I lived in Florida when Ron Desantis first ran for governor in 2018. I was psyched to support voter registration in my little town and when I realized our library was having an event I decided to support that. So I created flyers and put them up around town, bought snacks, met with the librarian in charge of events a few times, got her s…
I lived in Florida when Ron Desantis first ran for governor in 2018. I was psyched to support voter registration in my little town and when I realized our library was having an event I decided to support that. So I created flyers and put them up around town, bought snacks, met with the librarian in charge of events a few times, got her some Facebook-adapted graphics (which she never used) … every time we met, she said “don’t get your hopes up, don’t spend money, nobody comes to these events,” but I went for it the best I could.
Come the day of the event … that librarian wasn’t even working, and none of the other staff knew about it. I set up the room, dragged the stacks looking for people who could be persuaded to attend (“there’s food!”), and found a few teenagers. The voter registrar guy droned on about pointless details that would have put Al Gore to sleep, and the ONLY message he had for those kids was “you’re not old enough to vote.” Not “bug your teachers, bug your parents” or “you can preregister” or “this is something to look forward to” — nothing. (By wild random statistical anomaly, no doubt, Mister Boring was white and the kids were black.)
RON DESANTIS WON THAT RACE BY LESS THAN ONE HALF OF ONE PERCENT.
He won the next race by a landslide.
So next time you tell yourselves “our little foibles don’t matter because the other guy does worse things” or “that little vote doesn’t count because xyz sophisticated political reason,” you just think about those Florida Dems, riding the back of the bus at the DNC and wondering how they’re ever going to dig themselves out of their hole. If you think you have a job to do, it pays to goddamn do it right.
I lived in Florida when Ron Desantis first ran for governor in 2018. I was psyched to support voter registration in my little town and when I realized our library was having an event I decided to support that. So I created flyers and put them up around town, bought snacks, met with the librarian in charge of events a few times, got her some Facebook-adapted graphics (which she never used) … every time we met, she said “don’t get your hopes up, don’t spend money, nobody comes to these events,” but I went for it the best I could.
Come the day of the event … that librarian wasn’t even working, and none of the other staff knew about it. I set up the room, dragged the stacks looking for people who could be persuaded to attend (“there’s food!”), and found a few teenagers. The voter registrar guy droned on about pointless details that would have put Al Gore to sleep, and the ONLY message he had for those kids was “you’re not old enough to vote.” Not “bug your teachers, bug your parents” or “you can preregister” or “this is something to look forward to” — nothing. (By wild random statistical anomaly, no doubt, Mister Boring was white and the kids were black.)
RON DESANTIS WON THAT RACE BY LESS THAN ONE HALF OF ONE PERCENT.
He won the next race by a landslide.
So next time you tell yourselves “our little foibles don’t matter because the other guy does worse things” or “that little vote doesn’t count because xyz sophisticated political reason,” you just think about those Florida Dems, riding the back of the bus at the DNC and wondering how they’re ever going to dig themselves out of their hole. If you think you have a job to do, it pays to goddamn do it right.