We persist.

We still have a few left out of the 1000 postcards we are writing for AZ State Senate candidate Judy Schwiebert (website). OK, more than a few. Work party 3:00–5:00, usual place.

Also: Monday, June 24, 10:00 a.m., Dem hopeful Monica Tranel (website) will be at our standard meeting place. She is running in MT–01 against the odious Ryan Zinke. Lean/Likely Republican seat, the type we need to flip. Please let me know if you want to attend (not a ticketed event, no donation required), so I know how many donuts to order. Too early in the day for pretzels and chips.

Pursuant to the Indivisible Elmwood by-laws, champagne will be served.

(Non-alcoholic beverages and snacks, too.)

Those of you who wish to phone bank, please bring your laptops. (I don’t know if a tablet will work.) We will also have postcards. We are working for, among others, Judy Schwiebert (AZ Senate–02).

Snap analysis: The Trump die-hards are incensed almost beyond description. Even Susan Collins, coward that she is, found it necessary to condemn the unfair treatment of her Orange Man of Sorrows. They are putting their objections in the language of “rigged” juries and incorrect instructions from the judge, but their hearts speak of the prosecutors, judge, and jurors as Satanic agents. For the ordinary voter holding more orthodox religious views, of any religion, I don’t see this as helping Trump at all.

We can read salacious transcripts of the first week of Trump’s trial, the SCOTUS argument on immunity, today’s primary results…

The political recap was shorter than usual. The primaries are effectively over, and we know what, that is, who, we are up against.

Since the meeting there have been some positive trends. A minor special election for the Alabama State Assembly had a 32-point swing towards the Democrat, where the same Democratic candidate went from a 7-point loss in 2022 to a 25-point win. (Her previous opponent has left the legislature to serve his prison term for corruption.) And Cook Political Report moved two of Nevada’s three Dem-held congressional districts from Lean D to Likely D.

End of quarter financial reports are going to look bleak for Republicans. All the donations are going to Lord Donald’s lawyers. Look for downballot Republicans to start getting antsy.

We finished with some letter-writing for Vote Forward and some postcards. We are low on postcards. Some of you brought nice ones and I am trying to see if I can get a large order of them instead of reprinting our own.

Usual place.

The primaries are over. What’s the state of the election.

Worry less, work more: postcarding, letter-writing.

We will not be raising funds to help Trump cough up $450 million Monday.

At the top of this page, you will find two new menu items: “Political Calendar” and “Links”. They go to new pages. The Links page lists sites we are excited about. If I knew WordPress better, I’d like to get them running down the right hand side of this main page, which was the traditional place for your “link roll”. The Political Calendar includes events like our own meetings.

But, let’s be honest, who wants to add one Indivisible page to your daily browsing to see if some postcard party showed up. Instead, you should be able to add this calendar to your usual electronic calendar and new events will show up in the normal synchronization process.

Those who use Google Calendar can give me their email and I can share the calendar with you, or you can use the link below.

For others (e.g., Apple-based calendars) I believe this is the link that you copy/paste to subscribe to Indivisible Elmwood from your favorite calendar app. There will be a place under “Subscribe to new calendar”, or similar, to enter it, and it should be readable (but not editable) to all.

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/be84ab1b9ed2e4cc0b822ec667d6f882bd680c38821dca9fd0e796b8c6e62f99%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Technical support for this operation will be available.

Happy New Year, everyone.

We began with Naomi reviewing websites we rely on. There is a new permanent page with links (it will grow) which you can access from the menu at the top of this page. They are also mentioned below.

Aaron Frank’s Focus for Democracy has an event Sunday, February 25. Register here. We’ll get this up on our new calendar, also permanently linked above. He is currently touting Working America and Accelerate Change.

For a regular dose of optimism, Hopium Chronicles.

Sister District for downballot races.

Vote Forward for addresses to send letters; Postcards to Voters if you prefer those.

Bill gave us a summary of his work for Rudy Salas (that’s CA-22), with the reassuring news that he is a stronger candidate this time. Dan and Karen have also been canvassing in the Central Valley. There was some spirited discussion on whether Josh Harder needs our support. Cook rates his seat in CA-09 as “Likely Democratic”. My feeling is that the Salas race (rated Tossup) is more critical.

We continued with a discussion of the general issue of getting Democrats to turn out. Randy Starn (long time no see!) gave a phrase I had never heard before to describe voters who say they won’t vote for Biden over Gaza (used to be student loans): aggressive apathy. We need at least some of those voters to come to their senses by November. Sally brought up Relational Organizing in this sense. Link. Trainings are Mondays at 5:30.

Future meetings will be the fourth Sunday of every month. Socializing and morale maintenance. Be active in between. Here’s Chop Wood Carry Water, from Jess Craven, with a daily suggestion of what to do and a weekly summary of what went right for us and bad for MAGA.

I don’t have to tell you that Michael Feggans won by 8, that the State Senator (Rouse) whose district is included in Feggans’ won by 12, and the Dems flipped the House of Delegates. We found the margins surprising, because when we went to bed, Feggans was 4 behind and Rouse up by less than one. Even when Gideon texted us an hour later that Feggans was now expected to win, he was only up 4. Unfortunately for the numbers-inclined, the Virginia counties were not consistent in whether they counted mail or Election Day ballots first, not to mention geographic implications in partial reports that we can not even guess at. In our district, however, we can be sure that the mail vote was counted last, as it accounted for the entire ~2200 vote margin and then some. Feggans fought the Republican to a near-draw between the early in-person vote (pro-Dem) and the day-of vote (pro-Rep), but last I saw was up 2:1 in the mailed ballots.

This means I can’t say much about the remaining uncalled races. First, there’s three days’ grace for receipt of mail ballots. In one race, they have not yet finished with the initial count, and no one seems to know what type of ballots remain uncounted, or why. Then there will be the curing attempts on the mail ballots that have some sort of error. So, I wouldn’t give up on those yet.

There were nine canvassers from the East Bay, and we knocked, by my count, on about 2000 doors. The campaign had all the volunteers needed. We heard every target door was knocked on at least twice. We funded a well-organized machine that was ready for everyone who came through the door. (This does not apply to their poor taste in donuts.) Student delegations came down from DC to help. We were a little skeptical of the young campaign managers’ confidence based on turnout, but they were correct.

This post would be seriously incomplete without mentioning our wonderful hosts, David and Carol Pariser. Not only did they open their spare bedrooms, they cooked us dinner and uncorked a really first-rate wine every night.

Details tomorrow. Only regret: count was slow and race tight. We left the watch party before he could claim victory.