Chop Wood, Carry Water 8/13
Their tricks can't stop us!
Hi, all, and happy Tuesday!
So much is happening! Where to start? The Harris-Walz campaign continues to knock it out of the park in every way, packing stadiums, signing up unprecedented numbers of new volunteers, killing it on social media, and surging in the polls—even in Florida!
It’s clearly telling on Trump. In a desperate move, he’s returned to X, but too late; the X of today is not the Twitter of 2016, as Dan Pfeiffer so clearly explains in his latest post. Trump is like a grown man returning to the frat house of his youth and finding that the boisterous crowd he once lived with are all gone.
More proof of his desperation: his campaign just announced a sizeable amount of new ad spending, and pundits are taking note of an unusually large purchase in Georgia. Does the Trump-Vance campaign think they’re in trouble there? 24 million dollars worth of new ads suggest yes. So do FiveThirtyEight, The Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, all of whom have just moved Georgia into the “toss-up” category.
Now, I know what you’re going to say: “But aren’t Republicans in Georgia purging our voters from the rolls just to avoid losing? I heard about a terrible new law!”
And you’re correct, there is a bad new law—the one about which we wrote the DOJ yesterday. But I’ve gotten some new information about it from a voting expert I found through the Civic Center’s Laura Brill. His name is Justin Levitt—he’s a professor at Loyola Law School focusing on the law of democracy. He also worked on democracy and voting rights in the White House in 2021-22, and in the office of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice in 2015-17.
I asked Justin about the implications of the new law in Georgia, as well as Joyce Vance’s recent post suggesting that registrations within 90 days of an election might be “safe” (my word, not hers) from being purged.
What Justin told me was helpful, clarifying, and slightly reassuring.
He said, (and I’m going to quote him at length because it’s interesting and useful information):
There’s a lot of misinfo out there [about] the Georgia website. A few points:
The upshot is that I think what they’ve done is probably not legal, and they just got a notice last week from one of the leading civil rights nonprofits in the voting sphere saying as much. I’d expect a lawsuit to follow in short order, with a pretty good chance of winning.
And/but: the Georgia website is immensely stupid, but it’s not quite as stupid as it first looks. It looks like it just lets you cancel someone else’s registration if you know their date of birth, but that’s not actually true. You have to also know their SSN or driver’s license number … and though there are still plenty of flaws in that system, it’s also harder to do mischief to large numbers of people. I’d say it’s a two-alarm siren rather than the five-alarm siren it looks like.
[On the 90-day “safe zone:”] There’s a federal law that applies in 43 states (including Georgia, but not in places that have election-day registration, like Wisconsin). And it has some protections within 90 days of an election, which is what Joyce [Vance] was talking about. That law stops systematic list maintenance -– big-volume purges – within 90 days, but it doesn’t really prohibit individual one-off cancellations or challenges (e.g., I know Bob died last week) or someone reaching out to change their own registration (which is what the [Georgia] website purports to do, badly). There’s going to be an inevitable fight about whether the [Georgia] website violates that law if lots of people are using it – which is part of what the [abovementioned lawsuit] is trying to find out.
And so to your actual question, about the best way people can protect themselves. Joyce is absolutely right that the best protection is for people to check their registration on an official site. (There are lots of commercial vendors out there – quality varies pretty widely.) And it’s also good advice that if someone finds anything at all not right, re-register (and sure, take a timestamp).
In Georgia, the best statewide way to check your registration is here; the best way to register or re-register is here. Outside of Georgia, the easiest way to figure out how to check registration or register is vote.gov, which is the easiest URL to remember, and just got a much-improved facelift (including a ton of language and disability accessibility).
So there you have it. It’s bad, but not quite as bad as we at first thought. And we are not helpless to respond! Please share this information widely!
And listen, friends—if the Trump team thought Georgia’s new law were enough to seal the deal there they wouldn’t be spending 40M on ads in the state. Republicans’ shenanigans are maddening, and they’ll do damage for sure, but we have a solution—actually two! They are diligence—in checking and re-checking our registrations and asking friends to do the same—and determination—to turn out more voters than they can suppress, everywhere.
We understand the assignment, right? We always have! Now let’s get to it, being led not by fear, but love.
When we do that we can’t lose.
Call Your House Rep (find yours here) 📲
Hi, I'm a constituent calling from [zip]. My name is _______.
I understand that Representatives Jamie Raskin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just introduced a bill called the High Court Gift Ban Act to prohibit Supreme Court justices from receiving gifts valued at more than $50. I strongly support this bill—it would mark a significant step towards restoring faith and integrity in the Supreme Court, which, as we all know, is at a historic low. Will the Congressmember be signing on as a co-sponsor?
Extra Credit ✅
Let’s contact NPR and thank them for their fact-checking piece about Trump’s recent press conference. Their reporters took the time to document every lie in his deranged rant—all 162 of them! The article’s existence, as well as its content, are notable and important; if we want to see more journalism like it we need to laud it when it appears.
I dashed off this note (but feel free to write your own):
I'm writing to thank NPR for the excellent and important work done in its recent "162 lies and distortions” piece. Too few news outlets are bothering to call Trump out on his lies--it's dangerous, unfortunate, and a travesty of journalistic malpractice. To see NPR take the opposite tack is both refreshing and heartening. Please keep up the good work. I choose my news sources based on their dedication to upholding democratic norms and telling the truth about people in power. This week your reporters did both. America thanks you, and so do I.
Get Smart! 📚
Friendly reminder that this Thursday I’ll be doing a Zoom event about Project 2025 with Swing Left San Gabriel Valley.
During the meeting, I’ll do my best to tell you what Project 2025 is, why knowing about it matters, and what actions we can take to prevent a takeover of our country. After I speak, there will be a Q&A. We hope you’ll join us!
Spread the Word! 📣
Here’s another good video from the folks who brought you “Keep Republicans Out of Your Bedroom.” This one is about the threat to Medicare under a Trump presidency. Please share! You can copy the link to do so in the upper right hand corner of the video thumbnail.
Give 💰!
Blue Tent helps donors at all levels give effectively to elect Democrats and enact policies for a fairer America. It provides timely recommendations grounded in research and due diligence. I highly recommend checking out their website and/or signing up for their newsletter. They do great work.
You can also check out their top four 2024 recommendations—some of which are also mine, and give if you like.
Win Races—Write Postcards! 🗳
I am VERY excited to announce that Blue Wave Postcards has launched a postcarding campaign into NEBRASKA!
Why Nebraska?
Nebraska’s one competitive Electoral College vote may be the deciding vote for the Electoral College outcome if the presidential election is extremely close.
Nebraska has one competitive House race—in the same district as the Electoral College vote.
Nebraska has a competitive U.S. Senate race between an independent, pro-choice candidate, Dan Osborn, and the incumbent Republican Senator Deb Fischer, who is very unpopular. Deb Fischer votes with Mitch McConnell more than 90% of the time. No Democrat is running in the race.
Sign up to buy some cards and BWP will send you everything you need, including stick-on address labels. These cards are incredibly easy—you only write one sentence!
Win Races—Make Calls
Here are a bunch of phonebanking opportunities I’ve come across this week!
Michigan: Call women in MI with Supermajority. Sign up here
Also Knock For Democracy is hosting phonebanks several times a week in the next few weeks for Michigan’s 7th and 8th Congressional Districts. Sign up here.
New York: Phonebank for Josh Riley (NY-19), Wednesday, August 14th 6:00 - 8:00pm Sign Up HERE! (And if you want to know how awful Josh’s opponent is, watch this!)
Phonebank for Laura Gillen. NY-4 This is a seat that we can flip! Sign up here.
Progressives & Grassroots for Harris-Walz on Saturday afternoons from 3:00 - 5:00 PM ET with special guests to call into battleground states and recruit volunteers and voters. Let's win this! Sign up here.
National Women for Harris-Walz weekly Phone banks on Wednesday, August 14 at 6:00 p.m. ET, with guest stars! Sign up here.
Win Races— Get Ready for the CONVENTION!! 🥳
Women for Harris-Walz Pre-Convention National Organizing Call
Thursday, August 15 at 8:00 p.m. ET.
During the call, the Women for Harris-Walz team will give you a special one-hour sneak peek into the Democratic National Convention. They’ll also share how you can stay plugged in throughout the Convention via social media. Sign up and share with your networks using this link.
No Resistbot Letter Today! Sorry!
OK, you did it again! You helped save democracy! You’re amazing.
Talk soon.
Jess
Jessica—Bravo Girl! Your attention to the NPR fact checking article (on Trump’s 162 lies at his “snooze” conference last week) and your call to Thank NPR, prompted me to send this to them today:
Thank you ! Thank you! NPR. This kind of fact checking in near real time is so rare, I just had to express my deep appreciation to you for doing it. As Mae West always said: “Too much of a good thing is simply marvelous.!” Sadly, there has been too little fact checking for 9 long years! Please continue this important public service. —Marta Daniels, Chester, CT
Thank you, Jess! My Rep. is already a co-sponsor https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/8830/cosponsors so I called to thank him. And Yay for NPR!