Three reasons why I’m optimistic about this election
By Leah Greenberg, Indivisible Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director
I’m going to level with you. The vibes right now? They are not great! According to my inbox, there’s a lot of anxiety floating around about 2024.
That’s pretty reasonable. The presidential polls aren’t where we’d like them to be. The consequences of losing are catastrophic. I don’t begrudge anyone feeling worried.
Now, two years ago, as we geared up for the 2022 midterm season, things also looked pretty bleak. The most common smart-pundit take was that we were heading for a bloodbath. That summer, I wrote a piece called “The Case for Hope.” It talked through the reasons why — in spite of dismal polls and bad vibes — we believed we could pull out a win in 2022.
You can read it here. Frankly, I think it held up pretty well. We did in fact deliver the best first-term midterm margin for a president in a generation.
Now that the 2024 cycle is picking up, we’re seeing some of the same catastrophizing. And so in that spirit, I want to take a minute to make the case for hope in 2024.
Here are three factors that make me optimistic:
1. The Dobbs backlash wave just keeps building
Every few months someone comes out with a take about how voters are moving on from Dobbs. And then we have another election and it turns out voters are still really, really mad. Our latest data point: this week’s special election for a Republican-leaning state House seat in Alabama. Democrat Marilyn Lands ran aggressively on reproductive freedom and IVF — and she mopped the floor with her Republican opponent, winning in a 62–37 landslide.
This isn’t a Democratic district. It’s a district Trump carried in 2020. And yet, in the year 2024, when faced with an anti-abortion candidate and a pro-abortion candidate, these voters overwhelmingly chose abortion rights.
Abortion alone won’t win the election — but it’s the linchpin in a broader story we have to tell about the threat that MAGA poses to all our rights and freedoms. And all of our data suggests that that’s a story that resonates with a lot of voters.
2. Republicans are (once again!) lining up behind awful candidates
It’s hard to overstate how important candidate quality was in 2022. It’s why we not only held the Senate but expanded our margins: Democrats ran great candidates, and Republicans ran extreme MAGA weirdos. That same dynamic is setting up to repeat itself in key races. In Arizona, Ruben Gallego is facing off against fascist Kari Lake. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown is taking on Trumpist used car dealer Bernie Moreno. In North Carolina, Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson made national headlines for his musings about returning to an era when women couldn’t vote.
Candidate quality isn’t everything — but in a tight national environment, it matters a lot. And I’d rather be us than them.
3. Elections are about choices, and that choice is only now starting to come into focus
Here’s the reality: some set of people are reliable Biden voters. Some set of people are reliable Trump voters. And some significant number of voters have not decided either how they’re going to vote or whether they’re going to vote at all. The polling we have suggests that most of those folks have negative views of both parties, don’t really like politics, and (in many cases) aren’t even paying attention right now. They also, as a group, don’t like MAGA, attacks on abortion, or fascist politics. Which is to say, they’re gettable for our side.
Now, here at Indivisible, we’ve been operating on the assumption that Trump will be the nominee for the better part of a year. But for the average voter, the reality that Trump will be on the ballot in November is only beginning to fully register. Coverage of his spectacularly fascist messages — relegated to TruthSocial for much of the last few years — will become mainstream headlines again. The steady drumbeat of court hearings, trials, and legal shenanigans will continue. And we’ll have opportunity after opportunity to contrast steady progress under Biden with corruption, cruelty, and chaos under Trump.
The reality of this choice is just now setting in — and that means the opportunity to create that stark contrast begins now.
Now, what do all these factors have in common? To really take advantage of them, we’re going to have to do the work. Dobbs is terrible — but will voters be thinking about Dobbs? The Republican candidates are awful — but will voters know how awful? When it’s time to vote, who will voters be listening to?
We can’t rely on the campaign or the party to break through to the skeptics, the double haters, the disengaged voters. What we need are their neighbors, their families, their friends.
We’ve got to create the surround-sound story about what this election is about — and then we’ve got to make sure all those people we’ve reached get out to vote.
That’s where Indivisible comes in. And here’s where I ask you for money (SURPRISE: IT’S A FUNDRAISING ASK!). We’ve got an aggressive plan for 2024.
We’re launching our groundbreaking Neighbor2Neighbor voter contact tool — twice as effective as regular canvassing, at a small fraction of the cost — in every Senate and presidential battleground. And we’re recruiting a massive grassroots volunteer army to have hundreds of thousands of conversations with target voters.
We’re working with Indivisible groups in swing districts to target the Republican Unrepresentatives, ensuring that every swing district Republican is tightly linked to the most unpopular MAGA policies.
We’re putting staff and resources on the ground in Arizona to help Indivisibles mobilize to elect Ruben Gallego and win those crucial Electoral College votes.
We need your support. At the end of each quarter, we’re taking stock of how much we’ve got on hand. We do not have a huge cash reserve and we’re not squirreling money away. If we raise more, we’ll go bigger. If we miss our targets, we’ll do less.
We can do the work and we can win — but it’s going to take all of us.
