Hell yes, grassroots campaigning still counts!

In campaign postmortems, there's the usual angst-filled punditry out there that says nothing the Dems did, and especially nothing the grassroots did, mattered at all. 

Bull-bleep. As the season geared up, I described what we were going to see as a "hot and cold running volunteer" election and I stand by that. Vast numbers of people turned out to do the difficult job of direct voter contact in various forms. That's what happens when people really care and/or feel truly threatened.

And their efforts show up in the results. Where there wasn't much of a Harris-Walz campaign -- in the reliable blue states which saw only national ads and online media -- the shift toward Trump from 2020 was in the 6 percent range. Lots of Dems and Dem leaners didn't vote. But in the battleground states where money was invested and activism thrived, the shift was closer to 3 percent. Still too much obviously, but quite different. Yes, there was a red tide coming in, but some places Democratic (and small "d" democratic) activism came much closer to stemming that tide.

Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, sent out an informative message which aims to describe what party efforts, including at the grassroots, meant in his state. Some of what he saw:

... The shift here was just one quarter the size [of the national deficit]: a 1.5% swing from 2020. Not because Trump was weaker here than elsewhere, but because we were stronger.

Thanks to tens of thousands of heroes—our candidates, the campaign, party infrastructure, allies, and volunteers—we persuaded and turned out even more voters for Harris than we did for Biden in 2020. We lost Wisconsin by just 0.9%—the smallest margin of any state in America.

2024 was a high turnout year, second only to 2020 nationwide. But in most states, turnout went down slightly. In Wisconsin, overall turnout went up—by 1.3%, the most in the country. 

He describes the configuration of forces, groups, and miscellaneous people who made up the Wisconsin campaign: 

... Roughly 100,000 volunteers this year took part in the fight in Wisconsin.

The presidential campaign in Wisconsin and the WisDems core team worked together, hand in glove, on a constant basis. That integration was the product of years of work, relationships, and strategy. It was also made possible by the powerhouse Coordinated Campaign. ...

Every one of the 100,000 people who volunteered, including tens of thousands who knocked on doors and made phone calls in Wisconsin this year, helped Tammy Baldwin win Wisconsin, helped make huge gains downballot, and helped ensure that Harris came closer to winning here than any other battleground state.

The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class. ... Enormous thanks to all the groups involved in mounting an absolutely blockbuster field and communications operation in Wisconsin. 

Elections rely on a three-legged stool: the candidate campaigns, the party and volunteers—and allied groups. ...

Wikler's picture of the three-legged stool may be particular to Wisconsin. He heads one of the most effective Democratic parties in the country. In much of the country, especially bluer states, the three legged stool of progressive campaigning probably looks more like 1) candidates and party infrastructure of varying quality; 2) union workers where such exist; and 3) para-campaign and civil society groups like Seed the Vote, the ACLU, and enviros who've internalized that they have to play in elections to survive. 

But whatever organizational form that the wider democracy campaign assumes in the future, it will demand what Wikler enjoins:

... we organize in every corner and every community in Wisconsin, year-round.

Under-recognized is that the experiences and connections made when literally millions of people are activated in a campaign changes many of the people who participate. As legendary California organizer Fred Ross asserted: 

No good organizing is ever lost.

The period ahead may seem bleak, but there are a hell of a lot of us, we've seen each other, and we can get organized and feisty.

Ukraine thrown to Putin's mercies

Unlike many of my friends on the generally progressive side of things, I've long believed that US support for the flawed, but democratically legitimate, Ukrainian state was a right action. This is the first US intervention I've supported in a lifetime of rejection of US imperialism, yet support for Ukraine feels the natural continuation of a long trajectory. Russia's war is an imperial war, seeking to subjugate and absorb a people who want the freedom to define their own way. Yes, I'm something of a quasi-pacifist -- but Russia's crimes against an occupied population are heinous and should not be minimized.

The election of Donald Trump presumably means that Ukrainians are to be thrown to Putin's mercies. Europe is unprepared to step up and replace us. This is a crime much akin to western democracies' abandonment in the 1930s of the Second Spanish Republic to Hitler and Mussolini's pet local strongman, Francisco Franco. That betrayal did not slake the appetite of that era's fascists -- this abandonment won't today either. And we in the United States are even less prepared or even able to recover from our folly than we were then. Bad times indeed. 

• • •

Mick Ryan is a retired major general in the Australian Army. He writes a substack of military analysis.

A Peace Plan for Ukraine?: The West’s strategy for Ukraine is no longer failing. It has clearly failed.

... when the combined wealth of NATO’s five biggest members (U.S. Germany, UK, France and Canada) is twenty times that of Russia, and their military outstrips Russia in technology, size and capability, is a searing indictment about the strategic thinking, execution and will in what is currently known as ‘the west’.

It did not have to be that way. But a generation of western political leaders that were conditioned into slovenly strategic thinking by the long post-Cold War peace and the discretionary, slow-paced wars of the past two decades have been unable to sufficiently adjust their mindsets to deal with the ruthlessness of Putin and his supporters.

There is an old Chinese saying: strangle the chicken and frighten the monkey. It is a saying that a PLA General used with a friend of mine one time. In essence, if you wish to shape the behavior of a big competitor, attack and destroy a small ally of the competitor.

Unfortunately, the U.S. and NATO ‘strategy’ for Ukraine over the past three years, as well as their strategic impatience and inclination to enter into negotiations with a Russia that has the strategic initiative, means that the West instead has ‘fed the chicken and encouraged the monkey’.

We will regret this. And so, eventually, will our citizens.

• • •

In 2015, the British journalist Tim Judah, veteran observer of too many wars including the agony in the Balkans in the 1990s and 2000s, published In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine. This is a little book of vignettes from the early stages of the war between Ukrainians engaged in forming their European national identity and others who supported the continuation of life within the Russian imperial sphere. Long before the Russian invasion of 2022, Judah shed light on the creativity and resilience of so many in this benighted part of the world.

Despite being such a big country, Ukraine, for most of us who live the western part of the continent, is, or was, somewhere not very important. ...The aim of this book is not to record a blow-by-blow account of the events that led to the Maidan revolution of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, or the war that followed. ...

What I thought was that between journalism and academic books there was not much that explained Ukraine, that made it a vibrant place full of people who have something to say and tell us. Wherever I went I found, as in few other places I have been, just how happy people were to talk. Then I understood that this was because no one ever asks them what they think. Often when they started to talk, you could hardly stop them. If we listen to people who can understand why they think what they do, and act the way they do.

In Ukraine ... people have been taken for granted for so long, as voters or taxpayers or bribe payers, that when finally the rotten ship of state springs leaks and begins to list, everyone is shocked. But they should not have been. ... This book is about what I saw, what people told me and also those parts of history that we need to know in order to understand what is happening in Ukraine ...

Judah might not find the same openness to conversation today, two years into a devastating, existential war. Or perhaps he might. Ukraine has long surprised us. We do not know yet how the next chapter plays out.

"I never knew how much they hated us."

That was the conclusion of a brave and brilliant young woman who worked with Erudite Partner on the campaign just concluded.

This was an election which confirmed the existence of a wide gender gap. And for the youngest voting group, this wounds and can morph into righteous rage.

Jessica Valenti, who writes Abortion Every Day, communicates this aspect of our recent catastrophe:

The Fury Gap
Young women were radicalized overnight

If you thought the gender divide was bad before, you haven’t seen anything yet. Donald Trump’s win this week, bolstered by online shitposters and billionaire misogynists, has shifted something fundamental in young women. And while we’ll see plenty of ink spilled in election post-mortems about the online radicalization of young white men—as there should be—it would be a mistake to miss the story of how this election is doing something similar to their female counterparts.

Over the last two days, I’ve watched as young women’s TikToks and social media posts went from inconsolable shock to pure, hot rage. I saw in real time as those in their teens and 20s—some of whom voted for the first time—realized the depths of their country’s disdain for them. 

For those of us in middle age or older, there wasn’t anything revelatory about the election; we’ve lived that betrayal for years. But to understand for the first time that America would rather elect a rapist than a woman is soul-crushing. Even worse: Realizing just how many men voted for Trump not in spite of his sexual predation—but because of it.

As difficult as that epiphany is to bear, it did not take long for this younger generation of women to respond with a resounding fuck that and fuck you. ...

... This is a generation of young women who grew up online, steeped in a world of social media misogyny and trolls who comment on their bodies and demand they “make me a sandwich.” And that’s on top of getting the same lessons that women my age did—told to watch what you wear, when you walk, and who you trust.

So I have to imagine that after a lifetime of being expected to eat shit, waking up on Wednesday morning knowing that the men in your lives voted away your humanity made the decision to leave them behind pretty easy.

Especially considering how many took the mask off immediately after the election was called: Since Tuesday, young men have flooded women’s mentions with “your body, my choice”—a phrase that some even started shouting at little girls at school just a day later.

It’s that Republican-enabled impunity that will keep young women furious. Why put up with even a minute of it? ...

Let's those of us who thought we'd grown beyond having to scrabble to be recognized as fully adult and human in a man's world, figure out how to be there for these young ones who newly feel the pain we hoped we'd put behind us.

It's the COVID, stupid!

Of course not entirely. And the virus has plenty of enablers and accelerators. But the horrid result of the Presidential election convinces me that pandemic effects are still working through society. 

Mostly we're too close to the election to be very discerning. I took a broad view yesterday in the comments on David Rothkopf's substack effort to understand what the voters have done:

[David] tossed this remark in as a throwaway: "We still do not fully understand or appreciate what a game changer COVID was for our society." I will not be surprised if future historians with more distance suggest this was the central phenomenon in our politics.

COVID proved to us that government could not protect us -- or that it's response was cruel and useless --or somebody was trying to put something over on us. And many more things, all disillusioning.

I have seen surveys somewhere that internal resilience to the COVID shocks was highest among old people, even though we were objectively the most vulnerable. Very young people were worst thrown off-center. The in-betweens, in-between. [Found the study here. Does seem to say what I remembered.]

In the conditions of 2020-2025 America, our political order just wasn't up to a worldwide plague. Much follows from that, much of it more ultimately damaging than the plague itself ...

Before the vote, Patrick Healy ran focus groups for the New York Times:

The worst of the pandemic may feel far away now, but as we look at the Harris versus Trump contest on Tuesday, Covid is the essential prism through which to understand the trajectory of the last three years in America. The pandemic felled Mr. Trump in 2020, bringing out the true autocrat for all to see on Jan. 6, 2021, and fueled his hunger for the second term he felt he was owed. Covid shaped the economy that Mr. Biden tried to revive through policies that proved inflationary. The shocks and aftershocks of the lockdowns and closures set many of our focus group participants on harder paths in life, from schoolchildren to college students to workers to the elderly.

Covid changed and scarred America. Desperation set in for people who thought of themselves as financially stable or middle class. The frustration we heard in our early focus groups in 2022 metastasized into anxiety in 2023 and intensified into anger in 2024. Listening to them, I stopped seeing anxiety and anger as two distinct emotions. They were one and the same by the time the presidential general election began this year.

So many people talked about their lives before and after Covid that it influenced how I saw Mr. Trump’s chances and Mr. Biden’s challenges in this election (and how those challenges, inevitably, shifted onto Ms. Harris). ...

Nowhere in the world following the pandemic where elections genuinely matter have incumbent parties sustained their power as before. Sometimes the deep societal disruption has had results democratically oriented people can applaud. Voters bounced the Tories in Britain resoundingly and replaced the authoritarian party in Poland more narrowly. Even Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist party which runs not entirely free elections saw its margins decreased. 

Meanwhile, far right parties threw the previous bums out in Italy and Argentina, installing the more and less responsible far right.

Our societies have proved far more fragile than they look. We're enduring animals; we'll right ourselves, more or less. 

But the cost will be great. And there'll be novel challenges.

Friday cat blogging

 

The cats seem happy to have Erudite Partner back from the Reno campaign. She has resumed one domestic habit -- snapping pictures of the beasts. They seem to figure there's someone else who opens cans.

It's ugly. We carry on.

So we have done it. We have chosen disorder and disunity, criminality and cruelty, a cowardly attempt to turn back the clock in preference to choosing courage to search out a way forward. We, collectively, have revealed our shallowness and our foolishness.

Would that that this were a momentary detour. But I don't think it is. 

The riches of this land, both material and spatial, have given the motley collection of striving humans who live and jostle here a good 250 year run. (After we'd forcibly extirpated the previous inhabitants.) But we seem to have run out our string. 

The challenges of this moment in time are enormous: a climate that is becoming more and more hostile to life as we've known it, a world in which very different people and cultures are tossed up next to and often at odds with each other, exploding understandings of the malleability of genders, gender roles, and family structures. Not to mention, as in all eras, of plenty of aspiring crooks and petty tyrants who are only out for themselves and feel no responsibility to the collective "we." 

It's hard under the best of circumstances for large groups of humans to organize ourselves humanely. The mostly European-origin, mostly male-headed fraction of us has enjoyed something like the best of circumstances in this U S of A for a couple of centuries, but we're clearly coming back to the human norm while the natural balance around us collapses.

What to do? The answer is the same as always:

• Be kind to one another.

• Where people suffer, have their backs and lift up the weak..

• Don't get in their way when they lift themselves.

• Know that all people are both capable of horrors and infinitely valuable.

• Build the most humane institutions we can envision and create.

• Live without knowing when and where hope might break through -- and be bravely ready to notice when it happens. This last is harder than it should to be. That's who we are.

 I may need to give the blog a rest for a bit. Or not ...

Kamala's closing message

Today, we the people get to decide ...

From her closing speech in Philadelphia last night:

“We have an opportunity in this election to finally turn the page on a decade of politics that has been driven by fear and division. We are done with that. We are exhausted with it. America is ready for a fresh start, ready for a new way forward, where we see our fellow Americans not as an enemy, but as a neighbor,” she said.

“Ours is a fight for the future, and ours is a fight for freedom, including the most fundamental freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do,” she said. And she pledged always to put “country over party and self and to be a president for all Americans.”

“Tonight…we finish as we started: with optimism, with energy, with joy, knowing that we the people have the power to face our future and that we can confront any challenges we face when we do it together.”

“We still have work to do,” she said. “We like hard work. Hard work is good work. Hard work is joyful work. And make no mistake: We will win.”

Now back to the phones to call those harried voters in Philly one more time! 

Here's yesterday's canvassing launch in Reno; these folks are coming to turn out your vote -- with joy!

While we fixate on Trump ... MAGA mess below creates opportunities

The Downballot reports that Democrats are contesting far more state legislative seats all over the country than Republicans.

Across the 85 legislative chambers holding regularly scheduled elections in 44 states this year, Republicans are defending 3,169 seats while Democrats are protecting 2,616. But Republicans have failed to field a candidate in 1,066 Democratic seats, while Democrats have left 1,127 GOP seats uncontested.

While the Democratic figure for uncontested seats is slightly higher in raw numbers, on a percentage basis, they're playing more offense: Democrats are challenging Republicans in 64% of GOP-held seats, while Republicans, conversely, are contesting 59% of Democratic seats.

The totals reflect strong Democratic recruitment in many states, including Wisconsin, North Carolina, Florida, and even Idaho. In total, Democrats are running 2,042 challengers compared to 1,550 for the GOP. When accounting for open seats (which are also tallied in our new data set), Democrats are fielding 2,485 non-incumbents, versus 2,224 for Republicans.

The disparity also arises from the current dysfunction in the GOP. Lots of veteran legislators retired or were dumped by MAGA voters in primaries.

Altogether, 124 GOP legislators who wanted another term were denied renomination by voters, often for allegedly failing to adhere to far-right orthodoxy. Just 28 Democratic lawmakers, by contrast, lost primaries this year.

This is no way to build a political party. Perhaps a mob ... 

Assuming we live to fight another day, there's lots to build on here.

Women making it happen

As any number of commentators are reminding us today, polls don't win elections. Still, the election commentary world is thrown off by this bombshell:

Can it be true? Seems mighty unlikely given all recent past history in the Hawkeye state. Iowa used to be a swing state, but since voting for Obama in 2008 and 2012 has turned solidly Republican. Still, the Des Moines Register-Selzer poll reported out here is thought to be one of the best in the business and now says Harris has climbed into a four point lead.

Jess Piper is a rural Democratic organizer in neighboring Missouri, who lives only three miles from southern Iowa. She's a popular visiting speaker to embattled rural Democrats in both states. And she reports the lay of the land. The DM poll doesn't surprise her.

... I spoke in Davis County, Iowa almost two years ago. We met at the fairgrounds in the building next to the Swine Pavilion. I was asked to come and speak on state politics including Kim Reynold’s school voucher scheme and the Iowa abortion ban. I sat down to another potluck with midwestern sushi — a pickle slathered with cream cheese and rolled up in a piece of ham, sliced into little sushi rolls. I washed it down with lemonade and made sure to snag a Scotcharoo before I spoke.

The abortion ban was the topic of conversation with the women in this group, and I have news for those politicians going around thinking that abortion bans are only relevant to women of child-bearing age…they are wrong.

Women know that abortion bans impact every part of our lives. We know bans drive OBGYNs out of our states making any gynecological care difficult. We are losing women’s healthcare in states with bans. Rural women are hit particularly hard with an abortion ban.

... Here’s the thing that a lot of pollsters have been getting wrong: they don’t think abortion will be the reason that older women choose to vote for a Democrat. And I know that isn’t true. I have talked to hundreds of folks on the ground in places like Iowa. I’ve spoken to so many women.

Abortion may be seen as a political strategy to some, but it is life or death for women and girls.

... I know that the women are making it happen. Boys, look away while I tell a funny story. Recently, I was at an event with [rural podcaster] Fred Wellman…he doesn’t speak at small rural events as often as I do. He said of this particular event: “This is running so well. We are on time and there is a schedule of events and food too.”

I told him. “You know why, right? Women organized the event.” He laughed and then realized how truthful I was. I then told him about the one event I have attended in the last two years that was organized by a man. I knew it as soon as I arrived because there was no water, no coffee, and no sweet treats.

True story.

Women are taking the lead in this election and it’s because we have everything to lose. Our lives are on the line. Our children and grandchildren will suffer the consequences of a Trump win.

Women will organize events and knock doors and make calls and participate as election judges and create GOTV events and we will also feed you. We will give you information and warm your belly. Women are driving this election and it’s being done in a particularly feminine fashion.

This is the year of the woman. The stars have aligned. I am optimistic but a little scared. Excited but pragmatic....

Piper is working to pass the initiative to make abortion legal in her home state. Criss-crossing her own state, she's cautiously hopeful about that proposition too.

All Saints, All Souls, Dia De Los Muertos 2024

Remembering this year, two who've gone before:

Cliff Lichter was a friend from my years as part of the Catholic Worker movement in New York City and San Francisco. 

Cliff wandered the country for decades as an itinerant pilgrim, without fixed home or property, as the Spirit took him. He turned up with little warning at Catholic Worker houses of hospitality, monasteries and various intentional communities. He always helped out with whatever menial work needed doing. He was almost ostentatiously humble, but as you got to know him, you realized his intense piety was not for show; the guy really lived within a mystical universe that somehow sustained his unlikely existence. 

His Catholic Worker friend Brian Terrell wrote of Cliff and provided an epitaph:

Our dear friend and brother Cliff Lichter died on July 11, to continue his pilgrimage on another plane. Cliff had been a soldier and a Jesuit brother and a hospital orderly before finding his vocation as a wanderer. 

... He carried with him a note of introduction from Dorothy Day, dated Sept. 1, ’71, calling Cliff a “dear friend.” “I hope that he finds Catholic Worker friends and receives hospitality wherever he goes.”

In recent years, some of those good Catholic Worker friends in Worcester, Massachusetts, saw that he was well taken care of.  ...

This was Cliff.

“By the grace of God I am a Christian man, by my actions a great sinner, and by calling a homeless wanderer of the humblest birth who roams from place to place. My worldly goods are a knapsack with some dried bread in it on my back, and in my breast pocket a Bible. And that is all.” The Way of the Pilgrim, 19th century Russia

• • •

In 2000, doing his thing at some conference

Unexpectedly, Hunter Cutting died in September from pulmonary hypertension. He had trained legions of justice organizers and climate campaigners in the Bay and beyond on how to interact with media. He was my neighbor in the Mission; he was working down the block from the homeless encampment where the SFPD shot Luis Gongoro Pat in 2016. I would see him at vigils where Luis's family demanded justice from the city. Hunter leaves a shocked family; he left us all too soon.

Halloween on the phone bank

The dialer got into the spirit of the day on the UniteHERE phonebank yesterday.

 

While waiting for someone to pick up in Philly, it displayed screens like this with the phone icon jiggling.

 

Gotta keep the phone crew amused. We'll be on through the election, chasing down voters for Harris-Walz and supporting a couple of thousand canvassers in the battleground states.

Women finding a way; it's traditional

The MAGAs don't like women. In fact, we scare them. We might just think for ourselves.

Note from a public women's bathroom

So contends feminist journalist Jill Filipovic. 

There is ... conservative rage and panic over the prospect of their wives voting for Kamala Harris and simply not telling them. Harris supporters have launched a strategy of telling women that their votes are private, and no one has to know who you cast your ballot for — including your Trump-supporting husband. Fox News’s Jesse Waters griped that a woman voting for Harris and not telling her husband is “the same thing as having an affair... that violates the sanctity of our marriage.” That, he said, “would be D Day.” (Waters, it’s worth noting, divorced after he had an affair and is now married to his former affair partner).

Donald Trump, for his part, has doubled down on his Big Daddy pitch to women: “I want to protect the women of our country,” Trump said at a rally. “They said sir I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say… I said well I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not.”

Which doesn’t sound so far from “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

This is the misogyny election. It’s the election of abortion bans. It’s the election of conservative husbands who are enraged at the very thought of their wives having minds of their own. It’s the election of a man who boasts about sexual assault and demeans women who challenge him in the crudest of terms. ...

Here's hoping women can bring this contest home. The polls show an enormous gender gap between the voting intentions of men and women. It's girls against the boys. And the boys may get all hot up -- but do they vote? In general, women cast a considerable majority of ballots in presidential elections.

• • •

None of this is entirely new. I've written here before about learning how to work elections from my Republican committee-woman mother and her diligently maintained turnout lists. She patrolled her precincts and woe to the Republican voter who didn't show up. "Too busy; went fishing" said one indignant note on a voting record.

Yet in the 1964 presidential contest between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, I was always sure she secretly pulled the lever for the Texan. She had dragged me to the kick-off for Goldwater's running mate, the local forgettable Congressman from nearby Lockport, William Miller. He was a small-minded, abrasive McCarthyite. She distributed the Goldwater lit. But Goldwater scared her. She couldn't vote for a man she thought both rigid and dangerous. So I am pretty sure she didn't.

My father dutifully turned out for Barry. But none of this stuff engaged him.

My mother remained a Republican until she died in 1999. I wonder whether she'd still be a Republican today? Upper middle class white women with college degrees in cities, like her, have mostly "evolved," now voting as Dems whether they trumpet it or not.

If Harris wins, a lot of women will have found their own way.