[Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies
have yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that
getting Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission.]
[[link removed]]

BIDEN WINS, BUT NOW THE HARD PART BEGINS  
[[link removed]]

 

Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy
November 7, 2020
The Intercept
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies
have yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that
getting Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission. _

Renee Wilson, a member of service industry union Unite Here, canvases
for Joe Biden in Philadelphia on Nov. 2, , Rachel Wisniewski/Reuters

 

WITH PENNSYLVANIA, Wisconsin, and Michigan now squarely in Joe
Biden’s corner, the former vice president has secured the 270
Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidential election.
Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, President Donald Trump held leads in
all three states, but as votes from Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia,
and other urban areas were counted, Biden climbed ahead. On Friday
morning, after Biden overtook Trump in the Pennsylvania vote count,
Decision Desk HQ called
[[link removed]] the
race for Biden.

At the same moment that those votes from heavily progressive cities
beset by protests were putting Biden over the top, House Democrats
were locked in a tortured, three-hour conference call on Thursday.
Centrist after centrist lambasted the party’s left for costing it
seats in the lower chamber and threatening its ability to win the
Senate. It created a surreal juxtaposition: Had progressive organizing
on the ground around left-leaning issues driven registration and
turnout for Biden where he needed it, or had it hurt the party more
broadly? Or was it both?

The fiercest criticism was leveled by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a
former CIA official who won an upset victory in rural and suburban
Virginia in 2018. Her victory was symbolic, in that she toppled Dave
Brat, the tea party upstart who had himself toppled Majority Leader
Eric Cantor in 2014, presaging Trump’s rise a year later. In 2018,
Brat accused Spanberger of endorsing and being in league with, by dint
of her party identification, Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, and would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi — even
though she theatrically distanced herself from all three, as well as
former President Barack Obama. Her rousing defense — “Abigail
Spanberger is my name!” — earned her a viral clip at a debate with
Brat:

:

Spanberger won a narrow victory and spent 2019 and 2020 further
distancing herself from the party’s progressive wing. She is once
again locked in a close count, but appears to again have the upper
hand, poised for reelection.

It has not diminished her rage toward the left. On the call Thursday,
Spanberger vented not at “abolish ICE” but at “defund the
police,” the slogan that gained mainstream currency following the
protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Rep. Conor Lamb, whose special election victory in 2018 was a
bellwether of the coming blue wave, backed Spanberger up.
“Spanberger was talking about something many of us are feeling
today: We pay the price for these unprofessional and unrealistic
comments about a number of issues, whether it is about the police or
shale gas,” Lamb said
[[link removed]].
“These issues are too serious for the people we represent to
tolerate them being talked about so casually.”

But Lamb’s criticism of his party colleagues goes to the heart of
the flaw in the argument. Lamb wasn’t forced to defend defunding
the police because of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other members
of the Squad. Rather, it was Lamb who went to a Black Lives Matter
protest and took a maskless photo
[[link removed]] with
a (white) woman holding a “defund the police” sign. His GOP
opponent hammered Lamb for it. Most centrist politicians think of
politics as top-down — a strategy that’s decided upon and then
implemented. But “defund the police” — whatever one thinks of
the slogan — came from the protest movement that grew out of
Minneapolis, not from the messaging department of the Squad Central
Committee.

Democrats actually benefited from a surge in voter registrations amid
the protests, as noted by Tom Bonier, head of the major Democratic
data firm TargetSmart.

Party leader James Clyburn, the Democrat from South Carolina whose
endorsement of Biden launched him to the nomination, warned on the
call that if Democrats ran on Medicare for All and other progressive
issues, they would lose the upcoming Georgia Senate special elections
that will determine control of the upper chamber and dictate whether
Biden and the Democrats have the possibility of implementing a
legislative agenda. (Alaska’s Senate seat, a contest between
Republican Sen. Al Sullivan and independent challenger Al Gross, is
still up for grabs. While Sullivan is currently ahead, the count of
the remaining 44 percent of votes — absentee ballots — won’t
begin until Monday.)

Even so, progressives defended a number of Republican-leaning seats.
Democratic Rep. Katie Porter won reelection by 8 points in
California’s 45th District, covering Orange County and Irvine, which
she flipped in 2018. Further south, Rep. Mike Levin, who flipped the
49th District two years ago, won reelection, beating his Republican
opponent by 12 points. Both are co-sponsors of the Medicare for All
bill in the House, as are Jared Golden in Maine, Ann Kirkpatrick in
Arizona, Josh Harder in California, and Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright
in Pennsylvania, who all won reelection in swing districts. And Rep.
Tom Malinowski also defended his northern New Jersey district with an
8-point win, again holding onto a district he flipped in 2018. Cook
Political Report had rated both Porter and Malinowski’s districts as
R+3, and Levin’s as R+1.

Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies have
yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that getting
Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission. As attention
will shift to the Georgia special elections, can Democrats rally the
troops simply to help Biden confirm slightly more progressive cabinet
nominees? What is the Democratic agenda that the party can pledge to
voters to inspire them to vote in that January special election?

From the progressive perspective, it’s an easy question to answer,
and Ocasio-Cortez has made the argument herself repeatedly: It’s
better to have Democrats in control so that the left can push them to
be better, whereas Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown
himself immune to protest from the left. But that’s not a message
from the party itself.

And if Democrats don’t find a message — or insist on spending the
next few weeks attacking its left flank — then they have little
chance of winning the Senate. Mike Siegel, a Democrat who ran and lost
as a populist progressive in suburban Texas, said on this week’s
Deconstructed podcast
[[link removed]] that
without a persuasive message coming from the top of the ticket, he was
unable to convince disaffected voters that he was serious about
fundamental change. Without the Senate, Biden will be a badly hobbled
president, the kind that is routinely dealt a blow in the first
midterm. While Spanberger and Lamb may be angry, it appears that both
will still win, as will dozens of their colleagues who first won in
2018. In 2022, they may look back on this election fondly if they
don’t deliver something for the people who elected them.

[Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib encourages a resident to vote in the
upcoming presidential elections in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., October
18, 2020. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook - RC29LJ91STVW]

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib encourages a resident to vote in the
presidential elections in Detroit, on Oct. 18, photo: Rebecca
Cook/Reuters

THE FEARS PUT forward by centrist Democrats are the flip side of the
same political vision that Trump used to fuel his base. In nearly
every one of his rallies this fall, he singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar for
attack, arguing that she was so toxic in Minnesota that she would
deliver the state’s suburbs to him. He made the same claim about
Rep. Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and about the rising strength of the
left in Philadelphia, which he singled out during the first
presidential debate, claiming that “bad things happen in
Philadelphia.”

Yet Trump’s hopes were dashed. “He effed around and found out,”
said Omar on Deconstructed when asked about Trump’s strategy of
demonizing her to win suburban votes. Indeed, not only did margins for
Democrats expand in the suburbs in Minnesota, but Omar’s strength in
Minneapolis also helped power Biden to the win.

The same is true of the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia, where
strong left organizing catapulted Biden past Trump in two of the three
states that were crucial to the incumbent’s 2016 victory, and a
third (Minnesota) that the Trump campaign hoped desperately to flip.

In the late summer, as the GOP was
[[link removed]] knocking
on a million doors per week in August, the Biden campaign and the
Democratic National Committee resisted a return to in-person
canvassing — even though it had become apparent that there was a
safe way to do so — and advised their surrogates to do the same.

In Minneapolis and Detroit, Omar and Tlaib both rejected the advice of
the Biden campaign and instead sent volunteers to persuade people not
just to come out to vote for their member of Congress — after all,
they had effectively no GOP competition in their general elections —
but to do their part in ousting Trump by voting for Biden. In
Philadelphia, where leftist candidates have romped over the past four
years, thanks in part to a robust organizing community that saw two of
their leaders elected to the state House on Tuesday, unions and
organizers spent the final stretch of the campaign knocking doors in
areas where voters felt ignored by the Democratic Party.

It’s too early to know precisely what effect the progressive
canvassing operations and organizing had on the vote, as that will
require a deeper dive into the data to determine how many irregular or
first-time voters were pushed to the polls. Turnout surged everywhere
— Biden garnered more votes than any presidential candidate in
history — but it’s clear, at minimum, that Trump’s high-profile
attacks against Omar and Tlaib did not deliver him those states, and
there is preliminary evidence that their operations were
disproportionately beneficial to Biden.

In Detroit, voter turnout reached its highest point in decades,
election officials reported, even as the city’s population has
declined by 10,000 since 2016, and 3,000 people in Wayne County, which
includes Detroit, died from Covid-19. Overall in the county,
Biden won 587,000 to 264,000, a net of 323,000 votes, though more are
still left to be counted. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in the
city of Detroit by about 1,000 votes, but outperformed her by 67,630
votes throughout the entire county; that bump helped put him over the
top in a state that Clinton lost by some 10,700 votes.

With about 90 percent of the votes in her district counted, Tlaib
already has more than 220,000 votes, having beaten her Republican
opponent by some 170,000 votes and counting. That’s a significant
jump from 2016, when John Conyers Jr., who previously held the seat,
won it with fewer than 200,000 votes.

Oakland County, the suburbs outside Detroit, also went strongly to
Biden. Clinton netted roughly 54,000 votes there in 2016, but Biden
won it by 110,000 votes.

In Minnesota, Omar’s district saw explosive growth in turnout, with
more than 400,000 people casting votes. The district netted Biden more
than 250,000 votes in a state he won by just 232,000. And despite
Trump’s hopes, the suburbs did not recoil at Omar, giving Biden a
bigger margin than Clinton won there.

In Pennsylvania, where ballots are still being counted, Biden
outperformed Clinton in Philadelphia’s suburbs, including
Montgomery, Chester, Bucks, and Delaware counties — giving him a
crucial boost even as voter turnout in the city of Philadelphia
dropped. In other parts of the state, he flipped back to blue the
counties of Eerie and Northampton, which both voted twice for Obama
before flipping for Trump.

[Across The U.S. Voters Flock To The Polls On Election Day]

[Across The U.S. Voters Flock To The Polls On Election Day]

Congressional candidate Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, joined by
Democratic Senate candidate Tina Smith, D-Minn., speaks during a
get-out-the-vote event on the University of Minnesota campus on Nov.
3, photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

BOTH OMAR AND Tlaib faced competitive primaries, which they won
comfortably, and they never really stopped campaigning into the
general election. Their teams worked together, swapping notes on how
to safely canvas in a pandemic, and also worked closely with Rep. Mark
Pocan, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who
represents Madison, Wisconsin. Omar’s team made 1.4 million attempts
to reach out to voters through phone, text, or in person. They knocked
on more than 150,000 doors, hitting everyone in the district more than
twice on average, according to Jeremy Slevin, Omar’s communications
director. A record 400,000 people voted in the district, netting Biden
253,000 votes. Biden visited St. Paul, but not Minneapolis, where his
wife Jill Biden visited early last month.

Omar’s campaign hired dozens of organizers to turn out voters when
Minnesota started early voting in September, the Washington
Post reported
[[link removed]].
They knocked throughout October
[[link removed]] and
up to Election Day, especially targeting voters who sat out in 2016.
Omar was also one of the only Democratic Farmer-Labor Party candidates
to continue canvassing, the Star Tribune reported
[[link removed]].

Tlaib’s campaign focused on voters who turned out in 2012 and
stayed home in 2016, and knocked 16,000 doors in the six weeks leading
up to Election Day. They made close to 150,000 calls and sent 100,000
text messages and 100,000 pieces of mail. “Our message was more
about Democrats up and down the ballot,” said Tlaib’s
Communications Director Denzel McCampbell.

In Philadelphia, Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive group focused on
working-class issues founded in 2016 by local organizers, has helped
grow a squad of their own in state and local office. Two Reclaim
Philadelphia alums, Nikil Saval, who helped found the group, and Rick
Krajewski, previously a staff organizer, won their elections to the
state House on Tuesday. A coalition of local and national groups in
the city — including Saval and Krajewski’s campaigns, other local
elected officials, and unions — knocked 370,000 doors in the weeks
leading up to Election Day. That included West/Southwest Philly Votes,
the unions Unite Here and Service Employees International Union,
campaigns for State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, and City Council Members
Kendra Brooks, a WFP council member, and Jamie Gauthier. The 215
People’s Alliance, another local grassroots group, made a total of
35,000 calls and texts to Philadelphia voters, and provided 5,650
meals to voters and poll workers with help from the People’s
Kitchen, a local food security project. National groups like For Our
Future and Changing the Conversation knocked doors in Philly as well.

There were a number of virtual organizing operations as well. The
Working Families Party’s $1.5 million Vote Today Program netted
93,400 conversations about early voting, 76,900 commitments, and more
than 2,000 newly registered voters in Philadelphia. They recruited
just under 500 volunteers for the effort, which extended to protests
and dance parties at “count every vote” protests on Wednesday and
Thursday. Nuestro PAC, a group that worked to turn out the Latino
vote, run by former Bernie Sanders adviser Chuck Rocha, spent $2.1
million on bilingual outreach over the last four months.

Organizers with West/Southwest Philly Votes, a partnership between
Krajewski and Gauthier’s campaigns, knocked 20,000 doors between
October 3 and Election Day, an effort that took about 345 three-hour
volunteer shifts. Members from SEIU’s Local 32BJ joined that effort,
said Rachie Weisberg, field director for West/Southwest Philly
Votes. 

Reclaim partnered with the campaigns for Krajewski and Fiedler to
knock doors, said Amanda McIllmurray, Reclaim Philadelphia political
director and Saval’s campaign manager. Together with PA Stands Up, a
coalition of grassroots organizing groups that grew out of a response
to the 2016 election, 8,000 volunteers across local groups made just
under 7 million calls
[[link removed]],
sent just under 2 million texts, and reached 400,000 voters
statewide. 

SEIU members also held their own canvass, knocking 70,000 doors
statewide, 30,000 in Philadelphia, and 20,000 in surrounding suburbs.
They also knocked doors in Allegheny, in the Western part of the
state, and other areas and made 2 million calls statewide

The most significant push came from Unite Here, a hospitality workers
union that deployed hundreds of members to knock on 300,000 doors in
Philadelphia between October 1 and Election Day, the largest such
operation targeting Black and Latino workers in the city. Statewide,
the union knocked 575,000 doors. They got 60,000 people in
Philadelphia to pledge to vote for Biden, 30,000 of whom did not vote
in 2016. (Trump won the state by 44,000 votes that cycle.) 

“We saw the effects of everything that’s happened since 2016, with
police brutality, right — with Covid-19 and with the pandemic in
general,” said Brahim Douglas, vice president of Unite Here
Philadelphia’s Local 274. “We wanted to engage our neighbors in
places where typically, folks don’t go to,” he said, like his
neighborhood in North Philadelphia and where hopelessness as a result
of the pandemic is prevalent.

“This stuff affects our communities,” said Douglas, referring to
Covid-19. Last month, he lost his 21-year-old niece to the
coronavirus; her 1-year-old daughter had also contracted the disease.
“In the Black and brown communities, Covid has affected — here in
Pennsylvania — a lot of us. And we have a president that took that
stuff for granted, and I think that’s the hurtful part.”

_Ryan Grim is The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief.  He was previously
the Washington bureau chief for HuffPost, where he led a team that was
twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and won once. Grim is a
contributor to the Young Turks Network and author of the book
“We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement
[[link removed]].”_

_Akela Lacy is a politics reporter. She was previously The
Intercept’s inaugural Ady Barkan Reporting Fellow; prior to that,
she was a politics fellow in the D.C. Bureau. She has also worked at
Politico, covering breaking news and immigration._

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]