YouTube Video

On our weekly podcast about politics, Daily Kos The Brief, we’re in the middle of our new series spotlighting great organizations doing on the ground organizing in key 2022 battleground states. We are urging you to donate to these organizations. $20 today to these organizations will do more to help us win next year than $1,000 to a campaign weeks before the vote. These are the groups registering and educating voters long before campaigns even exist. These are dollars that will be spent directly engaging voters one on one, in a way that expensive, ineffective TV ads never will. And make no mistake—those late dollars to campaigns? It’s money pissed away on TV ads. So donate to these ground-campaign organizations or one in your neck of the woods. Make it a recurring donation! It’ll be the best political dollar you’ve ever donated. 

We’ve done episodes on Virginia, Michigan, and North Carolina. Today, we’re doing Pennsylvania. And oh man, does it get any more critical than Pennsylvania? Just like Republicans cannot plausibly win without Florida or Texas, Democrats’ chances in both the Senate and the 2024 presidential election are severely compromised if we can’t win the Keystone state. 

Donald Trump won the state by just over 44,000 votes in 2016, a margin of 0.7%. Joe Biden won the state by  80,555 votes in 2020, or 1.2%. But here’s the crazy thing—Trump got 407.000 more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016! That’s an increase of over 15%! In any conventional year, that would’ve been more than enough to secure victory. Yet Democrats turned out an eye-watering 532,000 more votes in 2020. Over half a million! On the plus side, we won! On the cautionary side, there are many first-time voters in that total. Will they turn out in 2022 when the stakes aren’t as obvious as in 2020? 

On the same note, will Trump’s army turn out for the midterms? They haven’t before. But we can’t assume they’ll similarly stay home next year. And the stakes are enormous: Any hope of a Kyrsten Sinema/Joe Manchin-proof Senate runs through this open seat. We must pick it up. And we need a governor and a state legislature that will ensure free and fair elections. Maybe even make it easier for people to vote! While Republicans have comfortable margins in the current legislature, that resulted from an extreme 2010 gerrymander when they had the trifecta (perhaps the most aggressive in the entire country). The governorship is a D Democratic open seat, and we must hold it. And the legislature will have new, fairer maps since Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf can veto any legislative map and kick it to the courts.

Today, our guest is Jamie Perrapato, Executive Director of Turn PA Blue, an organization dedicated to flipping the Pennsylvania state legislature by training and mobilizing grassroots groups and volunteers to support candidates in Southeastern PA and beyond.

And remember, early morning to grassroots on-the-ground organizers are the best political donations you will ever make. So please donate to Turn PA Blue, and the rest of our fundraising slate today.