Even better the guide clearly defines these tools and lays out how to use them our go to 7 tactics are: district office visits, phone calls, earned media, town halls, statewide Indivisible statements, letters to the editor, and op-eds. There are clear, simple definitions of each tool and step by step advice for using each tactic. Check out the summary and once you get started you just may find yourself reading the whole guide.
We need to level the playing field, and the Indivisible States guide tells us how to do that. Each state is different, and it can feel a bit overwhelming for a group like ours, that operates in both NJ and PA.
Happily for us, the States Guide gives clear advice on how to get oriented and get active on the state level. The guide shows us how to prioritize state issues, work the state committee process, and build coalitions with other state groups to multiply our impact. ILNH is working to incorporate the lessons from these new guides into our plans going forward. Indivisible Groups take action in their communities, build collective purpose, and create change.
We make calls. We show up. We organize. Four years ago, we wrote a guide to resisting Donald Trump. Our message was simple: even in a dark and frightening moment, when Trump and his minions controlled every branch of the federal government, we still had power.
We could use our power to resist—and ultimately, to win. We could never have predicted what would come next: that thousands of people would bring together their neighbors, their friends, their communities, to do just that.
That we would become part of a grassroots movement that would help save the Affordable Care Act, build a Blue Wave in , stand in fierce solidarity with communities under threat, and ultimately, kick Donald Trump out of office. Maybe you formed an Indivisible group. Maybe you showed up at a town hall, or a protest, or a congressional office.
Maybe you knocked doors, raised money, or ran for office yourself. We must recognize that Republicans have been working to rig our democracy for decades. They know the country is getting more diverse and more unequal.
They know a truly representative democracy will reject their radical social and economic agenda. And so they suppress voters, flood the system with corporate money, gerrymander districts, pack the courts with right-wing hacks. Their enemy is representative democracy, and they attack it at every turn. Our only chance of stopping them is to use this precious window of time to save our democracy—to enact the kind of structural reforms that will put power in the hands of the people.
We have this opportunity now because Democrats won a trifecta. We were congressional staffers during the last Democratic trifecta in That experience inspired the original Indivisible Guide.
Now, as President-Elect Biden and the Democrats return to power, we offer the flip side of that experience: what we can learn from the last time Democrats held a trifecta. The parallels between and are impossible to ignore: a Democrat follows a catastrophic Republican incumbent, inheriting an economy in shambles.
The incoming President has a mandate for bold action, but faces an opposition determined to delay, obstruct, and undermine. In , President Obama and Democratic leadership did everything they could to win over Republicans and build buy-in for their policies. It cost them precious time, and forced them to scale back crucial elements of their agenda—from the size of the stimulus package to key elements of the Affordable Care Act.
Now, as we head into a new Democratic trifecta, history is poised to repeat itself. McConnell knows that the surest way to win back the Senate for Republicans is to kneecap the Biden presidency. If we fail to use this Democratic trifecta now, we may not get another chance. We must learn from the past if we are to secure our democracy for the future. Whose responsibility is this? Yes, President Biden has a role to play here. As do congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
No, the task of saving our democracy is ours. If our leaders succeed, it will be because we supported, cajoled, and pushed them towards that success. A representative democracy is within our reach—but we must demand it.
In , Franklin Roosevelt won a landslide electoral victory against a discredited Republican opponent. The economy was in shambles and fascism was on the rise globally. Shortly after his election, a labor leader visited with him to ask for a big policy reform. Members of his own party urged caution. The Supreme Court fought back. What our legacy will be depends on what we do right now in this very moment.
Together, we can demand and win the era-defining reforms that save our democracy, lift a nation out of economic turmoil, secure our country against the current and future pandemics, and turn back a rising tide of fascism.
Ours could be an era that future generations write practical guides about. Defeating Trump is an incredible victory but we need to keep up the pressure on members of Congress MoCs in order to fix our democracy and deliver on progressive priorities. Trump was a symptom of a serious disease afflicting our democracy.
The most urgent thing we must do is unrig it and put power back in the hands of the people. Progress on all of our other priorities depends on unrigging the system with structural reforms. A Democratic trifecta is brand new political reality, which means your Member of Congress MoC will act differently now than they have in the past. The key to using your power to effectively pressure your MoCs is understanding how they think and what their goals are.
No matter who your MoC is, your organized, constituent power is crucial right now. Here we discuss what advocacy success looks like for each type of MoC, as well as tried and true Indivisible tactics for applying your constituent power. With a trifecta, we can finally go on the offensive and push for the progressive changes we need to live in a thriving, functioning democracy. In this chapter, we review four lessons we learned from our experience as Democratic staffers on Capitol Hill during the last Democratic trifecta.
Barack Obama was and is an incredibly skilled leader and communicator who built an historic blue wave on his way to the White House in For the first time since , Democrats returned to Washington, D.
As young congressional staffers, we were there to see some of those promises delivered; and, unfortunately, we were also there to witness in frustration so many that were not. Sound familiar? When Democrats took power in , the economy was in freefall. There was a global recession brought on by Wall Street abuses, millions of Americans were losing their homes and their life savings, and millions more remained without health insurance.
With control of the White House and large congressional majorities, Democrats kicked off the th Congress with an ambitious agenda, starting with the urgent need to deal with the economic crisis. Additionally, they promised to take action to reform the healthcare system, combat climate change, and pass immigration reform. The political opportunity was there, and expectations were high.
They spent over a year consumed in fruitless bipartisan negotiations over a healthcare reform package. By the time they finally passed the Affordable Care Act ACA on a party-line vote in March , internal infighting had weakened the bill and a wave of grassroots backlash and Republican bad-faith arguments had severely damaged its popularity.
Climate change legislation died in the Senate. Priorities like immigration reform, labor law reform, D. The result was unfortunate but unsurprising: Democrats lost big in The economy was improving but still terrible. In tempering their ambition, Democrats had failed to deliver quickly enough to convince voters to stick with them. The remainder of this chapter lays out four lessons to learn from. Democrats thought that if they negotiated with Republicans to pass their agenda, they could reach a deal and pass bipartisan legislation.
They thought that compromising with Republicans would increase their chance of success and add legitimacy and permanence to their legislation. They believed by doing so, they would inoculate themselves against the charge that they had rammed their agenda through Congress. Reaching compromise with Republicans turned out to be a sisyphean task. Democrats spent months going around in circles with Republicans which slowed down their legislative agenda.
Democrats repeatedly sacrificed key priorities in the process without any Republican support to show for it. Despite these self-imposed delays by Democrats, Republicans still accused them of ramming through a radical agenda.
Some of the common tactics they used included:. Republicans know that the only way that Democrats will succeed is if they move quickly, so Republicans will do everything they can to obstruct and delay.
Instead of foolishly looking for Republican votes that will never materialize, Democrats should focus on keeping their caucus together and passing bills with Democratic votes. President Obama entered the White House with a landslide and what looked like a clear mandate for his agenda. With broad public support behind them, Democrats hoped they could move quickly through their legislative priorities without negative repercussions.
Democrats were unprepared for the grassroots, conservative backlash that grew as congressional debates stretched on. The Tea Party, which began to pick up steam in early , was locally-focused, well organized, and hell-bent on stopping as much of the Obama agenda as possible.
We saw it up close—in fact our experiences with the Tea Party served as inspiration for the original Indivisible Guide minus their racism and violence.
The result was entirely predictable: The public narrative became one of one-sided, massive opposition to Obama and his legislative priorities. To win on legislation, we have to stay engaged well after an electoral victory like the one we had in November Written for a wide readership of students and scholars, The Routledge Companion to Islamic Philosophy is unique in including coverage of both perennial.
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