A “Dating Site to Defeat Fascism”

And other last-minute developments giving me hope about the election. Plus, how the Anti-Defamation League has lost its way.

As I wrote last week, I’m still feeling optimistic about the outcome of the election. Here are a few additional reasons why:

• Underlying demographic trends in the Rust Belt states that make up the Democratic “blue wall” favor Harris. As veteran political analyst Ron Brownstein wrote for CNN a week ago, using a new analysis of the latest Census Bureau data, the share of the eligible electorate that is white and non-college educated has declined a little more than two percent since 2020, while the share of whites with at least a college degree and voters of color have each increased by about one percent. This is part of an ongoing trend that has been playing out for years. North Carolina is the only state to buck this trend completely. And in Michigan and Wisconsin, two of the three Blue Wall states, the trend has been more pronounced, with Pennsylvania just a little less so.

• People who voted for Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden in 2020 appear to be sticking with Harris. That’s the upshot of Sarah Longwell’s latest Focus Group podcast (you need to subscribe to listen), which zeroed in on a group of such voters in Pennsylvania. Every single one of them said they were voting for Harris, not necessarily out of great enthusiasm but more as the lesser of two evils, because they can’t abide Trump.

• Trump’s ground game is weaker and less organized than the Democrats, and also rife with confusing contradictions. As this new New York Times report on the GOP field operation in Maricopa County, Arizona, notes, Republican activists are urging voters to take their mail-in ballots to polling places on Election Day, in order to vote in person and “be sure” their vote is counted, while also investing heavily in training poll watchers to be on the lookout for massive fraud. This kind of messaging may confuse and depress voter turnout—why bother to vote if you are also sure Democrats are “stealing” the election “again”?

• Finally, instead of trying to win over undecided voters in the middle of the electorate, Trump is clearly doubling down on the strategy that instinctively makes the most sense to him: scaring Americans with dark warnings about millions of violent immigrants ruining America and promising to deport them as soon as he gets into office, while trying to reach young men of all races by playing up his macho and norm-breaking bonafides. All the alpha-white-male behavior on display at Madison Square Garden this past Sunday may get a few more young men voting his way, but now it’s also clearly generating a bigger backlash among Puerto Rican voters, along with everyone else tuning into the election now who is realizing that “America only for Americans” is a deeply threatening slogan.

All that said, I remain worried that the third-party protest vote for Jill Stein will cost Harris enough votes to lose a key state like Michigan. But there’s some good news on this front: a new initiative called SwapYourVote, which aims to make it easy for progressive voters to act strategically: if you live in a swing state you can find a person in a safe blue (or red) state who will promise to vote for the Green Party (or Cornel West) in exchange for you voting for Harris.

SwapYourVote is the brainchild of two longtime progressive organizers, Rae Abileah and Andrew Boyd (co-author of Beautiful Trouble and other fine books like I Want a Better Catastrophe). Andrew is also an old friend of mine and we talked last night about the project. SwapYourVote, he said, is like “a dating site to defeat fascism.” The app on the site is linked to an Airtable database, which a team of volunteer “yentas” (a Yiddish word for matchmaker) are monitoring an Airtable database, and as soon as a swing voter signs up, a yenta immediately makes a match. Then, he says, “There’s trust building that has to happen across regional and ideological divides. It’s intimate coalition-building.”

Obviously, SwapYourVote has a very political goal—to elect Harris, defeat Trump while providing voters a way to pressure Harris on issues like America’s support for Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza and the climate emergency. Rae Abileah, its co-creator, says, “As a Jewish-American I was raised with a vigilance against rising fascism, and I can’t just stand by as I witness the ongoing starvation and death of children in Gaza.” She adds, “I know we must defeat Trump (and Netanyahu) but it’s also so hard to bring ourselves to vote for a Democratic party that continues to send weapons to Israel. I wanted to find a middle path that would be both strategic and connective.” 

Here's her key argument: “Our communities are embroiled in a bitter fight over this election, and we want to help unite progressives toward a winning strategy. Voting is not a love letter, it’s choosing our opponent, and Harris would be far more receptive to pressure from the Left than Trump would be.” 

I’d only add: it’s very clear that if Trump somehow takes power, he will impose some very severe pressure on progressives—he’s promised to deport pro-Palestinian protestors on campuses and as recently as Sunday, his VP candidate J.D. Vance was defending Trump’s promise to use the US military on “far-left” protestors.

Right now, usage of SwapYourVote is doubling every day, Andrew says. Since would-be swappers from safe states outnumber swing staters by about three to one, the site is nudging people to make a two-to-one match. That means for each would-be Stein vote in a swing state switched to Harris, two safe state voters are promising to vote third-party where they live. (All of this is completely legal, by the way, and there are precedents going back to the 2000 election.) Below you can watch an Instagram video of two voters, one from Maine and one from North Carolina, who got matched via SwapYourVote and decided to trust each other.

swapyourvote

A post shared by @swapyourvote

Billy Wimsatt, the founder of the Movement Voter Project, is giving SwapYourVote his strong endorsement. And not only has he personally swapped with a progressive voter in Ypsilanti, Michigan, now the two of them are trying to get their communities to act like sister cities to get more voters engaged. Read his take: “Why I Love Swap Your Vote (And Not Just Because It Could Tip the Election.”

If you need some help making the argument for this very pragmatic choice, I highly recommend this statement from a group of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, progressive Democrats and community leaders in Arizona. Here are some select quotes:

We know that many in our communities are resistant to vote for Kamala Harris because of the Biden administration’s complicity in the genocide. We understand this sentiment. Many of us have felt that way ourselves, even until very recently. Some of us have lost many family members in Gaza and Lebanon. We respect those who feel they simply can’t vote for a member of the administration that sent the bombs that may have killed their loved ones….

In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement. It would be an existential threat to our democracy and our whole planet….

Trump must be defeated. The only way to defeat him is to elect Kamala Harris. Voting for Harris is not a personal endorsement of her or of the policy decisions of the administration in which she served. It’s an assessment of the best possible option to continue fighting for an end to the genocide, a free Palestine, and all else that we hold dear.

Read the whole thing. Notably, Rep. Ruwa Romman, the Palestinian state legislator from Georgia who had sought to speak at the Democratic National Convention and was rebuffed, has endorsed the Arizona statement.

—Related: This essay by Eddie Glaude Jr., who teaches African-American studies at Princeton, is powerful testimony. He admits he didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because he had hoped to push the Democratic party to the left, and now he wonders if two close friends would still be alive if we had had a president who had told the public the truth about Covid-19.

The ADL’s Deafening Silence

A week ago, former White House chief of staff and retired general John Kelly told the New York Times and The Atlantic that while in office, Donald Trump said that Adolf Hitler “did some good things” and that “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” Kelly also said that Trump met the definition of being a fascist. Since the publication of those stories, Trump has taken to calling out one of their authors, Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, by name at his rallies, calling it “a failing magazine run by a guy named Goldberg.”

The Anti-Defamation League, which claims to be America’s leading organization fighting anti-semitism and other forms of hate, has said nothing in response. I’ve known Jonathan Greenblatt, its CEO, since his days as a civic tech entrepreneur as the founder of All for Good, a volunteering hub. So I emailed him, asking him to explain this decision. While privately we had a friendly back-and-forth, where I urged him to denounce this latest news about Trump’s abominable views, all he would say on the record was, “No comment.” Yesterday, the ADL criticized “political rallies” that “denigrate Jews, Palestinians, Puerto Ricans, and other marginalized groups” but wouldn’t even specify which rallies it was referring to.

This is a gigantic mistake. Worse, it’s another sign of “obeying in advance,” a phrase coined by leading historian Timothy Snyder, which he and many others are now using to describe Jeff Bezos’ decision to end the Washington Post’s practice of endorsing presidential candidates. “Doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate,” Snyder said on Saturday. “You are giving the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have.”

It is true that the ADL has criticized Trump for past statements he has made, most recently his declaration back on September 19 that if he loses the election it will be the fault of American Jews not voting for him. Recall what Trump said then, as he spoke to a Republican Jewish group: “I really haven't been treated right, but you haven't been treated right because you're putting yourself in great danger." At a second event before another rightwing Jewish audience, he cited polling suggesting a majority of American Jews would vote for Harris, “Do they know what the hell’s happening if I don’t win this election? The Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens, because… 60% of the people [are] voting for the enemy,” he said.

Here's how Greenblatt responded to those statements:

"Here we go again. I appreciate that former President Trump called out antisemitism and recognized its historic surge. He's right on that.

But the effect is undermined by then employing numerous antisemitic tropes and anti-Jewish stereotypes — including rampant accusations of dual loyalty. Preemptively blaming American Jews for your potential election loss does zero to help American Jews. It increases their sense of alienation in a moment of vulnerability when right-wing extremists and left-wing antizionists continually demonize and slander Jews. This is happening on college campuses, in public places, everywhere. There are threats on all sides, period.

Let’s be clear, this speech likely will spark more hostility and further inflame an already bad situation. Calling out hate is important, but I can’t overstate how the message is diluted and damaged when you employ hate to make your point."

Note how Greenblatt presumes Trump’s good faith opposition to antisemitism before chiding him mildly for using antisemitic tropes and stereotypes. Note as well how Greenblatt does a reverse Charlottesville, claiming that there are bad people on both sides of the political aisle. As if the putative next leader of the United States is somehow equivalent to some anti-Zionist college students. Sadly, Greenblatt’s equivocation and normalization of the Trumpist Republican party is now a well-established pattern.

So the ADL’s silence now should not be a surprise. Other Jewish organizations have not shied away. On MSNBC, Amy Spitalnick for Jewish Council of Public Affairs said “we should be clear how crazy it is that 80 years after the Holocaust—after my own grandparents survived but their families didn’t – we have a U.S. Presidential candidate that is glorifying and admiring Hitler. This cannot be normalized.” Like Greenblatt, Spitalnick runs a tax-exempt 501c3 organization, but that hasn’t stopped her from calling out anti-semitism and Hitler adoration wherever it surfaces.

Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, pulled no punches when I asked for her reaction. "We’re a week away from an election in which an organized fascist movement has a real shot at consolidating federal power,” she commented. “Every institution and every powerful person is making choices about how they position themselves - for access, for impact, for safety - in light of that real possibility. Some entities are raising the alarm and signaling that they’ll fight to defend American democracy and our values. Others - for example, the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos - are preemptively soft-pedaling their critiques or going silent.” She continued, now focusing on the ADL:

“For an institution dedicated to fighting antisemitism, what might the latter course look like? It might look like shying away from direct confrontation with Trump and ensuring that critiques, when necessary, are voiced as gently and quietly as possible - even as Trump dials up the antisemitic, racist, and antidemocratic rhetoric. It might look like taking a shockingly cautious and conciliatory approach towards Elon Musk, even as he turns X into a disinformation cesspool and propagates violently antisemitic conspiracy theories. It might look like focusing 90% of one’s attention on protesting college students, and as little as possible on the MAGA movement’s open antisemitism. It might look like giving Jared Kushner an award and calling him a champion. If Trump is elected, we’ll see how far down this path Jonathan Greenblatt is prepared to go."

History will record who spoke up now when all the red lights were flashing, and who bent their knee in advance.

Two more things

—If you want to help state Rep. Chris Rabb keep Pennsylvania blue, spread the word about these friendbanking events tonight at 5:30pm and Wednesday at 6pm.

—Finally, yes, there are all kinds of things to worry about after November 5. Assuming Harris wins the electoral vote, Trump is not going to give up easily. There are already indications that he is planning to use his base of support among House Republicans and in some state legislatures to force a “contingent” election where not enough Electoral Votes are certified for either candidate to gain a majority, and then the House votes, by state delegation, to pick the winner. The best way to defuse this scenario? Make sure Harris wins big.

Keep calm and protect democracy!

Seen on the streets of Durham, NC, this past week