John,

In light of Bernie Sanders dropping out of the Presidential race last week and yesterday endorsing Joe Biden, I want to share a few thoughts about the state of our politics right now. First, as Bernie has said, “The struggle continues.” With that in mind, I want to invite you to join us and Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker tonight at 7:00pm ET as we kick off one of the key ways we will continue that struggle — working to elect a slate of Green New Deal candidates to join Bernie in Congress [[link removed]] .

It’s been a hard few days since Bernie Sanders dropped out of the race. Personally, even though I knew that — barring some unforeseen change of events — the race was likely over after Super Tuesday, I still thought maybe there was some chance that the historic devastation wrought by coronavirus might be enough to open enough Democratic voters minds to the need for Bernie’s platform. It just seemed so obvious. Now more than ever, we need Medicare-for-All, universal paid sick leave, a living wage for the farmers, grocery store clerks, and service workers doing the most essential work in the economy, and the kind of bold economic recovery and transformation we have been talking about in the Green New Deal.

Yesterday, Bernie endorsed Joe Biden and announced that their teams would be working together on six policy task forces to bring together the nation’s best ideas on the economy, climate change, education, immigration, criminal justice reform, and healthcare. 1 It’s an encouraging sign that the ideas that inspired the Bernie movement won’t die with his candidacy. And yet, new policy commitments alone may not be sufficient to inspire enough skeptical voters, or voters who don’t normally turn out, to show up in November. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “What I want to do is to be able to go out and say, ‘This is the plan for us.’ But it’s hard to do that if there’s no plan for us. 2

We’re gonna take our time together as a movement to discuss and chart the path forward. For now, one thing is clear. The fight for a Green New Deal must go on. While there’s a big gap between the kind of change that is needed to confront society’s challenges and the kind of change that Joe Biden is calling for — especially when it comes to the climate crisis — another four years of Donald Trump would send our climate further past the point of no return. Bernie’s political revolution was never about one person, one candidate, or one campaign. Not me, us. We must continue to build unprecedented people power so that no matter who is in office, we can bring society to a halt until we win the change we need. We also must continue building political power — a deep bench of elected leaders who will fight with us for the long haul.

The truth is that our movement isn’t big enough yet to fully make the difference on something on the scale of a nationwide Presidential race. We saw that clearly on Super Tuesday. But we can have a real impact on down-ballot races, and have already scored some major wins in Congressional primaries in 2020.

Join us tonight at 7:00pm ET for a virtual rally with Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash and Kentucky U.S. Senate Candidate Charles Booker to kick off our digital organizing for our movement’s priority elections. After the rally, we’ll get straight to work, calling voters in Kentucky to make sure that they know someone like Charles is on the ballot on June 23rd. [[link removed]]

Charles Booker gives us something to fight for, and he’s the kind of leader we need in this moment. He’s a working class lifelong Kentuckian, the youngest black state legislator in 90 years, and he’s vying to take on Mitch McConnel running on a Green New Deal. In races like these, our organizing power has the potential to make a real difference. We saw it with a stinging loss in Jessica Cisneros’s race in Texas, where she came just 2,000 vote short of incumbent Democrat, Henry Cuellar. Cuellar was Big Oil’s Favorite Democrat who votes with Trump 70% of the time. Jessica won day-of voting in her district but lost early voting. Our movement made over 100,000 thousands calls to Texas in the final weeks. If we had ramped up our efforts earlier, I can’t help but think Jessica could’ve won. On the flipside, by starting earlier in Chicago and teaming up with others, we were able to help deliver a stunning upset of conservative corporate Democrat Dan Lipinski by Green New Deal champion Marie Newman. We also helped get Mike Siegel place first in his primary in Texas. Together with the labor unions supporting him, Sunrise Movement made up the biggest organized force supporting his campaign.

In June, we can score more upsets for Green New Deal champions like Charles Booker in Kentucky and Jamaal Bowman in New York on June 23rd, and Andrew Romanoff in Colorado on June 30th. But to do that, we need to get started now.

Register for our virtual rally tonight at 7:00pm ET with Charles Booker, and get plugged into our efforts to win political power for the long haul. [[link removed]]

Though elections might not always go our way, as long as we don’t lose sight of building our movement in the process, we can keep moving forward. If we do it right, the power we build through each election, we can leverage to push and pressure to keep building our people power. We’ve seen that through the start of our movement, and we’ve seen it through Bernie’s campaign as well. Candidates like Charles are also committed to building a movement through their campaigns.

Join us tonight to carry on the political revolution. [[link removed]]

The struggle continues,
Evan Weber
Political Director



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