Indivisible is targeting little-known
GOP House members in swing districts for the 2024 election. Co-founder Ezra
Levin says: ‘They are basically Marjorie Taylor Greenes in how they vote’
Juan Ciscomani. Tom Kean Jr. Brian
Fitzpatrick. Marc Molinaro. David Schweikert. Brandon Williams … Many Americans
would struggle to identify who these people are or what they do.
They are all, in fact, Republican
members of Congress. And progressive activists argue that their fate is more
crucial to the future of American democracy than more high-profile rightwing
political figures such as Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Indivisible,
a leftwing political umbrella movement founded in response to Donald Trump’s
election as president in 2016, has launched
a campaign to unseat 18 Republican members
of the House of Representatives from districts that Joe Biden won in the
election of 2020.
The
“Unrepresentatives” initiative is based on the premise that these 18 districts
– not the safe, deep red ones of Gaetz and Greene –
will determine if Republicans maintain control of the US lower chamber next
year. They are the “Achilles heel” of the Maga (Make America great again)
House.
The way you accomplish that is by keeping your head
down, by not making a lot of headlines
“These
are folks who are not in the headlines,” said Ezra Levin,
co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, acknowledging that the
sole exception is Congressman George Santos because of his outlandish lies.
“But the other 17, I would guess practically no Americans have ever heard of
and are not hearing of right now because they have a different pathway to
re-election. They understand this. They’re not dummies.”
Although the 18 are in swing
districts, they are not really moderates. They are under pressure to raise
money for their next election campaign. That means they have to make
commitments to donors about how they will vote in Congress – which is in line
with Greene and the Maga wing of the party about 95% of the time.
Speaking from Austin, Texas, Levin
explained: “They are basically Marjorie Taylor Greenes in how they vote. But
then that gets to the third step: they’ve got to convince the constituents in
their own districts that, while Congress is messed up and there’s a lot of
dysfunction there, they’re normal, everyday folks who just want the best for
their constituents.”
“It’s tricky to do that when you have
a voting record that looks like Marjorie Taylor Greene. But that is the
strategy. The way you accomplish that is by keeping your head down, by not
making a lot of headlines, by not advertising every vote you take that looks
like Marjorie Taylor Greene’s vote.”
These
Republicans work hard to cultivate a low profile away from the bright lights of
Fox News or other rightwing media, steering clear of hot button topics such as
abortion or Maga circuses such as the Conservative
Political Action Conference (CPAC).
But now Levin, a former congressional
staffer, intends to shine a light on them and ensure they have no hiding place.
“We have a clear goal and that is:
let’s make these folks famous – famous locally, specifically. Let’s make it as
clear as possible to their constituents that they are in fact backing up the
Maga majority.”
Indivisible is coordinating groups in
the battleground districts across eight states and supporting them with
training, media training and public relations help, and funding for billboards
and ads, props and costumes.
The effort includes rapid
response-style protests calling attention to Republicans’ votes and pressuring
them to publicly condemn their fellow Republicans’ worst positions,
highlighting such instances in local media.
Levin hopes that this might sometimes
persuade the 18 Republicans to flip their votes, for example on lifting the
debt ceiling: six would be enough to stave off a default.
In New York we
fought on the field that the Republicans chose and I do think that was a mistake
“The second possible outcome is that
you don’t flip their vote but everybody knows then in the district that they
voted with the Magas. If you accomplish that, then they’re more easy to defeat
next year because they’ll have a harder time accomplishing that last step in
their re-election strategy, which is trying to convince their constituents that
they are not indeed part of the Maga problem.”
Democrats
fared much better than widely expected in last year’s midterm elections,
maintaining control of the Senate and only narrowly losing the House – even
that outcome might have been avoided if only the party had not underperformed badly in New York. A third of Indivisible’s targets are in the
Empire state, traditionally a Democratic stronghold.
“In New York many folks on the Democratic side played up an artificial
rise in crime,” Levin recalled. “The dominant story was not how extreme these
Republicans are and how they’re coming after your freedoms, your abortion
rights, your schools, your community, your democracy. It was fought on an
entirely different field. We fought on the field that the Republicans chose and
I do think that was a mistake. That is a shame because had we taken all those
Biden-won seats, there would be a Democratic trifecta right now.”
Even so, Levin found plenty of grounds for optimism
in the midterms as Republicans fell short of expectations and Trump-endorsed
extremists were wiped out in Arizona, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. He did not
approve of Democrats’ efforts to boost election
deniers in Republican primaries – “playing with fire, a
dangerous strategy” – but believes the 2024 landscape is propitious.
“I see these 18 Democratic districts currently represented by
Republicans, eminently winnable. I see a presidential contest in which the Republican
party is tearing itself apart with [Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis or Trump or
folks who are trying to take both of them on.
“And I see a Senate map that is
indisputably tougher than the presidential and the House map but one that is
quite winnable. You look at the polling that we’re seeing now in Montana, in
Ohio, in West Virginia, in Arizona, some of these tough seats that we’d better
hold, and they look pretty darn good for us, which is why for Indivisible’s
political work, our north star is retake the House, hold the Senate, hold the
presidency.”
Levin
argues that, should Democrats replace the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, now
an independent who has defended a Senate procedural rule known as the
filibuster, with challenger Ruben
Gallego, they have a shot at reforming the
filibuster and working towards the codification of Roe v Wade, the recently
overturned supreme court ruling that enshrined a woman’s right to abortion.
As long as the
Marjorie Taylor Greenes are wielding the gavel, they’re going to have at best a
tenuous grip on power
Biden is an important part of that equation. Levin
notes that the president was widely criticised for focusing on abortion rights
and democracy in his last two
speeches of the midterms campaign. “He got a ton of flak for that. There were
folks even on our side calling it a strategic blunder. And yet he did indeed
double down on that strategy and the proof is in the pudding. It was the best
midterm margins arguably in modern American history.”
There is no sign of the Republican fever breaking
for now. Greene has risen to prominence in the House and appears to wield
influence over the speaker, Kevin McCarthy. Trump and DeSantis are racing to the right ahead of the Republican
presidential primary.
But Levin keeps faith in the survival of US democracy. “I do believe
that the Republican party can be saved. It’s got to be drilled into their heads
that as long as the Marjorie Taylor Greenes are wielding the gavel, they’re
going to have at best a tenuous grip on power. That is doable.
“The vast majority of Republicans were privately and publicly predicting
a massive red wave in 2022. They are not dummies. The folks who look at the
same numbers I look at know the reason why they lost is because, when the folks
got into the voting booth, they looked at the names on the list and they
thought, well, the Republicans are being driven by folks who are coming after
my schools, my communities, my freedoms, abortion rights, my family, I can’t
empower them.”
Levin added: “Their brand is in the gutter because
they’re empowering the Marjorie Taylor Greenes. They don’t currently have the
latitude to kick folks like them out of the party. There’s a reason why George
Santos is still a member of the House of Representatives.
But if they suffer enough electoral defeats they will be forced into moderation
and the dream: to have two pro-democracy parties in the Congress. We’re not
there right now but I do think it’s an achievable outcome.”
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