Don't erase the women who made this possible ...

The excitement, shading toward euphoria, of this unlikely campaign season seems to have settled into something more like a dedicated slog toward November 5. After the Biden withdrawal, the Harris-Walz coming out party at the convention, and anxious anticipation of a debate at which Kamala demonstrated she could wipe the floor with Donald, many of us are just working away at ensuring she wins. It's not a sure thing, but we are on track to elect Kamala Harris our 47th president so long as we do the work.

But before it gets lost, I want to share snippets of Rebecca Traister's thoughtful account of "How a women-led movement, born in the devastation of 2016, put Democrats on the brink of making history." Many women have worked for years laying the groundwork for the Harris groundswell.

... Harris is benefiting from the intense ground-level electoral engagement provoked by Clinton’s loss. It’s worth noting how much of the 2016 result, in which Clinton did win a majority of American voters, stemmed from the certainty on the part of those running her campaign, the Democratic Party, and the political media that she would take the White House and that Trump could never. Millions of Americans didn’t act in advance of November 8, 2016, in part because no one had made clear to them that they had to, that this was an emergency — and they then awoke on Wednesday morning to an emergency. At which point legions of them began to change their relationship to politics and civic participation.

The Women’s March took place the day after Trump’s inauguration, and the sea of ordinary people was so much larger than Trump’s party that it became the original trigger for the former president’s obsession with crowd size.

Kamala Harris, having been sworn in for her first Senate term not three weeks earlier, spoke at that march. “Even if you’re not sitting in the White House,” she said, “even if you’re not a member of the United States Congress, even if you don’t run a big corporate super-PAC … you have the power. We the people have the power. And there is nothing more powerful than a group of determined sisters, marching alongside with their partners and their determined sons and brothers and fathers, standing up for what we know is right.”

... “Women-led grassroots organizing gets dismissed by the Beltway class,” texted Katie Paris, who founded Red Wine & Blue in advance of the 2020 election. The group organizes multiracial suburban women, a Democratic response to the Moms for Liberty groups driving Republican turnout; Red Wine & Blue now has 500 groups nationwide, compared with Moms for Liberty’s 310. “But they really may have no idea what’s been going on in the middle of America,” Paris said. “Do they have any idea that we organize in our communities year-round and not just around elections? That we pay attention not just to presidential races but to school boards and school levies and whatever else needs tending in our communities? I was just listening to NYT Nate [Cohn] on The Daily and it’s like they have no comprehension of any dynamic outside of the candidates and their campaigns. It’s like they’re trying to report on the storm without checking the weather.”

It’s true that too few in the upper reaches of American politics take this level of organizing seriously, even as these efforts have, more than once in the past eight years, saved the Democratic Party in elections that everyone predicted it would lose, corrected its long-term failures to build state and local power, and ushered a new generation into office — composing a Democratic winning streak that stretches back not just to Dobbs but to Democrats flipping 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates in 2017.

... It’s hard to stress how unprecedented it is for a presidential campaign’s official launch to be powered by Black-sorority and abortion-related groups. There was no elaborate advance planning for this, but that’s sort of the point: Where was Harris when the music stopped and she became the nominee? Already talking to Black women and abortion providers and storytellers. ...

Yes, the joyous hope that we might, finally, rid ourselves of the felon and rapist who incites so much hate unites a multitude of improbable allies. But the women have been here from the beginning ...

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