Everyday Election Activism

An Insider's Guide (#10) - December 7, 2024

What is happening in activism land?

We are still in ‘rest and recover’ mode, but many of us have also moved into action. We have to. Everything we worked so hard for in this election is still on the line.

Mostly we are taking our first steps, not sure yet what we will do in the future. We are contacting elected officials or showing up to bear witness to Republican shenanigans. We are trying to get our bearings - joining webinars and attending in-person meetings. We are searching to find our place and trying to understand what activism looks like now.

I feel a shift! It feels like rebirth!

This week I felt a shift. A newly reimagined pro-democracy movement has started to take shape. Maybe the shift is just in my imagination, but I think not. It feels bigger than that. I realized a few days ago that part of my funk since the election came from the collapse of the high jinks, can-do, joyous energy of our Get Out the Vote efforts.

Leading up to the election, I was part of a huge, interconnected network of activists who felt the same way I did about the election, wanted the same things for our country, and who were working alongside me to save democracy and weaken the forces of authoritarianism. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were there to cheer us on.

On November 6, it felt as though the pro-democracy movement collapsed. Like balloons pricked with a needle, all our air was gone. The big, beautiful balloon we shared, and our smaller, personal balloons. Poof! Nothing to do but wring our hands, optimism decomposing in front of our eyes. Our hopes for the next four years disappearing, and all we could do was rage and grieve, privately with friends, or publicly online.

Everyone’s energy was depleted. The calls to rest, the mandate for self-care were oh so needed, but something was lost in that turning inwards. Even when I mustered energy to act - helping cure ballots or writing postcards for a special election - I felt adrift, an activist aimlessly trying to find something, anything worth doing, glad to be among a fine group of stalwarts, but feeling my own energy plummet.

But this week I think we turned a corner. And what I am seeing come into view around that corner is worth looking at! People are coming together from all directions, not only taking action, but re-imagining the future of our movement. It is clear that we still have fight in us, that we still have one another. We know that democracy only dies in darkness and we are determined to be the light. And best of all, there are still a lot of us standing!

What I see around the corner is the rebirth of our movement.

Are you feeling it too?

What will the new movement look like?

We don’t know yet! All we know is that it will be large and persistent and determined. That activists from the 2024 election will be joined by new faces and new energy, and that together we can find our way.

New leaders are emerging, too. Nearly a hundred new Indivisible groups had sprouted within weeks after the election. In North Carolina, brand new ‘Anger into Action’ citizen groups are meeting, supported by the state Democratic Party. I imagine groups with a similar spirit are popping up across the country. We are propelling our desire for a functioning democratic government into a large movement.

Ideas are bubbling up. Here is my spin on some of the action buckets connected with electoral politics that I have been reading about:

• Be the change we want to see. The Democratic Party needs to become the party that cares. We have to develop a year round presence in our communities. We want to show up for people, helping them get what they need and advocating for them loudly and consistently. We need to earn people’s support and change the perception that political parties are nothing more than a bunch of out-of-touch politicians who do little for everyday people.

• Transform the Democratic Party with big ideas that inspire. Discussions are brewing about new leadership in the Democratic National Committee and in Congress. I hear calls to strengthen state and county Democratic Parties. I am curious to see what emerges.

• Grow electoral power starting from the local and state levels. We need to identify and support young and diverse candidates for the next elections, and make sure there are Democrats on the ballot for every race.

• Build out voter turnout initiatives to expand the electorate among people who share our values. We can do more to inoculate voters against voter suppression. We need to take to heart whatever we can learn from 2024 turnout data and research findings generated by voting organizations so that we can reach more people, more effectively.

Inside and outside electoral politics, there are calls for other sorts of work:

• Expand our mutual aid groups and adapt them for the years ahead. Vulnerable groups are many, and MAGA Republicans inside and outside of government are likely to go after all of them, including immigrants, communities of color, people of Jewish and Islamic faith, LGBTQ people, and women.

• Create communications platforms and lift up effective messengers who can reach people outside the liberal echo chamber. We need to use these new media tools to inform and to fight disinformation. They can become trusted sources for news and build electoral power by addressing issues of concern to voters.

These are big ideas, not specific actions. At the moment we are crowdsourcing them. The discussion is decentralized. The doors are open wide for everyone to participate. Innovative and transformative change is coming to our movement. It may be unsettling not to know what activism will look like in six months, but there is also an element of excitement. No clarity yet, no playbook yet, but we will have more choices than ever about our roles in the pro-democracy movement.

I suspect that specific strategies will start to coalesce in the next few months and that the genius of all this brainstorming will lead to an energized pro-democracy movement. It will have space for both the Democratic Party and independent, community-based groups. I also expect new local initiatives to emerge that do not fit into any mold, but that will be carried out by inspired and energized groups of friends and neighbors ready to take action on their own.

Maybe that’s the source of my excitement - all the possibilities for building something new, powered by our collective creativity. We are hearing from brand new activists and leaders, as well as from experienced activists we already trust. People are signing on and signing up, and they will bring others on board with them. Something bigger than us is in the wings, and it will give us flight!

Will we be effective? If so, how soon?

These are the questions we all want the answers to! There is such urgency! We can hope for small victories in the near term, and for more electoral power after the state and local elections of 2025. We are aiming to end the trifecta in the midterm elections of 2026 and to make more progress in the states. We know that it’s not too early to get to work.

Of course there are no guarantees. Our victories may seem too small at first. They may not hold. But that uncertainty is true for any great undertaking. No risk, no gain.

Here’s the thing: We have a lot of potential power. As the underdogs, we are highly motivated and focused. Republican majorities in Congress are small and vulnerable. Some states have strengthened democracy in this year’s election. We have people, leaders, organizations, and networks already in place and poised to grow. And we have each other! As I keep saying, there are a lot of us, and more of us than them.

We need only persistence, patience and courage.

What is stopping you from taking action?

What emotions come to mind when you think about taking up activism again?

• Discouragement? After all you put into this election, why did it end this way?

• Anticipatory exhaustion? It’s tiring thinking about all that lies ahead of us.

• Anger? Are you mad at everyone who voted for Republicans, to say nothing of those who did not vote at all? Are you mad at politicians for not connecting to more voters?

• Sadness? Feelings of grief and loss about the election still haunt us. How can we avoid them?

• Concerns for our neighbors or personal fears about retribution? Our fears are not unwarranted.

Whatever you are feeling, my question to you is, what are you going to do with those emotions? Hint: the answer involves taking action. Activism energizes us. It will relieve our anxiety and build our confidence. It will harden us for the battles to come as we build our strength and numbers. It will soften us by allowing our caring to shine out into the world.

Activism is also inoculation against seeing ourselves as victims. It would be easy to identify as the righteous (but helpless) victims of the Republican Party (or the 2024 voters). We are vulnerable to the mind trickery that makes us feel small, alone, and cowed. We need to be careful about victimhood. If you find yourself entering this soul-killing tunnel, back yourself out of it, and look at the mountain the tunnel was carved out of. The mountain is so much larger than the tunnel. It is solid and beautiful. It offers a large vista.

Maybe what we need most is courage. We have among us many who embody courage, but it is always inspiring to look back at those who came before. A recent Marc Elias post on Democracy Docket quotes Martin Luther King, Jr:

“Courage breeds creative self‐affirmation; cowardice breeds destructive self-abnegation. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it; cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it. So we must constantly build dykes of courage to ward off the flood of fear.”

And we can always find wisdom in Mark Twain. I came across this quote in a Substack post of “America, America," by Steven Beschloss:

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."

What to do today?

That’s easy! Answer some of those calls to action you are seeing in your Inbox or online. Petitions are usually ineffective, so go for making phone calls or sending emails. Or show up at a protest where that kind of gesture is helpful.

• Support government protections of democracy. There is urgency to do as much as possible in the next month, before Republican are sworn into their new trifecta. From Indivisible:

  “President Biden and Democrats in Congress still have power right now, and we expect them to use it to protect our rights and democracy. That means publishing the Equal Rights Amendment, confirming pro-democracy judges, and stopping Republicans from jamming poison pills into must-pass year-end legislation. At the state level, we’re urging Democratic governors and legislatures to call special sessions and begin Trump-proofing their states by creating sanctuary policies and establishing legal defense funds.”

• Play a role in voter turnout in upcoming elections. In case you blinked, there have been five elections since November 5: a runoff election for City Council in Atlanta, GA, a constitutional amendment election in Louisiana, and three judicial races in Mississippi. There is one more election this month, a mayoral runoff in El Paso, TX, plus two special elections for the Virginia General Assembly in early January. We can expect special elections for Republican Congressional seats vacated by new Trump appointees in 2025. There will be opportunities to get involved with those elections as well with important state and local elections in the fall. Stay tuned, but if you are able, you can help out right now on the two elections coming up fastest by joining phone banks with Environmental Voter Project or writing postcards with Postcards to Voters. I recommend both groups.

If you are not seeing calls to action, consider following organizations that will keep you in the know, provide pep talks, and reassure you about the size of the pro-democracy movement. The largest are probably Indivisible and MoveOn, as well as popular newsletters such as Chop Wood Carry Water, Today’s Edition Newsletter, Hopium Chronicles, and Americans of Conscience Checklist, but there are numerous other organizations and great writers on Substack and other journalism platforms as well. Whatever it takes to overcome our exhaustion and counter discouragement, we must do. We are called to become the activists we are waiting for.