#11: Time to Go Out and Win Ourselves Six Senate Seats

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. 

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

It has gone better than planned. After he was elected President of the United States, Joe Biden expected he was going to have to settle for 48 Senators on his side. Raphael Warnock, Jon Ossoff and Stacie Abrams and all of the rest of us got him to 50 on January 5. Of course, we had a little help from Donald Trump, but by then he owed us a lot more than two Senate seats.

At 48 Democrats, Biden would have needed two votes from Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney to pass the American Rescue Plan. Those votes would not have been secured without a huge reduction in necessary spending. The difference between needing to get those votes and instead getting an aye from Joe Manchin is a trillion dollars of expenditures for economic recovery, repairing the tattered Affordable Care Act, and sharply reducing child poverty.

At 50 votes, the narrative that Manchin is blocking all of the best that is within us is false. He is providing cover for 6 to 8 Senators in each party who want to preserve the filibuster to make the parties work together at least on the basics. He was there to get us to fifty on the American Rescue Plan, and he will be there to support much of Biden’s infrastructure wish list. He has provided the key fiftieth vote to confirm countless Biden nominees. Passing the monumental climate change law we deeply desire (and need) would take sixty votes, since it is not subject to the budget reconciliation process. Manchin would be a problem there if he could be, but we are not close to sixty. On this front the President is moving us along nicely, using executive orders, other administrative actions and diplomacy. It is not close to enough climate change action, but it reflects Biden’s commitment and tenacity. This movement is accelerating rapidly.

We are getting what we worked so hard for. On vaccinations, Biden has instituted the delivery systems, the reliable supply and the clear messaging that were nowhere to be seen in December. Biden is using three budget reconciliation bills, countless executive actions and able elected officials to turn the country in a new direction. This will serve the United States and the world well for the next two years.

In November 2022, we face the off-year elections that will stop us or enable us to move forward with even greater energy. Perish the thought that we would end up with fewer than 50 votes, giving Mitch McConnell back a gavel, used before almost entirely to comfort the comfortable. Even the fact that Donald Trump now hates Mitch McConnell is not redemptive.

Why would we return to this ugly world? Instead, we will get Joe Biden at least six more Democratic seats that will strengthen his hand, expand his agenda, and help us prepare for the 2024 presidential election.

The greatest grassroots political effort of our time has been lulled by the absence of tweets from the big liar about the big lie. We need to start paying more attention to these matters right now, as hugely consequential Senate campaigns get organized. We are buoyed by the movement of voters away from the “Republican Party,” a party that stands for what, actually? Republicans are warring internally, but as one pundit has said, most are circling Trump’s Death Star.

The Trump battle with Mitch McConnell over which Republican Senatorial candidates should emerge is encouraging news. It will result in some wacky, easier to beat candidates, like Missouri’s felonious and previously disgraced former governor, Eric Greitens. Moreover, there are already several announced retirements, creating open seats where Republican Senators would otherwise be running for re-election. We will need to defend Mark Kelley in Arizona and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, both of whom are now running for full six years terms. There are these very promising opportunities:

• In Pennsylvania, the totally disgusted but insufficiently courageous Pat Toomey is retiring. Democratic Secretary of State John Fetterman, an important force in fighting against Republican election fraud lies, has entered the race and there will be a strong Democratic field.
• Republican Senator Richard Burr is retiring in North Carolina after voting for impeachment and shepherding a fair report on Trump’s dalliances with Russia. Democrats hold the governorship. Former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley, an African American, just entered the Senate race. She is an extremely attractive candidate who has won twice statewide.
• In Iowa, 87-year old Republican Senator Charles Grassley has yet to announce he is retiring, but he will do so.
• In Missouri, Roy Blunt is retiring. Republicans are seriously considering nominating the previously fallen Eric Greitens, who resigned as governor after being accused of blackmailing an ex-lover.
• Marco Rubio in Florida has a polling problem. Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murray is already running, and Rep. Val Demings may run as well. Demings is the former Orlando police chief that Joe Biden considered for the vice presidency.
• Ohio provides an excellent opportunity with the retirement of the moderate but Trump-genuflecting Rob Portman. There is a big squabble among Republican candidates. On the Democratic side, Representative Tim Ryan is a very strong candidate, and he is all in.

Given these excellent opportunities, let’s hasten to do these three things:

1) Give Tim Ryan a Fast Start
	Tim Ryan is a ten term Member of Congress whose ties to blue collar workers mirror those of Joe Biden. He is a good bet to reach the voters that elected John Glenn and Sherrod Brown. He has already started his campaign and has $1.25 million while the Republican field is still being buffeted by Trump, who organized a bizarre “Hunger Games” tryout. It is a good thing to get back in the habit or writing checks to candidates, and there is no better place to start than Tim Ryan.
2) Convince Our Side to Get to Work
	It is now a long time ago, but we should not forget that Indivisible and Swing Left (and others) stepped up to organize against Trump after the 2016 election while the Democratic Party itself was in the highest level of disarray. That is why we were able to take back the House in 2018. With regard to strategies to take back some more Senate seats in 2022, Indivisible is invisible and Swing Left is becalmed. You can use Act Blue to donate to Senate races through the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. It would be even better to use your existing connections to either or both Indivisible and Swing Left and tell them that you are eager for them to get going with developing and sharing their targeting strategies.
3) Set the Record Straight
	By now we have heard everything from Trump supporters. But there still can be a time when you can be appalled by what a member of Congress just said. Jim Jordan excoriated Dr. Anthony Fauci for depriving Americans of their liberties through mask requirements and limitations on large assembly. Fauci has responded that the real deprivation of liberty has been the death of 560,000 Americans due to the pandemic. It is time to call Jim Jordan’s district office in Lima at 419-999-6455 to give his staff your thoughts on these matters. Ask them what kind of man would rail at a simple request to protect others from an agonizing death?

Our efforts continue, and we have accomplished so much. As of today, we don’t have daily tweets to recall Donald Trump’s contempt for democracy. We need to recognize that we don’t need that reminder. Let’s get to work on these Senate seats as if today is October 1, 2022.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington

#10 Never Forget to Call a Lie a Lie

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. 

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

Every day, we have the pleasure of having a president who is an adult, who is experienced in managing the government and who has compassion for people. The era of the daily counterpunch and the hourly lie is behind us. For now.

Are we entertaining the notion that the four-year ordeal could not possibly happen to us again? Are we letting our intensity and our advanced political skills atrophy? Can we get focused every week on what must be done on both the policy and political side? As important, can we take full advantage of the relationship between the two, making sure independent voters understand what Joe Biden is doing to battle the virus and restore the economy?

We have a good start. Americans strongly support Joe Biden’s efforts to vaccinate the country. He has good support as well on the American Rescue Plan, the initiative to restore the COVID-ravaged economy. Americans are behind most of the individual elements of the infrastructure-rebuilding American Jobs Plan, but less comfortable with those elements once they are all assembled into a large package.

With hardly an exception, Joe Biden has been pitch-perfect. He knows how important his first year in office is, and he planned for it. The policy efforts stand on their own, but it is not difficult to ascertain one of their primary political objectives. Biden intends to move millions of blue-collar workers away from Trumpism by making them a clear winner in the economic recovery, which is good for them and good for the country. On the political side, this is intended to restore our previous political strengths in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the margins of victory in 2020 were modest. Not coincidentally, restoring our strength will help us flip Republican Senate seats in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio in 2022. It will not hurt in contesting the open seats in Iowa, Missouri and North Carolina.

Biden will not ever let “When will workers return to their office building” become the question of the day, as it often is in the media. He understands that tens of millions of Americans do not occupy offices. They grow things, manufacture things, provide health care, and serve people in physical space and real time. He will not stop being president for all of us, and independent voters will appreciate it at the ballot box.

That is why Republicans across the country want to change who puts a ballot in the box. Calling the Georgia voter suppression efforts “Jim Crow on steroids” is inaccurate, as it understates by comparison the virulent earlier voter suppression history of the Jim Crow South. In 1956, because of intimidation and violence, poll taxes and literacy tests, only 27% of African Americans were eligible to vote in Georgia. For the elections just completed, 68% were registered, a higher percentage than whites.

As so often is the case, Stacey Abrams had it right. These current Georgia voter suppression efforts are “Jim Crow in a coat and tie.” Ostensibly, the Brian Kemp and legislative efforts were devised under the rubric of election reform, to help voters trust the system even more. But the same people who passed the law have been lying about nonexistent voter fraud to tear down that trust. The new law compounds the lie. There is not a single word of it that would have been written if Republicans had won the Georgia elections. Pure and simple, Brian Kemp wants fewer minority voters because they make it more likely that he and his gang will lose.

And so it goes across the country. In our most recent missive in Our Unfinished Work we outline the specific steps we can all take to fight the rampant voter suppression attempts underway. We will block or defeat the bulk of them across the country, but we cannot stop them all. The new kid on the block is going to be helpful. Motivated by the prospects of boycotts, large American corporations are joining this fight. We are not being lulled into thinking that they will always be with us, or even that they are fully with us now. Nonetheless, this involvement matters a great deal. If corporate leaders continue to call the big lie of a stolen election a lie, it may well stimulate reconsideration of the Georgia bill. If not, it will slow down the voter suppression efforts in other state legislatures.

We can build upon the efforts of these temporary political partners and do these three things:

1) Keeping the Lie from Growing
	Incredibly, the former President has developed a new routine that the insurrection of January 6 was all about hugging and kissing. In an interview with Laura Ingraham, he emphasized the “great relationships” between the 400 now arrested insurrectionists and the Capitol Police, saying the insurrectionists “walked in and walked out.” Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois tweeted in response to the Trump interview: “No remorse and no regret. It is quite honestly sick and disgusting.” Representative Rodney Davis, the ranking Republican member of the House Administration Committee, charged with examining the happenings of the day, has stayed silent. Please phone him at 202-225-2371 to say that his allowing Trump’s hugging lie to stand dishonors the life of policeman Brian Sicknick who died of his January 6 injuries.
2) Support African-American Corporate Executives
	The strong corporate pushback against the Georgia bill to suppress voting did not materialize magically. It started with former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault, who maintains and utilizes a list of fellow African-American corporate executives. “The Fierce Urgency is Now” was organized by Chenault and sent by 75 executives. Send a personal note to Kenneth Chenault’s at General Catalyst Partners at 434 Broadway, NY, NY 20013 and pass on your thanks for him spurring a movement.
3) Help Joe Biden Address Home and Community Care
	The Biden-Harris infrastructure proposal is called the American Jobs plan, but a fifth of its proposed expenditures would go to rebuilding the uneven home and community health care system that attends to the needs of the elderly and disabled. Biden does not expect this $400 billion multi-year initiative to pass in its entirety. He is trying to increase America’s commitment to home health care in the millions of instances where it is the best option. A group of organizations flying the flag of the #CareCan’tWait Coalition has put together a major media campaign to make certain we do not turn away from this challenge. A strong part of that Coalition is Caring Across America You can get regular updates and send your donation to them to help make certain Joe Biden’s proposal starts something.

The lie that the election was stolen, the lie that voter suppression is thus required, and the lie about  the January 6 insurrection will not recede naturally. We did not get to our present favorable position by expecting justice to automatically prevail. Let’s do the work that needs to be done.

David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington