politics

Minutes for 9/13 meeting

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Actions: I let us run out of blank postcards (this will be fixed before the next meeting), but we had letters to write from Vote Forward to first-time Michigan voters. Technically non-partisan, but the intention is to help the Democratic ticket.

Issues: There’s a lot of concern about the possibility of the Trump regime interfering in the election. Since the meeting, even the Trump-besotted Supreme Court squashed their attempt to do so via the Postal Service. Indivisible and No Kings have called for a rally on October 17 to encourage everyone to Vote Early! At the time of the meeting, there were no locations listed in the Bay Area, but this has now changed: Oakland, Alameda and San Francisco Civic Center are now on the list. October 17 is the emphasis on the new flyer for the Friday protests.

Judy stated that there is now a Signal Group ready for nationwide action in the event of election tampering anywhere in the country. They suggest photographing your ballot before returning it, to deter manipulation. (With a county drop box two blocks from Indivisible Elmwood HQ, in front of the public library, this should not be an issue for us.) From Sally, the Indivisible What’s the Plan. Many links there, including this one to the Indivisible founders’ take on what is successful midterm messaging.

Donations: It’s late and many candidates have good war chests. Focus for Democracy always has good groups to support. And States Win has a growing list of downballot races, 55 last I looked. With one exception, I just donated en masse. The exception is Rockee Armstrong, AZ Assembly 13. We were paired with her months ago, so she got extra.

Also, if you have a choice between giving through ActBlue and OATH, OATH takes a smaller cut.

(And if I left something out here, let me know.)

Minutes from 4/26 meeting

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CA–22: Central Valley Matters has been busy. There’s canvassing every remaining weekend and GOTV May 29-June 2. Phone banking with Jane Fonda (!) on Wednesday, April 29, 6:00–8:00 pm. That’s this Wednesday! UAW President Shawn Fain is in Oakland Sunday, May 3 for a Villegas fundraiser, but for some reason, the flyer doesn’t give a location. And we gave out Villegas postcards with a script at the meeting; if you took some, write them and chuck them in the mail ASAP. If all you want is a donation link, here it is.

May 1: A little under-organized compared to No Kings 3, but No Work, No School, No Shopping. Not sure how this intersects with our daily café visits. We will have fresh posters for the usual Friday protest emphasizing workers. There are other Bay Area events. (Another map of events.)

Governor’s race: Everyone worries about Dems getting frozen out. Most of us in attendance were talking about the surprising endorsements billionaire Tom Steyer has received (e.g., Ro Khanna).

Arizona State House of Representatives: States Win (the former Sister District) has paired us with Dr. Raquel “Rockee” Armstrong. Her campaign website is here; she also made a video for States Win. There is a primary and a second candidate, but Arizona has two-member House districts so both will advance. The other candidate is a veteran with endorsements from other veterans; Armstrong has unions and Run for Something. From 2022 to 2024, one seat was held by a Democrat and one by a Republican. In 2024, the two Republicans finished about two points ahead of the Democrats. Overall we lost four seats in 2024, and need four to flip it back to Democratic control. More on Armstrong later; I assume we will do some combination of fundraising, outreach, and maybe even canvassing. The district lies east of Phoenix.

Focus for Democracy: Aaron Frank’s next round of candidates will be revealed Tuesday, April 28, on a 5:00 pm Zoom. Anyone who is interested should ask me for the Zoom link (not supposed to be posted publicly). Focus for Democracy is looking for bang-for-buck races up and down the ballot.

No meeting on Mother’s Day, May 10

Notes from the March 1st meeting

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We reviewed the election landscape in California, especially CA–22 and the governor’s race. As Bruce pointed out, the state Democratic Convention failed to reach the 60% endorsement threshold for either of these races. There’s even some fear that with eight Democrats splitting the pro-D vote, the two Republicans will end up advancing to the general election. Notwithstanding sentiment at the convention, we expect Democrats who can’t self-fund and are polling in single digits will drop out before June.

I went over the National Indivisible’s first three Democratic primary endorsements. I promised a video [coming soon] to go with the printed version, which is appended below. Two are trailing their opponent in fundraising and the third is an essential upgrade. Sally caught Leah’s and Ezra’s weekly What’s The Plan call. The official summary:

2026-03-01-NationalIndivDownload

Ann Overton brought an origami butterfly from the No Kings Art Build. The next event is Saturday, March 7, 1:00–5:00, in the Mills College area. You can sign up for that session and/or March 8, 14, and 15 with Mobilize.

We finished with 100 postcards for the Virginia Redistricting referendum, which was approved by the Virginia Supreme Court today.

Our Friday protests have grown (82 last week), but we still have enough chocolate for everyone. Indivisible Berkeley is starting a similar weekly protest, Wednesdays at 4:30–5:30 at MLK & Russell.

2026-03-01-IndivEndorsementsDownload

Notes from the 2/15 meeting

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I reported on the relatively favorable forecast for the House and the key Senate races. The most contentious California race, among Democrats, is the primary to take on David Valadao, the Republican in CA–22. The candidates are Randy Villegas and the more conservative Democrat Dr. Jasmeet Bains, who appears to be the favorite of out-of-area Democratic leadership. Conversely, Villegas is the favorite of Democratic leaders in the district, Dolores Huerta, and our colleague Mary Boergers, who leads the Berkeley chapter of Central Valley Matters. There will be a Villegas fundraiser this Friday, 5:00–7:00. If interested, you can sign up here.

Note that Sister District has renamed itself States Win, so that is how I will refer to it from now on. With the exception of a Michigan special election, they have not picked any races yet. They are playing in more states than last cycle, including Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, and North Carolina. We’ve written postcards or raised money in those states before. Nicole Zambrano has left States Win for grad school; Ariana Ybarra replaces her as the West Coast Organizing Manager. She warned me, they are fond of phonebanking.

Volunteers for roles in Indivisible Elmwood:

  • CA Indivisible – Bruce
  • National Indivisible and Vote Forward — Sally
  • Indivisible Berkeley & Indivisible East Bay — Estella
  • States Win — Martha
  • Central Valley Matters — Ann O.

[Martha and Estella: I will be granting you author permission for this website. I believe everyone else who volunteered has it already.]

We distributed 100 postcards encouraging turnout for the North Carolina primary. No need to bring them back here, unless you need some stamps.

Our protests have grown to over 100; ICE murders served as a a recruitment tool. They are currently 4:15–5:15. We will revert to 5:00–6:00 after the Daylight Savings switch.

Indivisible Berkeley is organizing a new weekly protest at MLK & Russell, Wednesdays 4:30–5:30 pm. Starts March 4.

Undoing Citizens United!

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A recent initiative—already on the Montana ballot this November— would go a long way toward  curtailing dark money from US corporations in US politics. Called a “corporate power reset,” it would remove from corporations the power to spend money on political campaigns. All corporations are legal fictions whose only powers are those given under state laws, and states can modify those laws to eliminate the power to influence elections.

 At a recent CA Indivisible Zoom meeting, Tom Moore of the Center for American Progress made the case for the Montana initiative (called the Transparent Election Initiative) and for making a similar effort in California and other states.  Moore is a senior fellow at CAP who previously served as counsel to a longtime member of the Federal Election Commission. His comprehensive report on a general Corporate Power Reset is below, along with related commentary.

Several CA Indivisible groups are pushing legislators and candidates for governor to commit to working for this kind of action in California. We can join them! A suggested script from Indivisible Ventura: “I’m calling from [zip code] and I want [State Senator/Assemblymember______] to introduce and support the Montana Plan to stop corporate spending in CA politics.”

Below are links for more information:

Web version of Tom Moore’s comprehensive CAP report, “The Corporate Power Reset That Makes Citizens United Irrelevant”: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-corporate-power-reset-that-makes-citizens-united-irrelevant/


Robert Reich, “How to Get Rid of ‘Citizens United'”: https://robertreich.substack.com/p/how-to-get-rid-of-citizens-united


Recording of CAP’s October 14, 2025 event introducing the project: https://www.americanprogress.org/events/undoing-citizens-united-and-reining-in-super-pacs/


Short explainer video that reached 4.7 million views on Reddit, despite the unphotogenic narrator: https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nrcrez/video_the_legal_strategy_that_renders-citizens/


Link to the October 2025 national polling on this reform and on dark and corporate money, commissioned by Issue One: https://issueone.org/press/new-polling-citizens-united-money-in-politics-reforms/


The Transparent Election Initiative, which is advancing this toward Montana’s 2026 ballot: https://transparentelection.org/


Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect, “Montanans Go After ‘Citizens United'”: https://prospect.org/2025/10/27/montanans-go-after-citizens-united/

Bruce

Minutes from the September 14 meeting

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 1 Comment

My notes show three action items, besides finishing the Virginia postcards, which I have mailed to Jessica Anderson Campaign HQ in Williamsburg, VA.

  • Most of the donation action is going to happen in 2026, although I have gotten multiple requests from Dems running against each other in Michigan and Illinois. I haven’t looked hard at any of these races. Eighteen[!] Democrats have filed to replace retiring Jan Schakowsky in IL–09, a very blue district where the primary is everything. Sister District has sent a donation link for this year’s Virginia House of Delegates races. Early voting has just started in Virginia. Voting in swing districts has been off to a quick start, but not at all clear whose voters were in a big rush to turn out.
  • Buy Blue. We can see from Disney’s hasty and inadequate retreat that boycotts are a serious worry for the cowards running our major corporations. (The Washington Post has lost 500,000 digital subscribers since 2021.) But we can use our money two ways: depriving the bad guys, but also supporting the good ones. I think I was promised a source for politically liberal companies (e.g., Costco), but I don’t see it. Whoever promised, please send again. There was a Buy Blue website years ago, but it’s gone.
  • Thank the judiciary. Standing up to Trump is a thankless job. Judges have been doing it since the beginning of this Trump regime, even though the Supreme Court has seldom shown inclination to back them up. We can write them thank-you notes. I believe someone has assembled a list of addresses. I simply started with a list of some of the most heroic judges: Paula Xinis [immigration], James Boasberg [immigration], Allison D. Burroughs [Harvard], Beryl Howell [spite against law firms]. As you can see, Google finds email and snail mail addresses with one click. (Two for some of the snail mail.) I’m going to get out the nice pen and stationery.

Friday protests continue.

Yes, I know I haven’t done minutes of the previous meeting yet. And if I have omitted something from this meeting, the edit button is never far away.

Minutes of the May 11 meeting

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Overview of Virginia: we are paired up with Del. Michael Feggans again, and we have in a request for a Zoom with him where we can ask him questions. The campaign is hoping this meeting will also generate some donations. As soon as we know the date for the Zoom session, we will pass it on and everyone can invite their friends. Meeting our candidate is a lot of fun. We committed to write 500 postcards, but as of now, Sister District has no Feggans addresses and asked us to write for Del. Nadarius Clark (running in an adjacent Tidewater district) instead. The 2025 elections in Virginia look good. The Republican candidates are making no pretense of Youngkin-like moderation, and they are arguing amongst themselves over their Lieutenant Governor candidate, who is openly gay. (Their gubernatorial candidate is against same-sex marriage.)

We talked about our Friday protests. People are enjoying them quite a bit. Last Friday we handed out several hundred action flyers—people love them! We talked about adding some new items to the protest and for this week 1) Naomi is putting together a songbook so we can sing together on one corner and 2) Ken will be recruiting for the June 14th protest. We will also add some new button styles and hand out some stickers (very popular to put on laptops). The band will be back though perhaps not this coming week. Everyone should continue to pass on word about the protests. We can always use more participants. We also talked about perhaps in the future adding another flyer distribution point, such as the Downtown Berkeley BART station.

For the action part of the meeting we wrote postcards for next Tuesday’s Scranton City Council election and some of us wrote to the Florida Bar asking for Pam Bondi to be investigated.

Notes from the 2/23 Elmwood meeting

/ Andrew J. Lazarus / 1 Comment

We will have a recurring visibility event at College & Ashby from 5:00 to 6:00 on Fridays, starting this Friday 2/28. Bring signs!

Economic Boycott: Buy nothing Friday, February 28, all day.

Short report about prior activities: We wrote 400 postcards last meeting and over 100 people turned up at our Not My President Protest last Monday (photos in previous post).

Current actions:

Sue Hildebrand, one of two Cal Dems staff members working on engagement joined us for a spirited fifteen minutes via Zoom. The useful part of her visit was explaining that the lowest level of the Party comprises the County Central Committees and we should get in touch with our County Committee to express concerns (good idea to learn who yours are!). Half of the Cal Dems budget ( 6 out of 12 million) goes to conventions and such. The other half goes to support candidates and field operations so they only can afford 2 full-time organizers. Hildebrand emphasized how little power Democrats have today.

Afterwards we split into three working groups.

I helped one group get on Bluesky, reviving my own account in the process. Bluesky is basically a drop-in replacement for what Twitter was before Musk turned it into xhit. Bluesky is growing. Musk’s right-wing sewer is not.

Twitter revenue chart

The second group did postcards for Susan Crawford in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, April 1st. We got our postcards from Activate America. There are also letters available from Vote Forward.

The third group is organizing a NEW branch of Indivisible Elmwood. Watch for more info here.

Next meeting is March 9.

Notes from the February 9 meeting

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Record attendance! The Resistance grows. Welcome new members.

Some other local Indivisible chapters: Indivisible Marin claims 10,000 members. Zoom meetings and action items. Indivisible East Bay has monthly meetings, sometimes in person, large scale action items. Indivisible Elmwood has in-person meetings bi-weekly, returning politics to a socially-engaged experience. We also do action items: postcarding, joining phone banks, fundraising, and sidewalk presence. (Our meetings alternate between two members’ houses. We realize that yesterday’s meeting was crowded. We may set up an RSVP system.)

Anyone who wants to post to this blog: email me, and I will authorize you. If there is interest, I will also explain how to post.

February 9 agenda

  1. Courage is contagious: How to be brave and mentally stable
  2. Support vital media  [copy of the handout will appear here after beautification]
  3. Recruitment of activists: Goal 3.5% of the population
  4. Daily political flossing: Many, many actions to choose from
  5. Future meetings: learning about social media, BlueSky, vital readings, action items

Yesterday’s handouts are available in the post right below this one.

We also wrote nearly 400 postcards for Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Susan Crawford.

We Choose to Fight

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Unless you’ve been forcefully tuning out the news, you must be  experiencing some of the horror/panic/disgust we’re feeling at the blitzkrieg of Trump nominations and wondering what, if anything, can be done.

Indivisible, the national organization, is organizing “We Choose to Fight” actions at senators’ offices—something not everyone can do at this point.  But phone calls and emails to Senate offices are still worth doing this week. Below is an email we sent (in slightly different versions) our Senators today, based largely on these resources from Indivisible. You might want to contact them as well. Both Padilla and Schiff have spoken out in hearings on Vought and Patel, so we start by thanking them.  Here is our email, (with parentheses for the Padilla version)

Dear Senator Schiff (Padilla),

I appreciate your outspoken opposition to Kash Patel’s nomination as FBI director (Russell Vought’s nomination as federal budget director). We need real leadership from Democrats in the Senate on this and on what amounts to a fast-moving coup attempt by Trump and his allies.

Our democratic institutions can only survive this authoritarian onslaught if those of you in leadership positions act forcefully to block this attempted blitzkrieg.  This could involve: denying a quorum by walking out whenever Republicans don’t have 51 votes in the chamber; blocking unanimous consent to force Republicans to take the longest possible route for each step of the confirmation process; using all 30 hours of debate on Patel (Vought) and other MAGA nominees to expose Project 2025, Musk’s Treasury takeover, the funding freeze and the mayhem at the FBI; forcing roll-call votes, quorum calls, and procedural delays to slow everything down; refusing to vote for even moderate nominees while this power grab continues; and making the case that this is a constitutional crisis requiring all hands on deck.

There is real fear in your constituency that Senators may try to appear “reasonable” to the MAGA steamroller and allow it to roll on.  You can offer reasonableness once the money and power grab is stopped, but at this critical moment, you need to make the case loudly and publicly about why you’re blocking this coup.

Your constituent,