this week hundreds of young ppl in westchester & rockland stood up and showed us the future we deserve.

they organized themselves & their families & friends, and then they turned out thousands of people to vote for medicare for all, a green new deal, universal childcare, housing for all, and a gay black man who grew up poor to enter the halls of congress as their representative.

NY-17 isn't super left- hillary won 65% of the primary vote in 2016 & biden won 75% this yr.

it's also one of the top 20 wealthiest CDs in the country.

one of our competitors is a big pharma heir who self-funded $5 MILL in this race.

this victory was NEVER a sure thing.

but @MondaireJones received 45% of the vote in this 7-way race, & we expect that margin to widen after absentee ballots are counted.

what caused thousands of moderate voters to walk into polling places & vote for biden + mondaire?

i'll tell you

this campaign prioritized relational organizing. yes, we made thousands of calls a night to every single person in the voter file (about 650k calls by the end of GOTV, in fact)..

..but we also demanded that ppl take responsibility for organizing their friends & family.

our volunteers knew that in #NY17 we couldn't just turn out supporters of M4A, GND & student loan debt forgiveness-- we had to persuade them first. and that was their scary & uncomfortable & awkward job.

our incredible organizers @VotrubaLaura & Elyse taught them how to tell their personal stories, how to explain policy in ways ppl would understand, and how to convince ppl to fight for someone they don't know-- and they did it.

our young ppl emailed their teachers, called their friends' parents (!!!), DM'd strangers on linkedin, & wrote letters to their neighbors. every day i'd hear about "a forty-five minute long conversation about medicare for all.. but i got her to vote for mondaire!"

on election day one of our staff members went to a polling place w/ a 45-min wait and talked to several parents who were "afraid" to leave the line bc their kids had made them turn out to vote for @MondaireJones

it was the honor of a lifetime to witness these young people (many of whom are still too young to vote!) refuse to accept what they've been given, refuse to wait their turn, and refuse to be beaten by big pharma & the military industrial complex.

it was an honor to witness parents & students in rockland county work to elect a graduate of east ramapo public schools to the u.s. house of representatives.

and on election night-- before results had come in-- we sat and listened as these young ppl told us that they are going to keep organizing, keep building their power, and keep bringing people into this movement.

our fav @ewarren said "when we give up on big ideas, we give up on the people whose lives would be touched by those ideas." thanks to the youth of #NY17, we are one step closer to M4A & a GND, one step closer to housing for all, & one step closer to justice. let's keep fighting.