The national activist group RootsAction.org announced today that it is launching a grassroots campaign aimed at “swing voters on the left” to persuade supporters of Bernie Sanders and other progressives in swing states to “Vote Trump Out – and Then Challenge Biden.”
The Vote Trump Out swing-states initiative will include a highly-targeted social-media program and other digital outreach, utilizing messages from national and state progressive luminaries – people who are widely respected on the left in ways that establishment Democrats are not. The campaign will urge progressives in the dozen battleground states to vote for Joe Biden rather than sit out the election or cast a third-party protest vote. Directed heavily toward young people, the effort will be entirely independent of – and often in opposition to – corporate Democratic leaders.
The RootsAction campaign has assembled a group of national endorsers who are likely to be persuasive to progressives on the fence about voting for Biden. They include: Ady Barkan, Medea Benjamin, Leslie Cagan, Noam Chomsky, Marjorie Cohn, RoseAnn DeMoro, Barbara Ehrenreich, Daniel Ellsberg, Bill Fletcher Jr., Jim Hightower, Rep. Ro Khanna, Jamie Margolin, Bill McKibben, Annabel Park, Linda Sarsour, Winnie Wong and James Zogby.
The #VoteTrumpOut campaign will assert that – while President Trump is unfailingly immune to progressive persuasion or protest – the fight for a full progressive agenda (ranging from major climate initiatives and anti-racism to universal healthcare, free public college and taxing the wealthy) would have the potential to win some victories with Biden in the White House.
The campaign’s mission statement declares: “We are not going to minimize our disagreements with Joe Biden. But we’re also clear-eyed about where things stand: supporting the Democratic nominee in swing states is the only way to defeat Trump…. If Biden wins, we’ll be at his door on day one, demanding the kinds of structural reforms that advance racial, economic and environmental justice.”
Renowned linguist, author and political activist Noam Chomsky contributed this comment to the initiative: “I live in the swing state of Arizona, and I’d vote for a lamp post to get Trump out.” Chomsky is featured in a campaign-launch video on the Vote Trump Out website.
“Our organization fought fiercely in the primaries for Bernie and against Biden,” said RootsAction.org cofounders Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon. “But the general election is far less about Biden than it is about Trump – the most dangerous president in modern U.S. history, who opposes virtually every policy and principle that progressives are fighting for.”
Founded in 2011 as an independent progressive force, RootsAction.org now has 1.2 million active supporters online in the United States.
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