Turnout!

Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency

Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, Matt Nelson, Matt Nelson, Suren Moodliar, Charles Derber, Matt Nelson, Suren Moodliar, Charles Derber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000072563
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Turnout! offers strategies for "emergency elections," like the 2020 races, and addresses the nuts-and-bolts for civic groups and individuals to effectively turn out the vote. Indeed, few elections in recent history represent the kind of apocalyptic turning point for our planet and democracy as the present one. Turnout! is both a creative work of political vision combined with a detailed manual for turning out millions of new voters.

Participation at local, state, and federal levels will have an outsized impact on the future of democracy and life itself. The elections also provide an opportunity to power-up social movements that can re-frame and re-define civic participation in an age of extreme inequality, climate change, and pandemics.

Contributors include powerful movement leaders Maria Teresa Kumar (Voto Latino), Aimee Allison (She the People), Winona LaDuke (Honor the Earth), and Matt Nelson (Presente.org); leading public officials advocating greater voter engagement like Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, and councilors Helen Gym and Nikki Fortunato Bas. Turnout! reveals strategies and real-world tactics to mobilize millions of discouraged, apathetic, or suppressed voters, including women, low-income, Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, LGBTQIA+, student and youth, and working-class voters.

Part I
The Emergency Election

1 Introducing the Emergency Election

Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, and Matt Nelson

2020 is the year of an emergency U.S. election. And the decision whether to allow the Trump administration to remain in power will help determine the future of democracy and of life on the planet.

2020 is not the first electoral emergency. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 can be viewed as another emergency election; it led to the Civil War, ended slavery, and helped preserve the nation. So can the 1932 election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that created a New Deal saving the country from collapse, though Roosevelt would later savage civil liberties by interning 120,000 Japanese Americans. While many elections have significant policy implications, emergency elections have an existential character. The future of the nation and of the planet is at stake.

When Donald J. Trump was first elected in 2016, it was also an emergency election, even if many did not realize it at the time. How much was on the line became clear when millions of people around the world came out to protest during the “Women’s March” on January 21, 2017, just one day after Trump’s inauguration. In universities, students, faculty, and staff gathered and wept together after getting news of the election results, sharing uncontrollable feelings of grief and fear. The same happened in many workplaces, community centers, and social justice civic and social movement organizations. Communities who were the focus of Trump’s hateful rhetoric and threatening promises braced themselves to endure the worst of what the new administration was planning.

After four years of Trumpism, we don’t have to guess at the existential dangers. This is a president who sees climate change as a “Chinese hoax” and is trying to shut down regulations that might help reduce toxic emissions and fossil fuel extraction. In fact, he’s even banned government officials from using the term “climate change.” Four more years of this, as climate change accelerates without regulatory restraint, spells planetary disaster.

The outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19), which President Trump xenophobically refers to as the “China virus,” and the massive economic crisis that it triggered, is another reason why 2020 is an emergency election. Never in U.S. history have we seen a public health crisis of this size and danger, which is expected to infect millions of people and kill hundreds of thousands. Nor have we seen an economic crisis of this scale and depth since the Great Depression. The convergence of these two crises affects the wellbeing and very survival of every person in the United States. 2020 is thus an existential election—involving survival of humanity inside and outside the United States because of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis. And democracy is at stake as well, with Trump declaring himself the equivalent of a “war president” with extraordinary powers, and Democrats, at this writing in April 2020, doing little to challenge this or offer their own agenda.

From the Oval Office (or on Twitter), Trump plays the “tough guy” who loves roughing up opponents and dissidents. He is attracted to autocratic leaders of North Korea, Brazil, Russia, India, and Saudi Arabia, and he is eroding the constitutional checks and balances of democracy. Four more years will strain an already weakened U.S. democracy to the limits. At the time of this writing, Trump is feeling exonerated by the failure of the Senate to convict him of impeachment, freeing him to do ever more of the norm-bending, lying, and constitution-breaking that will turn the United States toward unchecked plutocracy and autocracy, which some are calling a “monarchical democracy.”

We also know now that many of the Trump administration’s wildest promises were not mere rhetoric and demagogy; instead he intended to convert these into policy. From his earliest days in office, he has waged an unremitting war on immigrants and refugees. Turning his attention to cities, he has prosecuted a traditional neoliberal, corporate-friendly agenda with a new boldness to disenfranchise the most vulnerable and people of color, focusing his efforts on the constitutionally mandated census of 2020, and more recently further restricting already miserly welfare provisions. His war of words on Black, Muslim, Latinx, and Asian legislators, coupled with denigrating remarks about African, Caribbean, and Latin American countries, and most recently, a simultaneous embrace of Israel’s harshest policies and resuscitation of the ugliest antisemitic tropes, suggest a moral character that is unrestrained by societal norms. Although his racism, in addition to his sexism and homophobia, taps into deep currents, it represents an almost singularly concentrated form of racism, unhampered by those equally deep redemptive forces in American history.

An exceptional character makes for a national emergency—particularly in the COVID-19 era of public health and economic and environmental crisis in which the Trumpist policies will create an even more unequal and oligarchic society. Most of the working population will fall victim to even more ruthless neoliberal, corporate policies that jeopardize everybody, but especially imperil the health and economic wellbeing of millions of working people.

While this is not the first emergency election, it is uniquely important. No election in recent history has been this kind of apocalyptic turning point for the survival of the planet and for preserving democracy in a period of deep public health and economic crisis. It is why we are, during a global pandemic, writing this book. There is no higher urgency, less than a year before the election, than defeating the Trump administration’s agenda, the corresponding culture of fear, and the planned spoils of their corporate patrons. Success will require an emergency response, ultimately based on massively turning out people to vote in a nation that has historically had low turnout, partly because elites have worked hard to suppress the votes of those most likely to support a robust social safety net and universal human rights.

We should note that conditions giving rise to the 2020 U.S. emergency election are global, associated with world-wide neoliberalism, global climate change, and the rise of right-wing authoritarian movements around the world, as well as the COVID-19 health emergency and the global economic meltdown that the virus triggered. Emergency elections around the world have led to Trumpist-type regimes in many countries. Trump’s 2016 election reflected global trends in health crises and global neoliberalism breeding emergency elections in many nations. While in office, Trump himself bullied countries and intensified global bigotry, nationalism, and authoritarianism. If the Trump agenda persists, it will be a global as well as U.S. catastrophe.

The emergency turnout of enough voters to swing the U.S. election rests on three realities. One is that the country is extremely politically polarized, and it is divided especially closely in “swing states” of the Rust Belt and the Southwest. The country is so polarized that Republican congresspeople tend to dismiss even the threat of COVID-19 as hype and alarmism created to discredit their agenda, compared to Democrats in office who see it as a mortal threat. The second is that because the division is so strong and close in terms of contrasted numbers on both sides of the divide, there are more voters already decided than those easily persuaded. The outcome is thus likely to be determined by who turns out the most voters. The third reality is that there are, nonetheless, important and energized centrist and progressive turnout movements that have already begun and that have an opportunity to swing millions of still persuadable voters as well as to turn out many more millions of historically suppressed and other low-turnout voters.

2020 is within an era in which conservative elites have been able to control the presidency, the Senate, and most state houses after the 2010 sweep into power of the Tea Party. In that fateful year, those in power were able to gerrymander districts, suppress voting, tap billions in corporate dark money after the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, and move to intensify the culture wars and gin up hate of Black people, Latinos, women, the poor, LGBTQIA communities, and immigrants, while capitalizing on the Democratic abandonment of the white working class. Reagan Democrats, who were an important part of the emerging Trumpist takeover, helped Republicans fulfill a Southern strategy that linked unlikely bedfellows of evangelical Christians, rural and Midwest white workers, libertarians, and corporate plutocrats into a new Reagan-like revolution that set the stage for the current political epoch that is the primary focus of this book. Reagan’s election can be seen as the most recent incipient emergency election, setting the stage for the apocalyptic, full-blown electoral emergency of 2020.

The Reagan revolution led organically to Trump, who would cement the new Republican governing majority into a dominant oligarchy, uniting white workers with their bosses in the name of national glory, white European civilization, and new prosperity for a deregulated, racist, and violent American capitalism. But the capture of the levers of power by Republican legislators should not disguise the progressive attitude on economic issues held by a majority of the U.S. working population. A majority of U.S. adults and voters sees America drowning in a swamp of corruption by billionaires and giant corporations, who are outsourcing workers’ jobs, destroying unions, and dismantling social protections created in the New Deal. They see a president prepared to preserve corporate profits over existential threats to public health, the environment, and the wellbeing of the majority of working people in a deep economic crisis.

Progressives can win the 2020 emergency election partly because a majority of the country does not embrace the failed neoliberal economic policies of the super-rich corporate moguls and their political allies—and because the virus and the economic meltdown are making people’s economic prospects and health a frightening threat. But it will likely boil down to a very close contest, since millions of whites will vote for the plutocrats because of racism, a feeling of abandonment among ordinary white American working people, and the rage cultivated by callous conservatives against the “moochers” who get welfare and “cut in line.” This harmful conservative narrative purports that the moochers are empowered by liberals and socialists, inside and outside of political parties, to get an unfair share of a declining American Dream. Moreover, as the Trump administration slowly acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic and its massive economic impact were deadly serious, he has shown the power of the bully pulpit to rally the nation around him to solve one of the worst socio-economic crises ever faced, even though his policies have been inadequate, skewed toward the 1%, and full of bald-faced lies and horrific incompetency and failure.

The bottom line is that voter turnout is key, because the population is closely divided on partisan, geographic, and cultural grounds, and because the United States is historically a low-turnout nation, a democracy based on literally centuries of discouragement or repression of millions of people from voting. Some advanced democratic countries have mandatory voting and get as much as 90% turnout of eligible voters. The United States now tends to get about 60% turnout in presidential elections, and the voters are skewed heavily by race, class, and gender, as well as by constitutional rules that give hugely disproportionate power to people in mainly white states with small populations. Winning elections under these conditions requires emergency level turnout of people, especially in swing states but throughout the nation, who historically have been prevented from voting or discouraged from believing it will make any difference.

How to achieve that turnout is the subject of this short book, which we hope will be read by large numbers of people who realize how desperately important the election is and want to know whether there is anything they can do. The answer is yes! Not only are there things that you can do, but things that you must do to prevent catastrophe. This book lays out as simply as possible the perspectives and nuts and bolts of creating an emergency turnout that can defeat Trump’s agenda and shift the balance of power toward a more just, humane, and beloved society.

We have divided the book into several major parts. Notwithstanding their different areas of emphasis, most of the chapters overlap in terms of their subject matter and, in many cases, they could fit easily into any of the parts. Part I, which includes this introduction and three short overviews following it, presents the “big picture” of the emergency election we face and the kind of historical and current emergency turnout that can make a difference.

In Part II, “Movements and the Emergency,” civic, political, and activist contributors offer a useful overview of the election in light of particular constituencies and issues. They present their views of 2020 and offer analyses of the political moment. Together, they share the essential context for understanding the 2020 election and show that the anti-Trumpist, democratic opposition has not yet offered a comprehensive, coherent response to the COVID-19 crisis and economic meltdown. Nonetheless, in these chapters, we find the bold alternatives that must be proposed. Needless to say, there are dire consequences if social movements do not gain enough power or fail to champion a response that the public can rally around. Necessarily, this part of the book emphasizes the major political issues—whether public health, the economy and exploitation, climate change, racism, sexism, immigration, human rights, money and politics, and war and peace—all up for grabs in the 2020 elections.

Part III, “How We Win,” focuses on both electoral strategy and voting questions. They are vital to who will be allowed to register, vote, and be counted, thus ultimately shaping the outcome of the election. The election specialists who contributed to this section offer insights into how the progressive and centrist coalitions can massively turn out women, people of color, working people, immigrants, and other vulnerable constituencies. This section will also address issues fundamental to building coalitions locally, state-wide, and nationally—housing, jobs, education, and health care, matters all amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis.

Part IV, “Turnout!,” focuses on turnout activities and how activists and canvassers relate one-on-one with voters. It has a heavy emphasis on the nuts and bolts, especially as developed by progressive political and social movement organizations with deep experience in elections and turnout. This includes a wide variety of questions, all put in the context of the COVID-19 and the economic crisis—asking and providing answers to how one turns out voters in contexts that make traditional approaches unsafe.

Taken together, the contributions prefigure the broad coalitions of progressives and centrists who will make history in November—either living up to our historical obligations to U.S. history and the glob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Part I The Emergency Election
• Part II Movements and the Emergency
• Part III How We Win
• Part IV Turnout!
• List of Contributors