As we head into the final stretch in this year’s election, Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld sat down for this episode of The Brief to talk about courting Latino voters, grassroots donors, races with big returns on investment, and Republicans’ last-ditch efforts to suppress the vote. This week’s guests included Chuck Rocha, President of Solidarity Strategies and former senior advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, and David Nir, Daily Kos’ political director.
Markos and Kerry opened the show by talking about the desperate actions taken by Republicans at the state level to suppress the vote, which Markos believes is backfiring badly. In many states Republicans were confident they would win, the GOP now looks to be on shaky ground. As Kerry explained, this strategy is starting to fall apart at the seams:
The Trump campaign’s building blocks to 270 lay in Florida, Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, and Maine’s second district. Those were the “gimmes,” that’s what he called “the easy part.” … And all of those states are competitive, and in fact, in several of them in the polling aggregates—Florida in particular—Biden looks to have a several-point lead right now.
For the first half of the show, Chuck Rocha joined to talk about turning out the Latino vote and what’s at stake for the Democrats with this group. On efforts by Democrats to turn out the Latino vote, Chuck had this to say:
That they do a decent job is debatable, and the presidentials will do just enough work to get enough of 60-68% of the Latino vote, and then the press goes crazy ... That’s kind of like jumping up and down and being glad you got third place. The point I want to make is, if you treated Latino voters like you treat white persuadable voters in the suburbs, with the same priority, Latinos would vote Democrat at 95%, and the turnout would be through the roof. There were 12 million eligible Latinos in the last election who didn’t even show up, who were registered but didn’t even vote, because guess what? Nobody asked them. Nobody talks to them. Because people have to remember Latinos on average are ten years younger than the average voter … my son, who is 30, is the average Latino age of an American. You have to go talk to them and give them a reason to vote.
Chuck believes that calling and texting can make a huge difference in reaching out to people, especially Latino communities, but that the Democratic party takes Latino voters for granted. He explained, “We haven’t been in the room since this thing started. If Black people, and Brown people, and gay people are not in the room, that voice is not heard … you lose that [perspective].” Chuck also noted that a billion dollars have been spent talking to white persuadable voters, while the three largest Latino voter pacs have raised less than $10 million combined. Much of the difficulty lies in the fact that when it is time to cut campaign budgets, outreach efforts to nonwhite communities are often the first to go.
David joined for the second half of the show to talk about important down-ballot races and how the the Republican Party’s prospects are eroding in the final days of the election. Republicans are currently defending at least ten seats in House races across the country, with, as Markos noted, only a fraction of the money that House Democrats have on hand. David thinks Democrats have a lot to feel excited about when it comes to U.S. Senate races—Republicans are so busy playing defense and scrambling to protect their seats that Democrats have a great opportunity this November regardless of the exact outcomes.
Asked by Kerry which races could maximally benefit from grassroots donations, David mentioned the Michigan Supreme Court—where progressive candidate Elizabeth Welch is taking on two Republican candidates—as well as Secretary of State races in the Pacific Northwest and the U.S. Senate race in Kansas. David said that grassroots donors could push a candidate across the finish line to a win in races like these, and that it's crucial to keep pushing in the final days:
I strongly recommend donations to these races. The total dollar value spent in these contests is typically far lower than in a [U.S.] Senate race. There’s no one raising $57 million dollars a quarter for Oregon secretary of state, so grassroots dollars really get huge bang for your buck in contests like these.
The full episode can be viewed below:
Source: Daily Kos
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