How we'll flip this seat

What a week it has been. If you are tired – angry – wondering how to keep going – I’m here with you. The warning bells of fascism are ringing louder, closer, and more urgently every day.

Earlier this week, I saw the news that Tennessee House Speaker Sexton stripped Democratic lawmakers of all committee assignments to punish them for protesting last week’s map-shifting power-grab. As other red states rush to redraw their districts and create a “one party state in the American South,” as Heather Cox Richardson writes, I’ve been thinking about my team’s trip to Nashville last week to protest our own state’s redistricting.

Leaders in red states redrawing these maps are not just relying on a structural shift to maintain the balance of power – they’re relying on a psychological shift, too.

Some of you know that much of my career has involved sustainability and behavioral science, which is where I learned to put my big feelings around complex, seemingly insurmountable problems into solution-oriented actions. There’s a parallel to what we are experiencing right now that I think can help keep the stubborn spark of hope and action alive within you.

Sometime in the last decade, those with an interest in maintaining the fossil-fuel-dependent status quo switched strategies. They stopped promoting climate denialism – the idea that climate change is a hoax – because folks could see and feel how our changing climate was impacting them personally. Instead, the strategy switched to climate doomerism – the idea that things were too far gone for us to do anything about it.

The end result of both of these strategies, denial and doom, takes people out of the fight. In one instance, because you don’t think it’s happening, and in another, because you don’t think there’s anything you can do.

Sound familiar?

When many of us were ringing the alarm bells about Project 2025, authoritarianism, and the decline of our democracy, the first response was: that’s not going to happen. Now, the message they seem to want us to internalize is: it is happening – and there’s nothing you can do about it. But that’s not true, for climate or for our democracy.

They are only trying to dilute, weaken, and take away our power because we are powerful. They wouldn’t be doing any of this if we didn’t scare them.

I am not going to let them take away my joy, my determination, and my energy to keep showing up. I’m also not going to let them convince me of the lie that we the people don’t have power. I am too stubborn to let these megalomaniac lunatics drive our country into the ground without a fight.

If you’re with me and wondering what we do – I need your help. I have two concrete asks for you.

We know we have to show up at the polls in undeniable numbers. For this race, we need to get about 150,000 voters to cast a vote for me this November. Here’s the behind-the-scenes you may not know about how campaigns focus their efforts.

If I know you’re already voting for me, my team and I can stop trying to convince you with texts, phone calls, canvasses, and ads. We can target those efforts on all the folks that still need to learn about our campaign or be persuaded. It also means that during early voting and on election day, we can focus all our efforts on getting people who’ve said they’ll vote for me to the polls.

So if you’re going to vote for me, will you add your name here?

Here’s the second thing I need: your help identifying people who already plan to vote for me, convincing those who aren’t sure, and helping us get both groups to the polls in August and November.

We need a wave they can’t rig their way out of, and guess what? A conversation with a friend or family member makes people 8.3% more likely to vote. If every one of our supporters helps get their networks excited about this race AND to the polls – we will win this.

I know a lot of y’all are already talking with folks about the stakes of this race. To help you with those conversations AND let us know who’s already a supporter, we’ve launched a new tool through an app called Empower.

We made a guide to get you started in just a few minutes, which you can access on my website.

Want help getting set up? Join our next virtual Camp Cavalry on Wednesday, May 20th. Our field team will walk you through the app live and make sure you leave ready to go.

Don’t like a mobile app and need a way to track your conversations on paper? You can download and print our conversation log here. You’re welcome to bring it to any campaign event or email it to our field department at [email protected].

They’re going to continue to lie, cheat, confuse, and demoralize us to maintain power.

But I am not in the business of giving up, and I know that you aren’t, either. I propose we take on the business of stubbornly refusing to let them win by organizing our friends, families, and neighbors in ways we never have before.

Tim Burchett has Donald Trump, the GOP establishment, and the benefit of incumbency and name recognition. I have you and everyone you know. Out of those two groups, I know who I’m betting on.

In stubborn persistence and resistance,

Michaela