{"id":340,"date":"2018-08-18T11:57:36","date_gmt":"2018-08-18T15:57:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=340"},"modified":"2018-08-18T11:59:50","modified_gmt":"2018-08-18T15:59:50","slug":"an-observation-on-the-state-of-the-democratic-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=340","title":{"rendered":"An Observation on the State of the Democratic Party"},"content":{"rendered":"

Isaac Chotiner\u00a0<\/a>has a podcast at Slate<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>called \u201cI Have to Ask<\/a>,\u201d and this week he interviewed Michelle Goldberg<\/a>, now a New York Times<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>columnist.\u00a0 They cover lots of topics, including Omarosa and the Russia investigation.<\/a>\u00a0 But this bit caught my eye:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhenever I\u2019m in New York, I can work myself into this state of really bleak despair, and then I go out and travel and meet \u2026 it\u2019s not even necessarily Democratic Party activists as much as Indivisible activists or Democratic Socialists of America chapters or these sort of grass-roots groups that have sprung up since the election and are just doing so much work. And it always makes me feel so much more hopeful about the future.<\/em><\/p>\n

You hear the same story over and over again of these kind of middle-aged women who, they voted, but they didn\u2019t necessarily pay super close attention to primaries, maybe they had to look up what congressional district they were in, and who woke up the day after the election and were so shattered and looked around for somewhere they could go and found either an offshoot of Pantsuit Nation or a local Indivisible meeting.<\/em><\/p>\n

And you meet these women, and they go to meetings now four or five nights a week. They have all new friends. They are just astonishing organizers, and they\u2019re kind of using this intense local knowledge that they have. You can\u2019t replicate that when it comes to canvassing, somebody who just knows everyone on the block. So you see that being deployed everywhere, and that I think is why you\u2019re seeing these numbers in some of the special elections, these swings that are even bigger than the swings you see on the generic ballot.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can tell you that I saw the same thing all over Virginia\u2019s First Congressional Distric<\/a>t during the primary campaign this spring, and these folks don\u2019t seem to be tiring.\u00a0 So I\u2019m more optimistic than some of my fellow Progressives that we\u2019re really about to see a Blue Wave<\/a> in November.<\/p>\n

Go listen to the podcast or read the transcript<\/a>.\u00a0 Lots of good stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Isaac Chotiner\u00a0has a podcast at Slate\u00a0called \u201cI Have to Ask,\u201d and this week he interviewed Michelle Goldberg, now a New York Times\u00a0columnist.\u00a0 They cover lots of topics, including Omarosa and the Russia investigation.\u00a0 But this bit caught my eye: \u201cWhenever I\u2019m in New York, I can work myself into this state of really bleak despair, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[115,98,124,125,37,25],"tags":[126,89,29,97],"class_list":["post-340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-first-district-race","category-2018-virginia-senate-race","category-blue-wave","category-democratic-party","category-politics-and-elections","category-virginia-elections","tag-blue-wave","tag-democratic-party","tag-elections-in-virginia","tag-virginia-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=340"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":343,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340\/revisions\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}