Dear MoveOn member,
This is Robert Fox, chief operating officer at MoveOn. I'm the person in charge of budgets and operations. I'm writing to you today to share some troubling trends that the progressive movement has seen since the election.
When Donald Trump was first elected, there was a surge in donations not just at MoveOn but across the progressive movement. Those donations were critical to MoveOn's campaigns to take back the House, the Senate, and to ultimately defeat Trump. Those donations helped fuel the Resistance and give birth to a new progressive era that ushered in a new presidency—but winning the elections was just step one. Now we need to take the muscles we've built over the past four years and use them to push our country forward.
But with Trump no longer in office, donations have begun to trend down. Worse yet, we're hearing that other organizations across the progressive movement and the Democratic Party are seeing similar declines in donations, while Republicans are seeing huge spikes in donations to build their war chests for the 2022 midterms and even the 2024 presidential election.
This is obviously a huge problem, because, while Trump is gone, the challenges we face as a country, like climate change and systemic racism, haven't gone anywhere. And with Democrats holding the slimmest margins in the House and Senate in decades, we cannot afford to let Republicans jump out of the gate with a huge head start in the 2022 elections.
We've always felt that MoveOn belongs to you, our members. That's why I want to be totally frank with you: We need your help to keep MoveOn strong and able to run the big, grassroots, people-powered campaigns that will define our work this year and into the future.
Will you chip in $5 a month to help ensure we have the consistent resources to maintain the grassroots organizing that beat Trump so we can keep making progress on the biggest problems facing this country?
No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
This isn't the first time we've seen the pattern of donations going up during a Republican presidency and then dipping significantly once a Democrat is in the White House. The same thing happened when Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush.
It's understandable. After eight years of working our guts out to beat Bush and end his giveaways to corporations and the rich, his violations of civil liberties, and the Iraq War, a lot of people just needed a break.
But you know what happened next? The disastrous Tea Party 2010 midterms. Republicans not only gained the power to block Obama's entire legislative agenda but to push a sweeping far-right agenda at the state level and gerrymander two-thirds of the country to lock in GOP power for the rest of the decade, even when Democrats won the majority of the popular vote. We still haven't fully recovered from the wreckage of that year.
Mar, we're incredibly grateful for every dollar MoveOn members contribute. We always knew that donations wouldn't stay at the level we saw in the immediate aftermath of Trump's election in 2016, and we know that many folks dug deep last year to beat Trump and that it may not be realistic to keep giving at the same level. We especially understand how hard things are right now for so many Americans struggling in this pandemic economy.
But beating Trump didn't solve climate change, end racist policing, reform immigration, or get corporate money out of politics. All it did was create the opportunity to start to make progress on those issues again. And as we've learned in the fight for a $15 minimum wage, we can't count on the Democrats in Washington to take serious action unless they feel overwhelming pressure.
Here's the bottom line: We cannot afford to compromise on the type of big, game-changing work that allowed us to beat Trump and Mitch McConnell. And if Democrats don't deliver meaningful results, it will set the table for Republicans to take back the House and Senate in 2022 and, in a nightmare scenario, a return to Trump in 2024.
Will you chip in $5 a month to help ensure that we don't go backward and can keep making progressive change?
No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
Thanks for all you do.
–Robert Fox
Want to support MoveOn's work? Together, our diverse and vibrant coalition elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We have an opportunity to make progress, but only if we give it our all to call for bold progressive legislation to expand health care, solve the climate crisis, address systemic racism, and more.
Will you chip in to power the fight for bold, progressive change?
No, I'm sorry, I can't make a monthly donation.
PAID FOR BY MOVEON
This email was sent to Mar Alfaro on March 2, 2021. To change your email address or update your contact info, click here. MoveOn's privacy policy was recently updated. To read our new privacy policy, click here. To remove yourself from this list, click here.
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