Archive for the ‘Tea Party’ Category

US election 2020: The Samosa Caucus that spoils the Tea Party – India Today

Kamala Harris is on the brink of making history. She wont just be the first woman to occupy the second-highest office in America, she will also be the first person of colour to do so. While her mixed heritage is being celebrated in both Jamaica and India, she is part of a group of trail-blazing Indian Americans who have risen to prominence in American public life: The Samosa Caucus.

The caucus is a group of four other Democrats in Congress who have been re-elected in 2020. Congressmen Ami Bera and Ro Khanna from California, Congressman Raja Krishnamoorti of Illinois, and Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of Washington State.

They have fascinating, sometimes painful, personal histories. They share heritage, but more importantly, values. They are formidable opponents of the Trump cult, and are happy to destroy the Tea Party.

Jayapals family moved to the US in 1982, Jayapal lost her green card because of the premature birth of her child when on a visit to native Chennai and she was unable to return on time to meet the requirements for permanent residents. She eventually became a US citizen in 2000.

During a house judiciary committee hearing on the Equality Act, legislation that aimed to prevent discrimination against the LGBTQ, Jayapal delivered a moving speech in support of the bill. She knew intimately the burdens society placed on the group, said Jayapal she was the mother of a gender non-binary child.

Jayapal wiped her tears as she spoke, but she made her point.

At other times, like her interrogation of William Barr, Trumps Attorney General, she displayed her ability to shred the slipperiest of customers. Barr seethed through the hearing as he was schooled and scolded. At one point, tired of his shameless attempts to interrupt her questions, she came back with a simple assertion that had connotations well beyond the limited context of that hearing: Excuse me, Mr Barr, this is my time, and I will control it.

Others in the caucus have impressive track records of combating the corruption that Trump has infected institutions with. Some of the issues they have dealt with are relevant at this very moment. Trumps attempts to put sabotage the postal system to benefit in the elections was surgically exposed by Rep Krishna last year.

As for Khanna, hes Silicon Valleys congressman. He advocates policy that keeps a check on big tech, fighting for the rights of people gain more knowledge and control of their data. Another part of his job is to educate Congressmen. The tech illiteracy of the very people who have to pass the laws is appalling, according to Khanna. When Google CEO Sundar Pichai appeared before a committee, a Congressmen kept holding up his iPhone and accusingly asking Pichai if he could crack it. Pichai had to patiently explain to the gentleman, that Google wasnt Apple.

While this bunch of Congressmen has gained prominence nationally, they have fellow travellers down ballot.

Indian-American women seem to be doing particularly well a win in more than one way. Led by Kamala Harris, theyre piling up firsts. Jennifer Rajkumar is the first South Asian woman elected to the New York State Assembly. While Padma Kuppa is the first Indian-origin woman in the Michigan Assembly.

More than half a dozen men were also elected in various parts of the country.

One race that got a lot of media attention in India was in Texas, where Sri Preston Kulkarni was running for national Congress. Kulkarni lost by a moderate margin, but the fight might have been closer if he didnt have to deal with the Desi Dilemma (Desis include Pakistanis and Bangladeshis).

Kulkarnis congressional district is in the diverse greater Houston area. Houston is where the triumphant Howdy Modi event was held, but his constituency also has a fair number of Muslims.

During the campaign it emerged that RSS-backed organisations and individuals had donated to Kulkarnis campaign. Muslims in Texas have their own democratic caucus, and a member told me: That put our whole community off.

Whether that would have made a difference to the outcome is difficult to tell. But even though they have little to do with what is at stake, issues like Kashmir subdivide desis when they compete in smaller elections costing them wins.

At a national level, the minimum cost is being trolled. As Jayapal, a fervent human rights advocate, was because of her anti-national, anti-Modi stand on Article 370.

Jayapal survived, and has thrived. As have other Indian-Americans entering public life. Maybe their time has come, and they are, as Jayapal put it, beginning to control it.

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US election 2020: The Samosa Caucus that spoils the Tea Party - India Today

A Massive Stop the Count Facebook Group Has Ties to Republican Operatives – Mother Jones

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A rapidly growing Facebook group falsely accusing Democrats of scheming to steal the election with a plot to nullify Republican votes appears to be part of a coordinated campaign by Republican operatives, and has ties to the tea party.

The Stop the Steal group on Facebook, which was only created on Wednesday but already has almost 300,000 members (and is growing quickly), prompts new users to its page to navigate to a website off of Facebook to sign up for email updates in the event that social media censors this group.

The domain that the group pushes its members to, StolenElection.us, is registered to the Liberty Lab, a firm that offers digital services to various conservative clients, according to its website, and Scott Graves, who lists himself as the firms president on LinkedIn.

Its unclear if Graves and the Liberty Lab are running the site alone or were hired by a client. According to its website, the Liberty Lab has been employed by a range of organizations, with a notable track record of working on Republican projects, including Newt Gingrichs 2012 campaign, a push to recall Californias Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, and several pro-Trump projects.

The Facebook group and the website also appear to be linked to Women for America First, a group organized in 2019 to protest against Donald Trumps impeachment. In StolenElection.uss html code, Women for America First shows up repeatedly. Facebook displays a header on the Stop the Steal Facebook page showing that it was created by the Women for America First Facebook page.

Women for America First is a nonprofit co-founded and led by Amy Kremer, a former tea party activist. Mother Jones Stephanie Mencimer wrote about Kremer and her work boosting Republicans last year:

A former Delta flight attendant who calls herself one of the founding mothers of the tea party movement, Kremer was the longtime chief executive of the Tea Party Express, which organized bus tours across the country and worked on a variety of campaigns in 2010 and 2012 to help Republicans retake Congress. One of the best known tea party groups, the Tea Party Express was also well known for being run by a political action committee that raised tons of money from small donors and spent most of it on the political consultants who started the PAC rather than on candidates.

While the tea party did turn out large amounts of conservatives, it was famously the result of a successful astroturf campaign spearheaded by wealthy conservatives, including the Koch brothers.

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A Massive Stop the Count Facebook Group Has Ties to Republican Operatives - Mother Jones

Tea Party Patriots Action, FreedomWorks rally to ‘protect the vote’ in key battleground states – Washington Times

Conservative advocacy groups Tea Party Patriots Action and FreedomWorks are dispatching their activists in key battleground states to protect the vote.

Tea Party Patriots Action is marshaling its supporters to rallies in Phoenix, Arizona; Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Tea Party Patriots Jenny Beth Martin said her groups supporters are going to voice support for transparent and honest ballot counting.

In order for Americans to trust the election process, we must ensure that there are clearly defined laws surrounding our elections, and that those laws will be faithfully and consistently enforced, Ms. Martin said in a statement. We are coming together today and in future days to show our support for the Constitution, the rule of law, and election integrity. Fair and honest elections are an essential pillar of a free society.

FreedomWorks has mobilized its activists to rallies in the same locations in Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania as well.

The result of the 2020 Election is at stake, and our nation cannot afford to jeopardize the integrity of our electoral process, a FreedomWorks spokesperson said.

The rallies occurred outside facilities where election officials are counting votes, including the Philadelphia Convention Center, the TCF Center in Detroit, and at Phoenix City Hall.

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Tea Party Patriots Action, FreedomWorks rally to 'protect the vote' in key battleground states - Washington Times

Trump-linked figures have boosted #StopTheSteal movement – POLITICO

The groups other administrators were even more prominent conservative activists with close ties to Steve Bannon, the former manager of Trumps 2016 campaign and the ex-chair of the conservative news organization Breitbart, according to data collected by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that tracks online extremism and misinformation.

The pages rapid surge in membership was also helped by promotion from conservative activists and pro-Trump Facebook groups online. And for a group that existed for just over a day, it had an outsized, real-world impact.

As incoming results from multiple battleground states put Biden on the verge of winning the presidency, the baseless allegations of election-rigging are only getting louder, and some groups are working to organize countrywide rallies this weekend.

At the White House Thursday night, Trump boasted about the spirit he was seeing from people angered over voter fraud, although he did not cite any specific movement.

I've never seen such such love and such affection and such spirit as I've seen for this, he said during remarks in the press briefing room. People know what's happening, and they see what's happening, and it's before their eyes.

Yet the affiliation between the #StopTheSteal groups and Trumps camp show that this spirit is supported, encouraged and occasionally manufactured by Trumps own allies. Its part of Trumpworlds broader attempt to gin up outrage about misleading and false claims of voter fraud, thus giving Trump a way to claim the public is behind him.

This is definitely not just organic, up-from-the-grassroots disinformation, said Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and Facebooks former security chief. There are professionals here who are pushing some of this stuff based upon exactly what is going on in the polls and in the real-world arguments over the election.

Along with Kremer, administrators for the invite-only Facebook group included Dustin Stockton and Jennifer Lawrence, two political operatives and former Breitbart writers affiliated with other high-profile MAGA projects, according to research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

Stockton and Lawrence had recently been working on We Build The Wall, a Bannon-linked operation where Stockton served as a strategist and Lawrence as communications director. The group, a crowdfunding operation to raise money to build a border wall, counted major Trump allies on its board, such as former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Sheriff David Clarke, Academi CEO Erik Prince, and Bannon himself.

Neither Stockton or Lawrence returned requests for comment.

#StopTheSteal quickly grew beyond Facebook and into on-the-ground action. It was spurred on by MAGA influencers like Mike Cernovich, who helped the group organize a Wednesday night demonstration in Arizona, where more than 100 people flooded the Maricopa County tabulation center where volunteers were processing mail-in ballots. The demonstrators, several of whom had guns, got into a heated confrontation with journalists on-site, prompting security to escort them from the building.

The incident was then amplified and reinforced online. Social media posts tagged #StopTheSteal, including those showing protestors chanting MAGA slogans, quickly went viral after Wednesdays protest helped by far-right influencers promoting the videos. The posts garnered thousands of retweets on Twitter and shares across Facebook, based on data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics firm.

Some of the prominent conservative groups involved with #StopTheSteal have also organized rallies to get attention for the cause. Tea Party Patriots, one of the most influential political organizations in the original Tea Party movement, served as one clearinghouse, posting scheduling details for rallies in Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada on its pages.

It is important that election officials see the public pressure to ensure that we have a valid and legitimate count of the vote, the group said in a notice on its site. If the public is deemed to not care, it will be immensely easier for nefarious things to happen.

The presence of organizations like Tea Party Patriots has raised the profile of armed demonstrations held by far-right fringe groups, said Alex Newhouse, a researcher at Middlebury Colleges Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism.

They don't usually get into these really far-right campaigns, Newhouse said. So seeing FreedomWorks do it, seeing a verified Tea Party group pushing it, and seeing them push actual events with dates and times saying, Get out there, get on the ground and protect the vote that was surprising to me as well, and also a big reason why this took off as fast as it did.

Several protests are planned in key swing states this week, and were initially promoted on the #StopTheSteal Facebook page before it was removed from the platform.

The content they oversaw and cultivated was heated, and sometimes stoked violence.

In the #StopTheSteal Facebook group, users voiced their anger over what they said, without clear evidence, were efforts to steal the election from Trump. Others called for violence against what they perceived as widespread voter fraud across the country, even though such allegations have been widely debunked.

In one post, reviewed by POLITICO, a Facebook user posted an image with the text: I dont know why we are surprised about the vote, we all saw it coming and we know how it will end. Neither side is going to concede. Time to clean the guns, time to hit the streets.

Facebook users also responded to peoples posts with similar call-to-arms. Civil war! We are sick of this. Its about time, wrote one in the private group. There will be a war and the folks with guns will win, said another.

Several other Facebook messages in the invite-only group also promoted false allegations that the Democratic Party was stealing the election. God help our country!!! Im literally sick at my stomach. This election is very much rigged!!! said one Facebook user whose post was shared 185 times and received almost 2,000 comments.

Facebook deleted the group because of its rules against using the platform to promote violence or undermine the electoral process. We saw worrying calls for violence from some members of the group, Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, said in a statement.

But even with the disappearance of #StopTheSteals official Facebook page, other groups have continued to promote similar rallies through their own social media channels, and through conservative influencers advertising events on their own pages, according to an analysis from Media Matters, a progressive group monitoring far-right media. The bulk of these events are focused in swing states that are still counting ballots including Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania and are planned for locations where votes are being tabulated.

Within hours of the first #StopTheSteal Facebook groups being removed, at least 20 other groups with the same name with a combined membership of over 320,000 people had sprouted up on the social network, though Facebook removed some of these groups.

Some of the groups which are organizing protests in battleground states subsequently changed their names to pro-Biden topics to avoid detection, leading to pushback from their members, based on a review of their Facebook posts by POLITICO.

We have to avoid being in the open as much as possible. Our goal should be to fly under the radar, said the administrator of one of those groups with roughly 93,000 members. Facebook eventually removed that group.

High-profile conservatives are also now using other avenues to reach out. Women for America Firsts private Facebook page is advertising nationwide demonstrations for Saturday, according to data pulled by Media Matters for America, a progressive group monitoring right-wing media.

We will be sharing the locations where the vote counts will be happening in the contested states, wrote the groups coalitions director, Cindy Chalian. If you cant make it to any of those locations, we encourage you to organize a local rally to demand transparency and to count the LEGAL votes. We support President Trump and we demand our elections be honest and fair. End the fraud now!!!

Other MAGA personalities with large social media followings are hosting additional events, according to a new website, StopTheSteal.us, operated by Ali Alexander, an ex-Tea Party political strategist, current MAGA internet personality. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and Cernovich will be holding rallies in Arizona. Jack Posobiec, a correspondent for the Trump-friendly OAN outlet, and conservative activist Scott Presler will be in Pennsylvania. Kremer the #StopTheSteal group founder will be in Wisconsin. Many of these events were marketed online as grassroot uprisings to defend democracy.

Newhouse, the researcher from Middlebury, said the combination of social media, shared conservative messaging and the far-reaching influence of these MAGA forces, has created the perfect storm for a quickly spreading campaign.

He called SharpieGate a debunked but prominent conspiracy theory circulating on far-right forums claiming that Arizona used Sharpie markers to disenfranchise voters a prime example of a small local quirk that Trump allies quickly made into a nationalized MAGA flashpoint.

It took a few hours for SharpieGate to appear, and then to appear on protest signs that people are holding up in Arizona, he said. There's definitely a direct throughline there, and the amplification of online material and online campaigns in this area I'm pretty confident in saying that it's had an effect on actual on the ground activism.

Steven Overly contributed to this report.

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Trump-linked figures have boosted #StopTheSteal movement - POLITICO

Biden Wins, but Now the Hard Part Begins – The Intercept

With Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan now squarely in Joe Bidens corner, the former vice president has secured the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidential election. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, President Donald Trump held leads in all three states, but as votes from Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other urban areas were counted, Biden climbed ahead. On Friday morning, after Biden overtook Trump in the Pennsylvania vote count, Decision Desk HQ called the race for Biden.

At the same moment that those votes from heavily progressive cities beset by protestswere putting Biden over the top, House Democrats were locked in a tortured, three-hour conference call on Thursday. Centrist after centrist lambasted the partys left for costing it seats in the lower chamber and threatening its ability to win the Senate. It created a surreal juxtaposition: Had progressive organizing on the ground around left-leaning issues driven registration and turnout for Biden where he needed it, or had it hurt the party more broadly? Or was it both?

The fiercest criticism was leveled by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA official who won an upset victory in rural and suburban Virginia in 2018. Her victory was symbolic, in that she toppled Dave Brat, the tea party upstart who had himself toppled Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014, presaging Trumps rise a year later. In 2018, Brat accused Spanberger of endorsing and being in league with, by dint of her party identification, Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi even though she theatrically distanced herself from all three, as well as former President Barack Obama. Her rousing defense Abigail Spanberger is my name! earned her a viral clip at a debate with Brat:

Spanberger won a narrow victory and spent 2019 and 2020 further distancing herself from the partys progressive wing. She is once again locked in a close count, but appears to again have the upper hand, poised for reelection.

It has not diminished her rage toward the left. On the call Thursday, Spanberger vented not at abolish ICE but at defund the police, the slogan that gained mainstream currency following the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

Rep. Conor Lamb, whose special election victory in 2018 was a bellwether of the coming blue wave, backed Spanberger up. Spanberger was talking about something many of us are feeling today: We pay the price for these unprofessional and unrealistic comments about a number of issues, whether it is about the police or shale gas, Lamb said. These issues are too serious for the people we represent to tolerate them being talked about so casually.

But Lambs criticism of his party colleagues goes to the heart of the flaw in the argument. Lamb wasnt forced to defenddefunding the policebecause of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other members of the Squad. Rather, it was Lamb who went to a Black Lives Matter protest and took a maskless photo with a (white) woman holding a defund the police sign. His GOP opponent hammered Lamb for it. Most centrist politicians think of politics as top-down a strategy thats decided upon and then implemented. But defund the police whatever one thinks of the slogan came from the protest movement that grew out of Minneapolis, not from the messaging department of the Squad Central Committee.

Democrats actually benefited from a surge in voter registrations amid the protests, as noted by Tom Bonier, head of the major Democratic data firm TargetSmart.

Party leader James Clyburn, the Democrat from South Carolina whose endorsement of Biden launched him to the nomination, warned on the call that if Democrats ran on Medicare for All and other progressive issues, they would lose the upcoming Georgia Senate special elections that will determine control of the upper chamber and dictate whether Biden and the Democrats have the possibility of implementing a legislative agenda. (Alaskas Senate seat, a contest between Republican Sen. Al Sullivan and independent challenger Al Gross, is still up for grabs. While Sullivan is currently ahead, the count of the remaining 44 percent of votes absentee ballots wont begin until Monday.)

Even so, progressives defended a number of Republican-leaning seats. Democratic Rep. Katie Porter won reelection by 8 points in Californias 45th District, covering Orange County and Irvine, which she flipped in 2018. Further south, Rep. Mike Levin, who flipped the 49th District two years ago, won reelection, beating his Republican opponent by 12 points. Both are co-sponsors of the Medicare for All bill in the House, as are Jared Golden in Maine, Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Josh Harder in California, and Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania, who all won reelection in swing districts. And Rep. Tom Malinowski also defended his northern New Jersey district with an 8-point win, again holding onto a district he flipped in 2018. Cook Political Report had rated both Porter and Malinowskis districts as R+3, and Levins as R+1.

Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies have yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that getting Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission. As attention will shift to the Georgia special elections, can Democrats rally the troops simply to help Biden confirm slightly more progressive cabinet nominees? What is the Democratic agenda that the party can pledge to voters to inspire them to vote in that January special election?

From the progressive perspective, its an easy question to answer, and Ocasio-Cortez has made the argument herself repeatedly: Its better to have Democrats in control so that the left can push them to be better, whereas Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown himself immune to protest from the left. But thats not a message from the party itself.

And if Democrats dont find a message or insist on spending the next few weeks attacking its left flank then they have little chance of winning the Senate. Mike Siegel, a Democrat who ran and lost as a populist progressive in suburban Texas, said on this weeks Deconstructed podcast that without a persuasive message coming from the top of the ticket, he was unable to convince disaffected voters that he was serious about fundamental change. Without the Senate, Biden will be a badly hobbled president, the kind that is routinely dealt a blow in the first midterm. While Spanberger and Lamb may be angry, it appears that both will still win, as will dozens of their colleagues who first won in 2018. In 2022, they may look back on this election fondly if they dont deliver something for the people who elected them.

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib encourages a resident to vote in the upcoming presidential elections in Detroit, on Oct. 18, 2020.

Photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters

The fears put forward by centrist Democrats are the flip side of the same political vision that Trump used to fuel his base. In nearly every one of his rallies this fall, he singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar for attack, arguing that she was so toxic in Minnesota that she would deliver the states suburbs to him. He made the same claim about Rep. Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and about the rising strength of the left in Philadelphia, which he singled out during the first presidential debate, claiming that bad things happen in Philadelphia.

Yet Trumps hopes were dashed. He effed around and found out, said Omaron Deconstructed when asked about Trumps strategy of demonizing her to win suburban votes. Indeed, not only did margins for Democrats expand in the suburbs in Minnesota, but Omars strength in Minneapolis also helped power Biden to the win.

The same is true of the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia, where strong left organizing catapulted Biden past Trump in two of the three states that were crucial to the incumbents 2016 victory, and a third (Minnesota) that the Trump campaign hoped desperately to flip.

In the late summer, as the GOP was knocking on a million doors per week in August, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee resisted a return to in-person canvassing even though it had become apparent that there was a safe way to do so and advised their surrogates to do the same.

In Minneapolis and Detroit, Omar and Tlaib both rejected the advice of the Biden campaign and instead sent volunteers to persuade people not just to come out to vote for their member of Congress after all, they had effectively no GOP competition in their general elections but to do their part in ousting Trump by voting for Biden. In Philadelphia, where leftist candidates have romped over the past four years, thanks in part to a robust organizing community that saw two of their leaders elected to the state House on Tuesday, unions and organizers spent the final stretch of the campaign knocking doors in areas where voters felt ignored by the Democratic Party.

Its too early to know precisely what effect the progressive canvassing operations and organizing had on the vote, as that will require a deeper dive into the data to determine how many irregular or first-time voters were pushed to the polls. Turnout surged everywhere Biden garnered more votes than any presidential candidate in history but its clear, at minimum, that Trumps high-profile attacks against Omar and Tlaib did not deliver him those states, and there is preliminary evidence that their operations were disproportionately beneficial to Biden.

In Detroit, voter turnout reached its highest point in decades, election officials reported, even as the citys population has declined by 10,000 since 2016, and 3,000 people in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, died from Covid-19. Overall in the county, Bidenwon 587,000 to 264,000, a net of 323,000 votes, though more are still left to be counted. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in the city of Detroit by about 1,000 votes, but outperformedherby 67,630 votes throughout the entire county; that bump helped put him over the top in a state that Clinton lost by some 10,700 votes.

With about 90 percent of the votes in her district counted, Tlaib already has more than 220,000 votes, having beaten her Republican opponent by some 170,000 votes and counting. Thats a significant jump from 2016, when John Conyers Jr., who previously held the seat, won it with fewer than 200,000 votes.

Oakland County, the suburbs outside Detroit, also went strongly to Biden. Clinton netted roughly 54,000 votes there in 2016, but Biden won it by 110,000 votes.

In Minnesota, Omars district saw explosive growth in turnout, with more than 400,000 people casting votes. The district netted Biden more than 250,000 votes in a state he won by just 232,000. And despite Trumps hopes, the suburbs did not recoil at Omar, giving Biden a bigger margin than Clinton won there.

In Pennsylvania, where ballots are still being counted, Biden outperformed Clinton in Philadelphias suburbs, including Montgomery, Chester, Bucks, and Delaware counties giving him a crucial boost even as voter turnout in the city of Philadelphia dropped. In other parts of the state, he flipped back to blue the counties of Eerie and Northampton, which both voted twice for Obama before flipping for Trump.

Congressional candidate Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, joined by Democratic Senate candidate Tina Smith, D-Minn., speaks during a get-out-the-vote event on the University of Minnesota campus on Nov. 3, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Photo: Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

Both Omar and Tlaib faced competitive primaries, which they won comfortably, and they never really stopped campaigning into the general election. Their teams worked together, swapping notes on how to safely canvas in a pandemic, and also worked closely with Rep. Mark Pocan, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who represents Madison, Wisconsin. Omars team made 1.4 million attempts to reach out to voters through phone, text, or in person. They knocked on more than 150,000 doors, hitting everyone in the district more than twice on average, according to Jeremy Slevin, Omars communications director. A record 400,000 people voted in the district, netting Biden 253,000 votes. Biden visited St. Paul, but not Minneapolis, where his wife Jill Biden visited early last month.

Omars campaign hired dozens of organizers to turn out voters when Minnesota started early voting in September, the Washington Post reported. They knocked throughoutOctober and up to Election Day, especially targeting voters who sat out in 2016. Omar was also one of the only Democratic Farmer-Labor Party candidates to continue canvassing, the Star Tribune reported.

Tlaibs campaign focused on voters whoturned out in 2012 and stayed home in 2016, and knocked 16,000 doors in the six weeks leading up to Election Day. They made close to 150,000 calls and sent 100,000 text messages and 100,000 pieces of mail. Our message was more about Democrats up and down the ballot, said Tlaibs Communications Director Denzel McCampbell.

In Philadelphia, Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive group focused on working-class issues founded in 2016 by local organizers, has helped grow a squad of their own in state and local office. Two Reclaim Philadelphia alums, Nikil Saval, who helped found the group, and Rick Krajewski, previously a staff organizer, won their elections to the state House on Tuesday. A coalition of local and national groups in the city including Saval and Krajewskis campaigns, other local elected officials, and unions knocked 370,000 doors in the weeks leading up to Election Day. That included West/Southwest Philly Votes, the unions Unite Here and Service Employees International Union, campaigns for State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, and City Council Members Kendra Brooks, a WFP council member, and Jamie Gauthier. The 215 Peoples Alliance, another local grassroots group, made a total of 35,000 calls and texts to Philadelphia voters, and provided 5,650 meals to voters and poll workers with help from the Peoples Kitchen, a local food security project. National groups like For Our Future and Changing the Conversation knocked doors in Philly as well.

Renee Wilson, a member of service industry union Unite Here, canvases for Joe Biden in Philadelphia on Nov. 2, 2020.

Photo: Rachel Wisniewski/Reuters

There were a number of virtual organizing operations as well. The Working Families Partys $1.5 million Vote Today Program netted 93,400 conversations about early voting, 76,900 commitments, and more than 2,000 newly registered voters in Philadelphia. They recruited just under 500 volunteers for the effort, which extended to protests and dance parties at count every vote protests on Wednesday and Thursday. Nuestro PAC, a group that worked to turn out the Latino vote, run by former Bernie Sanders adviser Chuck Rocha, spent $2.1 million on bilingual outreach over the last four months.

Organizers with West/Southwest Philly Votes, a partnership between Krajewski and Gauthiers campaigns, knocked 20,000 doors between October 3 and Election Day, an effort that took about 345 three-hour volunteer shifts. Members from SEIUs Local 32BJ joined that effort, said Rachie Weisberg, field director for West/Southwest Philly Votes.

Reclaim partnered with the campaigns for Krajewski and Fiedler to knock doors, said Amanda McIllmurray, Reclaim Philadelphia political director and Savals campaign manager. Together with PA Stands Up, a coalition of grassroots organizing groups that grew out of a response to the 2016 election, 8,000 volunteers across local groups made just under 7 million calls, sent just under 2 million texts, and reached 400,000 voters statewide.

SEIU members also held their own canvass, knocking 70,000 doors statewide, 30,000 in Philadelphia, and 20,000 in surrounding suburbs. They also knocked doors in Allegheny, in the Western part of the state, and other areas and made 2 million calls statewide.

The most significant push came from Unite Here, a hospitality workers union that deployed hundreds of members to knock on 300,000 doors in Philadelphia between October 1 and Election Day, the largest such operation targeting Black and Latino workers in the city. Statewide, the union knocked 575,000 doors. They got 60,000 people in Philadelphia to pledge to vote for Biden, 30,000 of whom did not vote in 2016. (Trump won the state by 44,000 votes that cycle.)

We saw the effects of everything thats happened since 2016, with police brutality, right with Covid-19 and with the pandemic in general, said Brahim Douglas, vice president of Unite Here Philadelphias Local 274. We wanted to engage our neighbors in places where typically, folks dont go to, he said, like his neighborhood in North Philadelphia and where hopelessness as a result of the pandemic is prevalent.

This stuff affects our communities, said Douglas, referring to Covid-19. Last month, he lost his 21-year-old niece to the coronavirus;her 1-year-old daughter had also contracted the disease. In the Black and brown communities, Covid has affected here in Pennsylvania a lot of us. And we have a president that took that stuff for granted, and I think thats the hurtful part.

Update: November 7, 2020The article and headlinehavebeen updated to reflect Bidens official Electoral College win.

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Biden Wins, but Now the Hard Part Begins - The Intercept