Democracy Diary: Let's Make Calls and GOTV!

Republicans want to take away our freedom in bed, so let's take our rights back there, too. We're winning but we haven't won yet.

Hi, all,

You might have heard there’s an election going on.

Eric and I voted last week.

(Yeah, I know his eyes are closed in the photo. I didn’t notice until after we were done:). Luckily he had them open when he voted and drove home).

The drive-up voting in Johnson County is awesome - we’ve done it in two elections now and each time we’ve been eating lunch within 20 minutes of walking out the door to vote.

It’s especially fun to vote this way because Republicans hate it when voting is easy. Republicans work so hard to suppress the vote because their policies are enormously unpopular - they have been for 50 years, partly because the economy does way better under Democrats, and Republican policies are SUPER unpopular since Dobbs. Turns out most people don’t want eleven year olds to be forced to bear children and for women to get septic and die from pregnancy. Which, duh. So, the only way Republicans can win is to make it harder for people to vote.

What’s your plan to vote? Please share in the comments if you’d like - it turns out that we’re all much more likely to do something if we’ve made a plan and told someone else about it.

Now that I’ve voted, I can keep focusing all my energy on Get out the Vote efforts - and they are SO EASY now. Especially with this nifty auto-dialer called Scale to Win — just click any time 8 AM-11 PM central time, preview the script and the info on the sidebar, and start calling voters. Or you can come down to Christina Bohannon campaign headquarters with me Wednesday at 5, or go door knocking on Saturday. But the fun thing about Scale to Win is that you can do it in bed, which seems SO appropriate now that Republicans are trying to take away our freedom to use contraception and be pregnant and not die from ectopic pregnancies. As Coach Tim says: they need to mind their own business. And get out of our beds.

After the election, I have some thoughts about why even though I vote a straight Democratic ticket and think everyone else should, too (check out Network’s Equally Sacred checklist, which I think gives a pretty clear outcome for Democrats), I don’t consider myself a Democrat.

But voting for Democrats is a harm reduction strategy. If freedom is the goal, I don’t think we get there by not voting any more, or using the military against internal enemies (though I’m sure we’ll still use them against those who protest genocide), or deporting millions of our hard-working neighbors. We’re not more free when, as Jessica Valenti reminds us, “Since the end of Roe, we’ve watched women arrested for miscarriages, children forced to give birth, cancer patients denied care, and women stripped of vital reproductive organs. We’ve seen women die.”

In this election about freedom and democracy, Democrats are winning, but we haven’t won yet (as Simon Rosenberg says). So we’ll focus on that. Then on volunteering to help cure ballots. Then on whatever we have to do to keep them from stealing the election even when we win.

Only then will we talk about why all this is necessary, but not anywhere near sufficient. Because my thoughts about democracy have deepened and evolved quite a bit since my first post several years ago. But - we’ll talk about that after.

(Did you put a time on the calendar to call voters yet?)