Midterms: Get Out of Your Bubble

Get Out of Your Bubble.

There’s plenty of outrage so we aren’t going to do that. Instead, we’re creating a place with new tips, tools, insights, sources, and stories that can help us understand how to win this November.

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Mother’s Day was never meant to be about flowers — it was born in protest, built by women who showed up when the country was at war, when rights were being stripped, and when the powerful were counting on ordinary people to stay home. It’s past time to remember this. 

Jacobin’s piece on Mother’s Day’s radical roots traces the holiday to Ann Jarvis organizing in 1858 for sanitation and workers’ rights in Appalachian communities, to Julia Ward Howe founding an antiwar protest day after the Franco-Prussian War, to Coretta Scott King leading a welfare rights march on Washington just weeks after her husband was assassinated. These women didn’t wait for a party to lead or a court to rule in their favor. With the Voting Rights Act being dismantled in real time, a war in Iran widening, and our rights under assault from courts that have been deliberately stacked against us, the spirit of Civil Rights, women’s rights, and anti-war organizing isn’t nostalgia — it’s instruction. All of us — not just mothers, all of us — need to use our voices and show up. That is how we win.

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The Republican strategy to hold the House isn’t to win more votes — it’s to make Democratic feel hope, and they are executing it simultaneously across six states right now. We won’t give in. 

Last week we flagged this coordinated offensive, and this week the situation has escalated. Democracy Docket’s latest dispatch documents the full scope: Tennessee’s GOP legislature passed new maps that carve up Memphis — the state’s only Black-majority district — while simultaneously stripping the law that requires voters to be notified when their polling place changes; South Carolina Republicans are convening a special session to redraw maps targeting Rep. James Clyburn’s district, with thousands of primary absentee ballots already in voters’ hands; Alabama is racing to reinstate congressional maps a federal court already struck down once under the Voting Rights Act; and in Virginia, the Supreme Court denied the state’s request to reconsider its ruling, killing a voter-approved redistricting plan on a technicality. This is a synchronized, multi-state blitz to gerrymander Democrats and Black voters out of representation before November. But now is not the time to feel hopeless – every competitive seat on our target list just became more urgent.

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Take direct action to target vulnerable Republicans this Spring. Our campaign to flip 5 seats is focused on targeting Republican incumbents and tying them to Trump’s abuse of power and corruption. We can take power together. Support our campaign now.

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The fact that Trump’s approval ratings are tanking doesn’t mean Democrats will automatically win in November — and if you believe otherwise, you need to watch this.

The Bulwark’s conversation with Adam Serwer, one of the most incisive voices covering race, courts, and power in America, is essential listening for anyone who thinks bad polls for Republicans automatically translate to Democratic wins. Republican-controlled courts and state legislatures are engineering structural barriers specifically designed to insulate them from democratic accountability even when voters turn against them. Winning the public opinion battle has to be start of the right. We have to win on the ground, in the specific districts that can actually flip the House — and we have to start now.

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Sometimes you have to laugh… or you’ll cry. Tennessee state Sen. John Stevens — a state lawmaker who lived in Memphis for three years — looked a Black colleague in the eye and claimed he “didn’t know” that Memphis is predominantly African American- it must be because, like the courts, he is “color-blind”.

John Oliver broke it down on Last Week Tonight with footage that has to be seen to be believed: Stevens played dumb to avoid admitting the maps were racially motivated, because the law still technically prohibits intentional racial discrimination in redistricting. This is the identical playbook the Supreme Court used to gut the Voting Rights Act: claim you can’t “see” race, and you can’t be accused of targeting it.

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Both Parties Owe Voters a New Era — and Voters Know It

The story of 24 members of Congress over the age of 80 running for reelection in 2026 isn’t really about age — it’s about an institution that has stopped responding to the people it represents, and both parties are guilty. NBC’s detailed breakdownreveals a Congress whose average member age (58.9) is nearly two decades older than the median American (39.1), in a year when voters across the spectrum are demanding generational change.

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