Turning Revulsion of Trump Into Votes

On election day 2016, more registered voters stayed home than voted for Donald Trump.  Others who voted, threw their votes away on third party candidates motivated by some misguided sense of ideological purity.  By not voting or throwing away one's vote on a third party candidate with no chance in Hell of winning is in effect the same as voting for the least appealing candidate of the two major parties.  Had these non-voters voted or third party voting not occurred, America would not now be undergoing the daily nightmare of Donald Trump in the White House.  Hopefully, this reality is sinking in and now the task is to translate revulsion for Trump into votes at the polls come November, 2018.  In Virginia in 2017, Ralph Northam's campaign managed to do this via an incredible ground game that coordinated with all of the House of Delegates campaigns.  It's a pattern that can be replicated in 2018 provided voters belated grasp that their vote does matter and may be a bulwark against the worse excesses of Trump and the hideous GOP agenda.  A column in the New York Times looks at the need to turn hatred of Trump into votes in November.  Here are highlights:

During the 20 years that he has led the social democratic Working Families Party, Dan Cantor has waited for the left to get serious about building power through local politics. “People, sophisticated people, barely know who their state senator is,” he told me. A significant portion of nonmilitary spending in America is done at the state and local levels, he pointed out, “so it’s not like these are trivial offices. This is where people live.”

The religious right has long understood this. It became a major part of the Republican Party by systematically capturing seats on school boards and city councils. But many on the left either disdained electoral politics altogether — preferring demonstrations like Occupy Wall Street that quickly turned into ends in themselves — or gravitated toward nihilistic spoiler campaigns like those of Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.

Donald Trump’s election has changed that, spurring progressives to search for ways to exert power in the face of terrifying powerlessness. They have flooded into down-ballot races, bringing them unprecedented attention.

According to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll, one in five Americans have either protested or attended a political rally since the start of 2016. These activists, many newly minted, are overwhelmingly anti-Trump. Mitchell aims to make sure they turn their revulsion into votes. . . . . much of the anti-Trump resistance is made up of middle-aged suburban women, and most identify as Democrats.
 Building a party that can simultaneously encompass feminist actresses in Manhattan, black liberationists and white Appalachian strikers is no small thing. All over the world, right-wing populism is ascendant, and so far we have little evidence that multiracial left-wing populism can successfully challenge it. But one thing that Trump’s election taught us is that just because something has never happened doesn’t mean it can’t. “Can we merge these ideals with serious electoral heft?” Mitchell asked. People dreaming of a country that’s egalitarian, cosmopolitan and humane have no choice but to try.