Much like The Washington Post article, the editorial goes through the entire timeline of failure on the part of the Trump administration and ends with the statement, “But come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the president’s watch.”

It is this need for a reckoning that mandates we stay focused on politics and keep our eyes on the November election, despite the pandemic that rages around us. When Trump was elected, our outrage sparked the Women’s March and created the anti-Trump Resistance. That movement powered the blue wave in 2018. Despite the fears that now haunt our days and plague our nights, we must not lose sight of what has always been our prime directive, to make sure Trump is a one-term president. Our work in the Resistance was how we channeled our rage then and it must be how we channel our rage now.

But unlike the last three years, we cannot organize and attend rallies, we cannot knock on doors and speak directly to voters, we cannot even be together in a planning meeting or a Happy Hour social event. All last week, on every Zoom call with every organization, we struggled to answer the same question, “How are we going to get the public engaged when we are stuck in our homes?”

In an article on, April 5^th, The New York Times addressed this dilemma from a campaign’s point of view. “With Campaigns in Remote Mode, Pandemic Upends Battle for Congress: As retail campaigning has become all but impossible amid the public health crisis, candidates tread carefully in an uncertain political environment.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/politics/congress-campaigns-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

This article did not address the dilemma from the non-candidate point of view, meaning how are we in the grassroots going to function this year if we cannot go outside? The next day, April 6^th, The New York Times corrected that oversight with an article looking at the impact on progressive campaigns and on the grassroots movement from the pandemic. “Progressives Built an Organizing Juggernaut for 2020. Then the Virus Hit: After a disappointing turn in the presidential race, grass-roots progressive groups focused on congressional races and down-ballot campaigns. In weeks, the coronavirus has destroyed their plans.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/us/politics/coronavirus-elections-democrats.html

To quote from that article: “The grim picture may have a profound political impact for the general election and beyond. Democrats were poised to have an organizing juggernaut ready for the 2020 election, with the goal of both reaching new voters and helping reverse the state and local losses they experienced during President Barack Obama’s years in power. Even more, liberal groups hoped this election cycle would formalize their political infrastructure, so the activism that erupted in response to Mr. Trump’s election could be harnessed going forward. That may still happen, but it will require creative financial and digital solutions, according to interviews with several leaders of progressive political organizations and left-wing candidates running for office in states like New York and Ohio. Optimists have called it a time for political innovation, while others worry the structural barriers could stymie the progressive movement at a critical crossroads.”

The article zeroed in on the bind we are all in. We spent 2017 learning how to get out of our houses and speak in person to voters. Then in 2018 we utilized that knowledge and those skills to propel the largest voter turnout for a midterm election in 40 years. Now we have to learn how we are going to be effective without person-to-person contact.

Below are a few initiatives that are trying to address that need. The first is an app called Outvote that is mentioned in this article. Here is the description on their website: “Outvote is an app that makes it easy to support the causes and campaigns you care about. The goal of the app is to promote voter participation within progressive campaigns. Our larger mission is to build a community of organizers that remain active between election cycles. By partnering with the biggest campaigns, advocacy organizations, and nonprofits, the Outvote community will be able to mobilize around current events, elections, and critical moments in policy formation for social equality and justice.” https://www.outvote.io/

But Outvote seems to be primarily for organizers, a valuable resource but not really a direct conduit to voters. Indivisible has an ongoing project with a direct line to voters that activists can participate in from their homes. It is called VoteFWD and involves writing letters to voters in swing states. Here is the description from the Indivisible website: ‘Want to get out the vote in key states from the comfort of your own home? Indivisible is excited to be partnering this election cycle with VoteFWD. VoteFWD provides activists with names, addresses and a data-driven proven template to write letters to voters in important states. Letter writers will save their letters and send them right before the election so that voters receive them at the perfect, most-strategic moment.” https://indivisible.org/resource/write-letters-voters-votefwd

On my Zoom call with SuperMajority, which joined with Pantsuit Nation, I heard about two projects. The first is called Turnout Tuesday where they are asking their members to call their state Secretaries of State and press them on how they are going to use the federal funds to make sure the vote in November is secure, particularly if they are going to invest in mail-in ballots. The second is text messaging to voters and they have been conducting training seminars to teach members how to do “rapid response textbanking” to alert voters about important issues. https://supermajority.com/

At my local Indivisible group, East End Action Network (EEAN), we were already planning postcard-writing parties, creating and mailing personal postcards to voters in our district, as we did in 2018. This will be a joint project with Indivisible North Fork. These events will begin in July, after the New York primary on June 23^rd when we have a Democratic congressional nominee. While it is certainly more fun to party together (you can read the descriptions of these events in my book, The Resistance and Me, available on Amazon), we can convert this initiative to home-based postcard writing rather than in groups if we are still not able to gather together by the summer. The end goal of getting the postcards out there can still be achieved.

These are all good ideas. But they don’t go far enough. The voter suppression outrage by the GOP in Wisconsin underscores the extreme lengths the Republicans will go to keep people from voting. We are going to need bigger and bolder ideas to take the place of speaking to voters in person if we are going to be able to counter those GOP schemes. Possibly because they are aware of this challenge, Indivisible will be hosting a series of training webinars in April for Indivisible leadership on how to better use the virtual space during this lockdown period. If you are a member of an Indivisible group, someone in your leadership has probably already received an email about signing up. If not, reach out to your Indivisible contact. I tried to find a link for these webinars on their general website and could not find one. I look forward to whatever ideas come out of these webinars and will include them in later blog posts.

I am particularly worried what happens to voter registration. Normally the spring and early summer are key periods to focus on voter registration but how can that be done digitally and from our homes? I have been wondering if it is at all possible to conduct a virtual voter-registration drive and I would love to hear back if anyone has any ideas about this. How can we reach residents in the district who are not registered to vote? Is that even possible? They wouldn’t be in MiniVAN but would there be a way to cross reference residents with voter registration rolls to determine constituents who aren’t registered? We could mail them personal letters including the voter registration form if they cannot register online through the state motor vehicle department. Is there any way at all we could create such a list?

Along with my fear that we are not going to be able to register new voters, is a concern that our digital efforts are not going to reach the Independents and Unaffiliated voters we need to win in November. Maybe we should think about sending postcards right now to these voters with the facts about how the Trump administration has mishandled the pandemic, facts that would break through the fog of misinformation that Trump and his propaganda machine at Fox News are spewing out. These postcards could also have contact information for services that many constituents need during this crisis, such as food banks and how to file for unemployment benefits. And these voters are in MiniVAN. We would have to figure out how to pay for printing the postcards and the postage since these would not be funded by the campaigns.

We know from the midterm election how much time, effort and boots on the ground it took to power the blue wave. It is a process that starts months before with voter registration, educating the public, supporting primary candidates and then getting-out-the-vote. We do not have the luxury of waiting for the crisis to pass, waiting until we are able to knock on voters’ doors, not while Trump and the right-wing media saturate the airwaves with lies about this pandemic while at the same time erecting barriers to voting. If we are going to hold Trump and the GOP accountable in November, we need to act now and to do that we need bigger and bolder ideas of how we are going to reach voters, counter the lies and protect the ability for every American to vote.