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The 85th Regular Session of the Texas Legislature has come to an end. There is still a chance that Greg Abbott will indulge his profound cowardice by bending to Dan Patrick’s demand for a special session over far Right political priorities, but the main body of policymaking for the Lone Star State has come and gone for this biennium.

I would congratulate my fellow progressive legislative activists on surviving the whole thing, but I know that for those working on the rights of trans and queer Texans, for the poor and sick and undocumented, or to stem the flood of poisonous pollution in our air and water not all of your people made it through the last 140 days. Seeing that suffering and then diving head first into the active hostility displayed by their alleged representatives is one of the most stressful jobs imaginable, and if you yourself have made it then you are a real life hero.

You are the kind of person your heroes — the Martin Luther King and Barbara Jordan and Harvey Milk and Eugene Debs types — would have considered a peer and colleague. Really. Thank you for your service.

Now is the time for some self-care and healing, but fast upon that will be the season for translating the damage done in this session and the struggles waged over the last six months into victory over our enemies. Social movement-aligned organizers working in the Legislature this year have done a fantastic job of mobilizing popular forces to pressure, disrupt, and prophetically confront lawmakers. I have only been around off and on since 2003, but I don’t know that we’ve ever seen anything like this level of progressive civil society direct action in the Capitol.

We should not be fooled, however: even with these angry crowds around us, if elections were held today the vast majority of the oppressors lined up against us in the House and Senate and statewide offices would still win comfortably.

That’s the bad news, and it is rooted in the fact that a system of government literally established by the Ku Klux Klan and held captive for generations by a tiny, hyper-reactionary, white supremacist and patriarchal oligarchy has meant that Texas has perhaps the weakest civil society and lowest level of civic engagement anywhere in the Western world.

The good news is that there are clear opportunities for striking a blow to this power structure and shifting the balance of forces in favor of the people of Texas. The obstacles to these opportunities, however, are bipartisan and well-established. The rest of this essay is intended as an outline of the strategic opportunities and imperatives for Texas progressives interested in overcoming those obstacles, taking advantage of these opportunities and fucking up the Right wing state terrorists waging war on our neighbors and loved ones.

I do not believe that the changes we really need to fix Texas’ root problems can be secured at the ballot box or through existing forms of government. We need a revolution — a violent upheaval of the masses that destroys our oppressors and the state they have installed to do their bidding — but I also recognize that several of the major impediments to building a revolutionary movement in Texas could in fact be minimized or eliminated through progressive governance secured in electoral victories.

Key to this scenario is developing authentic social movements connected to the broad masses of oppressed and exploited Texans. Those movements will secure power for progressive politics which will improve the opportunities for those movements which will in turn shift the balance of forces in Texas to make a popular uprising possible when the obvious limits of the system at hand are finally reached.

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The Opportunity at Hand

So what does this look like in practice? What do we need to do right now, in the summer of 2017 to get there? First things first, we need to note that there is an actual, measurable opportunity for victory in the 2018 elections. If every voter that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 had voted for Wendy Davis in 2014, Davis would have won by 16 points. If all the Clinton voters had voted Democrat for US Senate then John Cornyn would have lost by more than 15 points. Essentially if just about half the voters that came out for Clinton in 2016 but did not vote for Davis in 2014 were mobilized in 2018 (and if GOP vote totals remained steady) then Democrats would win statewide.

Any honest strategy for progressive victory is not going to focus on changing minds of those who hate us — or even worse trying to shift our own priorities to appease our enemies — but rather on activating disconnected and irregularly engaged layers of progressive communities. That activation is the objective, and the most basic resources available to us to reach it are the very volunteers and supporters that mobilized during this session. Essentially we need to find a way to point those people in a strategic and effective way towards that goal and we can either win or come close enough to winning to force concessions from the enemy.

This starts by identifying, consolidating, preparing, and mobilizing those same volunteer activists again, this time outside of the Capitol. Just under 1600 registered against SB 6 — the so-called Bathroom Bill. An estimated 1500 mobilized to protest SB 4 — the anti-immigrant legislation — on the last day of the session this week. Hundreds more showed up on other bills, so 4,000 volunteers mobilized in person this session is a conservative estimate.

This is only in person, of course. If phone calls, letters, and emails are included we probably have at least two or three times this number. Altogether it is not unreasonable to assume that there are 10,000 social movement-aligned activist volunteers available around Texas right now. For better or worse, a large proportion of them are concentrated in the state’s big cities, and Austin in particular. They are eager and willing to step outside of their comfort zones, however, so the initial task at hand is to train them and prepare them for the extraordinary work they’ll need to do in the coming 17 months.

Dividing the number of Clinton voters that did not turn out in 2014 by these 10,000 volunteers yields a figure of about 400 voters per volunteer. Remember we only need about half these folks to turn out, which is about what you can expect to actually show up if you effectively reach all your targets. Social science has confirmed over and over again that in person, door-to-door outreach and live telephone calls are the two most effective means of motivating political action, especially voting. That means that the 10,000 volunteers need to be trained in these tactics first and foremost.

If they can reach 4–5 contacts per hour through these methods (a conservative but realistic estimate) then they would need between 80–100 hours to reach their 400. Splitting the difference at 90 hours and estimating 6 hours per volunteer shift — again probably conservative for folks that spent 20 hours waiting to testify at the Capitol — then they would need to volunteer 15 times on average over the next 17 months. One touch per person may not be sufficient, of course, so we should double it to 30 shifts then on average — not an extraordinary task by any means.

This math is not meant to be prescriptive; things are likely to be a lot more complicated than all this. The point, however, is to demonstrate the easy possibility of connecting an existing, motivated volunteer base to a known base of underutilized support. The specifics are less important than the commitment to actually build a grassroots mass movement among the most advanced elements of targeted Texas populations to agitate the Texas masses at large. This commitment and the groundwork necessary to make it happen are the first step we have to take this summer.

The Message We Need and the Obstacles We Face

Past these initial steps the overriding need in all phases of the strategy is to establish a lasting civil society in Texas — a material connection between individual Texas families and the political process making decisions that affect their lives. In the early phases this should simply serve to inform people of what exactly the Legislature has been up to.

It can be easy to forget that most Texans have no idea even when legislators are in session or not — hence all the Facebook posts about impending bills you’ll see your friends posting months after Sine Die. The communities most affected by recent policy and connected to our organizing work need to be informed about what exactly has happened and mobilized to hold politicians accountable. I have been very critical of the Indivisible movement in the past, but their tactics shifted to the state level and reaching out to a broader audience could be instructive here.

After agitating our bases against the status quo we need to begin translating that into political victory. This means recruiting candidates, and organizing and financing campaigns to elect them. The primary obstacles to this will not be the far Right or the Republican Party, but rather the Democratic Party establishment and the consultant class that has gotten rich in spite of persistent electoral failure. Consultants make this money off of the least effective tactics — flashy TV ads and mail pieces — and lose money off of what works — grassroots outreach.

As for the Democrat establishment, the dirty secret is that they would rather lose in the general election than face social movements in their primaries. This is where party leadership and safe seat elected officials are selected, and these figures are doing just fine in the minority. They have a vested interest in keeping our people in the dark and keeping civil society weak. These “leaders” and the consultants they love have all kinds of arguments against running candidates in all kinds of places around Texas — these arguments must be ignored with prejudice, and progressives must field candidates everywhere.

The bottom line here is that social movements must take matters into their own hands, fielding their own candidates regardless of what the party establishment in our various communities have to say about whose turn it is. We need formerly undocumented people, LGBTQ people — especially trans people — frontline pollution victims, family members of the incarcerated, union members, and others drawn directly from our ranks and supported by our grassroots to stand for office up and down the ballot.

Filing deadlines come in December, and successful candidates need a head of steam by that point. It is difficult to get people to do much during the holiday season from Halloween on, so candidates really need to get started no later than mid September to early October. Frankly, Labor Day is probably the latest a candidate wants to get moving, and late July through August are when a lot of folks you’ll need to engage are out of the state. This means that social movements need to be talking to prospects and preparing them NOW. Take a week to recover from the session and then start moving.

This mass mobilization will require historic coordination between organizations, of course, but social media makes it easier than ever to forge those connections. If we have that commitment, with concrete targets, training and utilizing already motivated activists, connecting mass bases to the ugly actions of their political leaders, moving behind candidates drawn directly from these communities with campaigns using the most effective grassroots techniques, then our power is guaranteed to grow, especially in light of the national political winds that may very well be at our backs.

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We Are the People We’ve Been Waiting For

Note finally that we are each the unmatched experts in our own communities, and with a little bit of effective targeting — which our organizer leaders can collectively direct — and some well-trained and motivated volunteers we can do far more with and for our people than any self-appointed “expert” ever could. Using our authentic connections to mobilize the minimally connected elements of our communities and Texas at large doesn’t take sophisticated modeling, it takes community — and that’s what community organizers know best.

There are literally more than a million details to fill in from here, and my analysis may be completely wrong. The three undeniable facts, however, are that

Thousands of progressive Texans have shown their willingness to act against the ruling power structure, Millions of Texans vote against the ruling order sometimes, but not at the right time They have important reasons to turn out this time, if only someone will let them know about them.

All of this has been my understanding of the shortest line between these three points. I look forward to contributing my efforts and resources where I can to make this change a reality in 2018 and beyond. A few victories like this and we can gain the position we need for the greatest victory of them all: a real Texas revolution led by the working people and colonized communities that need it the most.

Those who didn’t make it the last 140 days deserve nothing less, and nothing less will honor their sacrifice or justify ours day in and day out. Rest today, and let me know how I can help you fight again tomorrow.

Hasta La Victoria Siempre!