Indivisibles,

By popular demand, I’m trying to write fewer words. So let’s skip the
intro to this bi-weekly-ish newsletter and get right to it: the News, the
Brag, and the Discussion.

The News: Ohio and the path to national protections for abortion rights and
democracy

We’re all on the same mission here: defeat MAGA, codify reproductive
freedom, pass democracy reform, and dance on Trump’s first day in prison.
That’s the game plan.

But you’ve likely heard the conventional wisdom that, sure, Democrats may
take the House and Trump may lose, but the Senate map is just too tough
for us this year. 

The Senate map is tough this year. To maintain control, we’ve got to get
Gallego elected in Arizona and defend Nevada, Montana, and Ohio. That
feels like a lot, so it’s easy to dismiss it as impossible, just as in
2021 folks dismissed the idea of winning two Senate elections in Georgia
as impossible. Our chances of maintaining the Senate depends on both the
strength of our own campaign, and the weakness of the Republicans’.

That brings us to the news this week.

Senator Sherrod Brown is arguably the most vulnerable Democratic senate
incumbent in the country. If this popular, thrice-elected, and famously
disheveled gravelly-voiced incumbent loses, a Republican senate is almost
guaranteed. 

Given that, the Republican senate candidate matters a lot! You’ll remember
that Republicans fumbled a number of winnable races in 2022 by nominating
grifters (Dr. Oz), fascists (Kari Lake), and off-putting creeps (Blake
Masters). Surely, they’ve learned their lesson for 2024, you might say. 

And this week, Republicans chose Bernie Moreno, a rightwing MAGA car
salesman endorsed by Donald Trump. Moreno is both extreme and [ [link removed] ]a weak
general election candidate -- he says the 2020 election was stolen, calls
January 6th defendants “political prisoners,” and consistently polls below
Sherrod Brown and Trump.

Moreno parrots a lot of the wacky rightwing positions of the MAGA
coalition, but for the purposes of an election this year in Ohio, the most
important thing you gotta know about this guy is that he supports a
national abortion ban. In fact, in 2022, Moreno described himself publicly
as “Absolute pro-life. No exceptions.”

That’s relevant everywhere, but it particularly resonates in Ohio where
just months ago, Ohio Republicans rallied in defense of a new statewide
abortion ban that [ [link removed] ]infamously forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee
the state for abortion services. Ohio Republicans tried to protect this
law from voters’ backlash twice -- losing by more than 10 points on each
attempt. By a wide margin, Ohioans voted to enshrine abortion rights in
their constitution last year. 

Abortion rights are popular in Ohio.

Republicans could have selected a normal, boring, conservative Republican
(there are a handful of that endangered species left). That would have
made Brown’s reelection more difficult. Instead, they went for the
wackadoodle. Moreno’s nomination presents a clear choice in this election
between a MAGA footsoldier who wants to take away your rights and a public
servant with a decades-long history of delivering popular policies for the
public. 

This is a fight we can win. And if we do, we’ll likely be looking at a
Democratic senate next year that can amend the filibuster to protect
abortion rights nationwide. 

Onward.

The Brag: The Indivisible Presidency

It’s not every day you get a presidency named after your social movement
by a national columnist at a major newspaper, so I want everybody in the
Indivisible movement to see this. Last week, the Washington Post columnist
Perry Bacon wrote a piece on the four Biden presidencies -- essentially
the four strategic impulses of the Administration. One of those he labels
the “Indivisible presidency.” Yes, us Indivisible. 

Why the “Indivisible'' presidency? It’s a recognition of the now
years-long battle we’ve collectively waged to encourage Democrats to
forcefully take on MAGA -- their attacks on abortion rights and our
democracy. Perry recognizes this as one of the dominant forces in
Democratic politics today, and credits Indivisible with being the leading
voice for this approach.

[ [link removed] ]Quote from Washington Post column:'Third, there is the Indivisible
Presidency, referring to the liberal group that helped organize much of
the resistance during he Donald Trump years. Indivisible has been pushin
Biden and Democrats to prioritize fighting the radicalism of the
Republican Party, casting Trump and his allies as enemies of abortion,
democracy, and freedom.'

We believe it’s a good idea to take on the enemies of abortion, democracy,
and freedom directly because we think those are things worth fighting for.
But we also believe in this strategy because it’s electorally effective.
We spent much of the first half of 2022 extolling the virtues of this
approach and cajoling Democrats to take up a full-throated defense of
abortion rights and our democracy. After a lot of pressure and a
successful Kansas abortion rights referendum in the summer, they embraced
the strategy. As Perry concludes, it worked: 

[4]Quote from the Washington Post: 'Second, the election results from 2022
and 2023 (and 2018 and 2020 as well) suggest that the Indivisible approach
is electorally useful. When voters percieve Republicans as antiabortion
and antidemocracy, they are more likely to back Democratic candidates.

I’m not tooting my horn -- I’m tooting our horn. This strategy was
developed based on feedback from Indivisibles around the country. And we
should collectively be proud of the impact we’re having on the political
system. If you, like me, watched Biden’s State of the Union speech and
came away impressed and fired up by the President’s enthusiastic defense
of democracy and clear-eyed assessment of the threats of MAGA -- take a
bow. Politics doesn’t just happen. It’s not just something we consume.
It’s something we do. And all of us organizing with Indivisible are doing
it.

[ [link removed] ]…And if you want Indivisible National to keep doing it, I’ve got a
secret way to help: toss a few bucks into the hat to help us win the
Senate. Grassroots movements are fueling the national political strategy,
and grassroots dollars are fueling the movement. 

Easy peasy.

The Discussion: Vibe Check

It warmed my grade-grubbing heart to see all of your responses to the last
newsletter. I asked for a grade, and around 1,100 of you gave me a solid
A. I got one F. I’m sorry, Christopher. But I won’t quibble. My goal with
these newsletters is to build a shared understanding of the current
political moment, engage in a useful discussion, and learn some stuff
along the way.

Among the constructive criticism were a few notes that these newsletters
don’t have a ton of action items. That’s true! It’s been intentional up to
this point -- we send action items out to our email list every week, and I
don’t want to be redundant. But if you’re annoyed at not getting a
recommendation on this front, [ [link removed] ]let me point you to our 2024 campaign
work here. Here you can tell us how you’d like to help (postcards,
phonebanking, Neighbor2Neighbor, etc), which will help us direct resources
efficiently across the country.

For this week, though, I’d like to do a vibe check now that we’re past the
State of the Union and we have a clear rematch between Trump and Biden. I
want to get a sense of how this varies across the country. As you think
about your own community -- the community that was involved in building
the Blue Wave in 2018, defeating Trump in 2020, and holding back the red
wave in 2022 -- how engaged are they now? On a scale of depressed,
dejected, and fatalistic to willing to crawl over broken glass on their
hands and knees to defeat Trump again. Or, to make it simpler, on a scale
of 1 (disengaged) to 5 (highly engaged). 

[ [link removed] ]11

[ [link removed] ]2

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[ [link removed] ]4

[ [link removed] ]5

I welcome additional texture in addition to the one-click survey! I always
read through them -- even yours, Christopher. :)

I’ll write again in a couple weeks.

In solidarity,
Ezra

Ezra Levin

[12]Indivisble Co-Executive Director

Pronouns: He/him

PS: We celebrated Lila's one-year birthday this week. Like Zeke at his
1-year, she broke down in tears initially at all the commotion, but also
like Zeke, she squealed with glee after smashing her cupcake into her
face. Life is full of ups and downs.

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