The Resistance Helped Democrats Win on Tuesday. Now They're Turning to 2018
The Democrats’ surprise sweep in the Nov. 7 off-year elections wasn’t just a major victory for the party. It was a triumph months in the making for a network of progressive groups that did not even exist a year ago, but have been toiling to train candidates, boost turnout and energize activists in state and local races.
Run For Something, which recruits and trains progressive millennial candidates to run for state and local office, helped 10 young candidates run for Virginia House of Delegates. Seven of them won, and two others are headed for a recount. Overall, of the 72 first-time candidates Run For Something endorsed nationwide, 46% won—a huge jump over the paltry average success rate for first-time candidates.
Flippable, another upstart progressive organization which tries to turn local swing districts blue, sent more than $150,000 to five targeted races in Virginia, where Democrats may have won enough seats, pending recounts, to control the commonwealth’s House of Delegates, where Republicans held a 66-34 majority. Of the 20 races they targeted in Virginia, Washington and Florida, they won 16.
Sister District, which redirects volunteers in safe blue states to assist with competitive races elsewhere, made nearly 19,000 calls and knocked on more than 3,000 doors to help elect Cheryl Turpin, a Virginia House of Delegates candidate from a Trump district. Overall, Sister District won 13 out of the 14 races they targeted.
The lesson, says Run For Something co-founder Amanda Litman, is to compete in every local election you can, because you just might win. “We were working in the districts that nobody else was engaging because they didn’t see them as winnable,” Litman says. She sees the surprise victories in Virginia as a vindication of that strategy. “It means we need to double down, get as big as we possibly can, run as many candidates as possible, and focus on good talent and strong campaigns.”
The successes on Tuesday should give a boost to that strategy. According to Litman, Run For Something normally gets about 10 requests a day from interested young candidates. In the 24 hours since the polls closed in Virginia, she heard from 100 new candidates.
Other organizers see Tuesday’s outcome as a signal to campaign everywhere. “Before yesterday, we might have said, ‘Let’s work on these close states,'” says Flippable CEO Catherine Vaughan. “Now we’re seeing more possibility in states where it seems like the odds are stacked against us.”
Activists are taking the hint. Indivisible, one of the biggest and best-organized groups in the so-called Resistance, announced on Thursday a new plan to transform their well-trained network of anti-Trump advocates into a standing army of volunteers for the 2018 midterms. Their new electoral handbook, Indivisible 435, provides guidelines on how to endorse a candidate and how to help with voter registration. The aim, organizers say, is to transform the oppositional energy that helped defeat the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into a surge of positive momentum going into the 2018 midterms.