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Indivisibles,

It’s Thanksgiving newsletter time with your host, Ezra! As always, this
newsletter is free, and I won’t be asking you for money here -- these
newsletters are all about building community, developing a shared
understanding of the world, and giving you a picture of our ridiculously
adorable 2-year-old (scroll to the bottom for that). And since it’s
Thanksgiving, I want to give some thanks while giving a peek behind the
curtain on how this year in politics played out for us.

Sidenote: normally I say you can find me on Twitter, which is still true
[ [link removed] ]here, but I’m increasingly skeptical of the platform with Elon at the
helm. I’m starting to explore other platforms, so you can find me on
[ [link removed] ]Mastodon here, and on [ [link removed] ]TikTok here where I’ll record a video version
of this newsletter. I like Twitter and hope we can maintain a non-troll
community there, but I’m also not putting my full faith in the right-wing,
conspiracy-theory-spreading man-child who now calls the shots there.

With that, let’s do some reflecting and thanking together.

How we kicked off the midterms

In January of this year, I was out in Arizona marching with Indivisible
members from across the state and with MLK Jr’s family encouraging Kyrsten
Sinema to side with us over Mitch McConnell. We were calling on her to
reform the filibuster and pass the democracy bill protecting our
elections, ending gerrymandering, and getting money out of politics. But
Sinema instead gave a defiant speech on the floor of the Senate, killing
the democracy bill.

This was a rough period for the pro-democracy movement. Sinema and Manchin
killed the democracy bill. Our economic agenda was on life support.
President Biden had yet to move forward on any inspiring executive action.
Talk of an inevitable red wave in the midterms had started to bubble up.
What got me through this period was talking with Indivisible leaders about
what we do next -- and that talk naturally turned to the midterms.

It was at this point that we rolled out our strategy for the midterms. If
I spoke to your Indivisible group virtually or in-person anytime this
year, you probably heard one thing from me: Our only chance to win in 2022
was by making this election a referendum on MAGA extremism. The specific
issue might depend on the community -- book burning, support of
seditionists, radical attacks on abortion rights. But the throughline was
the same: We needed to make voters choose between us and those
power-hungry wackadoodle MAGAs.

Indivisible went all in on this strategy. We joined a national messaging
collaborative called Protect Our Freedoms with communications guru [ [link removed] ]Anat
Shenker-Osorio and Way to Win, who helped keep us both on offense and on
message. We launched pilot programs in Pennsylvania and Arizona to help
local Indivisible leaders drive public attention to the other side’s
extremism. From bird-dogging anti-abortion zealots to gettting chuckles
across the state for donning giant broccoli costumes, Indivisible leaders
started getting creative for how to force MAGA extremism on the front
pages. 

At our national convention this summer with Senators Raphael Warnock and
Elizabeth Warren, Indivisible focused on messaging strategies and tactics
to drive public attention to MAGA extremists. Our friend Navin Nayak, who
leads Center for American Progress Action, led a training around using the
language “MAGA Republicans” to drive our point home. Indivisible released
a new guide to getting earned media highlighting MAGA extremism and worked
with our organizers across the country to help local groups do this work. 

While political prognosticators were running flawed polls and predicting a
red wave, those of us on the ground knew there was political power in this
approach. 

Book burning is not popular. 
Violent conspiracies to overturn our elections are not popular.
Banning abortion is not popular. 

We believed we were morally right in loudly opposing this scary MAGA
extremism, and we believed there was political potency in this approach
too.

How we won the strategy debate

While Indivisible were running with our anti-MAGA strategy by the early
spring, this was not the dominant position of Democratic Party leaders --
at least not yet. Both publicly and through back channels we encouraged
Party leaders to join us in this approach to the midterms, but we met
resistance. As recently as July -- even after the Supreme Court struck
down Roe -- I heard from senior Democratic leaders that abortion was a
“loser” issue to be avoided on the campaign trail. Seriously -- I gasped
too at the time.

But we kept pushing -- we wanted Dems on our side. And in [ [link removed] ]my August
newsletter, I was celebrating a victory. We hadn’t won the elections yet,
but the media was reporting a shift: [ [link removed] ]Democratic leaders…to focus on
calling out Republicans as “extremists.” This was major progress! The
Democratic Party was doing something we're not that used to: It was
unifying around a central campaign message. By the fall, this
transformation was complete. President Biden’s final two speeches of the
campaign were rallying cries on abortion, democracy, and MAGA extremism.
The Party was unified and on message headed into the midterms. 

We were thrilled. We were celebrating. A few days later, my
spouse/co-founder Leah wrote “[ [link removed] ]The Case for Hope,” making a
straightforward case for hope for the midterms. She pointed to GOP
overreach on abortion and the Big Lie, the weakness of MAGA candidates
winning primaries, and the Democrats seemingly getting their mojo back.
The piece holds up well.

But while we were celebrating, much of the professional political world
was condescendingly sure we were wrong. Reviewing one of Biden’s speeches
on the threat of MAGA extremism to our democracy, the regularly-wrong CNN
commentator Chris Cillizza, called this messaging approach a “[ [link removed] ]strategic
blunder.” Professional opinion-havers across the political spectrum shared
this assessment. Voters don’t care about abortion or democracy! The
Democrats are out of touch! A red tsunami is going to come crashing down
on all these woefully misguided Democrats! 

At this point though, we had won the strategic debate and there was
nothing to do for us but finish the campaign. We wrote hundreds of letters
to the editor. We orchestrated spectacles and public events to shine a
light on MAGA extremism. We contacted millions of voters -- we postcarded,
we phone banked, we textbanked, we canvassed. And then we waited for the
election results.

How it went down

If I have one personal anecdote from this election that sums up what we
achieved, it comes from canvassing a swing district in Washington state. I
was knocking doors with Indivisibles in Washington’s 8th -- a must-win
district that most thought was a tossup. I came across a middle-aged white
guy with a backwards baseball cap who told me his top issues this year
were “inflation and the economy.” This was the exact kind of voter the
political commentators were saying the Democrats were losing by focusing
on sideshows like democracy, abortion rights, and right-wing extremism. I
asked him who he was supporting in the congressional election and he told
me, “Well not the Republican -- he’s crazy!” 

We won that race. And not just that race.

You didn’t have to go too far from Washington’s 8th to find another
example. Washington’s 3rd was one of Indivisible’s stretch races. It
included large swaths of rural Washington, and the district had voted for
Trump twice. But the incumbent -- a rare anti-seditionist Republican --
had lost her primary to a MAGA wackadoodle. The race was such an
interesting case study that Michelle Goldberg [ [link removed] ]wrote up a profile of it
in the New York Times. And when I was out in the district this fall, what
I heard from Indivisible leaders on the ground was this was winnable. So
we saw an opening, even as prominent prognosticators like Nate Silver gave
the Democrat a 4% chance of winning, and the national Democratic Party
largely declined to invest in the race. 

And we won that one too -- by less than 1%, but we won! 

Across the country we won similar races -- election night was an
almost-unending flow of good news updates, which then continued in the
days to come. We won “Republican” districts. We flipped the Pennsylvania
Senate seat (welcome Senator Fetterman!) and the state House. We picked up
governorships and state legislatures. We won secretary of state and
attorneys general races. We defeated election deniers up and down the
ballot. 

No, we didn’t win everything -- you never do in a national election.
Indivisibles in New York mourned the loss of several winnable
congressional districts along with those of us in Texas, Florida, and
California. Among the most painful losses for me was Mandela Barnes’
less-than-1-percent loss to Ron Johnson -- in a race Indivisibles across
the country worked so hard to win. And while the Republicans managed to
gerrymander their way into a House majority, it is a miniscule,
disorganized, and weak majority.

Even accepting the losses, this was an historic midterm, arguably without
precedent in modern American history. 1934, 1962, 2002. Those are the
three examples of a President performing well in his first midterm in the
last century. But there was no Great Depression like in 1934. There was no
Cuban Missile Crisis like in 1962. There was no terrorist attack like in
2002. And there was no rally-around-the-flag effect boosting presidential
approval ratings like in all three. Instead what we had this midterm was
anti-democratic MAGA candidates, and all of us focused on making this
election a referendum on that extremism. And it worked. Democracy won.

How we’ll keep winning

I listened to the New York Times Daily podcast after the election, [ [link removed] ]How
Democrats Defied the Odds. Their conclusions quickly became conventional
wisdom in political circles: It turns out focusing on abortion, democracy,
and MAGA extremism was politically potent. Who woulda thought! In the days
that followed, this became so accepted that it achieved a status of almost
being foreordained. 

This was not foreordained. Just the opposite. The conventional wisdom a
month ago was that the red wave was coming, and that the Democrats
deserved to lose because of their strategic blunder focusing on abortion,
democracy, and MAGA extremism.

We did not get lucky. We fought hard for this outcome. 

And in fighting for this we did not just take a bet on our strategic
instincts. We didn’t just win an election. We didn’t just make political
history. We proved something important: In this country, there is a
political price to pay for anti-democratic extremism. 

We fought hard for the political world to learn this lesson. We should
hold onto it, repeat it, and proselytize it as we look forward to the
future fights against the miniscule MAGA majority in the House, against
Trump, against Desantis, and against the right-wing extremists who seek to
take away our freedoms and undermine our democracy.

So on this Thanksgiving, I am thankful to be a small part of this movement
that has spent the last six years racking up win after win for our
democracy. There are more of us than there are of those MAGA weirdos.
We’re better organized. We know how to win. We won. We’re winning. And we
will win again.

In solidarity,

Ezra

Ezra Levin

[11]Indivisble Co-Executive Director

Pronouns: He/him

PS: As promised, here is our now impossibly grown 2-year-old Zeke. Born a
couple weeks before the 2020 election, Zeke now has two major national
election wins under his belt (well, if he wore a belt). We’re aiming to
get him at least one more big win before kindergarten. In non-political
news, he is currently obsessed with potatoes and has designated one mommy,
daddy, and baby potato for each of us to carry around the house at all
times. A good organizer already.

[12]Zeke smiling into the camera

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