This Time is Different

I’m going to keep this edition of The Connector relatively short because we all have more important things to do today. But I want to address some feedback that I got from last Friday’s issue, “Reasons to be Cheerful.”

While a lot of you wrote to say you appreciated some good news about Biden-Harris’ prospects, a few questioned whether it made sense to say that “democratic legitimacy goes to the side that gets more votes.” One friend who I respect deeply for their own years of organizing admonished me for “prematurely celebrating” and urged me instead to emphasize how badly tilted the system is against democracy, that we’re in the middle of an “authoritarian slide” and that we shouldn’t take anything for granted, like all the votes being counted.

Here’s the thing. Right now, Biden is way ahead in the polls and Democrats are quaking in their boots, while Trump’s campaign is in a deep hole and his supporters think they’re ten points ahead. Psychologically, this is upside down. We are winning, and by around 11pm tonight as the first tallies come in from the west coast states, it will be clear that we’re ahead in the total vote.

Before you rush to remind me that the Democrat was also ahead in the total vote in 2000 and 2016, remember one more thing: this time is different. This time, there is a massive muscle that has been built by tens of thousands of organizers who have been toiling ever since November 2016 to rebuild the grassroots base of progressive politics in America. In 2000, Al Gore explicitly decided not to mobilize Democrats in Florida or nationally to defend the vote counting process there, other than trying to win the fight in the courts. (Read labor organizer Jane Mcalevey’s recounting of her experience as an AFL-CIO national staffer sent to Florida if you need a refresher on how the Gore campaign gave up on the battle for public opinion in those critical days.) In 2016, Democrats were in complete shock after Trump’s victory, leaving such a political vacuum that outsiders and newcomers with no prior organizational experience were the ones who launched the Women’s Marches and the Indivisible movement.

This time is different. I was astounded to learn yesterday that more than four million people have taken action using the Mobilize organizing platform in the 2020 cycle. That is double the number who took action in 2018, which you might recall was when Democrats retook the US House of Representatives and made other significant gains at the state house level. It is also double the number of active volunteers that powered Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaigns. Mobilize says the current volume of activity flowing through its platform, which is used by more than 1600 campaigns and organizations, is twelve times what it was in 2018.

Yes, the Trumpites have been holding mass rallies/superspreader events and those crowds are big. Big crowds prove nothing about electoral prospects; I can remember when Walter Mondale had 100,000 people in the Garment District of Manhattan in late 1984 and he still lost badly to Ronald Reagan. The MAGA folks in their muscle cars and pickup trucks are driving around trying to demonstrate their dominance, and those images are scary because they are designed to be intimidating. But when we share them with each other, we give the other side far more power than it really has.

In the meantime, our muscle is less visible because we’re behaving more responsibly and not holding big rallies. But if you’ve been on any Zoom meetings held by Democratic-allied groups lately, you know the number of people patiently making calls and texting voters is enormous. Monday night, more than 70,000 people were making calls for Biden. Meanwhile, as I write, so far there’s been little sign of the “50,000 poll watchers” that the GOP claimed would be showing up at polling sites nationwide. ProPublica’s Electionland reporting hub, which has 149 local and 12 national news organizations in its consortium, and almost 500 reporters across the country, has also so far turned up few problems.

The election won’t be over tonight, to be sure. It will take a few days, at a minimum, for all the mail-in ballots and provisional ballots to be counted. We’re organizing for that too: Sign up to Protect the Results to be part of that. And there may be court challenges, since the Trump side already knows that suppressing votes is its only strategy for getting out of the hole it’s in. But let’s go forward with confidence that our democracy is rising, and that no matter what some politicians may say, the elections belong to the people, and the millions of us who have learned how to organize ourselves democratically to bring our voices together will make sure of that.