The Daily Kos community—in other words, you—are now one of the biggest forces in progressive politics. And there's no way the rest of America won't be taking notice.
[T]he political activity [in Kansas] didn’t come from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, nor did it flow from the Democratic National Committee, whose new chairman, Tom Perez, ran on a pledge to compete in all 50 states.
Instead it came from Daily Kos, one of the pioneers of the liberal blogging period of the aughts, which has found newly acquired relevance in the era of Democratic resistance to Trump.
It wasn’t a fluke. Kos readers had already sent more than a million dollars to the campaign of Jon Ossoff in Georgia, and in the next few weeks you’re likely to read about how they’re pumping eye-popping sums into Montana to boost Rob Quist and, perhaps, even into South Carolina, where a race is shaping up to replace Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.
That's you, the members of this community, responsible for this. You now have the power to take on races nobody expected to contest and make them competitive. It didn't come from any of the usual places we've now come to expect as the status quo in American politics, no billionaire seeking to install a favored friend or industry group pouring money into a state race on behalf of one of the industry's reliable apologists. It's actual, bona fide people-power, ten or twenty bucks at a time, from folks who don't have their own lobbyists but do have their own principles, and are fed up with that status quo.
You're a movement now.
The reason this site's political director is talking about races like this to Rachel Maddow isn't because our team identified it as a sleeper race worth quick attention, but because you then went out and made it competitive on your own. You gave the Democratic candidate the means by which to compete on an equal footing—to get the Democratic message out in one of the reddest districts in the country, and the voters listened.
That might be the best message of all, here; that no matter how conservative a district might be, no matter how often Fox News talking heads blare from how many televisions, we can counter their brigades of nonsense and propaganda-spewers. If a congressman wants to gut healthcare, they're not going to be able to do it quietly anymore. Republican Ron Estes may have won the race, but he's going to Washington as the representative not of a safe, do-what-you-want blood-red district but of one that is going to be watching his every Republican move.
There's two more immediate races that we can make an immediate difference in. In Nebraska, Democrat Heath Mello is challenging incumbent Omaha mayor Jean Stothert, a Trump-supporting Republican who appears to think her best chance of keeping her current job is to simply clam up about all the things Trump is now doing. Mello can win this one, giving Omaha a mayor that will oppose the lunatic edicts coming out of the Trump White House.
And, of course, there's Jon Ossoff's House run in Georgia. It's another race that had no reason to be close, but Jon Ossoff is a good candidate, with a good message, and voters are listening to him. Money may be pouring into Republican coffers from all the usual big-money meddlers, everyone from the Club for Growth to the NRA, but this movement, on this site, responded with over $8 million in small dollar donations, kneecapping a wide swath of those big-money efforts by ourselves.
This is something to be proud of. We may win some of these, we may lose all of them—we've never targeted the easy-to-win races, after all, but focused on the ones where we thought we could make a difference that was worth making—but something happened in the last year that turned our efforts from an effort that could tinker at the margins of a race to a force that could single-handedly make a race competitive.
That “something” isn’t just anger at Trump or at the Republican abandonment of any pretense that they stand for anything else but their own party power, or fury over so many decent things in America forever in danger of going by the wayside because the people who made so very much money during the last few decades are absolutely furious with the notion of giving as much back to their country as the generations before them did. It's the nationwide progressive decision to damn well do something about it, one city, one district, and one race at a time if that's what it takes.
It's all right to toot your own horn over this one. We've gone so long with a narrow set of big-money organizations deciding among themselves which candidates the voters would be allowed to hear from and which would be silenced that it's gotten to be actually a wee bit amazing to hear that a group of individual citizens was able to upend that system all on their own. It's a big deal.
Again, and no exaggeration: You're a movement now.
Here are our next targets: Give $3 to Heath Mello ASAP so that he can turn Omaha blue on May 9, or chip in $3 to help Jon Ossoff and sign up to make calls to Get Out The Vote for Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff here.