I haven\u2019t written since the election because, to be honest, I just didn\u2019t know what to say before. I had utterly convinced myself she would win- as much because I couldn\u2019t fathom four more years of Trump than anything else. And when she didn\u2019t\u2026 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I told myself I would come back when I was ready. But Jan came and I still couldn\u2019t convince myself to submerge every day back into a constant state of outrage\u2026 Maybe I could act like so many Americans and just ignore it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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- \u201cI forget her name right now.\u201d He didn\u2019t even question that it could be a HER. \u201cNo,\u201d I said, \u201cshe didn\u2019t win.\u201d He immediately knew, \u201cTrump? How can that be?\u201d And that was it. That was the reminder I needed for why I was in this fight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also knew this time had to be different. Like many of you, I had spent Trump\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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We need to do more than resist. We need to build. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is our mission now. To build power, to build governing majorities, to build a government that actually delivers solutions for us. <\/strong>When I say \u2018we\u2019 I of course mean \u2018we\u2019 here at Flip the States, but I also mean \u2018we\u2019 as in the community resistors that we all have become and the \u2018we\u2019 who will now be the power builders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here is our plan: to be ruthlessly focused on putting Democrats in power.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At Flip the States, we won\u2019t be conducting ideological screenings of candidates because this isn\u2019t about purity, it’s about power. We won\u2019t be picking favorites in the primaries because it isn\u2019t about perfect, it\u2019s about winning. And we won\u2019t be polling and\u00a0predicting winners and losers like a horse race. This isn\u2019t a game; it’s our lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Join us. Join us in our fight to take power. This is our plan: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n