The Indivisible Presidency
By Ezra Levin, Indivisible Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director
By popular demand, I’m trying to write fewer words. So let’s skip the intro to this bi-weekly-ish newsletter and get right to it: the News, the Brag, and the Discussion.
The News: Ohio and the path to national protections for abortion rights and democracy
We’re all on the same mission here: defeat MAGA, codify reproductive freedom, pass democracy reform, and dance on Trump’s first day in prison. That’s the game plan.
But you’ve likely heard the conventional wisdom that, sure, Democrats may take the House and Trump may lose, but the Senate map is just too tough for us this year.
The Senate map is tough this year. To maintain control, we’ve got to get Gallego elected in Arizona and defend Nevada, Montana, and Ohio. That feels like a lot, so it’s easy to dismiss it as impossible, just as in 2021 folks dismissed the idea of winning two Senate elections in Georgia as impossible. Our chances of maintaining the Senate depends on both the strength of our own campaign, and the weakness of the Republicans’.
That brings us to the news this week.
Senator Sherrod Brown is arguably the most vulnerable Democratic senate incumbent in the country. If this popular, thrice-elected, and famously disheveled gravelly-voiced incumbent loses, a Republican senate is almost guaranteed.
Given that, the Republican senate candidate matters a lot! You’ll remember that Republicans fumbled a number of winnable races in 2022 by nominating grifters (Dr. Oz), fascists (Kari Lake), and off-putting creeps (Blake Masters). Surely, they’ve learned their lesson for 2024, you might say.
And this week, Republicans chose Bernie Moreno, a rightwing MAGA car salesman endorsed by Donald Trump. Moreno is both extreme and a weak general election candidate — he says the 2020 election was stolen, calls January 6th defendants “political prisoners,” and consistently polls below Sherrod Brown and Trump.
Moreno parrots a lot of the wacky rightwing positions of the MAGA coalition, but for the purposes of an election this year in Ohio, the most important thing you gotta know about this guy is that he supports a national abortion ban. In fact, in 2022, Moreno described himself publicly as “Absolute pro-life. No exceptions.”
That’s relevant everywhere, but it particularly resonates in Ohio where just months ago, Ohio Republicans rallied in defense of a new statewide abortion ban that infamously forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee the state for abortion services. Ohio Republicans tried to protect this law from voters’ backlash twice — losing by more than 10 points on each attempt. By a wide margin, Ohioans voted to enshrine abortion rights in their constitution last year.
Abortion rights are popular in Ohio.
Republicans could have selected a normal, boring, conservative Republican (there are a handful of that endangered species left). That would have made Brown’s reelection more difficult. Instead, they went for the wackadoodle. Moreno’s nomination presents a clear choice in this election between a MAGA footsoldier who wants to take away your rights and a public servant with a decades-long history of delivering popular policies for the public.
This is a fight we can win. And if we do, we’ll likely be looking at a Democratic senate next year that can amend the filibuster to protect abortion rights nationwide.
Onward.
The Brag: The Indivisible Presidency
It’s not every day you get a presidency named after your social movement by a national columnist at a major newspaper, so I want everybody in the Indivisible movement to see this. Last week, the Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon wrote a piece on the four Biden presidencies — essentially the four strategic impulses of the Administration. One of those he labels the “Indivisible presidency.” Yes, us Indivisible.
Why the “Indivisible’’ presidency? It’s a recognition of the now years-long battle we’ve collectively waged to encourage Democrats to forcefully take on MAGA — their attacks on abortion rights and our democracy. Perry recognizes this as one of the dominant forces in Democratic politics today, and credits Indivisible with being the leading voice for this approach.
We believe it’s a good idea to take on the enemies of abortion, democracy, and freedom directly because we think those are things worth fighting for. But we also believe in this strategy because it’s electorally effective. We spent much of the first half of 2022 extolling the virtues of this approach and cajoling Democrats to take up a full-throated defense of abortion rights and our democracy. After a lot of pressure and a successful Kansas abortion rights referendum in the summer, they embraced the strategy. As Perry concludes, it worked:
I’m not tooting my horn — I’m tooting our horn. This strategy was developed based on feedback from Indivisibles around the country. And we should collectively be proud of the impact we’re having on the political system. If you, like me, watched Biden’s State of the Union speech and came away impressed and fired up by the President’s enthusiastic defense of democracy and clear-eyed assessment of the threats of MAGA — take a bow. Politics doesn’t just happen. It’s not just something we consume. It’s something we do. And all of us organizing with Indivisible are doing it.
Easy peasy.
The Discussion: Vibe Check
It warmed my grade-grubbing heart to see all of your responses to the last newsletter. I asked for a grade, and around 1,100 of you gave me a solid A. I got one F. I’m sorry, Christopher. But I won’t quibble. My goal with these newsletters is to build a shared understanding of the current political moment, engage in a useful discussion, and learn some stuff along the way.
Among the constructive criticism were a few notes that these newsletters don’t have a ton of action items. That’s true! It’s been intentional up to this point — we send action items out to our email list every week, and I don’t want to be redundant. But if you’re annoyed at not getting a recommendation on this front, let me point you to our 2024 campaign work here. Here you can tell us how you’d like to help (postcards, phonebanking, Neighbor2Neighbor, etc), which will help us direct resources efficiently across the country.
For this week, though, I’d like to do a vibe check now that we’re past the State of the Union and we have a clear rematch between Trump and Biden. I want to get a sense of how this varies across the country. As you think about your own community — the community that was involved in building the Blue Wave in 2018, defeating Trump in 2020, and holding back the red wave in 2022 — how engaged are they now? On a scale of depressed, dejected, and fatalistic to willing to crawl over broken glass on their hands and knees to defeat Trump again. Or, to make it simpler, on a scale of 1 (disengaged) to 5 (highly engaged).
I welcome additional texture in addition to the one-click survey! I always read through them — even yours, Christopher. :)
I’ll write again in a couple weeks.
PS: We celebrated Lila’s one-year birthday this week. Like Zeke at his 1-year, she broke down in tears initially at all the commotion, but also like Zeke, she squealed with glee after smashing her cupcake into her face. Life is full of ups and downs.
