Voters are turning out in record numbers to swear in Kamala Harris

This is how we win

Ok. I know what your inbox looks like.

That’s Anxiety from Inside Out 2, who is doing the strategy for the fundraising efforts of all your favorite Democratic candidates and the ones you forgot you gave to at some point.

There are, of course, reasons to be anxious. Democracy is at stake. Races like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania Senate show extremely lackluster Republican candidates pulling closer. And Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown need near miracles to overcome their extremely lackluster Republican opponents just because of the twin factors of negative partisanship and a tsunami of cash from the right.

But there are far more reasons to be optimistic.

There’s that Iowa poll, which, if even close to right, shows that (male) pollsters generally have been “ignoring the Dobbs effect,” as Marcy Wheeler documents.

And even if you take the (male) polls as correct, which prominent pollsters seem to be warning us against doing, they still look pretty good for Harris/Walz, even at Real Clear Politics.

The alleged “historic” realignment of Black and young voters touted early in this race seems more like an AI hallucination than a reality.

And Trump’s campaign, which was bizarre and riddled with JD Vance’s 4Chan buddies' nonsense before, has nosedived since that Nazi Open Mic Night at Madison Square Garden.

I’ll get the caveats out of the way. Polling errors like we saw in 2016 and 2020 would give him an electoral college win. And we know that no matter how badly he loses and how many fewer millions of votes he gets than Vice President Harris., he will declare victory and theft. Every adult of a certain age remembers the Access Hollywood tape and how that night felt in 2016.

But I want you to think about how we’re winning because that’s part of how we win. It’s a strategy.

“What we need to be saying — as individuals who care about the future of this country — is that voters are turning out in record numbers to swear in Kamala Harris,” explains messaging demigod Anat Shenker-Osorio.

Why?

“We say it that way because it creates social proof. People do the thing they think people like them do. People want to be on the winning team, be part of those record numbers, not on the losing team. We say ‘swear in’ and not ‘elect’ because we gotta get this ball all the way down the field. And we already know that that is not just a matter of what happens on November 5th or the week of counting. It is what happens through certification, through January 6th, and all of the rest of it.”

Read the whole post at The Ink. 

It will help you feel like a plant being watered.

Here’s the tl;dr:

And I also want you to consider what we’ve overcome to reach this point. We’ve earned this.

If you’re reading this, you were almost certainly changed by the 2016 election. You realized how much more we needed to do. And you started doing it.

This is a new Democratic Party. We have failings, serious ones. But we’ve also built a party that will win against overwhelming maps, money, and fraudulence. And because we’re a better party, we will take that victory to fight for what’s right once it’s clear Kamala Harris is sworn in. This is a party big enough for America but also led by a new wave of progressives who know we can will do better.

We’ve come together around a candidate who has done nearly all of what you’d hope a male candidate with the gifts of Barack Obama might do, but backward and in heels. And in the first presidential election after the fall of Roe, she has stepped up, in heels, to the task of making the full-throated case for reproductive freedom that this moment demands, encouraging that Dobbs effect that (male) pollsters have attempted to squint away.

And we’ve done it without expecting anything in return except the chance to make sure our votes and voices still count.

There are still miles and endless stress eating to do before sleep. And there’s so much we can do.

Just to get you thinking, I’ll focus on what you can do for the two states we’ve focused on this year.

Michigan

We can help win the presidency, hold a US Senate Seat, defend close House seats (and possibly pick one or two up), and keep our trifecta.

You can still register to vote in Michigan on Election Day. So join this virtual phone bank at 3 PM ET today to help get sporadic voters to the polls.

Arizona

We can help win the presidency, hold a US Senate Seat, defend close House seats (and possibly pick one or two up), and WIN a trifecta.

Join a virtual phone bank focused on state legislative races at 4 PM PT.

You can always donate to the Movement Voter Project to help turn out the voters we need most, protect the election, and then transform policy.

WHAT ELSE?

Greg Pak has a fantastic list of ways to help win.

And I want to know what you’d recommend. Because voters are turning out in record numbers to swear in Kamala Harris, and all we have to do is help them do it.