Let's do this

[swan_tower]

I think I was somewhere over Hudson Bay, about thirty-five thousand feet in the air, when I heard the news that Biden had dropped out of the race. I've spent the last two weeks on vacation in Europe (more about that later), and I'd really been enjoying the extent to which that put me out of daily engagement with political news; when a flight attendant oh-so-helpfully shared that particular bombshell with me, the bottom dropped out of my stomach, because I thought, this is going to be fucking chaos.

But it's . . . not, is it? I mean, yes, the racists and the sexists are going to lose their goddamned minds over Harris, and yes, there will be other people who are definitely not racist or sexist but nevertheless find ~other reasons~ to not support Harris. (Maybe she has some emails they can freak out about?) This will be chaos in the sense that the ugliest aspects of America are going to scream their bigotry to the skies. But she has the party establishment behind her, and she has an absolute FLOOD of support from grass-roots donors in the aftermath of the announcement. I think the whole "I'm not excited about this candidate" thing is sometimes overblown -- my ideal president is honestly a boringly competent administrator who puts their head down and gets the job done -- but it's true that excitement can get people to the polls who wouldn't have otherwise gone. And we're gonna need that to make sure Team Bigotry doesn't fuck this country over and enshrine the King of Orange to rule over us all, with a compliant Supreme Court behind him.

So, yeah. Let's fucking DO THIS. Let's get our first female president into office, not through the GOP trotting out some conservative mannequin to show how much they care about The Ladiez, not through Biden stepping down during his second term (which I honestly thought had a decent chance of happening), but through us actually electing her. Let's put the female mixed-race prosecutor against the sexist, racist felon. And let's elect a tidal wave of Democratic candidates into the House, the Senate, the governorships, the mayoralties, everything down to the local dog-catchers, because it's that patient attention to down-ticket races that has let the GOP build the leverage they needed to screw us all over the way they've been doing lately.

And if you don't have a lot of money to donate -- to Harris or to those down-ticket races -- or if you do, but in either case if you have free time, consider volunteering with Vote Forward. They work to encourage unregistered and low-propensity voters to engage with an election, and their success rate is pretty damn good. All you need is a printer, envelopes, stamps, and the will and ability to write a brief personal message on each letter. Said message has to be non-partisan, but since we're at a point where saying "democracy good" is simultaneously non-partisan and anti-Republican, it's not a tough needle to thread. Let's get people to the polls.

Comments

[daidoji_gisei]

Not directed at you personally, or maybe solely, but—I don’t get why everyone is so surprised that the Democrats fell in line to support Harris. Biden is not, in fact, senile, and he’s an experienced politician. I haven’t a doubt that before making the public announcement he made a lot of phone calls to make sure that his chosen replacement was going to have the party backing her up.

[swan_tower]

I think there's a difference between "Biden would absolutely prep the ground" (which I agree on; the man is good at what he does) and "Biden would succeed in getting everybody to fall in line." There's a lot of room there for opportunists to lunge at a chance for their own aggrandizement, but I've seen much less of that than I feared.

[bookblather]

I'm scared to death but I'm here to work, so let's get voting. And thank you for linking Vote Forward. I used to volunteer with them and have since forgotten the name.