Virginia Rising

Shifting the Political Terrain in Virginia

by Thomas Assefa, Voter Organizer

This summer, I had the honor and privilege of being a part of VNM’s Southern Solidarity Summer, which succeeded in reaching 22,000 voters in just 5 weeks. After an initial training that involved: the political ideology behind this work; the key issues for VNM (prioritizing and strengthening public education in Virginia and keeping drinking water toxic-free from corporations that want the ban on uranium mining in Virginia lifted); the nuts and bolts of the Voter Activation Network (VAN); and the importance of communications in shifting public opinion, we spent weeks knocking on doors and talking to voters that are primarily people of color – an emerging New Majority.

Although in 2011 the Southern Solidarity Summer members have sophisticated technology such as I-Pods that tracks where voters live, cell – phones, social media venues such as Facebook and Twitter – and might I add, the freedom to go into neighborhoods without having to worry about the prospect of facing death as did Freedom Summer volunteers in 1964  - we went from apartment to apartment, house to house in the sweltering heat emanating from the Virginia sun.

Our shirts were drenched in sweat, mosquitos buzzed in our ears, signs listed foreclosed homes, and startling loud giant warplanes flew above us in the Norfolk sky (seemingly a stone’s throw away). At the end of an exhausting night, we would huddle back as a team in our hotel, debriefing the day – and our numbers – but also importantly hear some of the inspiring stories others brought back from the field that would reenergize us for the following day.

One of the goals of this effort was to identify voters who resonated with the aforementioned issues and committed to force all candidates in Senate District 6 to prioritize these issues once elected in the upcoming state – wide elections. I met African Americans who had marched during the Civil Rights movement in the struggle for voting rights and who understood deeply the importance of voting. I also met folks who did not pay too much attention to local or state elections but whose perspectives shifted after we really talked through issues that were close to their hearts.

For example, I met Travis who had voted in the 2008 presidential elections but admitted to me that he didn’t pay much attention to statewide politics. After directing our conversation to the deteriorating state of public schools as a result of budget cuts, Travis, a parent of two kids in the public school system got visibly angry and told me how anxious he was about the kind of poor quality education his children were receiving and concluded that the future of his kids depended on his ability to act in the upcoming statewide elections.

I met voters who made a strong commitment to vote for candidates in November who will prioritize toxic-free drinking water and keeping their environment clean – who said that folks of color did not care about environmental justice? Our success during those weeks proves hopeful in moving thousands of African American and immigrant voters to the polls and vote for progressive candidates in Virginia’s upcoming fall elections.

But beyond the upcoming elections, what was instructive to me over the long-term was the following statement and question we would engage voters in: “We all need to participate to create the communities that we want to live in. Can you volunteer with Virginia New Majority to make issues we care about political priorities in Virginia?” Virginia New Majority’s unique approach to electoral politics, one that focused on the issues that communities care about and that included the identification of folks at the grassroots to drive its bottom-up political agenda is the kind of experiment that traditional grassroots community organizations should explore in electoral work.

The possibilities from electing progressive candidates that respond to the issues folks on the ground care about, to laying the foundation to run members from The New Majority for public office, to building an alternative to the corporate driven two party system and other potentialities yet to be discovered are endless. This really hit home during a highlight conversation I had with a voter who seemed to have lost hope with the dominant political parties and terrified with the emergence of a reactionary party and boldly stated “we’ve got to make our voice heard over the kind of tea party politics we have seen recently!”

I leave Virginia with a couple of important things:

1)     As a grassroots organizer who admittedly frowned upon electoral work in the past and chose to stay outside the political arena, I am very grateful for Southern Solidarity Summer particularly in helping me understand the value of including voter participation work in our ongoing grassroots activities around base-building and public policy campaigns to achieve our long term mission and vision and simultaneously increase our reach and scale exponentially;

2)     And equally important, I’m hopeful that an organization driven from the bottom-up by will be the beginning of an independent progressive political movement that will shift the political terrain towards democracy, justice and equality in Virginia and beyond!