Last Week’s California National DNC Moment Took Decades to Create
How are you feeling?
Let me tell you, even though most of the convention evenings went past my bedtime, I am feeling fired up! I’m sure you are as excited to win as I am. Watching VP Kamala Harris, the first reformer district attorney from CA and Tim Walz, a Midwest governor who’s delivered unprecedented progressive policies to his state be the center of the DNC was inspiring.
How’d we get here?
I’ll leave the story of Biden dropping out of the race to others. But Kamala got here substantially with support from the founders of CDT. In the early 2000s CDT’s co-founders backed her as S.F. DA before they started CDT because she was a reformer. They then started CDT in 2005, and started the first SuperPAC for Obama in 2007. And then in 2010 when Kamala ran for CA AG against the popular Republican LA DA, they strongly backed her on the coordinated and independent sides, being some of the first and few donors to robustly give. While even then many other CA donors couldn’t see what they saw in Kamala, Karl Rove did — he spent a million dollars against her in the general election because he saw her as a future danger to fascist Republicans like him. She won that race by the barest of margins, less than 1%, in a brutal 2010 cycle when Democrats lost across the country.
And, on a slight tangent, those same donors became the first out of state donors to Stacy Abrams in 2009. Those same donors have backed congressional candidate Lateefah Simon, who the nation met when she spoke at the DNC Convention on Wednesday night, for almost two decades.
Now that the convention is over, we all get to take a moment to regroup, and we have 74 days to make a federal Democratic trifecta happen.
Michelle Obama implored all of us to “do something” and here’s our recommendations for what to do:
- To give towards winning the presidential and US Senate races, go to BFD.
- To volunteer for those national races, go to Seed the Vote. If you want to volunteer closer to home, reach out to Michael to learn about federal, state and local races you can drive to.
- To win the US House give to Battleground California. Blue Tent recently recommended BGCA as the CA place to give.
- To win state and local races that will make California more progressive, give to Progressive Era PAC.
Together we’ve gotten us here. Together we will make this happen.
