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Dear John,

Although the conditions for this election continue to be strong – Trump is
unpopular, Republican candidates are flailing and Democrats are fighting
hard on every front – there were a few setbacks last week that remind us
these next 50+ days won’t come easy.

Trump’s efforts to interfere with voting by mail, new Tarrant County
polling place closures and Texas’ 1.2-million voter “suspense list” could
each determine how free and fair the midterms will be.

But the important thing in working through these challenges is to keep in
mind that no loss and no victory in this struggle will be final. We are
going to have to keep pushing until we win. And then continue the fight
long after we do.

Back in the old days, say in 2016, it was inconceivable to me that America
could roll in reverse. Maybe progress came too slowly, but the direction
was, and always would be, forward.

The big historical waypoints — the 14th amendment, the 19th amendment, the
Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Roe v. Wade, Obergefell — proved that
we traveled a one-way road to enlightenment. “The arc of the moral
universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” All of that.

Of course when Republicans got behind the wheel or tried to drive from the
backseat — Reagan, Newt, Bush, Boehner, etc. — they’d slow things down,
try to take us off course. Democrats in power at times would fail to
deliver on the full promise and potential of government — accepting half
measures, mediocrity, ineffectiveness — and that could build up resistance
to progress as well. But the inertia of 200+ years of momentum, I thought,
was just too much for it to stop completely.

Like millions who supported, campaigned and voted for him, when Obama won
the White House in 2008 I thought our work was through. We could sit back
and watch him deliver on our sky high expectations. Now we were really
going to move forward!

But then eight years later, Trump won the White House on a vision that
dispensed with choosing the right or left fork in the road, dispensed with
forward motion altogether. The entirety of his vision was limited to what
could be found in America’s rearview mirror. In 2016 we lost both the
election and the illusion of inevitable progress.

But the wakeup could have come earlier, if we’d been paying attention.

Three years before, the Roberts Court had overturned much of the Voting
Rights Act. The one that John Lewis nearly lost his life to win, that LBJ
staked so much of his presidency to sign, that took our country nearly 90
years to pass. In Shelby v Holder they decided that racism and election
interference no longer threatened the ability of every American to fairly
and freely vote. In her scathing dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote that
discarding the law which had produced the closest thing to a true
democracy in American history “is like throwing away your umbrella in a
rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

President Barack Obama hugs John Lewis on the 50th Anniversary of Bloody
Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches, at the Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. (Photo by Pete Souza)

Within minutes of the decision, Texas imposed the most restrictive voter
ID law in the country, disenfranchising more than 600,000 citizens who,
all of a sudden, couldn’t meet the state’s standard for proving who they
were. Over the decade that followed Texas also closed more than 700
polling places, twice the number of the next most restrictive state, and
almost all of them in African American and Latino neighborhoods.
Congressional districts were racially gerrymandered, voting by mail was
restricted and voting locations were moved miles away from colleges and
universities.

Without the protection of the Voting Rights Act, politicians were free to
not only pick their voters, but they could now choose who could vote in
the first place.

It was a preview of what was to come from the first Trump term. Like the
Shelby decision that imperiled the fundamental right to vote, the attacks
on immigrants, on the Constitution and the rule of law reversed progress
that had been won at extraordinary sacrifice over decades.

When Roe was overturned in 2022 by the justices appointed during Trump’s
first term, another longstanding milestone of progress was toppled — like
the loss of voting rights, unthinkable until it happened. Because only in
a fever could you dream that a victory won by three courageous Texas women
in 1973 – persuading an all-male Supreme Court that American women had a
right to make their own decisions about their own bodies – could be
reversed by an adjudicated sexual abuser 50 years later.

But maybe there was virtue in these losses. The scales fell and we were
able to see our country and our politics for what it was, not what we
wished it to be. We understood that as hard-fought as our forward progress
had been, it could be rolled back at the turn of a single election.

What’s been happening over these last ten years and what’s coming to a
head right now in our country — this battle between authoritarianism and
democracy, between cruelty and decency — is what it’s going to be like for
a long time. Maybe the way it’s always been, maybe the way it will always
be.

Earlier this summer we briefly celebrated when a federal judge ordered the
Trump administration to stop interfering with vote by mail, only to see
the Supreme Court decide that, because the Postal Service had yet to
publish rules around mail-in ballots, the plaintiffs had no standing.
Then, once those rules were published, that same judge again enjoined the
administration from interfering with voting by mail. [ [link removed] ]Now Trump is
appealing this to a Supreme Court stacked with his chosen justices. They
could decide the issue as soon as next week.

We breathed a sigh of relief last month when the Republican majority on
the Tarrant County Commissioner’s Court reversed course on their plan to
close nearly half of the county’s polling locations thanks to the outrage
from their constituents. This is the third-largest county in Texas, home
to Fort Worth and a true bellwether in our state’s politics. [ [link removed] ]Recently
the Court reconvened and decided to close more than 90 of them anyway.

And as Democratic candidates pull ahead in poll after poll in Texas, as we
register tens of thousands of new voters and as we overcome attacks on the
voting rights of naturalized citizens, [ [link removed] ]we’ve just learned that more
than 1.2 million Texans are now on a “suspense list,” meaning that they
are required to take action to remedy their registration or may have a
hard time voting in November. I met a mother and son in San Antonio who
told me that of the four members of their household, the three that
reliably vote in the Democratic primary are now in suspense, while the one
who votes in the Republican primary is not. I am hearing stories like this
across the state.

Each of these setbacks are serious but not defining. And if we fight back,
they will not defeat us.

In vote by mail, it’s possible that the Supreme Court rules against Trump
and upholds the injunction, allowing ballots to go out under the status
quo ante and protecting the millions of Americans who rely on this form of
voting. And even if they choose to create extraordinary chaos by siding
with Trump and allowing the new USPS rules to go into effect, we can work
to educate every voter about their rights under these new rules and
encourage those who can to vote in person.

In Tarrant County, we can acknowledge that for many voting will be much
harder and then work to help those most impacted. The polling site at UT
Arlington, home to more than 42,000 students, was one of those closed this
week. In response, our organization Powered by People will be at UTA this
week registering students, updating registrations for those on the
suspense list and personally staying in touch with every one of them to
guide them to the next closest polling site.

And when it comes to the more than one million registered Texans on the
suspense list who are now unsure about their registration status, we are
relentlessly showing up to meet them where they are – in person and
virtually – to help them check their status and update their registration.
We’ll add to their numbers through the voter registration program we’re
running across the state that’s bringing in a record number of new voters.
As of this spring there are 1.5 million more voters on the rolls than
there were in Trump’s last midterm.

We’ve just got to keep fighting, through the losses, past the wins. It
never ends. Maybe the moral arc bends but only when we pull on it.

If we win the Texas governor’s race and pick up enough seats in the state
house, we can end the voter purges and allow people to register to vote
online or automatically when they turn 18 or become a citizen.

If we elect Democrats to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court we can
restore the polling places for as long as we keep a majority. It’ll take
hustling every election cycle to keep good people in, bad people out.

If we defeat Trump and the MAGA movement at the polls — like electing
James Talarico to be the 51st vote in the Senate — we can pass a new
Voting Rights Act that will protect all eligible voters and means of
voting, including by mail. And those political rights will stand for as
long as we vigorously defend them, against authoritarians and against our
own complacency.

No victory, no matter how justified, how righteous, is ever permanent.

That’s a lot of work, a lot of fighting in front of us.

[ [link removed] ]Powered by People is committed to that fight. If you’re with us, please
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Thank you,

Beto




 


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