What Was Possibly the Most Important Election of Them All?
Hint: It was in 2023
Voting, voting, voting. The fate of our world these days turns on getting out the vote, I believe. And so it seems to me that the biggest election of our time was perhaps not Bush/Gore 2000 or even Biden/Trump 2020. It was Protasiewicz/Kelly in 2023.
Who?
The truly incredible part of this election was not that someone got elected whose name no one could pronounce. It was that people paid attention.
This is the kind of election that usually about forty-seven die-hard voters turn out for, most of them related to the candidate. It was held in the often-ignored state of Wisconsin. It wasn’t for President or Congress, but for a spot on the state Supreme Court. (I never even realized that Wisconsin had a supreme court.) And it was scheduled, not on Election Day, but on Tuesday, April 4. An odd “special” election that usually, no one would bother much about.
In this election, Janet Protasiewicz won that spot on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, defeating Republican Dan Kelly. And this meant that the Court now had a progressive majority, and the state’s relentlessly partisan gerrymandered voting maps could be tossed out and redrawn. In a swing state, mind you. It’s all about the swing states.
Nine months later: December 22 headline in the New York Times: Justices in Wisconsin Order New Legislative Maps
“The ruling has the potential to produce a seismic political shift in a crucial presidential swing state.”
This is why voting matters.
How did this happen? This election was won by a creative and relentless campaign waged by people both in and out of the state. The key was contacting individual voters. Reminding them of the stakes, giving them information about the election—date, times, polling places.
But how can you help with something like this if you don’t happen to live in the state?
Phone calls, postcards, and texts. Hundreds of thousands of contacts with prospective voters, reminding them (poor souls, it sucks to live in a swing state) over and over and over again just what was at stake in this election.
As it is in every election, the youth vote was critical. Some progressive activists hit the campuses, talking to students, putting up posters, even placing flyers with information about when and where to vote on every single chair in classrooms. Other activists texted young voters, giving them the information they needed to make it to the polls.
How to get involved in this kind of effort? I recommend a group called Activate America, which coordinates ways that out-of-staters can help in getting out the vote. Here’s how they describe themselves:
“Our actions - phone banks, texting campaigns, canvasses, and postcarding - are strategically targeted at key voter universes.
“We use the latest research and work with national and community-based organizations to refine messages that result in victorious campaigns. Our goal is a Congress with majorities of pro-choice, pro-gun safety, pro-democracy, pro-worker, pro-environment Democrats who will pass legislation that makes a material difference in peoples’ lives.”
Take a look at their postcarding, phone banking, and texting (when available) campaigns. They’re updated often.
This month, by the way, they’re highlighting postcards for the February special election to replace the corrupt George Santos in Congress.
The coming election is going to be so frighteningly close. Those redrawn maps in a swing state like Wisconsin could make all the difference. Remember 2000? (shudder) Who’d have thought that the election would hang on a few votes in a few districts in a single state?
If the 2024 contest does indeed come down to the wire, maybe this will have been the most important election of all time. Who knows?