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Empowering local organizations to get out the vote.
Wisconsin Elections Depend on African American Voter Turnout
In 2000, Gore won in Wisconsin by only 5,708 votes; in 2004, Kerry won by 11,384; in 2016, Trump won by 22,748. The Blue Wave of 2018 helped Tony Evers defeat Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker by 29,227 votes; in April, Republicans won a State Supreme Court Justice seat by only 5,981.
For all these elections, the margin of victory/defeat correlates to the percentage of voter turnout in 148 primarily African American wards in Milwaukee. The city is the most segregated in America, and voter ID and other state laws further cripple turnout in this crucial population.
Based on the experiences of past elections, three organizations — Organizing Corps 2020, Black Leaders Organizing for Communities, and the Wisconsin Democratic Party — aren’t flying in “experts.” Instead, they’re recruiting and training organizers who already have strong roots in the community. In turn, these volunteers will engage and energize voters in their own neighborhoods.
The three groups have the leadership, focus, and ability to put resources to work effectively. As important, they have personal connections and access to vital alliances. To learn more about and donate to all three with a single click,
visit this Act Blue fundraising page.
Some of the candidates
Virginia Weekend of Action
In Virginia, Democrats are only four seats away from flipping the entire legislature blue. There are enough left-leaning voters in Virginia to win — if they go to the polls. In last year’s Blue Wave elections, Virginia, turnout was nearly 60%, allowing Democrats to flip three congressional seats. In 2017, one race was so close that Democrats lost on a coin flip.
Hence, October 12 and 13 are hereby the Virginia Weekend of Action. With just a few weeks before Election Day, Swing Left is kicking voter turnout efforts into overdrive. The goal is to write 100,000 letters to Virginians urging them to vote.
Check the calendar above to find the Weekend of Action event closest to you. Handwriting personalized letters is the single most effective thing you can do from afar to turn out voters.
What’s at stake with these four seats in Virginia? There is extensive potential for change. A win will give Virginia a chance to:
Redefine legislative and congressional districts that were last drawn in 2010 by Republicans to disenfranchise African-American voters.
Address restrictive voter ID laws, early registration deadlines, and barriers to absentee voting — all issues that proportionately impact African-Americans, as does Virginia’s ban on voting rights for people convicted of a felony.
Enable passage of liberal policies; in the past, the GOP-controlled House of Delegates prevented state Democrats from voting to become the 38th and final state needed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.
There’s no doubt that a win in Virginia will build momentum for Blue wins across the country in 2020.
For more information, read the
Swing Left Virginia Primer.
Can you guess where these fabulous volunteers are from? If you said Texas you’d be right. Elizabeth Daniel and Webber Barton flew all the way from Texas to Maine to register voters. They braved flights and bad weather with great results: 21 new voters.
Four Unsung Heroes of Maine
Tom Shiple and Carolyn Marsden are two of the unsung heroes of Maine voter registration. They have done all the back-end processing for the 500+ voter registration cards that volunteers have collected since mid-August.
Not to bore you with the details, but it took a @#$! of a lot of work to build and populate the spreadsheets that
Calculate how many Democratic and unenrolled voters registered
Determine which locations are most productive for encouraging voters
Generate data for individual letters to every town clerk that receives the completed registration cards
Furthermore, Tom, a software engineer, took the time to automate the most time-consuming steps.
So … when Senator Collins loses thanks to ALL of our efforts, keep a special place in the pantheon of heroes for these four special people.
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