Our Unfinished Work: #4: How We Can Make This the End of an Error

This is the next of a new series of missives on our unfinished work to restore the promise of our country and its government. Each will focus on a single element of the many opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. Each will provide three steps we can all take to build upon our huge victories winning back the House in 2018 and the Presidency in 2020.

We will be sharing these messages every two weeks by eblast and on blog, Our Unfinished Work. Please click here to be added to our email list. You can also follow me on Facebook where you can also read and share these messages. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement.

Dear friends, I finished this missive Wednesday morning just before rioters stormed the US Capitol. In it I stressed that Republican Senators have been with Trump every step down this sorry path. Their subsequent words have been heartening but they are way, way too late. The wounds our nation has suffered have been at their hands and not just those of Donald Trump.

It is too early to say how much the president's bizarre participation in encouraging the Capitol siege will decrease his political stock going forward. Either way, the proof that we can and will take this on is there today in the election of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff and the glorious dismissal from the podium of Mitch McConnell.

It was a horrible day for America, but we can make it into a signal of the end of an error not the start of a new one. This 230-year-old grossly imperfect dream filled experiment in self-governance is well worth fighting for.

Just as much as his mother and father, Republican Senators created Donald Trump. Deliciously, it has now cost them their Senate majority. They always knew that he worshipped only at the church of Trump, that he is monumentally incurious, that he forms his policies only on "gut" instincts, and that he has no allegiance to the Bill of Rights. They understood that he has no sense of how government works, no focus, no empathy, and no work ethic.

It seems like the president's political stock has fallen a great deal but we don't want to assume that. Nonetheless, for four years they regularly offered their obeisances. They left him unchecked and ignored their own oaths of office. It is not redemptive that some have voted on January 6th to confirm Biden's selection. They decided to swim only after they filled the moat with water and sank all of the available boats. Once Pennsylvania was decided on Saturday, November 7th, they could have declared the presidential election over and congratulated Joe Biden. If they had, they would have won both Georgia Senate seats this week.

They didn't do that. They created their own divided party and fueled the stop the steal movement that will poison much of America's political life for some time.

There have been multiple schools of thought about Donald Trump's impact in years to come. One theory has already been discarded - that his soul crushing act will diminish quickly, giving way to golf. He will push on, requiring our ongoing vigilance. He isn't going to accept any responsibility for the Georgia results. He would call in a drone strike on Lindsay Graham, Melania and Ivanka if it would help him maintain his following. Even as we celebrate the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Trump resistance must continue.

The careful, exceedingly conservative Senator John Thune of South Dakota has been afforded an advance peek at what is to come. After Thune said Trump's January 6th schemes would "go down like a shot dog" Trump started recruiting a 2022 primary opponent and has pronounced Thune's career over.

And so it will go in the Republican party's new age. There will be epic inter-party battles in 2022. Trump will seek to unseat Republican Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia, guilty of following election law.

Of the 34 Senate seats up for reelection in 2022, 22 are held by Republicans. All six of the states with the closest races for president in 2020 will feature Senate races in 2022. Republicans will defend in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Pennsylvania (all promising for Democratic pickups) and Democrats will defend in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada.

Donald Trump Jr. has said that it's now Donald Trump's Republican Party and there’ll be plenty of challenges from those who differ with that view. Those primary wars will provide new opportunities and openings for Democrats way beyond the expected results in off-year elections. That is because Trump will force his endorsed candidates to lock down the base over and over, cede the center and seek to win through expanded turnout.

The better way for Republican candidates to win in 2022 in Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina and Wisconsin would be to secure the base and compete for independent voters, mostly in the center. Trump's alternative approach is terrifying to Republican strategists because it denies the nation's demographic destiny, which helped yield 81 million votes for Joe Biden.

By relying almost entirely on the turnout from this base, Trump is betting on a segment (white males over 30) that is a smaller percentage of the voting population than it has been at any time in our nation's history. Biden, Harris and the Democrats have instead sought support from the multi-racial multi-ethnic society that we have already become and from the electoral emergence of 18-to-30-year old’s. This all underscores why Republicans are working so hard to suppress new registrations and the voting of non-white populations.

As these scenes unfold Trump resistors should not take diverse voters for granted. For their part Biden and Harris would never do such a thing. In the last 10 weeks our political situation has improved greatly. Let's keep moving in the right direction by doing these three things:

1) Support Targeted Organizing
	There are separate powerful political advocacy organizations intensively focused on African-American, Asian American and Latino populations. Now, rather than November 22 is prime time to make certain these organizations are strong, and that the Democratic agenda is responsive to them. Don't wait to support the Asian American Advocacy Fund, Mi Familia Vota, and Stacy Abrams Fair Fight.
2) Thank Doug Ducey
	On Election night early returns from Arizona sustained us, showing us our first path to 268 electoral votes. From that night until Arizona electoral votes were certified,, Republican Governor Doug Ducey withstood enormous pressure from Donald Trump and stood tall for election Integrity. Please write to thank him engage@az.gov.
3) Renew Your Campaign Committee Connection
	We will all need our independent campaign organizations sooner than we think. There would have been no presidential victory on November 3rd and no Georgia Senate sweep on January 5th without millions of calls, texts, postcards door-knocks, and dollars generated by independent organizations. It's time for us to re-enroll and hear what's next on the to-do list.