CEO Update: 365 days until the midterm elections

Writing that sentence made me anxious.  Reading that sentence probably made you anxious.  We're all anxious, all the time, because society as we know it appears to be crumbling, and the worst humans we can think of somehow get elected to office and do unspeakably bad things with relative impunity for reasons unclear.  And the entire thing is exhausting. Utterly exhausting.  I don't know about you, but most of my days are defined by exhaustion. I was exhausted in mid-2019 as Vote.org imploded.  I was exhausted in late 2019 as I incorporated VoteAmerica.  I was exhausted throughout 2020 and my team and I worked every single day trying to keep democracy on the rails under increasingly strange and distressing circumstances.  When we formed VoteAmerica, we were primarily worried about hostile foreign interference.  How adorably naive of us. Within months, COVID hit, and we had to pivot to helping everyone vote by mail.  And then we had to pivot again as we watched a partisan attack on the post office, which forced Americans to choose between voting and dying of a deadly-airborne virus that 50% of elected officials refused to even acknowledge was real.

Somehow we made it to Election Day, which was great, only to realize the GA runoffs meant we wouldn't get any time off post election to do normal things like "eat Thanksgiving dinner" or "exchange holiday gifts with family."  Which was fine, mostly, because what's six more weeks of insane work when you've already worked every day for 52 weeks.  We somehow pulled ourselves across one more finish line, watched the Georgia returns come in, and went to bed fairly confident that we would finally get some rest. 

How adorably naive of us.  We all went to bed confident that Democrats had flipped the Senate, only to wake up to an armed insurrection.  In the United States of America. During which angry white people stormed the US Capitol Building with impunity, on a gleeful mission to murder as many Congresspeople as they could find while somehow the National Guard did nothing and the sitting President of the United States cheered them on.  What the absolute fuck.  And here we are, 10 months later, and there have been no repercussions.  I can't even wrap my head around that. 

But of course it gets worse.  Republicans introduced 408 voter suppression bills in the first half of 2021. 19 states have already enacted laws that make it harder to vote.  This is bad, but it's par for the course.  Republicans decide decades ago that their clearest path to victory law in reducing turnout.  But with Trump controlling the party, they've added something new and frankly terrifying: they're just going to attack the validity of any election they don't win.  Trump started this nonsense before the 2020 election; Larry Elder continued this nonsense during the CA recall; and Greg Youngkin grabbed the baton during the VA gubernatorial election.

Someone on Twitter recently wrote that they didn't have the emotional or physical bandwidth for every election to be the most important election of their lifetimes.  Hard agree.  This is exhausting.  And this email is much darker than I intended it to be.  Apologies. 

The upcoming midterm elections are going to be the most important election of your lifetime.  They will be more important than the 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 presidential elections combined. Because democracy itself is on the ballot.  And if past performance is any indicator of future results, 33% of presidential election voters will stay home.  

 Now for some relatively uplifting news: increasing turnout in midterm elections is so much cheaper and easier than it is in presidential elections, because these "drop off" voters are already registered and they already know how to vote.  So you can get them back to cast ballots in 2022 by shouting from the rooftops that midterm elections are more important than presidential elections.  This messaging works. It works very well. I have produced 100s of pages of academic research in partnership with Professor Christopher Mann demonstrating this.

So here's the plan.  First, we're going to get through the midterm elections as a team and by through, I mean we're going to fight like mad because democracy is on the line.  If you're reading this email, you're on the VoteAmerica team.  Welcome, we're glad to have you.  Second, we're going to have some very serious conversations about structural investments that will pay dividends over decades, so that every election is the most important of our lives.  And finally, we're going to give ourselves permission to re-imagine our democratic institutions, and embrace the sort of changes that the founding fathers made every 2-4 years.  Democracy is supposed to be iterative.   The constitution is supposed to be amended, the number of Supreme Court justices is supposed to increase over time, and for the love of all that is holy, the entire point of the Census is to increase the number of House Representatives so that large-population states like CA, NY, and TX actually have federal representation.

But first we need to make it through the Midterm Elections.  The VoteAmerica team moved mountains last year, quickly, because we were able to hire 28 full-time people to work around the clock.  It was amazing to watch.  And then like all democracy organizations, we had to let 75% of the team go because funding tends to evaporate. We cut every possible expense, we all agreed to do 4 jobs, and we managed to cross this year's finish line, meaning we still exist 365 days before the midterm elections.  

In 2020, we raised nearly 12 million dollars and spent every penny of it to help voters cast their ballot. Now we need to do it all again. We’ve spent the last few months analyzing the programs we ran and figuring out where we can make improvements and scale up the work to have an even greater impact. From billboard advertising to campus mobilization, SMS election reminders, text based Voter Helpline, and more—these programs will help drive record voter turnout in 2022 if we have your continued support. 

 Team, it's go time.  We've got 365 days to make collectively make democratic magic happen. On the VoteAmerica side, we've got enthusiasm and expertise in spades.   

Let's go.

Debra