MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald weighs in with a post-mortem on the 2014 elections, noting “The Democratic 2012 playbook included aggressive use of opposition research to attack opponents, superior field organization and tight coordination among outside groups and wealthy donors. Republicans’ mistakes during that election included candidates who made lots of gaffes. This year, both scripts were flipped…n 2014, Democrats took the lead in verbal flubs, even as they waited in vain for Republicans to slip up.”
The Center for American progress Benton Strong explains how “Deep Voter Pessimism and Lack of Economic Agenda from Democrats, Not Just Structural Obstacles, Drove GOP Gains in 2014.” Strong quotes TDS founding editor Ruy Teixeira “The path forward for Democrats seems straight,” said Ruy Teixeira, CAP Senior Fellow and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. “In order to maximize support among core constituencies and reach further into the Republican hold on white voters, they must develop and promote a sharp vision of economic equality and greater opportunity for those left out of the recovery.”
Taylor W. Anderson notes at the central Oregon Bulletin that “In a year that saw perhaps the lowest turnout in decades elsewhere, Oregon probably had the highest voter turnout in the nation, according to preliminary results…Oregon’s 69.5 percent turnout is highest in the U.S. for the second-straight midterm election. States have about a month to certify vote counts, but it is unlikely that any state’s official results will rise above Oregon’s…Elections officials are taking the high turnout to trumpet Oregon’s mail-in ballot system and other election reforms that they say have helped drive up votes.”
On Meet the Press Howard Dean put it this way: “Where the hell is the Democratic party?…You’ve got to stand for something if you want to win…You cannot win if you are afraid…You’ve got to strengthen the state parties. It requires discipline, accountability, but it also requires money to go to the state parties and we have to trust the state parties.”
The Intercept’s Juan Thompson explains “How Voter Suppression Helped Produce The Lowest Turnout in Decades.”
David Lauter of the L.A. Times shares the perspective of TDS founding editor Stan Greenberg on the midterm elections outcome: “On the central issue of the economy, Greenberg said, Obama was “out of touch” and “tone deaf” in his insistence on talking about a recovery that many voters don’t feel…”He isn’t speaking to the main economic problem,” Greenberg said, adding that the lack of an economic message directed at the anxieties of average families had contributed heavily to low turnout of Democratic voters.”
Crystal Ball has some bragging rights about their predictions for the 2014 midterms, and they are not shy about claiming it. As Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley write, “On Monday, we offered our final calls in all 507 of the Senate, House, and gubernatorial races…As of this writing, 490 of those races have been called for one party or the other, and we got 476 correct (97%)…We did best in the category everyone was watching most closely, the battle for the Senate, successfully calling 32 of the 33 called races.”
At Daily Kos Armando considers the role of Gov. Scott’s late ad blitz attacking Democratic candidate Charlie Crist, who had a six point favorability edge going into the election.
Democrats also got clobbered at the state level and now hold majorities of both houses in only 11 states, compared to Republicans majorities in both houses of 30 state legislatures. Maybe it’s time for Dems to show what they can do in these states and set some high standards in infrastructure upgrades, employment and education. National Journal’s Kaveh Waddell addresses some of the possibilities in his post, “When Liberal Causes Don’t Stand a Chance in Washington, Activists Go Local.”

The main message of the election and take-away from Democracy Corps’ election-night poll is surely a call to the Democrats’ national leaders to address this new economy where jobs do not pay enough to live on, working women and men are struggling and need help, and good American jobs are not being created while the government is beholden to those with the most money.
The voters want to vote for change, and this poll shows that the Democrats and their supportive coalition would rally to a message that understands people are struggling with the new economy; but that was not President’s economic narrative for this election and it showed. Tackling the new economy is a tremendous undertaking, but also one that will be well received by a large audience of voters and that is the best path forward for Democrats.
But for all that and two consecutive off-year wave elections, there is no reason to think Republicans have raised their odds of electing a president in 2016. Looking at this poll, one would rather be in the position of the Democrats than of the Republicans.
In the presidential electorate that we surveyed, some of whom voted on Tuesday, Democrats have a 6-point advantage in party identification; the congressional vote is even; and Hillary Clinton defeats Mitt Romney by 6 points – well ahead of Obama’s margin in 2012. Moreover, this does not reflect the projected growth in Millennials and Hispanics in the 2016 electorate.
The election was fundamentally important, but has not disrupted the national trends and coalitions – even on the day of electoral triumph for the Republicans.
Read the memo here.
View the Data.
See the graphs.

The following article by John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from the Center for American Progress:
American voters remain deeply pessimistic about their own economic prospects and those of the country as a whole and distrust all major institutions of government, including the president, Congress, and both major political parties. As a result, the 2014 elections mark the third consecutive midterm election in which voters turned against the incumbent party to flip partisan control of one branch of Congress. In this election cycle, the Republican Party successfully mobilized discontent with President Barack Obama and the state of the economy to pick up at least seven seats for a minimum 52-seat majority. Democratic-held seats that went to Republicans include Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia, with Louisiana going to a runoff. The GOP solidified its hold on the U.S. House of Representatives, picking up at least 14 more seats for a commanding 243-seat majority so far. It also added three more governorships to its ranks, for a total of 31 states with Republican governors.
The loss of Senate control was largely expected given the difficult task Democrats faced this year: In order to keep their majority in the Senate, they needed to hold seats in Republican-leaning states whose voting bases were more conservative, older, and less diverse. But the GOP’s hold on the Senate remains tenuous, with the party facing the prospect of defending 24 Senate seats versus 10 for the Democrats in the 2016 presidential election year. As longtime political journalist Ronald Brownstein notes, as of the 2014 results, neither party has successfully held control of the U.S. Senate for more than eight years since 1980–a trend Republicans will surely need to keep in mind as they organize their agenda going forward.
American politics has entered a long phase of electoral volatility and divided government, with Republicans holding distinct advantages in mobilizing their coalition in many statewide and local contests and Democrats having a seemingly firm grip on presidential politics. The longer-term demographic and geographic shifts that are rapidly changing American society have yet to coalesce into clear partisan majorities across multiple levels of government. Given the seemingly intractable economic difficulties facing American families, as well as voters’ distrust of the government’s ability to address these problems, this lack of strong partisan control of American politics means we should expect more wild shifts between election cycles and more divided government and gridlock.
Why did the Republicans do so well in 2014?
A combination of factors contributed to the GOP’s victories. First, incumbent parties nearly always lose seats in midterm elections, especially in the middle of a president’s second term. Second, the electoral map in 2014 manifestly favored the GOP from the start–as was long known. Five of the seven GOP gains came from states that voted for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) in 2012; Colorado and Iowa are the exceptions. Third, the Democrats suffered from poor turnout of their key supporters. Indeed, this drop-off has reached historic levels.
Finally, and critically, the 2014 national exit poll highlights the extent to which voter pessimism, fear, and anxieties about the economic future benefited Republicans despite the party’s abysmal ratings in Congress. Keeping in mind that no one exit poll explains voting trends that develop over time, it is notable that 65 percent of 2014 voters said the country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” and 69 percent of this bloc voted Republican. Seventy percent of voters rated the national economy as “not so good” or “poor,” and 64 percent of them voted Republican. Fifty-nine percent of 2014 voters believe economic conditions are “poor and staying the same” or “getting worse,” and more than 6 in 10 of these voters chose Republicans.
Despite clear signs of economic recovery in the aggregate, many American voters heading into the polls this year were not feeling improvements in terms of their own jobs, wages, and benefits and subsequently took it out in force against the president’s party. Absent any clear or far-reaching national agenda and message to address people’s real economic concerns about jobs, wages, and opportunity, the Democrats essentially ceded control of the national campaign, opting to try their luck with a series of localized and targeted campaigns. Outside of important victories on minimum-wage ballot initiatives in five states and paid sick days in Massachusetts, this strategy produced little in partisan terms for the Democrats. The GOP similarly lacked a unifying national economic agenda, but given the level of anxiety and anger among voters, it did not appear to play a determining factor in their victories. Both parties will need to do much more to prove they can effectively address voters’ overarching economic needs going into 2016.
Notably, neither the president himself nor his signature policies, such as the Affordable Care Act, appear to have played an outsized role in voting. Only one-third of midterm voters said that their vote was “to express opposition to Barack Obama,” while a plurality–45 percent–said President Obama was not a factor and around one-fifth–19 percent–said they voted to support him. In addition, 48 percent of voters said the 2010 health care bill “went too far,” and these voters overwhelmingly chose Republicans, while 46 percent said it “was about right” or “didn’t go far enough” to reform the health care system. Although President Obama served as a powerful symbol of GOP frustration and anger and was certainly a focus of GOP voter mobilization, the midterm itself was not determined primarily by reactions to him.
As both Democrats and Republicans go forward following these results, both parties and any future presidential candidates must find a compelling and convincing way to address voters’ ongoing pessimism about the future and the need for more widely shared–and felt–economic gains. Even with unified control of Congress, Republicans risk falling into a familiar pattern of pursuing legislative tangents and extremist tactics that must be addressed if they want to solidify gains going into 2016. Democrats need to find a way to ensure that the economic recovery since 2008 is reaching more people and that they have significant new ideas post-Obama to improve the lives and financial security of American families.
Who voted?

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The following article by George Lakoff, Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant,” is cross-posted from HuffPo. His website is: georgelakoff.com.
It is time to shine a light on the strategies used by Democrats, and on the Democratic infrastructure that uses those strategies.
Democratic strategists have been segmenting the electorate and seeking individual self-interest-based issues in each electoral block. The strategists also keep suggesting a move to the right. This has left no room for the Democrats to have an overriding authentic moral identity that Americans can recognize.
Those strategists form an infrastructure that all Democrats have come to depend on; not just the candidates, but also the elected officials, Democrats in government, and citizens who either do, or might, find progressive policies morally and practically right. The strategic infrastructure includes PR firms, pollsters, consultants, researchers, trainers, communication specialists, speechwriters, and their funders.
It is an important and powerful infrastructure and we all depend on it. I believe it is vital to separate this infrastructure from the strategies it has been using. I believe the strategies can be greatly improved so as to give a true, deep, and moral picture of what progressive politics is about — one whose content and authenticity will resonate with, and inspire, a majority of Americans.
I have just published a book about how to do this: The All New Don’t Think of an Elephant! It is an updated and much expanded version of the original, which introduced the concept of conceptual framing, which is about ideas, not just about slogans. The present book includes what I have learned over the past decade by bringing to bear results in my academic discipline, the Brain and Cognitive Sciences. The book is short, easy-to-read, and inexpensive.
At this point, some details are in order. Here is what is widely done according to present strategies. Not everyone uses all of these, but most are common.

Use demographic categories to segment the electorate, categories from the census (race, gender, ethnicity, age, marital status, income, zip code), as well as publicly available party registration.
Assume uniformity across the demographic categories. Poll on which issues are “most important,” e.g., for women (or single women), for each minority group, for young people, and so on. This separates the issues from one another and creates “issue silos.” It does not include segmentation for moral worldviews that differ between conservatives and progressives.
Assume language is neutral and that the same poll questions will have the same meaning for everyone polled. In reality, language is defined relative to conceptual frames. And the same words can be “contested,” that is, they can have opposite meanings depending on one’s moral values.
Assume that people vote on the basis of material self-interest and design different message to appeal to different demographic groups. In reality, poor conservatives will vote against their material interests when they identify with a candidate and his or her values.
In polling, apply statistical methods to the answers given in each demographic group. This will impose a “bell curve” in the results. The bell curve will impose a “middle” in each case.
Assume that most voters are in the middle imposed by the bell curve. Move to the middle. If your beliefs are on the left of the “middle,” move to the right to be where most voters are. You will be helping conservatives, by supporting their beliefs. And you may ne saying things you don;tje
Check the polls to see how popular the present Democratic president is; if he is not popular, design you message to dissociate yourself from the president. It will reinforce the unpopularity of the president when members of his own party, as well as the opposition, disown him.
Attack your opponents as being “extremists” when they hold views typical of the far right. This will help your opponents, as they will appear standing up for what they believe in among those of their constituents that share any of those views.
Attack your opponents for getting money from rich corporations or individuals. This will help your opponent among Republicans (and some Democrats) who respect the values of the wealthy and successful.
Argue against your opponents by quoting them, using their language and negating that language. Negating a frame reinforces the frame, as in the sentence “Don’t think of an elephant!” This practice will mostly reinforce the views of your opponent.

Such strategies miss the opportunity to present an overriding moral stand that fits the individual issues, while saying clearly what ideals Democrats stand for as Democrats. There happens to be such an overriding ideal that most Democrats authentically believe in.

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There is no shortage of explanations about why Dems got creamed yesterday. Here’s a few of them:
David Corn at Mother Jones: “Obama and his team succeeded in transforming campaigning, integrating an intense focus on data and metrics with on-the-ground organizing. And they did it twice. But the president has not transformed politics. To beat back the expected oppositional waves of 2010 and 2014, he needed a playbook as unconventional, imaginative, and effective as those he used in 2008 and 2012. He needed to keep show-me independents on his side and Democratic-leaning voters, particularly those who otherwise would be unconcerned with politics, somehow engaged in the process. And he had to do this while presiding over a Washington that seemed to be a miasma of disorder and while contending with a troubled economy and all hell breaking loose overseas. He needed to keep the we in the mix.”
“This much-vaunted turnout operation turns out not to have deserved much vaunt.” – Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast.
From Ezra Klein at Vox: “There wasn’t a secret rush of Latino voters the pollsters had simply missed. Focusing on cultural appeals like “the War on Women” didn’t work. For all the Obama campaign hype, the Democrats hadn’t actually discovered dark arts of GOTV that allowed them to survive a GOP year. The polls were wrong — but they were wrong because they undercounted Republican support. As often happens, Democrats fooled themselves after the 2012 election into believing they had unlocked some enduring political advantage. They learned otherwise.”
“Candidates from Arkansas to Kentucky, from Iowa to Georgia, lacked message discipline and skipped one opportunity after another to effectively target voters with any notable precision. For all of the bellyaching, tooth gnashing, and public wailing, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. ..Rather than stand on and fight for progressive principles, these candidates fed voters a diet of stump speeches, campaign literature, and television ads that sought to gussy themselves up as non-confrontational centrists who are less likely to wage war with conservatives than they are to brew them a cup of hot cocoa and tuck them into bed at night.” Goldie Taylor at The Daily Beast.
At Fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver explains: “…the average Senate poll conducted in the final three weeks of this year’s campaign overestimated the Democrat’s performance by 4 percentage points. The average gubernatorial poll was just as bad, also overestimating the Democrat’s performance by 4 points.”
John B. Judis at The New Republic: “In Florida, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist lost whites without college degrees by 32 to 61 percent; in Virginia, Senator Mark Warner’s near-death experience was due to losing these voters by 30 to 68 percent. In Colorado and Iowa, they held the key to Republican Senate victories. In 2012, the Democrats benefited by facing a Republican who reeked of money and privilege and displayed indifference toward the 47 percent. Romney lost the white working class in states like Ohio. Democrats may not have that luxury of a Mitt Romney in the next election. And in that case, they will have to do considerably better among these voters, or else 2016 could turn out to be another nightmare election for the Democrats. ”
Harold Meyerson puts it this way at The American Prospect: “…the Democrats’ failure isn’t just the result of Republican negativity. It’s also intellectual and ideological. What, besides raising the minimum wage, do the Democrats propose to do about the shift in income from wages to profits, from labor to capital, from the 99 percent to the 1 percent? How do they deliver for an embattled middle class in a globalized, de-unionized, far-from-full-employment economy, where workers have lost the power they once wielded to ensure a more equitable distribution of income and wealth? What Democrat, besides Elizabeth Warren, campaigned this year to diminish the sway of the banks? Who proposed policies that would give workers the power to win more stable employment and higher incomes, not just at the level of the minimum wage but across the economic spectrum?”
Peter Beinart notes at The Atlantic, “This year has been different: GOP activists have given their candidates more space to craft the centrist personas they need to win.”
“…Exposed in this election were the fallacies of the Democratic establishment. Social issues alone can’t provide victory, since Republican candidates found it possible to rouse their base while donning sheep’s clothing on choice, or going silent on gay marriage. Sophisticated campaign targeting and get-out-the-vote operations can’t substitute for passion, clarity, and vision to motivate Democratic base voters to vote. White men and married women will be won not by adopting a corporate agenda or by joining in rigging the rules against them. They will be won by driving an agenda that will address the pressures they feel.” – Robert Borosage at Campaign for America’s Future.

Princeton Election Consortium’s Sam Wang: Between 45 and 51 Dems +Indies (or 55-49 for Republicans)
Crystal Ball’s Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley: 53-47 Republican majority.
Fivethirtyeight’s Nate Silver: Republicans have a 75% chance of 51+ seats.
New York Times The Upshot (Nate Cohn et al): 52-48 Republican majority “likeliest” outcome.

From Kitty Lan’s “Harvard Poll Gets It Wrong: Millennials Aren’t Massively Shifting Right” at Campaign for America’s Future:

The “Survey of Young Americans’ Attitudes Toward Politics and Public Service” released this week by the Harvard Institute of Politics seems to send a simple, direct image: Democrats, you have lost the support of millennials.
But the tragedy of this poll is that it fails to tackle a fundamental question: Why? For that reason, it fails to paint an accurate picture of the challenges millennials face that underlie their political beliefs.
The biggest highlight of the Harvard survey is the reversal of Democrat’s strong lead in the last election cycle. “In 2010…according to exit polls, Americans age 18 to 29 favored Democrats by 58 percent to 42 percent, a 16-point margin. Four years later…the IOP survey finds that likely young voters prefer Republican control of the Congress by a slim four-point margin of 51 to 47 percent.”

However, adds Lan:

On Thursday the Youth Engagement Project issued a rebuttal to the Harvard study that pointed to a finding in the study that got lost in the mainstream media coverage. “Here is what the Harvard poll actually says,” wrote Alexandra Acker-Lyons of the Youth Engagement Project. “Millennial voters favor a Democratic Congress 50%-43 percent and self-identify as Democrats by +11 [11 percentage points more than Republican]. Only millennials who said they were ‘definitely voting’ in 2014 favored electing Republicans over Democrats, 51 percent-47 percent.
“The poll’s findings do not support the media narrative that millennials have become Republicans – they haven’t. Only likely youth voters favor Republicans. This is not without reason as likely youth voters are more likely to be white and conservative, which – as you might expect – does not reflect the youth voter overall.”
The Youth Engagement Project’s own poll with Project New America and Harstad Strategic Research concluded that roughly three-quarters of the millennials who voted for President Obama in 2012 would support Democratic Party control of Congress in 2014, while only 12 percent prefer Republican control. These voters could tip the scales for Democrats on Tuesday – if they show up at the polls.

While it seems unlikely that these younger voters will show up today in anything resembling 2012 turnout rates for their age cohort, it’s good to know that their MSM-trumpeted ‘right turn’ is just another example of crappy reporting.

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Here’s the bottom line. The Tea Party Republicans and their Big Business and Wall Street allies plan to grab what they want while ordinary people sleep through this election.
They want ordinary Americans to stay home on Election Day.
To them, high voter turnout is like daylight to a burglar — or for that matter to a vampire. It stops them cold.
The corporate CEO’s and Wall Street bankers together with Tea Party extremists control the Republican Party. They see this traditionally low-turnout mid-term election as the perfect opportunity to take over the United States Senate, Governors’ mansions and State Houses with politicians who represent their interests.
They don’t want Senators from Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alaska, South Dakota or Michigan. They want Senators from the Koch Brothers and their corporate and Wall Street allies — Senators who actually represent them and will do whatever they are told.
They want to know that when the chips are down they can count on government officials to continue rigging the economic game so they can continue to siphon off all of the economic growth for wealthiest one percent of the population.
That’s why, at the beginning of this cycle, the Koch Brothers’ network vowed to invest $300 million to smear Democratic candidates for office. That’s why Wall Street has redirected most of its giving to the GOP. And that’s why Republicans have spent the last two years passing laws to suppress voter turnout — especially among African Americans and Hispanic voters.
In order to continue taking our money, they need to take our votes. Where they can, they’ve passed “voter ID” laws that disenfranchise hundred of thousands — and impose what amounts to a poll tax — allegedly to stop the non-existent problem of voter identity fraud. Where they can, they’ve curtailed early voting periods and access to mail ballots.
In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State has gone so far as to refuse to process 40,000 new voter registrations.
The smaller the turnout, the better for the plutocrats who want to continue to have unfettered access to virtually all of the economic growth generated by the American economy — just as they have for the last 30 years.

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The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
North Carolina House Speaker Thom Tillis didn’t have any problem jamming through a so-called “voter ID” law that was intended to take away the voting rights of thousands of North Carolinians — including many African Americans.
But the moment Democrats or civil rights organizations exhort African Americans to go to the polls and stand up for their right to vote — and prevent Tillis from being elected to the U.S. Senate — the Republicans squeal like stuck pigs.
“Oh, that’s unfair, that’s playing the racial card,” they say. Wrong. That’s being held accountable for policies that intentionally attack the interests of African Americans and millions of other ordinary voters.
With Tillis as speaker, the North Carolina legislature passed “Stand Your Ground” legislation similar to the law that allowed the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer in Florida. But the GOP thinks it is utterly unfair for him to be tied to the real-world consequences of his actions in government.
Community and civil rights organizations throughout the South — and around the country — are exhorting African American voters to go to the polls in the mid-term elections by pointing out that when African Americans don’t vote they get outcomes like Ferguson, Missouri. And they are dead on. Sixty-seven percent of the city’s 21,000 residents are black, but only 12 percent of the voters in the last municipal election were black. The result: a city council with only one African American member and a police force of 53 officers — of which only three are black.
There could be no better example of what African Americans get if they don’t vote. Yet the Republicans think that reference to Ferguson is “inflammatory.”
It’s not the least bit “inflammatory.” It simply means that the African American community intends to stand up for itself in the political process.
It is tribute to the fact that the leaders of African American organizations realize that if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu — and that goes for all of us.
Democrats and everyday Americans of all backgrounds should take a lesson from the way African American leaders are standing up for President Obama. They are pointing out in radio spots and mailings that while it is perfectly legitimate to criticize the president in a democratic society; many of his Republican and right-wing critics have crossed the line to disrespect. They are telling African American voters: “It’s up to us to have the president’s back — vote.”
Republicans don’t like to hear that. In fact, the corporate CEOs and Wall Street billionaires who control the Republican Party — in coalition with groups of tea party extremists — don’t want most ordinary Americans to wake up and go the polls.
That doesn’t just go for African Americans. They are hoping that Hispanics, women, working people, and young people of all sorts stay home and forget there is an election. That way they hope they can elect a Republican Senate so that if a vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court they can prevent President Obama from appointing a justice that is not in Wall Street’s back pocket.
They want a Senate that can work with the tea party-controlled House to hold the president and the country hostage unless they are allowed to slash tax rates for big business, eliminate the Medicare guarantee, cut Social Security benefits, gut the regulation of Wall Street, dramatically restrict women’s right to choose and limit access to contraception. And none of that is an exaggeration. Those are the positions they put right on their campaign websites.
If you are reading this article and haven’t voted, make a plan right now for how you plan to vote before Tuesday. In most states you can vote by mail, vote early at many locations or — of course — go to your precinct on Tuesday and cast your ballot.
Figure out now what time you plan to vote and how you plan to get to the polls or the early vote location. Don’t put it off.
Many critical elections in state after state are on a knife’s edge — they will be decided by a handful of voters.
Tens of thousands of Americans have given their lives — on battlefields far away and in struggles for voting rights here at home — so that every single American can have the right to have a say in determining our country’s leaders.
If you think that it doesn’t matter — or that it won’t affect you, or that your vote won’t influence the outcome — you are simply wrong.
In the end the big issues that completely shape our individual lives and the future of our society are decided by who votes.
Will there be job opportunities for our kids? Will a small group of Wall Street speculators be allowed to sink our economy once again like they did in 2008? Will you have the right to control your own reproductive decisions? Will your monthly Social Security check be cut? Will we leave our kids a planet that is so filled with carbon pollution that we can’t grow enough food or our cities are regularly swamped by monster storms like Hurricane Sandy? Will ordinary people finally get wage increases from our growing economy or will all of the growth continue to be siphoned off by the wealthiest one percent?
If you don’t plan to vote, are you really willing to allow the billionaires and CEOs to get what they want? Are you willing to let them steal your family’s security while we sleep through the election?
Don’t let it happen. Get up off the couch and go vote. Better still, call your neighbors, your sons and daughters. Tell your spouse to vote. Volunteer with a campaign to get other people out to vote — it works.
The plain fact is that if we don’t vote it won’t just be some politician who loses an election. If we don’t vote, we lose.