Hi John — this is Representative Summer Lee.
We’re ticking off the last few days of 2024, and I know folks are probably in a few different places right now.
Some of you might be ready to go for the fights ahead. Others might still be taking a break from politics or the news in general. And most of us are probably feeling some level of unease, not sure about what’s coming next.
I have been feeling a lot of these things too. That’s why I wanted to take this opportunity to talk to you about how I am seeing this moment and our shared work ahead. But before I do: If you’re ready to stand with me and the Working Families Party and recommit to our shared fight for working people in 2025, I’m asking if you’ll make an end-of-year contribution to WFP today. Our side will never have the billionaires and their big-money SuperPACS — but what we will always have is each other.
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John, Republican megadonors came after our movement this cycle, promising to defeat working-class leaders in Congress. They ended up spending nearly $24 million in two races alone to unseat my colleagues Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush in what became two most expensive House primaries in history.1
Their voices will be missed. The aim of these Republican megadonors was to spend as much as they could to silence the voices in Congress who have been taking on corporations and billionaire CEOs — and they’re not about to stop now.
The truth is, when you look around Congress, you don’t see too many people with backgrounds like mine.
I grew up in a working-class family. We didn’t know any elected officials. But that didn’t mean we didn’t have a perspective on the solutions our community needed.
The folks I knew growing up — regular working people of all backgrounds — those are the kinds of people I try to bring with me every single day I am entrusted to represent Pennsylvania’s 12th District in Congress.
So often, they're the ones with the solutions, the expertise, the insight into how to make things just a little better for families struggling to get by.
When we say that the people closest to the pain should be the people closest to the policy solutions, that is not just a cute saying. It’s a way of thinking about how we approach the very real problems that we face in our communities. If we want to solve the problems that working people are dealing with, we can’t keep icing out the people who live it.
Republicans and the billionaire class don’t want these voices to be heard in Congress at all. Whenever they see us stand up for higher wages, for affordable housing, for universal health care, for peace — they react in fear of what we might achieve together and start calculating how many millions of dollars it would take to silence us.
We have no reason to believe they’ll stop now, and every reason to believe they will come at us again in 2026.
But I know our movement is stronger than any GOP billionaire that tries to buy our elections.
And I know we are strongest when we build the kind of independent infrastructure we need to have working people’s backs when they run for office and after they get elected.
That’s the work the Working Families Party does day-in and day-out. It’s why I’m honored to continue to fight alongside WFP in Congress. And it’s why I’m asking you today to recommit to our shared fight for the long haul:
The fights ahead of us in 2025 and 2026 are going to be some of the most challenging of our lifetimes — and we need to be prepared at every level. If you’re able, chip in with an end-of-year contribution to WFP so that the voices of working people can continue to be heard loud and clear in Congress, state houses, and other halls of power across the country.
In solidarity,
Summer Lee
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Source:
1. Cori Bush becomes second Squad member ousted in a primary, Politico, August, 2024.
