Swing Left - Novel Grassroot campaign strategy.
I tried to access the original site, but it must be down because this project was just discusses on MSNBC.
Here is an older article:
Swing Left and the Post-Election Surge of Progressive Activism
n January 18th, the Twitter account for a new political organization posted its first tweet: a link to swingleft.org—a neatly designed Web site where you can plug in your Zip Code to find the nearest U.S. House district whose seat was, in the most recent election, decided by a small margin—along with the message “Let’s get to work.” The Swing Left campaign, which aims to win the House for Democrats in 2018, quickly went viral. The comedian Sarah Silverman tweeted “Start thinking mid term elections now - this makes it CRAZY easy,” with a link to the site. As the roughly three million people who came out for the Women’s March on Saturday made colorfully evident, an enormous, amorphous bundle of progressive energy in the country is searching for an outlet or three. By January 22nd, a hundred thousand people had signed up to receive Swing Left updates. That number has since more than doubled. In addition, ten thousand people have filled out a form on the site to offer their skills in a volunteer capacity. The Web site has been shared on Facebook nearly three hundred thousand times.
Swing Left is the brainchild of Ethan Todras-Whitehill, a “writer, GMAT teacher, dad, and political nerd” who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. “Like a lot of people, after the election, I was flabbergasted and devastated,” he told me this week, over the phone. “But I work through stages of grief pretty quickly.” The morning after Donald Trump’s victory, as he sat in a local coffee shop, he reached acceptance: the Trump Presidency was real. “The way forward is to do something in 2018,” he said. “And it’s a very bad map for Democrats in the Senate in 2018, but House elections tend to swing against the incumbent, particularly when one party controls all three branches. All of this meant that 2018 would be a prime opportunity for Democrats to take back the House.”
Todras-Whitehill lives in a solidly blue area, with no immediate opportunities to flip or meaningfully defend a congressional district. “No Republican ran for office around here—they didn’t even bother—and a lot of progressives live in districts like that,” he said. So he went home and perused CNN’s Web site to find the closest district where the margin of victory was close. It was New York’s 19th Congressional District, where the Republican John Faso defeated Zephyr Teachout, a Democrat, by fewer than thirty thousand votes in November. “I was getting ready to post on Facebook, to say that I would commit my time and energy to flipping N.Y. 19 in 2018,” he said. “But then I wondered, Why did I just have to do that? Why doesn’t a tool for finding your nearest swing district already exist?”
snip
Swing Left identifies swing districts through a simple calculation: the congressional districts whose seats were decided within a margin of fifteen percentage points. I entered my Brooklyn Zip Code and Swing Left gave me New York’s Third Congressional District, centered in northern Nassau County, where the Democrat Tom Suozzi, a first-time congressman, won his seat in 2016 by a little more than seventeen thousand votes. In other areas of the country, the districts to which Swing Left would direct you are implausibly far from home: someone in Seattle, say, would get a district in rural Nevada. The interface is, for now, simple: Swing Left shows the district boundaries and the name of the current representative and then prompts the user to sign up for a mailing list to receive more information in the future.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/swing-left-and-the-post-election-surge-of-progressive-activism
= new reply since forum marked as read
Organizers associated with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee are launching a new partnership with Swing Left, an organization focused on flipping House seats, to expand the committee’s voter outreach in key districts, according to emails obtained by Roll Call.
Organizers on the ground in competitive House districts sent out emails to Friday encouraging supporters to attend a “Summer Canvass” on Saturday to talk to voters.
The organizers, who are in the districts early as part of the committee’s “March into ’18” effort, are encouraging people to volunteer to knock on doors and talk to voters about the 2018 election.
“Volunteers can make or break an election, which is why it’s so important that we hit the ground running into 2018,” the organizers wrote in emails
More...
This is good news for smaller grassroots orgs that have a great campaign but need to grow in size & power, to be more effective.
Next time someone shouts "where are the Democrats?" "Dems in Disarray!"
THIS is where you'll find them.
Grassroots Orgs that are already proving effective by the many close & upset races we've already won on local & state levels.
This is the brainchild organizing of leaders like Clinton, Howard Dean, Barack Obama, and the thousands who see a path to taking back ownership of our country & are stand defiant to those who would work to undermine our nation's future.
They're the one's the press doesn't show you.
And they are magnificent in their efforts.
I am in the NY 27th. and WE WILL OUST CHRIS COLLINS !!
In spite of, so far, zero DNC support. :>
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