In victories from North Carolina to Washington State and Maine, we find evidence that good organizing not only works, it wins.
I always find hope in how people come together in the hardest circumstances. In the past few days, my heart and my soul have been filled with comfort from talking with many of you across the People’s Action family, and I want to share a little of what I hear.
People’s Action hosted several calls this week to make meaning of this moment. The first was with some of the hundreds of thousands we met for the first time through our deep canvass phone banks during the election, while a second was with staff and members from our 40 affiliate groups in 28 states.
In both conversations, I found inspiration and reasons to hope. Because when we look beyond the headlines, we find evidence that good organizing is the antidote to authoritarianism - which is something we will all need in the days to come.
In places where People’s Action and its affiliate groups engaged in year-round organizing to build base and relationships around the issues that matter most to people, we won. Yes, we won.
These include Down Home North Carolina, who broke the Republican supermajority in the state’s legislature, defended public education and defeated the Republican candidate for governor, Mark Robinson, a self-avowed “Black Nazi.”
To achieve this, Down Home ran the largest rural field program in the state’s history. They knocked on 636,874 doors, while People’s Action’s national volunteer program made an additional 932,000 calls into the state.
What we saw in North Carolina proves that year-round base building and organizing works,” says Vicente Cortez, Down Home’s political director. “We have to be with our people building leadership, and building trust in our communities if we wanna see the changes that we need.”
This victory will give North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, power to refuse federal attempts to tear down democracy in the state.
“Thank you, People’s Action, for throwing down with us,” Vicente told us. “Every time our new governor vetoes bad legislation - the next abortion ban, the next bill to fund a school voucher program, he is doing it with the power of working people under his pen.”
Another important victory was in Missouri. While Republicans won the top of the ticket, Missouri Jobs with Justice helped overturn the state’s abortion ban and won Proposition A, a ballot initiative for a $15 minimum wage and paid sick leave, which won with more than 58 percent of votes.
“We deep canvassed on the issue for two years, and it paid off,” said Kai Sutton, an organizer for MOJwJ in Springfield. “While we’re disappointed in federal and state and state elected official outcomes, we remain curious about how to reach this overlapping set of people and bring them into power-building and organizing that actually improves their lives.”
People’s Action affiliates won more important victories we must learn from - such Progressive Maryland, who helped defeat a billionaire-backed initiative to fire half of the City Council in Baltimore, and elected a Black woman, Angela Alsobrooks, to the U.S. Senate. The Maine People’s Alliance defended a Democratic trifecta, electing two-thirds of their endorsed candidates all across the state, and reelected Jared Golden to the U.S. Congress, overcoming a MAGA challenger whose out-of-state supporters spent nearly $10 million to flood the airwaves with attack ads.
All of these victories took hard organizing, and were hard won - tens of thousands of contacts over many months to deliver the votes that won. But in each case, our members' efforts delivered the decisive margin. This is evidence that good organizing works when we put in the effort, do it consistently and do it in the right way, with the most effective techniques.
Each of these victories our full attention, as they will be important to our efforts to defend democracy. So over the next few weeks, I’ll share more of what learn, and what this tell us about the road ahead for People’s Action. But for now, I want to leave you with some reflections from our friend Heather Booth, who joined one of our calls this week.
Heather is a legendary and much beloved organizer who founded the Midwest Academy and Citizen Action, which joined other groups to form People’s Action as a national network in 2016.
“I think what happens now depends on what we do,” Heather told us. “What we built, what People’s Action and others built, is quite beautiful and quite strong - strong enough and energized enough that if we continue, we can turn it around. We’ve been in hard places before, and we have turned it around.”
Heather is right. We’ve turned it around, and we’ll do it again. We lived through Reagan, two Bushes and Nixon, and emerged stronger to fight for everyday people. Heather reminded us that not long ago, there weren’t voting rights in this country. There weren’t civil rights. There wasn’t reproductive freedom. Organizers and organizing won all of these things, and we will defend them as we fight for more.
I want all of us to remember that the multi-racial working class in this country has more in common than they want to make us believe by dividing us. What we hear from families over and over is that people are struggling to make ends meet. Rent, groceries, healthcare and utilities are too high, and this is the case in households in urban areas, rural and across party lines.
We are all hurting, and under Trump, things will get a lot worse. Yet this is where we go deeper and get stronger as a movement for social justice. This is where we reach across and not only build stronger community spaces for ourselves, but also invite others to join us, because no matter who they voted for, we will all be impacted by what this administration will do.
We need community now more than ever, and the Organizing Revival is how we continue to build and expand. But it starts with each and every one of us, and it must start now.
What can you do? Stay strong, and stay united. If you haven’t yet, contact a People's Action member organization near you and join our National Volunteer Program, so we can all move forward together.
Thank you!
Sulma Arias is executive director of People's Action/Institute, the nation's largest network of grassroots organizing groups, with more than a million members and 40 affiliates in 28 states.
