Dear Jason,
Things are bad, and getting worse.
The question is, what are we going to do about it?
My view is that, in order to make it better in the long term, we have to win elections. Put people in office who believe in science, follow the facts, and do what is right, regardless of the politics. That's why I'm hosting a phone bank this next Thursday, July 16th, where we will reach out to hundreds of thousands of Texas Democrats. The results from these calls will be shared with the Texas Democratic Party as well as Democratic candidates up and down the ballot (courthouse to state house to White House) to use for Get Out the Vote efforts in the fall.
In the midst of this pandemic, unable to knock on doors, hold rallies and town halls, and totally dependent on phone-to-phone field work, Texas Democratic candidates will be able to leverage our work to contact their voters. They won't have to waste time calling bad numbers or Trump supporters, because our volunteers will have made the millions of calls necessary to cull extraneous numbers and return a verified, usable list of Texas Democrats that we can turn out during early voting and on Election Day.
That's why we're doing this work now, to win these elections in November.
We don't want to look back on this day from election night wondering whether we could have done more. Let's do everything we can now.
As if we needed any additional clarity on the stakes of this election, yesterday we learned that Texas had reached a new record for Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations, and that the United States recorded its highest single-day spike in new cases.
In Corpus Christi, they've run out of room in the morgue and they're requesting morgue trailers from FEMA. In the Rio Grande Valley they've run out of nurses. El Paso, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin and Houston are all seeing record spikes in transmission, hospitalizations and death.
These are the consequences of past elections.
America elected a President who is contemptuous of public health guidance. The man in the most powerful position of public trust ignores the scientists and doctors whose advice might have kept us safe. He instead chooses to traffic in lies, create chaos and confusion, leaving us the country hardest hit by the virus. Americans represent 4% of the global population but we are now 25% of the world's cases and deaths.
Texas elected a Governor who, in the words of the Houston Chronicle, chooses to "embrace partisan politics and a fringe populist backlash over common sense and sound medical advice from his own advisers." Governor Abbott has "condemned the Lone Star State to the circumstances we face today: Hospitals near the breaking point. Nearly 3,000 Texans dead — and counting."
But if it is the elections of these men that left us in such desperate straights, it's the elections in November that can begin to make things right.
Electing a Democratic majority to the state house for the first time in 20 years puts people who believe in science, in expanding access to healthcare, in addressing the disproportionate burden that Black and Latino Texans carry in this crisis into power. And awarding our 38 electoral college votes to the Democratic nominee for President for the first time in over forty years spells the end of Trump and the beginning of something much better.
But the only way to make these changes, the only way to win these elections, is through the hard work of contacting the voters who will decide them. That's what we do and we'd love to have your help doing it.
Please join us:
Virtual Voter Contact Phone Bank with Beto
Thursday, July 16
7 p.m. - 9 p.m. CT
Thank you,
Beto
This is a picture from last Monday's phone bank, where we made over 316,000 phone calls.
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