Indivisibles,

It’s semi-regular newsletter time, and I’m feeling good! Let’s hop right to the News, The Brag, and the Discussion. 

The News

We’re living rent-free in Trump’s warped little brain.

Donald J. Trump himself posted to his social media network a 5,000-word Breitbart hit piece on me, Leah, and the entire Indivisible movement. As you would expect, the piece includes plenty of lies, antisemitic innuendo, and bizarro conspiracy stuff.

Gotta love when your enemies are obsessed with you!

I wanted to share a few thoughts of my own on this, since this kind of thing comes up every election season.

First -- the strange thing about fighting a fascist movement is that it’s full of clowns and it’s also very dangerous. And those things are both true at the same time! We personally tend to lean into the humor of the situation when stuff like this comes up, because let’s be real: When clowns are being clowns, you gotta laugh. But we take the resulting right-wing attacks and threats seriously too. Please don’t think that just because we’re having a good chuckle right now, we aren’t also being careful about the risks and supporting Indivisibles to do the same. 

Second -- while this kind of right-wing smear campaign tends to pick up during the election season, it’s not new. And what I’ve come to realize over the years is it always follows roughly the same formula. Some right-wing hack takes a look at our website (or our strategy guide PDFs), slaps a giant caps-lock "REVEALED" label on the public communications we’ve already pushed out, and breathlessly reports about how they’ve blown the lid off a huge conspiracy. They claim that they’ve "DISCOVERED" materials on our website, or that they "CAUGHT" us on video at a meeting that had us on the public agenda. They get on our email list and "EXPOSE" what we’re saying to a million people.

There’s a reason they do that. They need villains who are sneaky, malevolent, conspiratorial. The alternative -- that Indivisible is made up of regular people, in every state in the country, standing up for our values and organizing for our democracy -- is unacceptable to them. They have to lean on conspiracy theories, because otherwise they might have to face the reality that they’re losing because their ideas are unpopular.

The simple fact is there are more of us than there are of them. Indivisible has to do its organizing in public because that’s where the people are; we don’t have another option! We started with a public Google Doc with lots of typos, for Pete’s sake!

Our strategy depends on people power; theirs depends on a minority subverting our democratic institutions.  

We do our organizing in the open. We’re not afraid of people finding out about us: In fact, our success depends on people finding out about us. So we’ll keep doing what we’re doing as we look forward to the next Breitbart "expose." And if you’re an Indivisible leader, just remember: You’re living rent-free in Donald Trump’s head. 

Because there’s one thing they got right: We are the nationwide movement "hellbent on defeating Trump," and Indivisible is indeed pushing "the pedal to the metal as it accelerates into the 2024 election season."

The Brag

Here’s what pedal to the metal on winning in 2024 looks like. 

There’s a lot to brag about these last couple weeks, but I’m going to focus here on the big thing that I’m excited about right now:

Indivisible has developed a massively impactful new voter contact tool. Every year we test new strategies to improve our electoral work. Some stuff works, some stuff doesn’t. We were blown away by the results of our newest experiment: Neighbor2Neighbor -- a new tool we’ve developed over the last couple years that combines light relational organizing with traditional canvassing by giving volunteers a list of 10 sporadic Democratic voters to contact in their immediate neighborhood. 

Our study, validated by an independent analysis, found that it’s TWICE as impactful as traditional canvassing. It’s effective, it’s easy to use, and it will be the star of our 2024 electoral program -- which we launched this week: Project 2024: Majority Over MAGA. We’re also offering it to pro-democracy partners at no cost to boost turnout beyond Indivisible. Read more about it here. We want this to get very big once we open it up to the general public this spring -- so read on to the discussion below to help me wrestle how to spread the message far and wide.

If I’m bragging about the movement and our work, I’m probably going to ask you to throw in some dough to help. We want to offer Neighbor2Neighbor to more pro-democracy partners; we want to reimburse more groups for their voter contact expenses; we want to buy more postcards and get more letters to the editor published. We want to get out more votes! This costs money, and for a grassroots-led and grassroots-funded movement like ours, getting more money means me writing these words: Please give us more money. 🙂

That’s it -- this isn’t a hard sell. Give if you can, and keep working towards a just democracy regardless.

The Discussion

How can we get as many people as possible actively engaged this year?

Here’s where my head is right now: It’s still early. Most normal people are not paying close attention to politics right now. It will be months before they do. 

But our success depends on drawing more people into the movement. We need more people to help shift the narrative with op-eds, letters to the editor, and media-grabbing events. We need more volunteers to write postcards, make calls, send texts, and -- most importantly! -- knock on doors with Neighbor2Neighbor.  

If you’re reading this, you’re probably not the target audience! I’m not the target audience either. We’re super engaged in the fight right already. But we need to reach beyond the choir and pull more people in. How do we do that?

My hope with Neighbor2Neighbor is that it is so damn effective, so simple to use, and so unintimidating (just talk to a few neighbors!) that it can be an excellent on-ramp to convert inactive allies into active participants in this fight. But inertia and cynicism can be tough to overcome. 

So here’s my prompt for discussion: Think of two or three politically inactive friends who are also generally aligned with us. They agree Trump is the worst. They want MAGA defeated. They want abortion rights codified and democracy reform enacted. But they’re not engaged in doing anything about it themselves. 

What do you think we could do to convince them to either use Neighbor2Neighbor (if they’re in a competitive district or state); or convince them to help recruit folks in key districts and states to use Neighbor2Neighbor (if they’re not in a politically competitive area)? What would you recommend Indivisible National do to supercharge that recruitment?

In answering this question, I’d encourage you to check out this post that walks through Neighbor2Neighbor. We have not yet launched national signup for Neighbor2Neighbor, but I want our recruitment to be as strong as possible when we do. The more people we get in, the more people we get out to vote, and the greater chance we have of winning across the board in November.

Thank you for offering your reflections, creativity, and ideas here! Looking forward to reading through your thoughts!

Until next time

Coming off a week like this, I can’t help but feel optimistic. The national election strategy launch call on Thursday with (future Senator) Andy Kim really just put me in the right frame of mind. If you want to get there, I’d encourage you to check out the recording here. It’s just so legitimately inspiring in national gatherings like this to see and feel the power of the Indivisible movement -- power that is, as Trump’s Breitbart article breathlessly reports, "essentially unprecedented in world history."

They ain’t seen nothing yet.

In solidarity,
Ezra

Ezra Levin Co-Executive Director Pronouns: He/him