First off: from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank you and everyone else on my email list. We set an ambitious fundraising goal for the end of the quarter, and I’m excited to say that because you and folks like you stepped up, we’ll be able to file a campaign finance report that we can be proud of. Over the next few months, as it comes time to knock doors, make phone calls, and get on the airwaves, we’ll not only have the resources we need to compete—we’ll have a report that shows everyone how serious we are and that I’m confident will help attract additional investment to this race.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
As I’ve said time and again, this movement is about something so much bigger than one office. Our campaign is about motivating voters to turn out for Democrats up and down the ballot, because over the last decade and a half of Republican governance, I’ve watched as our leaders have ignored the needs of their constituents, insulated themselves from accountability, and made our representative democracy less representative bit by bit.
I’ve been thinking about it in the context of the French & Indian War, because, well. You know me. Of course I am. (Which, fun fact, the war was begun in part when a little-known twenty-two year old Virginia Militia commander named George Washington launched a surprise attack on a small French patrol in the Ohio river valley wilderness.)
See, the French & Indian War was really just one theater of the much larger Seven Years’ War, another venue for the burgeoning French and British Empires to have at each other as they jostled for colonial dominance of the New World, South Asia, and Africa. Nominally, Great Britain won out in the end, but in the process of claiming victory, they also doubled their national debt.
And though this was a debt that Great Britain had accrued as part of a global conflict, they took out paying for it on their American colonies by imposing new taxes on tea, stamps, sugar, paper, paint… and, well, you probably know how that went.
It struck me the other day that this isn’t so different from what the Republicans in our legislature have been doing. (Hear me out.) They’ve spent the last decade wasting away our state’s financial resources , paying for absolutely everything in cash, and shirking their responsibilities to fund essential services. And as a corollary to that, even though they’ve nominally cut taxes, a good deal of NC families have actually seen their taxes go up..
They haven’t really offered any North Carolinians a break, they’ve just shifted the responsibility of paying for education and infrastructure to our county governments, forcing them to raise property taxes to keep up. I recognize there are a lot of material differences between the two situations, but I think the core principle is the same as what was so unfair about the British parliament forcing the American colonies to step up and fund the debt of an entire empire.
I mean, our county governments don’t have a direct voice in the legislature, and the GOP has drawn our legislative districts for partisan gain in such an extreme way that most of them are completely insulated from answering to voters. In a way, it’s just taxation without representation all over again.
Well, and tomorrow we’ll be lighting off fireworks to remember what happens when a government tries to do that to Americans. But we’re lucky here in the United States—we built a system that enacts revolution at the ballot box, via a peaceful transfer of power. That system is under attack right now, don’t get me wrong, but that’s why this upcoming election really will be one of the most important ones of our lifetime.
We’re at a turning point. Democracy is at stake. The soul of our nation is at stake.
And that’s what this campaign is about. Thank you for being with us, and thanks for helping us keep up the momentum. If you didn’t get a chance to contribute before the campaign finance deadline, that’s alright—it may not show up on this report, but the more grassroots support we get, the more we’ll have the ability to do.
