I haven’t written since the election because, to be honest, I just didn’t know what to say before. I had utterly convinced myself she would win- as much because I couldn’t fathom four more years of Trump than anything else. And when she didn’t… well, like so many others, I just had to tune out. I completely shut it down. The news, the headlines, the podcasts, the emails and on and on.
I told myself I would come back when I was ready. But Jan came and I still couldn’t convince myself to submerge every day back into a constant state of outrage… Maybe I could act like so many Americans and just ignore it?
And then my young son came home from school to tell me he was studying the inauguration. He told me he learned it was a celebration and asked if we would celebrate. I asked him if he knew who our next President would be and he responded quickly- “I forget her name right now.” He didn’t even question that it could be a HER. “No,” I said, “she didn’t win.” He immediately knew, “Trump? How can that be?” And that was it. That was the reminder I needed for why I was in this fight.
I also knew this time had to be different. Like many of you, I had spent Trump’s first term learning to resist. Protests, phone calls, visits to my Senator and Representative. I had resisted with the best. But outrage and resistance alone hadn’t beat MAGA.
We need to do more than resist. We need to build.
This is our mission now. To build power, to build governing majorities, to build a government that actually delivers solutions for us. When I say ‘we’ I of course mean ‘we’ here at Flip the States, but I also mean ‘we’ as in the community resistors that we all have become and the ‘we’ who will now be the power builders.
So this is the work. At Flip the States, I and we will be doing it every day. Resisting when we must, but building every day towards something better. Always building.
Here is our plan: to be ruthlessly focused on putting Democrats in power.
At Flip the States, we won’t be conducting ideological screenings of candidates because this isn’t about purity, it’s about power. We won’t be picking favorites in the primaries because it isn’t about perfect, it’s about winning. And we won’t be polling and predicting winners and losers like a horse race. This isn’t a game; it’s our lives.
Instead, we will keep doing what we do best – using hard data about the electorate, the cost of a campaign, redistricting, chamber and positional power and more to determine which races are both winnable and will have the largest impact if won by Democrats. And we will ground ourselves in the same place we have always been: being community members in fly over country turned resistors turned power-builders.
Join us. Join us in our fight to take power. This is our plan:
- Special Elections: We already in process of identifying & ranking the upcoming special elections. Don’t waste your time and money on un-winnable races or on groups preying on our outrage to raise money for them. We’ll have rankings soon so you can instead focus on where we can make an impact and win.
- 2025 & 2026 Elections: We are preparing the data now to release Impact Scores for the upcoming 2025 elections in NJ and VA and the 2026 midterms. Winning state majorities matters. Supporting state Democratic leaders to build a bench and to offer a real alternative to the Trump agenda matters. And, early 2026 money matters. It can beat back Republican challengers before they even get in a race. The time to build is now.
- Add our next 1000 members: The ‘we’ matters and we need your help to do it. Thank you for already being with us. Now, please help us get the word out by asking 3 friends to sign up to Flip the States. We aren’t here to beg for money. We are here to be part of a community building Democratic power, which is why instead we share where your money goes farthest to help Democrats across the country and where it doesn’t.
In a recent posting, Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the current Republican effort in North Carolina to reject 60,000 votes and deny a Democratic Supreme Court Justice her voter elected seat. Cox wrote, “That focus on preserving power in the states to keep political and economic power in the hands of a minority is a key element of our current moment.”
To date, every piece of data, every impact score, every web page, every email, every everything has been created by our team of volunteers. Help us show the power of community. Help us show what Democrats and the majority can do when we put them back in power.
Amber
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Get the Path to Power.
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