To Indivisible Elmwood

I have been working with East Bay Activist Alliance (https://www.eastbayactivistalliance.org/) on developing an intern program to support state legislative races in critical states.

We choose states and races based on impact at multiple levels as follows: an eye to flipping legislature to end gerrymandering, to support up-ballot races within the state like Governor or Attorney General, to support up-ballot federal races like for the US House or US Senate (either to hold a seat or flip one), and to support the Democratic presidential candidate with a significant number of electoral college votes. We are picking the state races by whether or not they are conceivably flippable. We aim to help push them ahead in the end. We do not pick sides in primaries because we want to support local choices.

We have chosen to work in Michigan because we have relationships there from work two years ago when we helped flip a state senate seat and a state house seat in Oakland County, a formerly segregated county immediately outside of Detroit. We will be working directly with four campaigns there, two holds and two flips. We are currently helping two other campaigns to flip, but only in the early part of their campaigns. We will work with two campaigns in North Carolina and one in Arizona (AZ legislative district 6 which includes Flagstaff).

In each of the past two years, we have had one intern, first in Michigan then in Virginia. Thus far this year we have seven interns who are working now because of the Covid quarantine. They are all working in Michigan on 5 legislative races, helping StateWide Indivisible Michigan (SWIM), and a national campaign, One Fair Wage (https://onefairwage.com/about/). They are working remotely to help campaigns. Some of the work is phone banking, other actions involve research for the campaign or data gathering of one type or another. The interns are very enthusiastic and want to learn about political campaigning and flip things Democratic.

Our Michigan candidates at this time are Padma Kuppa (https://www.electpadmakuppa.com/), Laurie Pohutsky (https://housedems.com/pohutsky), and Julia Pulver (https://www.juliapulver.com/). Our Arizona candidate is Coral Evans (https://www.coralevansaz.com/). We have not finalized the NC races that we will support, but we plan on taking on two.

EBAA has a new website, and it offers a broad view of what we do. It connects to all Bay Area political activities some of which may be of interest to some of you. Our full service offer to campaigns is our expertise and our structures for fundraising, phone banking, text banking, post carding, canvassing, and supplying an intern.

EBAA is a completely volunteer organization, no paid staff, but a lot of very talented and knowledgeable activists. We can also use any local support, funding and actions that you and others can offer. So please, check out the website and see what’s there. If you have questions, feel free to contact me (bill.activist@gmail.com or 510-220-5239). I think that the fundraising link will take you to the Giving Circles effort that we are using to replace the activity-based fundraising was used before.

Thanks for all that you all do!

Bill Marthinsen