Big event! Today we will decide on the Elmwood Invisible Slate, combining Sister District recommendations and Andy’s analysis to figure out which are the races that we can have the most impact on and how (from local house races up through Senate) . Bring your ideas and we’ll hash this out together. Our past record is really good—let’s see if we can help some just under-the-radar elections to win on our way to White House and then win them. Also on the agenda, some reports of works in progress and resources.

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Andrew Lazarus is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Indivisible Elmwood
Time: Jul 5, 2020 04:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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The rate after June 15 is about triple where we had been, although still low by National and California standards.

Expect serious slowing of re-opening measures. A few more months and I may have enough hair in back for a comb-over.

New York: No more news as of time of this posting. The race to face Lee Zeldin (NY-01, Long Island) has a margin of less than 200 with most of the ballots outstanding.

Kentucky: Squeaker win for McGrath. I suspect she would have lost if the election were this week and not last week. I would have more regrets except I don’t expect either can give Moscow Mitch more than a token scare. But: we flipped a Kentucky State Assembly seat up for a special election, 57–43(!). Dr. Karen Berg is the first Democrat to hold it in 25 years. She turns out to be the childhood neighbor of a friend, so we kicked in $25. And—look— that was enough! By my math, this costs the Republicans their veto-proof majority in the chamber.

Colorado: To the surprise of no one, John Hickenlooper won the right to dispatch Cory Gardner in November. Primaries for Progress, which I take, has a low opinion of Hickenlooper. Their newsletter even compared him to Dianne Feinstein: waste of a safe blue seat. Most of the mainstream press attention went to the Republican incumbent in CO-03 losing his primary to a QAnon-conspiracy nut. She also doesn’t let people with masks into her bar. Basically, someone who makes Sarah Palin look like Eleanor Roosevelt. She is highly likely to win; the district is strongly Republican.

Massachusetts: The day after Jamaal Bowman ran up the score on Rep. Eliot Engel (NY–16), I got a call from Alex Morse, the mayor of Northampton, Massachusetts. He’s running from the left against Richard Neal (MA–01), the chair of Ways and Means whose indolent pursuit of Trump’s taxes was frustrating. Morse called me months ago and I told him I’d wait to see Bowman’s result before making a commitment to another insurgency. Morse, who said he’d been at Bowman’s Campaign HQ for Election Day, wanted to make sure I remembered my pledge. I had. I even told him so when I picked up the phone.

Naomi reviewed material on the most effective strategies for GOTV. Postcarding is effective, letter writing more so. (Vote Forward, for letters.) There does not seem to be a problem with contacting people too much, as long as it isn’t an intrusive method like texting. Gentle social pressure and reviewing the actual voting process are better than partisanship. Email Naomi to get postcard addresses for TJ Cox.

I reviewed several upcoming Democratic primaries. Tomorrow we see if tortoise Charles Booker has overtaken hare Amy McGrath for KY-Sen. I tend to put more credence in the polls showing both of them far behind Moscow Mitch than those showing McGrath even with him. There were also several primaries in New York with racial and generational overtones. The NY Times, against type, mostly endorsed youth.

Links to Senate candidates in big bang-for-buck races. Greenfield (Iowa). Bullock (Montana). Cunningham (NC). And rather than donate to Biden generically, we can funnel donations through groups that will push him in a desirable direction. Example: Clean Energy for Biden. (Unfortunately, their name and URL are too easy to misread as “clean energy forbidden”, which is the Republican plan.)

Judy spoke again about the malign Alameda County sheriff. At this point we are trying to remove his support in the county Board of Supervisors. This year the key election is in District One. The progressive candidate in the General Election is Vinnie Bacon, a member of the Fremont City Council.

Bruce is keeping an eye on developments in Indivisible California. Much of the recent call was on Black Lives Matter.

“Don’t miss them!”

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4:30-5:30 Zoom link:

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1. Act wisely report Naomi
2. Political update Andy
3. Indivisible update Bruce
4. Sheriff report Judy
5. Wise political giving via Sister District Bill

The national Indivisible organization has recommended the following actions for this Friday 6/19 and beyond:

1. RSVP for a Juneteenth Day of Action event near you. The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) has created a centralized map for folks to register events and RSVP to them—there are several in Berkeley & Oakland Friday. If you’re looking for ways to take action from home, a good starting point is our resource for taking action in solidarity with Black lives — but we also encourage you to stay intentionally plugged in and aware of the demands and activities of Black-led organizing groups in your area.
2. Call on your own local and state officials and tell them to defund your local police department and invest those funds in resources people need in Black communities, Indigenous communities, and communities of color. Local governments must commit to cutting funding for the police and investing it in Black community-led education, health and safety programs (such as funding for schools and youth homelessness services, solutions to the opioid crisis, and non-police responders for crises such as mental health response teams and community violence prevention programs). There is a national crisis of violence against Black people that spans centuries. Now is the time for visionary and radical change that you can be a part of. Call on your own local and state officials and demand this long overdue change.
3. Urge your elected officials to sign onto the No Cash from Cops campaign. This is a campaign led by our partners at Color of Change, urging elected officials to refuse to take any political donations from police unions or sheriff associations, and donate any contributions already taken to Black-led community strengthening initiatives.

Happy Father’s day, and here is the link.

Andrew Lazarus is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Indivisible Elmwood
Time: Jun 21, 2020 04:30 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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My Inbox has also lost weight during the Quarantine, dropping from 54,000 emails to under 30,000, and still shrinking. I just ran across two old emails from “Aaron (the Give Smart guy)” from January, 2019 on the Democrats’ chances to retake the Senate.

Let’s say, we are in much better shape now than it looked then. He expected Doug Jones to lose, meaning we needed four flips. Still the case.

Only Colorado seemed likely. Arizona seemed better-than-even. Maine, worse-than-even, although he correctly predicted Sara Gideon as the strongest challenger to Collins. Montana he correctly predicted as tier-one if Bullock entered after his Presidential campaign collapsed (against Conventional Wisdom, came to pass). North Carolina, Iowa, and Georgia were where the Dems needed to catch up. (We have. In none of those three did he even mention the eventual winner of the D primary.)

I’ve decided to take another look at the Kentucky Senate primary. Charles Booker is getting local endorsements while Amy McGrath keeps running the same two-issue campaign: part personal determination, part Mitch McConnell is evil. I’m not sure that plays well in the long run. McGrath can, of course, turn her $10MM warchest on her primary opponents.