Virginia’s results, whether it was Critical Race...what was it again, Caravan? Ebola? Laptop? Emails? or midterm based differential turnout, or frustration with democrats, or a bad Mcauliffe campaign, or all sorts of things mixed together (Personally, better Republican turnout based on a mix of these makes the most sense to me, applying across several elections.), are frustrating, and presumably you don’t want similar results to play out in 2022. But sitting here reading or making posts abou these things doesn’t help, so what can you do?
You need more votes, and you need to fix several root problems among democrats in power, to fix a lot of these. So, to get started?
Organizing more votes
votesaveamerica.com/…
https://www.voteriders.org/
https://www.lwv.org/
League of women voters is famous, but doesn’t hurt to throw it in to a list like this. All three are general purpose organizations.
For State organizations:
List of States, follow the links (This is the self promotion part of this post, this link has further links to individual states, and links to state organizations are first in each state article.)
The Brief including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan, and others. This is this site’s big podcast, interviews people doing this sort of organization somewhat often, and has links to said organizations.
After the 2020 election, there was lots of celebration of Abrams’s Georgia organizations, plus various groups in Arizona. Those groups, and ones like them in other states, are continuing to do work: want to win elections, you need more voters, and these are the groups to go to.
There are also campaigns gearing up right now: Mark kelly, Raphael Warnock, Maggie Hassan, Catherine Cortez Masto. These senate races seem to be fundraising well, so I’d personally go for the more general state organizations, but they will likely use the money at some point. I haven’t linked to senate primaries, since we don’t know who the person is yet, and presumably saving money or spending it elsewhere for a general election is a better use of money.
Replace Mods with Progs
For this entire year, and going back further into the primary, moderates have been really showing their ass and causing all sorts of problems. Filibuster crew holding up lots of bills + Sinema and Manchin are the obvious one (including possibly allowing lots of extra gerrymandering with the voting rights/elections bills held up), but we also have internet commenters going nuts and opposing anything progs do, and anger from moderates when a bill was held up, slow prosecutions from Garland, primaries and other contests throughout the year...it’s been a mess. It’s also very clear that if Progs were actually followed and allowed to put things in place, a bunch of far more useful programs would be put in place and dems would have quite a lot more successful bills to point to.
(“But it’s not moderates, it’s conserv….”, and a whole series of other complaints. I have one post about this from awhile ago, and will have another one in the next week to knock down some of these.)
Getting more progs into office, and replacing toxic members, is also a big priority. Right now there’s only two races I know of, but i can add more:
Cisneros vs. Cuellar again Cuellar is one of the most toxic democrats in office, voting very commonly with Republicans including being one of the people pointlessly holding up the BBB bill.
Replacing Maloney. Carolyn Maloney generally seems o.k.ish, but notice in these negotiations how even the “o.k.” people were willing to just go along with the bipartisan thing and not push all that much for the bigger one, which could well turn out to be a terrible decision. The more progs there are, the better stuff passes.
I can update this if I learn about more challengers.