A message from Yasmin Radjy
In the final stretch of an election, we talk a lot about numbers. I’ve been thinking a lot this week about something harder to quantify: what happens when we ask people to do hard things together.
At Swing Left, we ask a lot of our volunteers. We ask them to learn how to organize and lead. To listen seriously to people who disagree with them. To have difficult conversations and try to persuade. To bring other people along. Sometimes, to schlep two hours and knock doors in nearly 100-degree heat or pouring rain.
And again and again, they rise to the occasion. I saw that all over the country last weekend.
In Temecula, California, Adam Brody spent hours in brutal heat having genuinely tough persuasion conversations with voters. Before the canvass, a volunteer asked whether Adam and I were actually staying to knock doors after the kickoff.
I was confused. Of course we were. That was the whole point of being there.
And Adam really did the work: listening more than talking, looking for common ground, staying in conversations even when they were hard. Afterward, he told me that as someone who hates imposing on people, canvassing is his “literal worst nightmare.” But he does it anyway because doing something meaningful and high-impact—even far outside his comfort zone—helps him sleep at night.
When I asked how he felt after canvassing, he said: “Like I’ll be able to sleep better tonight.”
In Kansas, country music singer Bryan Andrews had a similarly tough day knocking doors. He came away not discouraged, but with a new level of respect for the volunteers who do this work week after week—and a desire to go deeper himself.
And I think that gets at something important about what we’re building. When people actually do the work—whether they’re longtime volunteers, musicians, actors, students, or people showing up for the first time—they come away understanding its seriousness, respecting the people doing it alongside them, and wanting to go deeper.
Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote about how America’s local civic associations and institutions taught people the habits of public life—that democracy was something people learned through practice.
I saw another side of that idea in Pasadena with Donna, the extraordinary leader of one of Swing Left’s strongest volunteer groups, Swing Left San Gabriel Valley.
Standing in her garden, surrounded by a packed crowd and a buffet of more than a dozen desserts she had personally made (!), Donna described leading her local Swing Left group as “the honor of her life.”
What struck me was how deeply this community has become part of her life. Some of her closest friends—people she now considers family—are people she met through organizing. She talked about how hard it can be later in life to form truly meaningful new relationships, and how much this community has enriched her life.
She also talked about how organizing has changed her: constantly pushing her to become a better leader, bring more people along, and recognize her own ability to make a difference.
Political scientist Theda Skocpol writes in Diminished Democracy about walking through a New England cemetery and seeing 19th-century gravestones that recorded not just people’s names and dates, but the civic organizations to which they belonged. She reflects on how difficult it is to imagine that today, when so much of our relationship to civic life has become signing a petition, clicking a link, or making a donation.
What struck me last weekend is just how different what we are building is.
The immediate reason we do this work is to win elections. But in the process, we’re also building something bigger: a real, serious, joyful, profoundly meaningful civic culture.
People are forming relationships that become family. They’re becoming—or finally being recognized as—extraordinary organizers and civic leaders. They’re learning to listen, persuade, solve problems together, and experience their own agency.
We’re not just giving people things to do. We’re giving people a place to belong, a way to lead, and meaningful work to do together.
Last weekend, watching Donna, Adam, Bryan, and volunteers across the country, that idea felt very alive to me.
There are 38 days until Election Day. There is an enormous amount of work left to do.
But this is what gives me hope: people are willing to do hard things. They’re willing to learn, lead, listen, persuade, and bring others along. And when we give people the opportunity to experience their own power, they so often rise to it.
That’s what we’re building. And if you want to be part of it, join us for these final weeks: swingleft.org/action.
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