Pour a fresh cup of coffee and take in this 2000-word celebration of progressive organizing from the New York Times.
The deadly coronavirus pandemic had a silver lining for progressive organizers from coast to coast. Zoom meetings and conference calls meant activist leaders stuck inside could still brainstorm and strategize:
The video call was announced on short notice, but more than 900 people quickly joined: a coalition of union officials and racial justice organizers, civil rights lawyers and campaign strategists, pulled together in a matter of hours after the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.
They convened to craft a plan for answering the onslaught on American democracy, and they soon reached a few key decisions. They would stay off the streets for the moment and hold back from mass demonstrations that could be exposed to an armed mob goaded on by President Donald J. Trump.
They would use careful language. In a presentation, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal messaging guru, urged against calling the attack a “coup,” warning that the word could make Mr. Trump sound far stronger than he was — or even imply that a pro-Trump militia had seized power.
Subtlety is not the typical response from the progressive left, and rarely valued or practiced. Reaction appears more the norm to those on the outside. In this case, however, advance planning meant executing an effective response to Trump’s attempts to control the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.
The Democracy Defense Coalition led by Deirdre Schifeling, a former top strategist for Planned Parenthood, grew from “a long season of planning and coordination by progressives.” When the doomsday scenarios war-gamed in the spring and summer emerged after the fall election, progressives were ready. Not with “fiery rhetoric and divisive demands” but with a “more studied vocabulary, developed through nightly opinion research and message testing.” And perhaps more importantly, with relationships born of months of cooperation aimed at protecting the vote:
For the most part, the organized left anticipated Mr. Trump’s postelection schemes, including his premature attempt to claim a victory he had not achieved, his pressure campaigns targeting Republican election administrators and county officials and his incitement of far-right violence, strategy documents show.
Ai-jen Poo, a prominent organizer involved in the effort, said the realization had dawned on a wide range of groups: “We all had to come together and bring everything we could to protecting our right to vote.”
Those groups ordinarily pursue their own goals from women’s issues to labor organizing. But in this effort, everyone’s interests were on the line.
Michael Podhorzer, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. strategist, was one of the new coalition’s architects. As the pandemic took hold in April. he drafted “Threats to the 2020 Election” outlining how cyberattacks, mass disinformation and more might disrupt voting and vote-counting.
“We are eight months away from crisis,” Mr. Podhorzer wrote in a missive to his allies. “Our efforts over the last three years to create a political infrastructure to mobilize and persuade voters has been extraordinary, but our preparation for the coming crisis has been woefully inadequate.”
Other progressive strategists, at organizations founded after 2016 like the Fight Back Table and the Social and Economic Justice Leaders group, had been mulling the same perils ahead.
As detailed here in August:
The Transition Integrity Project ran a series of war games in June to simulate what might happen after Election Day. About 100 bipartisan players from former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, plus pundits and academics participated.
Over the summer and into the fall, weekly coordination calls over Zoom brought together hundreds of progressive organizations focused on winning the fall elections. With a coalition of over 200 strategists and activist groups, the Democracy Defense Coalition became “the largest of several interlocking progressive federations that prepared for a contested election.”
So when election night tipped in Joe Biden’s direction, organizers were prepared and coordinated. Planned pos-election rallies were replaced by targeted actions in places at vote-counting facilities. If the right attempted to revive the Brooks Brothers riot of Florida 2000 in Philadelphia and Detroit, progressives were prepared to head them off, the Times explains:
Anna Galland, a prominent progressive organizer involved in the deliberations, said it had been a “tough decision” not to mobilize nationwide demonstrations. Part of the concern, she said, had been that they might “inadvertently turn the tide of media momentum” by depicting a defeated president as a fearsome adversary.
“Organizing any kind of massive ‘It’s a coup’ mobilization, in the midst of those contested days, would have just been bait for the right,” she said.
Where they did gather, organizers were urged to take a tone of celebration and triumph. The goal, leaders agreed, would be to make Mr. Trump’s actions look impotent. Ms. Stamp described a midweek demonstration in Philadelphia, organized when she and others learned of a Proud Boys presence in the area, that became a “two-day dance party” that averted a tense standoff.
As Protect Democracy pushed back against Trump activists’ efforts to intimidate elections officials, Democracy Docket and other well-prepared Democratic attorneys quashed case after case — over 60 — brought by Trump lawyers to overturn election results.
The New Republic’s “Soapbox” in September dismissed planning for these efforts as “ridiculous war-gaming.” Then came months of Trump denying he had lost, alleging his reelection was stolen, pressuring state elections officials, and finally inciting violent insurrection. Yet through it all, advance planning and progressives’ cooperation helped our republic survive the greatest threat to our democracy since The War of 1812.
Cynical observers often condemn Democrats and progressive allies for doing nothing (or nothing effective) because those efforts are not visible to the casual observer. But not seeing is not the same as nothing happening. Take heart. There is more than meets the eye.