If Biden holds out the win, which I expect him to, it will be because of the efforts of Black and Latino and Native organizers in Atlanta, Phoenix, Philadelphia or Las Vegas. Minneapolis and Detroit too.

These are people who are used and abused by the Democratic Party.

Party officials and campaign managers often refuse to see our capacity as leaders, especially outside of our own communities.

Our lived experiences are often shouted down in lieu of advice from mediocre white consultants.

If the party wants to actually grow support in our communities—or even learn to build a base with anyone but college-educated whites— they have to start listening to the organizers on the ground.

And stop only choosing BIPOC who are willing to be quietly tokenized to lead.

It should be so obvious now that so much of what beltway consultants are saying doesn’t work. It should have been obvious in 2016.

But we continue to pay for their shitty ads, their overdramatic emails, anything we can do to not have to actually organize.

BIPOC organizers have cut our teeth in communities that have been disenfranchised, where people are often skeptical of the electoral process.

You need us.

One of the easiest lessons the Democrats could have learned post-2016 would have been choosing a party chair in 2017 who actually knows how to organize: Keith Ellison.

It’s such a perfect example to me of how, even in the darkest times, they’ll pick the corporate hack.

People are asking “Why stay?” Pretty simple: our system is built to be for two-parties. We don’t have the numbers to breakout of that yet.

What we can do is elect folks wherever we can that are bold, leftist leaders. And organize as much as we can outside of electoral politics.

And moreover, I don’t think we should concede our power to shitty Democrats and let them take more resources our communities deserve.

My friends and I built a powerful organizing apparatus in Minneapolis. But our party leaders never asked us how we were organizing or wanted to learn from us. Just called us a “mafia” and continued to shut us out.

You’d think when we were being enormously outspent and winning, they’d want to learn how we were doing it.