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Robert Fisk Was a Reporter Who Brought the Wars Home and Shaped the Thinking of a Generation |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56938"><span class="small">Harry Browne, Jacobin</span></a>
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Sunday, 08 November 2020 09:29 |
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Browne writes: "British journalist Robert Fisk, who died last week, produced decades of outstanding work, from Ireland to the Middle East. His greatest impact on public opinion came after 9/11, when he mounted a brave challenge to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq."
Robert Fisk, who worked as a Middle East correspondent for the Independent, has died in Dublin at the age of seventy-four. (photo: Mohamed Nanabhay/Wikimedia Commons)
Robert Fisk Was a Reporter Who Brought the Wars Home and Shaped the Thinking of a Generation
By Harry Browne, Jacobin
08 November 20
British journalist Robert Fisk, who died last week, produced decades of outstanding work, from Ireland to the Middle East. His greatest impact on public opinion came after 9/11, when he mounted a brave challenge to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
 hen word got out last weekend that the veteran British journalist Robert Fisk had died in a Dublin hospital, one of the strongest expressions of sympathy came from the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins.
I knew that his taking of Irish citizenship meant a great deal to him, and his influence on young practitioners in journalism and political writing was attested by the huge audiences which attended the occasions on which he spoke in Ireland. Generations, not only of Irish people but all over the world, relied on him for a critical and informed view of what was taking place in the conflict zones of the world and, even more important, the influences that were perhaps the source of the conflict.
Michael D (as this popular president is invariably called in Ireland), who himself rose to fame as an excoriating critic of US imperialism, was always bound to emphasize Fisk’s Irish connection. But this was not some opportunistic “one of our own” blather: Fisk’s influence in Ireland was profound.
The Other Side of the Story
As I reflect on that influence, my mind returns to September 11, 2001. That afternoon in Ireland, the grief and immersion in the suffering of New York City was palpable. (Boston and New York are both occasionally — and sometimes competitively — referred to as “the next parish over”). Irish Times journalist Conor O’Clery spent part of that day reporting live on RTÉ, the Irish national radio station, from his Battery Park City apartment, with a view of the towers.
As a transplanted New Yorker in Dublin, I was asked to appear on an evening drive time show, to share my sadness but also, I promised myself, to tell some hard truths about what lay behind the attacks.
I had to join the queue. On air the conversation was sad, but also informed and penetrating. Off air, the host and guests talked of the “chickens coming home to roost.” By the next morning, the same phrase was being used on RTÉ with the microphones on. Here in the Republic of Ireland, where for decades it had been virtually illegal to broadcast explanations and excuses for the IRA, people were on air explaining, if not excusing, Al Qaeda.
Robert Fisk’s voice was everywhere, and his ideas were vital in both creating and meeting that Irish urge for explanation. Ireland’s colonial and anti-imperial history, its political sophistication, and its strong Palestinian solidarity movement are significant factors in the opening of a discursive space that is unusual in the English-speaking world. So it would be wrong to exaggerate Fisk’s individual role — but it would also be blinkered to ignore it.
When liberal-centrist writer Kathy Sheridan of the Irish Times emerged on September 15th to complain that it was “too soon” for the “other side of the story” that had been ubiquitous in Irish media all week, she felt compelled to concede a list of imperial sins that could have been ripped straight from Fisk’s dispatches:
…the million Iraqi children dead from US-led sanctions; the third of the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank which survives on £1 a day, cheek by jowl with a US-subsidized, first-world Israel; the Afghans condemned, not only to the barbarous rule of the Taliban (who began life as the well-funded pets of the US), but also to be the victims of other mass-murderous US hunts for Osama bin Laden; the swaggering, ignorant disdain with which a neophyte US president has been trashing international treaties…
Yes, that passage is not Fisk himself but rather an incredible imitation, coming from a reliable pillar of the Irish establishment — a tribute to his influence.
“The Best Touchstone”
It’s not every posh-sounding English accent that emerges as such a trusted and quotable voice across the political and media spectrum in Ireland. But Fisk had earned the respect that made him the explanatory mainstay in Ireland on 9/11 and beyond. As a young journalist, he covered the Troubles in Northern Ireland for the London Times, then did a PhD at Trinity College Dublin about Irish neutrality during World War II, later turned into a good book, In Time Of War.
But it was in Lebanon during the 1980s, when he served as a correspondent while thousands of Irish soldiers served as UN peacekeepers, that the popular bond with an Irish audience was forged. His reporting of the massacre at Sabra and the Shatila refugee camps in 1982 was the most memorable moment, but Fisk was in it for the long haul.
Irish Army colonel E. D. Doyle wrote in January 1991 that Fisk “was the best touchstone” for understanding the military situation in the Gulf War, partly because Irish soldiers knew he was solid: “We used to say [in Lebanon] that when Fisk criticized us in a UN operation we should examine our performance.”
By that time, Fisk worked for the London Independent. The Irish Times subscribed to the Independent’s wire service, and Fisk’s stories often featured more prominently in the Dublin newspaper than in the London one. In April 1991, Noam Chomsky told an audience at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government that the Irish Times had the best coverage of the Gulf War of any newspaper in the English-speaking world.
That quality was by no means all about Fisk: Maggie O’Kane contributed brilliant coverage from Baghdad and Michael Jansen in Cyprus used her contacts across the Middle East to illuminate the crisis. But Fisk’s unmistakable, bespectacled picture-byline, accompanying reporting and analysis mostly from Saudi Arabia, was a large part of the package.
Big Pictures and Small
Five years later, when Israel shelled civilians sheltering at a UN compound near Qana in southern Lebanon, the phones lit up on Ireland’s main radio phone-in show, and Fisk was, again, the “touchstone.” As I wrote in the Irish Times at the time, many callers
…were citing Robert Fisk’s brilliant, heartbreaking reporting. Fisk could not only be read most days last week in this newspaper, he was on the radio around the clock . . . unafraid to provide context, history lessons, straight good sense about proportionality and eyewitness evidence that contradicted official versions of events … a Fisk strength is the ability to move from the big picture — strategy, geopolitics — to the small — a woman carrying the body of her father.
A friend who produced TV and radio shows over those decades recalled this week how readily Fisk would go out of his way to appear in Irish media, where even conservative presenters mostly deferred to “Bob.” His influence was evident when, in February 2003, Dublin hosted one of the world’s largest demonstrations, per capita, against the impending Iraq war.
Fisk was, even then, controversial: in the early 2000s, the right-wing columnists in Ireland’s Sunday Independent (then owned by the same company as his home paper in London) made him something of a target. But he seemed to like arguments and tended to swat opponents away with authoritative ease.
On one occasion in 2010, I was the moderator at a debate about the media and the Middle East where Fisk was the major draw for a paying audience. Backstage before the event, Fisk mischievously asked me and others whether a particular opponent had ever been to Israel/Palestine. When we replied that to the best of our knowledge, the man had not, Fisk prepared the inevitable and entertaining ambush: “I assume you’ve been to the Middle East … no?!”
Over the years, Fisk’s public appearances in Ireland, for those “huge audiences” to which Michael D referred, were generally at such widely marketed events — book festivals, summer schools, prestigious campus debates — rather than events within anti-war circles or the Left. His door-stopping books, Pity the Nation and The Great War for Civilisation, still turn up in the most surprising Irish households — homes that carry no other hallmarks of left-wing tendencies. Popular understanding here of the sins of empire rests heavily on his shoulders.
Until a decade ago — and probably to this day for that majority of people who have not been caught up in arguments over the Syrian civil war — a reference to something said or written by Robert Fisk would be enough to settle a debate in Ireland, insofar as such a thing can ever be said to be settled.
A Role Model
For my journalism students in the early days of the Afghan and Iraq wars, Fisk was an obvious if intimidating role model. For their family members, he was likely to be the name that came to mind: “Ah you’re studying journalism — Robert Fisk!” When a relation of one recent graduate encountered Fisk at an Italian literary festival in 2007, the result was a signed festival program brought home as a gift and bearing a command from the Great Man: “Monitor the centers of power!”
Of course, among journalists, here as elsewhere, some of the esteem for Fisk came through gritted teeth. He could be contemptuous of other reporters and was the scourge of those war correspondents who were “embedded” during US wars. There was some schadenfreude when, traveling without military protection in December 2001, he was assaulted by Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
He had learned his mistrust of the military — and of the reporters who get too close to it — the hard way, here in Ireland. When, in 2010, the Saville Inquiry published its long-awaited findings on Derry’s Bloody Sunday massacre, nearly four decades after the event, Fisk put his own profession in the firing line:
[D]id we British journalists have something to answer for in our slavish adherence to the notion of the British Army’s integrity? I don’t think we cared about the Irish — either the Catholic or the Protestant variety. I don’t think we cared about Ireland.
Fisk, self-evidently, cared about Ireland. His own historical “touchstone” was the settlement of empires after World War I: in his telling, the world of war that he covered across Eurasia for nearly fifty years was the rotten fruit of that bloody soil, stretching from Ireland in the northwest to Iraq in the southeast. He was scathing about “peace processes” that attempted to pave over unjust history.
In his mostly warm-hearted recollections of the late John Hume in August this year, Fisk recalled scolding the Irish politician, over dinner in Derry two decades ago, for glib efforts to translate “peace-making” from Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine: “The nearest Irish approximation to the Israeli-Arab struggle, I suggested, would be an attempt to mediate an end to violence after the 17th century dispossession of the Catholics.”
It is difficult to imagine a more “Fisky” passage, in its stentorian tone, its historical reach, its political acuity, its intellectual confidence, its personal cockiness — the shine was still on Hume’s Nobel Peace Prize, after all, as Fisk lectured him about making peace — and yet also its context of affection and conviviality. In Ireland as elsewhere, such moments will be missed.
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Biden Defeats Trump, Ending 4 Years of Environmental Destruction |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=46576"><span class="small">Zoya Teirstein, Grist</span></a>
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Sunday, 08 November 2020 09:25 |
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Teirstein writes: "Biden's win marks the beginning of the end of one of the most environmentally damaging terms in United States presidential history."
Joe Biden putting on a mask. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Biden Defeats Trump, Ending 4 Years of Environmental Destruction
By Zoya Teirstein, Grist
08 November 20
 fter more than three days of uncertainty, CNN and the Associated Press have declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election. It wasn’t the landslide Democrats had hoped for.
At the beginning of the night on Tuesday, it looked like election forecasts that had predicted a blue wave were plagued by a 100 percent margin of error. But as time went on and mail-in ballots rolled in, the former vice president steadily edged ahead of incumbent Donald Trump in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The Keystone State finally pushed Biden over the 270 electoral vote mark. At about 11:30 a.m. on Saturday, Biden finally claimed victory.
Biden’s win marks the beginning of the end of one of the most environmentally damaging terms in United States presidential history. During his nearly four years in office, Trump successfully rolled back dozens upon dozens of environmental protections, dismantling Obama’s climate legacy with a vengeance.
His anti-environment agenda began in earnest with a vow to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement (a move Biden has promised to reverse once he’s in office — something easier said than done). Since 2017, Trump has sought to remove safeguards from treasured national monuments, made life more dangerous for some very good looking birds, tried to force states to relax their fuel efficiency standards, repealed Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and made it easier for coal-fired power plants to pollute nearby water supplies, among many, many other regulatory changes. Under his leadership, career scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, the United States Department of Agriculture, and other federal agencies have resigned — citing industry meddling, internal pressure to withhold scientific findings, and other factors more evocative of a Soviet-era Russian government than a 21st-century American one.
It’s likely that Trump will continue dismantling the nation’s environmental protections until January 20. But the good news is there is now an end in sight. The next administration aims to be the polar opposite of the Trump administration on most issues, and especially the environment.
Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan is a cheaper version of what Green New Deal advocates have been publicly pushing for since February 2019. The plan calls for a massive investment in renewable energy, emissions technology, green jobs, and environmental justice. Ahead of the election, Biden surrounded himself with a diverse group of climate advisors, seeking input from Varshini Prakash, the co-founder of the youth-led climate group the Sunrise Movement, former Secretary of State John Kerry, and the Green New Deal co-mastermind herself, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
In the final days of his general election campaign, Biden did what few other presidential candidates have done by making climate change one of his main closing arguments. His campaign pushed out climate ads in Michigan, on cable TV, and on Twitter. At the final presidential debate in Nashville, Biden made history by promising to “transition” the U.S. off of oil (something Trump thought, incorrectly, would tank the Democrat’s favorability).
During the Democratic presidential primary, Biden went from forgotten underdog to presidential nominee in a matter of months. In the general election, he bested Trump despite the incumbent’s ferocious and unyielding offensive strategy. Next up? The most difficult hurdle yet: getting comprehensive climate policy through Congress, possibly without the aid of a Democratically controlled Senate.
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Trump Defends Lawsuits: "No One Knows More About Fraud Than Me" |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Saturday, 07 November 2020 13:44 |
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Borowitz writes: "Donald J. Trump offered a full-throated defense of his election-related lawsuits on Thursday, arguing, 'No one knows more about fraud than me.'"
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Trump Defends Lawsuits: "No One Knows More About Fraud Than Me"
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
07 November 20
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 onald J. Trump offered a full-throated defense of his election-related lawsuits on Thursday, arguing, “No one knows more about fraud than me.”
Trump ridiculed television commentators who have dismissed his accusations of election fraud, claiming that he has “much more experience in fraud than all of these beauties put together.”
“People forget that, right when I became President, I settled a twenty-five-million-dollar fraud case against me,” he said. “You can’t beat hands-on experience like that.”
“For my entire life, I have been drenched in fraud,” he said.
Trump said that, when his election lawsuits are argued in court, his special expertise will win the day. “Fraud is my middle name,” he boasted.
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Biden Wins, but Now the Hard Part Begins |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50983"><span class="small">Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy, The Intercept</span></a>
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Saturday, 07 November 2020 13:43 |
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Excerpt: "With Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan now squarely in Joe Biden's corner, the former vice president has secured the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidential election."
President-elect Joe Biden. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
Biden Wins, but Now the Hard Part Begins
By Ryan Grim and Akela Lacy, The Intercept
07 November 20
In Detroit, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia, organizing by progressives gave Biden a boost.
ith Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan now squarely in Joe Biden’s corner, the former vice president has secured the 270 Electoral College votes he needs to win the presidential election. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, President Donald Trump held leads in all three states, but as votes from Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and other urban areas were counted, Biden climbed ahead. On Friday morning, after Biden overtook Trump in the Pennsylvania vote count, Decision Desk HQ called the race for Biden.
At the same moment that those votes from heavily progressive cities beset by protests were putting Biden over the top, House Democrats were locked in a tortured, three-hour conference call on Thursday. Centrist after centrist lambasted the party’s left for costing it seats in the lower chamber and threatening its ability to win the Senate. It created a surreal juxtaposition: Had progressive organizing on the ground around left-leaning issues driven registration and turnout for Biden where he needed it, or had it hurt the party more broadly? Or was it both?
The fiercest criticism was leveled by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA official who won an upset victory in rural and suburban Virginia in 2018. Her victory was symbolic, in that she toppled Dave Brat, the tea party upstart who had himself toppled Majority Leader Eric Cantor in 2014, presaging Trump’s rise a year later. In 2018, Brat accused Spanberger of endorsing and being in league with, by dint of her party identification, Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and would-be Speaker Nancy Pelosi — even though she theatrically distanced herself from all three, as well as former President Barack Obama. Her rousing defense — “Abigail Spanberger is my name!” — earned her a viral clip at a debate with Brat:
Spanberger won a narrow victory and spent 2019 and 2020 further distancing herself from the party’s progressive wing. She is once again locked in a close count, but appears to again have the upper hand, poised for reelection.
It has not diminished her rage toward the left. On the call Thursday, Spanberger vented not at “abolish ICE” but at “defund the police,” the slogan that gained mainstream currency following the protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.
Rep. Conor Lamb, whose special election victory in 2018 was a bellwether of the coming blue wave, backed Spanberger up. “Spanberger was talking about something many of us are feeling today: We pay the price for these unprofessional and unrealistic comments about a number of issues, whether it is about the police or shale gas,” Lamb said. “These issues are too serious for the people we represent to tolerate them being talked about so casually.”
But Lamb’s criticism of his party colleagues goes to the heart of the flaw in the argument. Lamb wasn’t forced to defend defunding the police because of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other members of the Squad. Rather, it was Lamb who went to a Black Lives Matter protest and took a maskless photo with a (white) woman holding a “defund the police” sign. His GOP opponent hammered Lamb for it. Most centrist politicians think of politics as top-down — a strategy that’s decided upon and then implemented. But “defund the police” — whatever one thinks of the slogan — came from the protest movement that grew out of Minneapolis, not from the messaging department of the Squad Central Committee.
Democrats actually benefited from a surge in voter registrations amid the protests, as noted by Tom Bonier, head of the major Democratic data firm TargetSmart.
Party leader James Clyburn, the Democrat from South Carolina whose endorsement of Biden launched him to the nomination, warned on the call that if Democrats ran on Medicare for All and other progressive issues, they would lose the upcoming Georgia Senate special elections that will determine control of the upper chamber and dictate whether Biden and the Democrats have the possibility of implementing a legislative agenda. (Alaska’s Senate seat, a contest between Republican Sen. Al Sullivan and independent challenger Al Gross, is still up for grabs. While Sullivan is currently ahead, the count of the remaining 44 percent of votes — absentee ballots — won’t begin until Monday.)
Even so, progressives defended a number of Republican-leaning seats. Democratic Rep. Katie Porter won reelection by 8 points in California’s 45th District, covering Orange County and Irvine, which she flipped in 2018. Further south, Rep. Mike Levin, who flipped the 49th District two years ago, won reelection, beating his Republican opponent by 12 points. Both are co-sponsors of the Medicare for All bill in the House, as are Jared Golden in Maine, Ann Kirkpatrick in Arizona, Josh Harder in California, and Susan Wild and Matt Cartwright in Pennsylvania, who all won reelection in swing districts. And Rep. Tom Malinowski also defended his northern New Jersey district with an 8-point win, again holding onto a district he flipped in 2018. Cook Political Report had rated both Porter and Malinowski’s districts as R+3, and Levin’s as R+1.
Democrats insisting that progressive issues are losing policies have yet to articulate what their winning agenda would be, now that getting Trump out of the White House is no longer the mission. As attention will shift to the Georgia special elections, can Democrats rally the troops simply to help Biden confirm slightly more progressive cabinet nominees? What is the Democratic agenda that the party can pledge to voters to inspire them to vote in that January special election?
From the progressive perspective, it’s an easy question to answer, and Ocasio-Cortez has made the argument herself repeatedly: It’s better to have Democrats in control so that the left can push them to be better, whereas Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has shown himself immune to protest from the left. But that’s not a message from the party itself.
And if Democrats don’t find a message — or insist on spending the next few weeks attacking its left flank — then they have little chance of winning the Senate. Mike Siegel, a Democrat who ran and lost as a populist progressive in suburban Texas, said on this week’s Deconstructed podcast that without a persuasive message coming from the top of the ticket, he was unable to convince disaffected voters that he was serious about fundamental change. Without the Senate, Biden will be a badly hobbled president, the kind that is routinely dealt a blow in the first midterm. While Spanberger and Lamb may be angry, it appears that both will still win, as will dozens of their colleagues who first won in 2018. In 2022, they may look back on this election fondly if they don’t deliver something for the people who elected them.
The fears put forward by centrist Democrats are the flip side of the same political vision that Trump used to fuel his base. In nearly every one of his rallies this fall, he singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar for attack, arguing that she was so toxic in Minnesota that she would deliver the state’s suburbs to him. He made the same claim about Rep. Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and about the rising strength of the left in Philadelphia, which he singled out during the first presidential debate, claiming that “bad things happen in Philadelphia.”
Yet Trump’s hopes were dashed. “He effed around and found out,” said Omar on Deconstructed when asked about Trump’s strategy of demonizing her to win suburban votes. Indeed, not only did margins for Democrats expand in the suburbs in Minnesota, but Omar’s strength in Minneapolis also helped power Biden to the win.
The same is true of the suburbs of Detroit and Philadelphia, where strong left organizing catapulted Biden past Trump in two of the three states that were crucial to the incumbent’s 2016 victory, and a third (Minnesota) that the Trump campaign hoped desperately to flip.
In the late summer, as the GOP was knocking on a million doors per week in August, the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee resisted a return to in-person canvassing — even though it had become apparent that there was a safe way to do so — and advised their surrogates to do the same.
In Minneapolis and Detroit, Omar and Tlaib both rejected the advice of the Biden campaign and instead sent volunteers to persuade people not just to come out to vote for their member of Congress — after all, they had effectively no GOP competition in their general elections — but to do their part in ousting Trump by voting for Biden. In Philadelphia, where leftist candidates have romped over the past four years, thanks in part to a robust organizing community that saw two of their leaders elected to the state House on Tuesday, unions and organizers spent the final stretch of the campaign knocking doors in areas where voters felt ignored by the Democratic Party.
It’s too early to know precisely what effect the progressive canvassing operations and organizing had on the vote, as that will require a deeper dive into the data to determine how many irregular or first-time voters were pushed to the polls. Turnout surged everywhere — Biden garnered more votes than any presidential candidate in history — but it’s clear, at minimum, that Trump’s high-profile attacks against Omar and Tlaib did not deliver him those states, and there is preliminary evidence that their operations were disproportionately beneficial to Biden.
In Detroit, voter turnout reached its highest point in decades, election officials reported, even as the city’s population has declined by 10,000 since 2016, and 3,000 people in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, died from Covid-19. Overall in the county, Biden won 587,000 to 264,000, a net of 323,000 votes, though more are still left to be counted. Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in the city of Detroit by about 1,000 votes, but outperformed her by 67,630 votes throughout the entire county; that bump helped put him over the top in a state that Clinton lost by some 10,700 votes.
With about 90 percent of the votes in her district counted, Tlaib already has more than 220,000 votes, having beaten her Republican opponent by some 170,000 votes and counting. That’s a significant jump from 2016, when John Conyers Jr., who previously held the seat, won it with fewer than 200,000 votes.
Oakland County, the suburbs outside Detroit, also went strongly to Biden. Clinton netted roughly 54,000 votes there in 2016, but Biden won it by 110,000 votes.
In Minnesota, Omar’s district saw explosive growth in turnout, with more than 400,000 people casting votes. The district netted Biden more than 250,000 votes in a state he won by just 232,000. And despite Trump’s hopes, the suburbs did not recoil at Omar, giving Biden a bigger margin than Clinton won there.
In Pennsylvania, where ballots are still being counted, Biden outperformed Clinton in Philadelphia’s suburbs, including Montgomery, Chester, Bucks, and Delaware counties — giving him a crucial boost even as voter turnout in the city of Philadelphia dropped. In other parts of the state, he flipped back to blue the counties of Eerie and Northampton, which both voted twice for Obama before flipping for Trump.
Both Omar and Tlaib faced competitive primaries, which they won comfortably, and they never really stopped campaigning into the general election. Their teams worked together, swapping notes on how to safely canvas in a pandemic, and also worked closely with Rep. Mark Pocan, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who represents Madison, Wisconsin. Omar’s team made 1.4 million attempts to reach out to voters through phone, text, or in person. They knocked on more than 150,000 doors, hitting everyone in the district more than twice on average, according to Jeremy Slevin, Omar’s communications director. A record 400,000 people voted in the district, netting Biden 253,000 votes. Biden visited St. Paul, but not Minneapolis, where his wife Jill Biden visited early last month.
Omar’s campaign hired dozens of organizers to turn out voters when Minnesota started early voting in September, the Washington Post reported. They knocked throughout October and up to Election Day, especially targeting voters who sat out in 2016. Omar was also one of the only Democratic Farmer-Labor Party candidates to continue canvassing, the Star Tribune reported.
Tlaib’s campaign focused on voters who turned out in 2012 and stayed home in 2016, and knocked 16,000 doors in the six weeks leading up to Election Day. They made close to 150,000 calls and sent 100,000 text messages and 100,000 pieces of mail. “Our message was more about Democrats up and down the ballot,” said Tlaib’s Communications Director Denzel McCampbell.
In Philadelphia, Reclaim Philadelphia, a progressive group focused on working-class issues founded in 2016 by local organizers, has helped grow a squad of their own in state and local office. Two Reclaim Philadelphia alums, Nikil Saval, who helped found the group, and Rick Krajewski, previously a staff organizer, won their elections to the state House on Tuesday. A coalition of local and national groups in the city — including Saval and Krajewski’s campaigns, other local elected officials, and unions — knocked 370,000 doors in the weeks leading up to Election Day. That included West/Southwest Philly Votes, the unions Unite Here and Service Employees International Union, campaigns for State Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, and City Council Members Kendra Brooks, a WFP council member, and Jamie Gauthier. The 215 People’s Alliance, another local grassroots group, made a total of 35,000 calls and texts to Philadelphia voters, and provided 5,650 meals to voters and poll workers with help from the People’s Kitchen, a local food security project. National groups like For Our Future and Changing the Conversation knocked doors in Philly as well.
There were a number of virtual organizing operations as well. The Working Families Party’s $1.5 million Vote Today Program netted 93,400 conversations about early voting, 76,900 commitments, and more than 2,000 newly registered voters in Philadelphia. They recruited just under 500 volunteers for the effort, which extended to protests and dance parties at “count every vote” protests on Wednesday and Thursday. Nuestro PAC, a group that worked to turn out the Latino vote, run by former Bernie Sanders adviser Chuck Rocha, spent $2.1 million on bilingual outreach over the last four months.
Organizers with West/Southwest Philly Votes, a partnership between Krajewski and Gauthier’s campaigns, knocked 20,000 doors between October 3 and Election Day, an effort that took about 345 three-hour volunteer shifts. Members from SEIU’s Local 32BJ joined that effort, said Rachie Weisberg, field director for West/Southwest Philly Votes.
Reclaim partnered with the campaigns for Krajewski and Fiedler to knock doors, said Amanda McIllmurray, Reclaim Philadelphia political director and Saval’s campaign manager. Together with PA Stands Up, a coalition of grassroots organizing groups that grew out of a response to the 2016 election, 8,000 volunteers across local groups made just under 7 million calls, sent just under 2 million texts, and reached 400,000 voters statewide.
SEIU members also held their own canvass, knocking 70,000 doors statewide, 30,000 in Philadelphia, and 20,000 in surrounding suburbs. They also knocked doors in Allegheny, in the Western part of the state, and other areas and made 2 million calls statewide.
The most significant push came from Unite Here, a hospitality workers union that deployed hundreds of members to knock on 300,000 doors in Philadelphia between October 1 and Election Day, the largest such operation targeting Black and Latino workers in the city. Statewide, the union knocked 575,000 doors. They got 60,000 people in Philadelphia to pledge to vote for Biden, 30,000 of whom did not vote in 2016. (Trump won the state by 44,000 votes that cycle.)
“We saw the effects of everything that’s happened since 2016, with police brutality, right — with Covid-19 and with the pandemic in general,” said Brahim Douglas, vice president of Unite Here Philadelphia’s Local 274. “We wanted to engage our neighbors in places where typically, folks don’t go to,” he said, like his neighborhood in North Philadelphia and where hopelessness as a result of the pandemic is prevalent.
“This stuff affects our communities,” said Douglas, referring to Covid-19. Last month, he lost his 21-year-old niece to the coronavirus; her 1-year-old daughter had also contracted the disease. “In the Black and brown communities, Covid has affected — here in Pennsylvania — a lot of us. And we have a president that took that stuff for granted, and I think that’s the hurtful part.”
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eorgia might flip. It might not. It’s leaning that way, but it’s not going to matter. Joe Biden’s expected win in Pennsylvania seals the deal.
