Indivisibles,

Hello! I’m here with a three-weeks-out midterms update. And I want to talk about something a little crazy: the case for being wildly, over-the-top hopeful about the midterms.

If you know me, you know that I’m not an optimistic person by nature. I spend a lot of time on worst-case scenarios and planning for bad stuff. But right now, I actually feel really, really hopeful and I think you should too.

Here’s why:

1. The data is on our side. The special elections, the off-year elections, the general election polling, the district-specific polling -- it all points in one direction: a gigantic anti-MAGA tsunami. Our people are energized, their people are depressed, and the swing/nonvoters are hella done with MAGA. At this point, the case for Republicans depends on the polls being massively, systematically wrong. And look, that’s happened before. But I’d sure as hell rather be us than them.
2. Trump is alienating every voter he can. The Iran war, tariffs, AI and data centers, ICE raids and detention centers, gas prices, BS unpopular (and unbelievable) promises of $5k checks. As the midterm nears, Trump is flailing, and as he flails he pushes more voters away. If you’ve been to a battleground state in the last few months, you’ve heard stories of people taking Trump signs down. If you knocked on doors recently, you’ve heard people pissed about AI, ICE, Flock cameras, the war, and the economy. Just about every time Trump opens his mouth, he drives more people away, and even his die-hard supporters are less interested in this election because he’s not on the ballot.
3. Hope is a strategy. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a hundred times: Authoritarians want you scared. They want you disempowered. They want you hopeless. In this case, Trump wants us to believe that the election is hopeless, that he’ll win or he’ll steal it, and there’s no point in engaging.

We’ve seen this playbook in action a hundred times before -- and there’s only one way to respond. We strategically embrace our power. We lean into the good news. We refuse to lower our expectations. And in doing so, we disarm authoritarians’ most powerful weapon: our own fear.

I’m proud to say that when Indivisible was building our political strategy, we planned for this world -- and we built a program designed to help win not just in purple places but in ambitious reach seats across the country. We’re not just fighting hard for the swing seats -- we’re putting Republicans on defense in their home turf. We’re taking the fight to them in the districts they THOUGHT were safe gerrymanders. We’re building for a tsunami.

OK, now here’s the caveat. The case for optimism depends on actually getting our coalition out to vote. And that means we have to reach them. Midterms see lower turnout than presidential elections -- and that means that the ultimate results depend more than ever on whose program can successfully turn voters out.

We need to reach the low-propensity Democratic voters who vote in presidential years but sit out the midterms. We need to touch the people who skipped the 2024 election, or who voted Trump because they were fed up with the status quo. We need every single one of these people to have one, or two, or three real conversations with a real human who can talk to them about why this election is important and help them make a plan to vote.

There are two ways you can be part of that effort to help reach the voters we need to win:

1. You can sign up for a volunteer shift here -- just enter your address to find the best ways to get involved based on where you live. If you’re in a swing state or district, we’ll put you to work reaching out directly to your neighbors via Neighbor2Neighbor, our signature, highly effective hyper-local canvassing program. If you’re outside our targets, we’ll ask you to phone bank for key competitive races. Either way, this is how to be part of the conversations that actually move people.
2. You can donate to fund our largest-ever midterm program here. We’re surging funds to local Indivisibles to support grassroots outreach. We’re running vote contact across 40 races in 22 states. We’re supporting the most ambitious election defense program in our organizational history. It’s all necessary -- and it all costs money. If you can, please consider supporting our work.

I hope I’ve convinced you to feel a little optimism. But either way, it’s time to get to work. 

In solidarity,
Leah Greenberg
Co-Executive Director, Indivisible