Protecting the Results

“I’ve seen some botched national convenings in my 25 years of organizing, and this one may take the cake.” That’s Jonathan Smucker, one of the cofounders of Lancaster Stands Up* and the broader Pennsylvania Stands Up, tweeting yesterday afternoon in the aftermath of a wave of local “Protect the Results” rallies across the country the previous evening. “If you’re positioning yourself as the convener and telling local and state organizations to use your platform for the actions we were already planning, you can’t pull the rug out from under us.”

As I report in a new piece for The New Republic that was posted last night, for months organizers have been planning for the potential need to rapidly scale up a national day of protest in the event that President Trump disrupted the November election. That effort was launched last winter by two groups, Indivisible and Stand Up America (SUA). The former is known for the thousands of local groups that formed under its banner after Trump’s victory in 2016 (and as readers of this newsletter may recall—I’ve been very involved helping run my own local group, NYCD16-Indivisible, here in southern Westchester/northern Bronx). The latter is a “digital-first” organization founded by Sean Eldridge, a progressive activist who is married to Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, who had previously run an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in upstate New York in 2014. SUA claims 2.5 million members, but what they are actually is people on an email list and Facebook who respond to the group’s action calls.

Over the last several months, Protect the Results quietly built a national network of organizations who all saw a need to prepare for a post-election “doomsday” scenario where Trump refused to accept losing. In late summer, it unveiled a website and started collecting individual sign-ups. In October, the group unveiled a national map and toolkit for local organizers, inviting people to step up as local event hosts. By mid-month, more than 100,000 people had signed up and there were 245 events on the map, numbers that roughly doubled by election day.

When Trump declared late Tuesday night that he had “already” won—a point he doubled down on yesterday—it seemed as if PTR’s red line had been crossed. Here was Trump falsely and rashly claiming victory and disrupting the orderly count of ballots then underway. In all of its communications, PTR had told its folks, “we think the likelihood of activation is high” and to be ready to move “as early as 5pm local time on Wednesday.”

The process for making that decision was never clear. On an organizing Zoom meeting of the NYC PTR coalition in late October, I asked Brett Edkins, the political director of Stand Up America, how the go/no-go decision would be made. He said that the national organizations backing PTR would have a call to consult with their local hosts. But he offered no details—did he mean the more than 100 national groups that had endorsed PTR? Or some smaller group, or even just the heads of Indivisible and SUA?

Wednesday morning, local event hosts were polled by Google Form, and three-quarters of them were in favor of going forward with their planned events. But later that morning, on a national conference call, they were told that the groups on PTR’s national steering committee had decided to hold off. It took hours for this information to be communicated back to local hosts. In Westchester, hosts got a text from Sarah Dohl of Indivisible just before 1pm that blandly read, “The election results aren’t final and we’re staying tuned as key states continue reporting. Protect the Results will not activate the natl network right now, and we trust local leaders like you make you your decision about what’s going on in your community.” Even worse, at 3:30 in the afternoon, Edkins sent an email to all of PTR’s individual members titled, “Hold tight. We may still mobilize the national Protect the Results network, but not yet.” Edkins wrote:

“Americans across race and zip code turned out in historic numbers to make their voices heard at the ballot box. Election officials are continuing to count votes across the country, Biden is ahead in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and the outcome of this election will be decided by voters, not Donald Trump. That’s why, as of this moment, the Protect the Results coalition will NOT be mobilizing our national network today, but we remain ready to activate if necessary. While we’re not mobilizing nationwide, some local organizers may still hold “Count Every Vote” events in their communities. Now is the time to be patient and wait. And with Biden currently ahead in key states, we are cautiously optimistic about the results.”

This flummoxed many local organizers. In some places where this message was received earlier local time, like the Bay Area of San Francisco, Edkins’ message led people to cancel their events entirely. Others went ahead, but had to deal with confusion from their local allies and diminished turnout. One organizer wrote me, “So many people wanted, needed to be part of a beautiful expression of solidarity with democracy and celebrate/protect the votes so many had worked so hard to make happen. Which would have been a great part of the narrative, a positive thing amid the doomscrolling. I hate that people were denied that since it was already organized and all the leaders had to do was not stand in the way and let it unfurl from coast to coast, from blue state to red state, from swing state to safe state.”

“Every organizer in our state was furious at PTR,” Smucker told me yesterday evening. But he also emphasized that there were “well executed and disciplined actions all across Pennsylvania [that have] gotten good press and shaped the picture here.”

Yesterday afternoon, I’m told that Stand Up America’s founder Sean Eldridge told a Zoom conference call of PTR hosts that he was sorry for the miscommunication, that they promised to do better, and that they would set up a system for consensus decision making with them. I’ve made several efforts to get PTR staff to respond to my questions about this whole episode. And there’s still no clarity about exactly why PTR pivoted away from all of its pre-election messaging. One theory is that some organizations decided they didn’t want to risk being seen as “chaos agents” and they feared that going to the streets Wednesday would only fuel right-wing expectations of a left-wing coup. That line of thinking has some merit, but if that’s the reason PTR held its powder, it hasn’t said so.

Trying to divine how and why decisions get made about political strategy and tactics is never easy. Organizations and organizers are notably wary of sharing that kind of information, partly because they have real adversaries who will use it against them, partly because they are in a competitive chase for funding, partly because of an ethos of keeping disagreements “inside the movement,” and partly because they’re human.

In that vein, I should offer a clarification about the quote from Nelini Stamp in my New Republic article. I cited her a few weeks ago in this newsletter as someone with a lot of organizing experience who was worried that the left would rush to the streets too quickly in the event of a close election. Last night, she pointed out to me that her comments were not directly aimed at PTR, but more generally about the movement as a whole. I regret the error.

More broadly, at a time of mass participation and mobilization, the tendency for national and paid organizers to keep things “inside” creates a chasm between them and local volunteer organizers. Most volunteers don’t have day jobs in the movement. Nor is there much media helping them understand how the organizations or campaigns they align with actually think about strategy. The fact that many paid organizers work for either 501c3 or c4 groups also distorts communications, since those groups have to be incredibly careful about not violating IRS guidelines around political speech. America is a huge country, which compounds the problem of building trusted connections between organizers.

All of that means what Protect the Results tried to do was, from the start, going to be incredibly hard to do successfully, on the first try. Hopefully, airing out what worked or didn’t work can inform future efforts.

Odds and Ends

If you read only one thing about the meaning of this election for the future, make it this op-ed by Roxane Gay.

*Here’s a beautiful retrospective of how Lancaster Stands Up has evolved from an emergency community meeting of 300 souls in the wake of Trump’s 2016 into a powerful example of local organizing that has built a backbone of real, continuous engagement across Pennsylvania, helping turn that state blue again.

This thread by Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez about why Democrats may have lost seats in the House bears close reading. As some centrist Democrats start blaming Black Lives Matter for supposedly alienating voters in swing districts, AOC argues that the losses might have more to do with poor political campaign practice and a lack of long-term year-round investment in deep canvassing, which can blunt the effects of racial resentment.

Speaking of deep canvassing, a big cheer to Changing the Conversation Together, which set out two years ago with a plan to build a big on-the-ground operation in eastern Pennsylvania, and which had hundreds of people knocking doors in north Philadelphia in the last two months. I canvassed with them back in February and more recently on a couple of Saturdays this October, and it was amazing to see 150 volunteers spread across a park to get their walk lists, all carefully socially distancing, and then to hit the doors and see how conversations change people.

Tomorrow, we celebrate. The Voters Decided. Find an event near you at that link.

Oh, and about the orange menace?