#netroots

The first Netroots Nation conference in a Trump-era election year opened with not one, not two, but five keynote speakers of color, all of whom underlined the potential of a “multiracial coalition” of voters made up of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and progressive whites. Their prescription for taking back the House in the November mid-terms was not winning back Trump voters, but expanding the electorate. “Our swing voter is not red to blue,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the 28-year-old Bronx Democrat who upset Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley in a June primary, told an audience of progressive activists on Saturday. “It's non-voter to voter.”

The line was met with huge applause from the audience at Netroots Nation, the annual gathering for progressive candidates, activists, and organizers. Where as last year’s conference attendees saw a gubernatorial candidate’s speech interrupted with shouts of “trust black women,” this year’s felt like a very intentional tribute to people of color, especially  women.  The conference offered more than 20  training sessions and panels specifically addressing how to reach those voters, as well as the millions of eligible Americans who aren’t registered to vote. The majority of panelists and presenters, according to Netroots organizers, were people of color.

Democrats have been grappling with key questions about coalition building since the 2016 election: Should they prioritize winning back the voters they lost to Trump? Should they attempt to woo the white voters gradually fleeing the party? Progressives this weekend said, emphatically, no. It’s a genuine attempt to remake the Democratic Party at a time when racial and class tensions are the highest they’ve been since the 1960s—and it’s also put them on a collision course with party leaders and other Democrats.

“I think Trump’s win scared the shit out of everybody,” said Anoa Changa, a progressive activist and host of the podcast The Way with Anoa. “I think it’s been a wakeup call for a lot of people that we have to invest. We can’t just do the traditional model where we only talk to super-voters.”

That doesn’t mean ignoring whites and Trump voters, she says. Instead, “it’s rejecting the notion that our way to victory is having a centrist, moderate right-leaning strategy that feels like we could peel off Romney Republicans, versus investing in communities of color, marginalized groups and progressive white people,” Changa said. “There is this notion that...we can’t address the issues of race, systemic oppression because we don’t want to piss these voters off. We have to find a way to do both.”

A key voting group that progressives want to mobilize consists of more than four million voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012 didn’t vote in 2016. More than 50 percent of them  were people of color, and almost one-quarter were under age 30, according to data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. “If 2016 had happened with the same voter turnout patterns as 2012 then [Hillary] Clinton would have won,” said Brian Schaffner, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who helped conduct the survey. “Clearly turnout can influence outcomes.”

But it’s bigger than the Obama voters. Roughly 59 percent of black Americans and 48 percent of Hispanic Americans voted in 2016, compared to 65 percent of whites. If progressives could just close this gap, they argue, Democrats would win more often. They aim to do that by mobilizing already registered voters—and by registering new ones: Roughly 30 percent of the citizen voting-age population is unregistered, and those Americans are more likely to be young people and people of color. These are the people activists call the “New American Majority.”

The Democratic Party so far has leaned into economic messaging as a way to win in 2018: After the 2016 election, they unveiled “A Better Deal” aimed at appealing to moderates and weary Trump supporters. They’ve been backing Conor-Lamb type candidates who, through their backgrounds and focus on jobs and wages, are able to come off as more independent. In 2016,  Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York  told The New York Times last week, “there was a blind spot that we had as Democrats with respect to engaging with the American people around the economic anxiety that they continue experience.”

But progressives are adamant that the only way to win in November and beyond has to be about more than economics, and that the right message—the one that will appeal to progressive whites, as well as turning out more people of color to the polls—invokes both race and class equally. Two Netroots trainings on developing a “Race-Class Narrative” were completely filled this weekend, with activists and organizers participating in mock-canvassing sessions in which they practiced delivering lines that contained both racial and economic messages. “The status quo has been not to talk about race, and there’s a myth out there is that if you talk about race you’ll lose,” said Causten Rodriguez-Wollerman, one of the leaders of the training, and a strategist with the public-policy organization Demos. “You cannot build a multiracial coalition by being silent on race.”

Full Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Closing 

Keynote Netroots Nation 2018

AOC on how to pay for HEALTHCARE.

CUOMO:

"Man!  You want to spend a lot of my tax money on these proposals that you and Bernie and others have," Chris Cuomo said. "Medicare for All, college tuition, maybe even housing that the Green New Deal that you have. It is all very expensive, especially on the single-payer side. And that it gives people sticker shock. ..."

AOC:

"... People talk about the sticker shock of Medicare for all," 

"They do not talk about the sticker shock of the cost of our existing system. 

You know in a Koch-brothers-funded-study, it shows that Medicare for all is actually much cheaper than the current system that we pay right now. 

And let's not forget that the reason that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act is because they ruled that each of these monthly payments that every day Americans make is a tax. 

And so while it may not seem like we pay that tax on April 15th. We pay it every single month. 

Americans have the sticker shock of health care as it is."

"And we're also not talking about is why aren't we incorporating the cost of all the funeral expenses of those who died because they can't afford access to health care," 

"That is part of the cost of our system. 

Before The Social Justice Warriors, There Were The Netroots (From Sajia Sultana)

A Racefail Memoir

From Sajia Sultana

In my twenties I was fascinated by blogging and the net-roots, all those wonderful left liberal blogs of the early 2000s – Pandagon, Alas a Blog, 3 Quarks Daily, Feministing, Obsidian Wings, Digby, Making Light.

I learned of Making Light through one of Neil Gaiman’s posts on fanfiction. Teresa Nielsen Hayden had written a lovely post on Mary Suefanfiction and…

New Things On the Horizon

Logo design of the Wheelin’ & Dealin’ podcast

The blog has been quiet for awhile, and that is due to all that I have been getting into recently.

First is the new adventure I am on – I am the co-host of the Wheelin’ & Dealin’ podcast, which made its debut on the CSPN network last week.  This podcast is politically-focused, and I am leading it with Neal Carter.  Neal approached me earlier this…

Philly Netroots Addresses Disability Rights

On June 11, the Netroots Nation Convention kicked off in Philadelphia. One of the largest gatherings of progressive activists, volunteers, and leaders in the country, the five-day event started with a series of smaller pre-conferences focused on specific communities. This included DisabilityRoots, which addressed the concerns and needs of disabled communities in the city, state, and country.

The…