Ignore the polls that say the Republicans are likely to win back the House next year. They’ll simply depress you.
Ignore the polls that say suburban voters are deserting the Republicans. They’ll simply give you false hope.
The election is 18 months away. That’s a lifetime in political terms.
Ignore those utterly tiresome people who say the Republican Party is dead. NO IT ISN’T. That supposedly “dead” party could win it all in 2022 and use their power to overturn a Democratic victory in 2024. So for god’s sake could everyone stop yammering about the “death” of the Republican Party. It is very much alive, and its adherents are pushing voter suppression, voter roll purges, control of state and local election boards, and allowing state legislatures to overturn election results.
Am I making myself clear?
You know why the Republicans win in Florida so much—I mean, besides the torrent of bullshit lies coming out of them 24/7—? They contact their voters face to face. They use deep canvassing. They talk to their people directly. THEY GET OUT THE VOTE. We may despise them as people, but they know how to win. And we need to copy them.
I know it’s early. But now is the time to start cranking up the Get Out the Vote efforts.
Deep canvassing, comprehensive and widespread, is utterly necessary. We need to be building or reviving our GOTV apparatus NOW. We need to keep fighting the GQP’s voter suppression in court. And we need to remind ourselves of a hard truth: The Republican Party is trying to establish a right-wing dictatorship in the United States, one in which they can never be voted out. This statement may seem extreme to you, but I assure you the evidence is growing increasingly abundant every day. From David Leonhardt in The New York Times:
In more than 10 states, including Texas, Florida, Georgia and Arizona, Republican lawmakers have responded to Trump’s defeat by moving to make voting more difficult. It’s true that some of these measures are defensible on other grounds and others may have less impact than Democrats claim. But the intent of the laws is clear, and they will surely have some effect.
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Provisions that target heavily Democratic areas — like Georgia’s limits on drop boxes — are particularly blatant. “The typical response by a losing party in a functioning democracy is that they alter their platform to make it more appealing,” Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, has told The Times. “Here the response is to try to keep people from voting. It’s dangerously antidemocratic.”
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A few states have also given state legislators more power over election administrators, potentially making it easier for politicians to reject an election’s result. These provisions may be even more dangerous than the hurdles to voting, especially since they are an explicit response to Trump’s big lie, as Joshua Douglas of the University of Kentucky has written.
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Could all of these moves come to little, much as Trump’s postelection flailing did? Yes, that’s one possible outcome. But it is not the only one. In a way that would have been unfathomable a few years ago, one of the country’s two major parties is taking steps that would allow it to overturn the outcome of a future election.
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The Republican “base” does not believe in the principles upon which our democratic-republic is founded. It wants an authoritarian state, and it wants it right now. These people hate us and they see us as the enemy. They are in an all-out culture war against us, a war that has been stirred by decades of right-wing hate propaganda. Forget this bullshit argument that “they won’t come out to vote if Trump isn’t on the ballot”. YES THEY WILL. The Republicans will get them out. Fox “News” and Newsmax and OAN and Breitbart and The Federalist will get them out. We will need a maximum effort to defeat them. The future of freedom in our country depends on it.
Therefore, I recommend the following:
TELL AMERICA ABOUT THE BROAD SUPPORT OUT THERE FOR PRESIDENT BIDEN’S PROGRAM. EMPHASIZE THE POSITIVE IMPACT IT IS ALREADY HAVING.
WRAP THE INSURRECTION AROUND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S THROAT. They’re trying to downplay it or even pretend it didn’t happen. Don’t let them.
AND CONTACT AT LEAST 100,000,000 POTENTIAL DEMOCRATIC VOTERS FACE-TO-FACE. Yes, you saw that right. At least 100 million. Voter participation in midterms falls off. We can’t let that happen. We cannot have repeat of the catastrophic 2010 election, in which too many of our people couldn’t be bothered to participate. It handed the House and a lot of state legislatures over to the Republicans. It handed the redistricting process over to the Radical Right. It crippled President Obama’s program. We can’t have that again.
So yes, I’ll be a broken record again. Over the next eighteen months you’ll hear the same message out of me again and again and again:
GET OUT THE VOTE. GET OUT THE VOTE. GET OUT THE DAMNED VOTE.