Non-Bulletin (easily overlooked): Virginia, several hundred miles away from Vermont, selects the justices for its Supreme Court by a vote of the General Assembly. (It’s an oddity; everywhere else, except in South Carolina, state supreme court justices are appointed by the governor or elected by voters.)
Bulletin! By a 4–3, one-vote margin, the Virginia Supreme Court on May 4 rejected a redistricting plan the state’s citizens had voted to approve two weeks earlier. The result could be that Vermonters, for years to come, will be subjected to a federal government whose conduct and policies are anathema to the majority of our citizens.
Maybe not. Virginians had hoped to counter the off-year redistricting epidemic sweeping (mostly) the South following the U.S. Supreme Court’s dismantling of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Maybe the four Democratic seats they had hoped to attain won’t be necessary for moderate and progressive voters to overcome the deck that’s being stacked against them in the November midterm elections. Maybe.
Regardless, the legal decision proves a point.
“The Virginia Supreme Court’s ruling just underscores how important state-level elections are,” says Gretchen Elias, a founding and current member of Lean Left Vermont. “Three of the court’s current justices” — all of whom voted to overturn the redistricting that citizens supported — “were appointed when Republicans held control of both chambers of the Virginia Legislature,” Elias says, “It’s one of many examples of how local and state-level elections matter for democracy.”
Lean Left Vermont is a small cadre of central Vermont women — yes, they’re all women — who work behind the scenes to help Vermonters empower citizens in swing states and vulnerable communities seeking a more inclusive, democratic, and fairer government.
Another Way
Lean Left Vermont evolved from the same conditions that incubated activist groups like the Indivisible chapters that have proliferated around the state: The election of Donald Trump to the presidency in 2016, and their determination to protect values he opposed. The Women’s March, held just after his inauguration in January 2017, was a catalyst: the energy and turnout, in Montpelier and nationally, revealed a burgeoning movement that could be harnessed.
Elias remembers going to gatherings in the area and feeling the vibe, but realizing she wanted to follow a different course than those around her. Their drive to protest and demonstrate is important, she says. And they correctly perceive that Vermonters run the gamut of political opinions.
“At the same time it was, ‘I’m in a very blue progressive state, so calling my representatives in Washington doesn’t feel very impactful. There has to be a way I can get my help to the people in the purple and red states, where a little bit of my time and money will go much further.’
“For me, the motivator was not to strengthen Vermont’s bulwark against this creeping … stuff, but to do something I feel is going to get the whole country on the right track again.”
She and a half-dozen other like-minded souls found each other. They met up at Montpelier’s Kellogg-Hubbard Library — a few driving in from Waitsfield and Waterbury — to follow their inclinations. They formed Lean Left Vermont. Theirs was not a divergent path from the activist groups who organize community members, protest ICE actions, and convene honk-and-waves, or rallies that draw hundreds and sometimes thousands of participants. On the contrary, it’s complementary.
“I think of Lean Left as, like, the brain trust [of the MAGA-resistance movement],” says Ginny Sassaman, of Indivisible Calais. “They do a lot of research, focusing on what’s happening at the state level in other important states.”
“I consider Lean Left our mother ship for a lot of stuff,” says Judi Daly, part of the leadership team for Indivisible Mad River Valley. Dana Goss, who helped organize that group before withdrawing to work primarily with Lean Left, is, Daly says, “heavily plugged into boots-on-the-ground in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Virginia.”
Lean Left has spent nine years developing relationships with national organizations such as Sister District and the Center for Common Ground. These contacts, and their own communication with neighborhood groups in strategically important locations, help Lean Left develop strategies for supporting them.
But Lean Left is a tiny organization; a membership list contains just eight names. They need substantial reinforcements — ground troops, as it were — to put their research to work for people in those swing states struggling to be heard.
One way to support movements in battleground states is to send money. Sister District, which sprang up immediately after the 2016 elections to focus on down-ballot elections, was an early proponent of “Giving Circles” — coordinated efforts to funnel money where it can do the most good. Groups all over Vermont have activated their own monthly Giving Circles and largely look to Lean Left for guidance on where it should go.
“Since 2019,” Lean Left recently calculated, “we’ve raised more than $657,000 for grassroots groups and organizations.”
“It’s important to stress that the money never goes through us,” Davison emphasizes. “The Giving Circles send it directly to the groups we’ve recommended — or that they’ve found themselves — who know how to put it to its best use.”
Consider recent recipients of Giving Circle campaigns. Imagine North Carolina First focuses on public policies designed to improve educational opportunities for less-advantaged people in that state, to narrow the wealth and influence gap. BlueVote.org, working in Pennsylvania, has developed a sophisticated informational and phone-banking network to more deeply engage voters in issues like jobs, wages, and inflation that affect their lives. Vermonters would be unlikely to discover or identify such groups on their own. Lean Left does the digging and advances the concept that fortifying them fortifies support for those causes nationally.
“We tried giving to campaigns at first,” Elias recalls. “There were special elections for candidates like Jon Tester [in Montana] and Jon Ossoff [in Georgia]. That was the Sister District model. But as we got more confident and made more connections, we started to realize these grassroots organizations that are building connections in working-class communities, communities of color, communities where their voice isn’t being heard — those folks stick around if they have the resources. So if you invest in them not all is lost if the candidate that year doesn’t win. You’ve built these connections and it will get you farther along.”
It’s a course that Elias and her partners recommend as the midterm elections approach.
The U.S. Mail
Postcarding is similar, in outreach and theory. Lean Left develops mailing lists and provides a brief script that volunteers agree to follow. The script is composed by groups rooted in the communities where the cards will be sent; they know the issues and language that will resonate with recipients. The cards come from, and are signed by, Vermonters, but their purpose is to convey information and express solidarity. Activists around the state join in; Indivisible Calais, for example, sometimes holds postcarding parties.
As with Giving Circles, Lean Left’s postcard efforts have evolved: their purpose is not to whip up support for specific candidates.
“We’re a coordinator for a nonprofit group called Center for Common Ground,” says Dana Goss. “We’ve written postcards with them that focus on letting people know they’ve been purged from the voter rolls … and how they can reregister. That sort of thing, it’s voter protection.”
The cards also inform people about issues flying beneath the radar, and elections they might not be aware of, such as state supreme court elections in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, both of which seated justices inclined toward inclusive visions of rights and democracy. Vermonters, led by Lean Left, also postcarded for the Virginia redistricting plan that voters approved and the state court rejected.
Volunteers Needed
Possibly the heaviest lift for Lean Left’s volunteers, yet perhaps their most helpful role, is phone banking. Postcarding and sending money are one-way communication. Phone banking is two-way. As November’s midterm elections approach, Lean Left hopes new people will take on the challenge, because the final months and weeks will be intense.
That surge of volunteers, Goss emphasizes, must come soon.
“This isn’t easy work,” she explains. “It takes a while to get up to speed; it takes a while to gain confidence. We help with that. We meet [by Zoom] every Sunday. We give people the tools they need to learn the technology and get comfortable with the introductory script, and then we stick with them to provide a supportive community.”
“For the technical stuff,” Davison says, “it’s just keeping at it until you’re comfortable with it. It’s really more about the courage of talking to strangers. And you’re talking about politics! I mean, that’s a big deal. Every time I’m on a phone bank it’s about getting my stomach to calm down before I make those calls.”
And yet, they agree, phone banking can be exhilarating. For one thing, there’s the camaraderie; callers during these “power hours” can retreat to virtual “rooms” to get technical assistance from Lean Left or share their experiences with other callers. “We’re there for each other,” says Elias. “We help each other out.”
But the greatest reward comes with the human connections that happen.
“In a phone bank you may start with a question, like ‘What are the important issues in your community?’” Davison says. “You may end up talking about voting Democratic, but you listen to the voter first. It’s hard to do in some ways; but when you get to enter into a real conversation with a voter. You’re not going to forget it.”
It Takes Both
Summer is here. In the sunshine, street corner demonstrations, banner drops from bridges, and other resistance activities, may, on some level, be celebratory.
But push will come to shove as early voting begins, followed by election day in November. Phone banking will become a service with even greater intensity, plugged into a national network.
“They’re called voter-assistance hotlines,” says Goss. “If a voter calls and says, ‘I know I’m in the right poll location but they told me I’m not,’ we’ll try to help them through it. If things can’t be resolved we send it to ‘the boiler room’; that’s where the lawyers are, and sometimes they’ll send an attorney to try to resolve that issue because there’s only a limited amount of time.”
“It’s the quiet work of talking to voters, making sure they have information and that their rights are protected. That’s going to go a long way,” says Davison.
Protesting is important, she says. It’s inspiring, unifying, emboldening, cathartic.
“But they’re linked together. We’ve got to do the work to make sure people’s rights are protected and get them to the polls. We can protest all we want, but if we don’t win in November, that’s going to be a problem.”
