Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) fears participatory democracy:
Change the outcome? You speak as if the outcome is predetermined, senator. You mean infrequent voters may determine the outcome, don’t you? Surely.
Stacey Abrams is working hard to determine the outcome of Georgia’s Jan. 5 U.S. Senate runoff elections that will determine which side of the chamber controls it. “I’m nothing special … I just — I’m kind of relentless,” she recently told Rolling Stone:
What was different in 2020?
Republicans, when they took over the [Georgia] House, the Senate and the governor’s mansion, were very intentional about making vote-by-mail easier, because it was largely the province of older white voters. For years, Republicans beat us at vote-by-mail. And there was a great deal of suspicion about it from black and brown voters — including because, in 2010, then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp arrested a group of black voters in south Georgia for using vote-by-mail. When I ran for governor in 2018, we were the first campaign that did a deep and wide investment in vote-by-mail: We sent [voters] applications, we made sure they returned those applications, and we harangued them to return those ballots. We, in 2018, dramatically increased their participation. [And] what happened in 2020 is that voters were not willing to risk their lives — especially black and brown voters. They were afraid of going and standing in long lines, because you have to remember, in [the primary in] June, we had eight-hour lines.The other piece was that we, through Fair Fight [and] the Democratic Party, made it easier to vote by mail. In Georgia, if you were black or Latino, you were twice as likely to have your absentee ballot rejected. If you were young, it was three times more likely that your ballot would be rejected. Because of the consent decree that we were able to get enforced against the secretary of state, more of those ballots could be fixed — they could be “cured” so those votes would count.
When Republicans outperformed Democrats in voting by mail, they supported it. Now that that balance has changed, the Rand Pauls among them are opposed. Go figure.
Abrams added that she wants to figure out how to convince the “next 50,000, that next 100,000 voters to believe that [voting is] worth the effort.”
“I would focus on that,” Abrams continued (emphasis mine), “and I would marry that to aggressive attempts to articulate and demonstrate what policies can look like. I’d love to be able to embed — not to bring people in, but to actually cultivate from within communities — folks whose only job is to talk about the connective tissue between policy and outcomes.”
This is where Democrats fall short as Anat Shenker-Osorio reminded Pod Save America last week [timestamp 1:15:45] using the brownie analogy:
“When we are walking through the grocery aisle and want to buy brownies,” she begins, “what is the image on the brownie box? The brownie! What’s not staring you in the face? The recipe! … We need to stop messaging our policy and talk about what our policy achieves.”
Don’t argue your policies in public. Talk about outcomes.
Abrams wants to activate those infrequent and new voters by telling them how their families’ lives will get better if they turn out to vote for Democrats. They won’t stand in line to vote for policy prescriptions.
Universal health care? Talk about how much more money families will have in their pockets at the end of each month. Talk about not worrying the next health care crisis will bankrupt you. Your kids will get well and stay well. You’ll be able to go to the doctor without risking your home. We’ll save 68,000 lives per year. One of them might be yours.
Right now, my truck is sitting in the driveway with a bad water pump. When it goes into the shop, all I want to know is how much it costs and when it will be ready to drive again. I don’t care about the details. That’s why I hire a mechanic. That’s why (less ideological) voters hire politicians. For the results.
It’s that time of year again, friends. If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so below. And Happy Hollandaise!