The transition from Red to Purple to Blue in election outcomes has been much talked about for years. Although we have indeed witnessed a gradual shift thanks to demographic trends, predictions for widespread, immediate impact benefiting Democrats have often been more aspirational than realized.

MOVE Texas is using visual and performing arts to get young voters motivated. Young voters are the key to this election. 41% of Texas voters are under 30 and 61% of those are people of color. If this portion of the voters can be motivated to vote, it will utterly change Texas politics!

Can the United States conduct a safe election in November? Unfortunately, what we saw in the 2020 primaries was not encouraging. In April, state courts forced Wisconsin to go forward with an in-person election, siding with the GOP over the objections of the Democratic governor.

One of the biggest success stories from the 2018 mid-terms was Orange County, the once solidly Republican vast population center in Southern California. All four of Orange County’s Republican-held U.S. House seats flipped blue, as did a district attorney, county supervisor, and two state legislature seats. Voter turnout was the highest it has been in decades for a mid-term election.

All eyes have been on Wisconsin since at least the 2016 election. That’s when the state was part of the crumbling blue wall that handed Donald Trump an electoral college victory. Wisconsin has always been hard-fought political turf, with strong progressive and far-right movements battling it out for control.

On July 17th Representative John Lewis, a stalwart of the Civil Rights movement and one of the architects of the Voting Rights Act, died. In his eulogy for the Congressman Barack Obama referenced the long history in America of disenfranchising People of Color and sounded a warning.

Michigan Liberation (MI Lib) has proven that the path to getting people out to vote is the path of local politics. MI Lib knows that the District Attorneys are the public officials that are most likely to have a devastating affect on the citizens of Michigan, and MI Lib has set out to change the people in those positions to ones who understand that a criminal justice system should protect and build communities, not destroy them.

Activists and organizers always face the fundamental challenge of persuading voters to listen. Simply getting a potential voter’s attention can be a major obstacle. That process becomes much more challenging and complex when the nation is in the grip of a deadly pandemic.

The pandemic is a storm and we all feel its impact. At the same time, white Americans are in a much safer boat than are communities of color. This is true in terms of health; true in regard to who lives and who dies. It is also true in terms of economic impact, now and for the foreseeable future.

Martin Luther King’s incisive view of violent protest has been quoted many times in the last weeks: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” He followed this insight with an equally acute question: “And what is it America has failed to hear?”