Congratulations to the voters and volunteers and to Heather Boyd. This is an important win to keep the PA House in Democratic hands.
This win will allow the PA House to advance LGTBQ+ rights, workers’ rights, voting rights, abortion rights, common sense gun safety laws, and many more progressive priorities. These wins only happen because of help from people like you.
@TonyStark Congratulations to Boyd and everyone who worked to make this happen.
If you wrote 5, 20, or 50 postcards or made phone calls to help with this effort (I did!), know that you made a difference for democracy. You not only helped the people of this district and Pennsylvania, but many Americans. Decisions made by the PA House will keep guns out of other states and will allow people from all over the country where care is restricted to access reproductive health care in PA.
@MariaHill It’s important to note that not only do these races matter and that all races matter, but that each individual can have a positive impact.
We can write postcards, letters, volunteer for text banks and phone banks, donate, put up signs, help deliver signs, help voters get to the polls, and help spread this information on social media and to people we meet every day.
And that things that will help us all do happen. They happen all the time and will happen more the more we all engage.
@TonyStark@MariaHill
I watched a nice lecture at Brown University on YouTube yesterday by one of the authors of 'How Democracy Dies' or a title along those lines.
Anyways how that relates to this thread about the democratic victories in yesterday's elections is that I think I have an idea on how we can help increase voter turnout on the left.
Unless we are talking explicitly about the political parties, it would be great if just said left and right. I'll try to do a thread on that video.
@MariaHill@GreenFire I’m interested in things that increase voter participation overall and although I’ve enjoyed great improvement on that in my own area, we can all learn from other good information.
@TonyStark@MariaHill
I'll try to remember to tag you when/if I get around to threading a discussion on that lecture. It's an hour and a half video so a thread is probably necessary to get more people to consider the lessons that are outlined in it plus my idea about trying to change our language related to our two-party system and the frustrations that it brings to our electorate.
Just gonna point out that one of the things I saw among progressive US friends (mostly white middleclass fans from various fandoms) during the 2016 election was the repressing of the progressive voter because HRC wasn't progressive enough for them; because they wanted Bernie and they didn't get him.
Telling people that HRC was a shit candidate meant some who might have voted didn't. It meant people who might have gotten out for democracy (even if it wasn't perfectly their candidate) decided to stay home on election day.
I thought about those friends in the years that followed - many of them Jewish, bi, trans... Do they regret it? I don't know. I took a 6 month hiatus from the SMs we shared and didn't reconnect when I returned.
But I still wonder: how many people did they influence across SM not to vote in their vocal insistence that the Dem platform wasn't good enough? How many more were out there in 2015-2016, repressing the vote because it "wasn't good enough"?
Participation absolutely matters, but the concept of "participation" also includes how we speak about democracy and being involved in it. All those accounts telling people "it's both parties" and "your vote doesn't count"? They disincentivise participation in the democratic process. (Burn like trash, assholes.)
Not trash-talking democracy or the 'lesser evil' also matters!
@seldear@MariaHill This is a good discussion to have and I don’t want to ignore it! I am a progressive person as you know, Sel. So is Maria. We were both supporters of Hillary Clinton.
We do know there were disruptive, intentional social media campaigns to try and influence the election for Trump. How much effect it had is hard to quantify.
I’ll come back to this but I had a response earlier today that implied progressives should work with Democrats. Progressives ARE Democrats.
@seldear@MariaHill And yes, downballot races are effected by federal election turnout. Worse for Dems again if people stayed home. We are all paying for that and unfortunately will for, I can’t say how long.
It’s not necessary to have perfection for progress. It is necessary to prevent what we ended up with for it. The “burning it all down” doesn’t leave much to build with.
@TonyStark@seldear@MariaHill
Democrats are the progressive political party in the USA, no ifs, ands or buts about it if being progressive means making progress.
@TonyStark I knew two people in 2016 who fell into the category @seldear is talking about. One who does not have a lot of privilege and saw Bernie as fighting for people like them. After the election, they told me they regretted their Stein vote. They were also in a safe blue state. But they did know that they could have influenced others.
The other was a white, middle class woman in a swing state, one of the former blue wall states that went red. I was too angry to keep in touch.
@seldear@TonyStark@MariaHill Didnt HRC and her voters do the same thing when Obama won the nomination in 2008? I wish I kept the study but it suggested more HRC voters didn’t vote for Obama than Berners who didn’t vote for HRC.
@seldear@Dinger@MariaHill If true, and I’m not sure if it is as I’ve never heard that and I’ve volunteered since Bill, it hardly matters as Obama won. Honestly, I’m not even that big on reliving the last elections other than learning from them and moving forward. Hopefully people have done that. I can tell you that I supported Warren for 2020, followed by Harris and Castro, and had zero hesitation volunteering for Biden after the primary and have zero hesitation for 2024
That's the key, isn't it? You fight for who you want to rep you, and if it's not who you hoped for (whoever was your candidate), you go for whoever remains who best represents the world you want to live in.
And if none of them represent that perfectly, well, voting isn't like a marriage and you're not choosing The One Forever And Ever. You're picking public transport - the best option to get you closest to where you want to be.
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