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It's not that the vision is wrong. But if I had a dime for every time a nat'l observer on the left issued stern advice to local grassroots to "get started" on work that _they are already doing_ ... I would be rich enough for Liz W's wealth tax to worry me prospect.org/article/will-t… 
It is bizarre to how much Tough-Love-Advice-to-the-Dems gets published, pronouncing gravely on the importance of local engagement: with apparently zero awareness of the ways local engagement has *already* transformed who even counts as "the Democrats" in communities across the US
As @hahriehan & I wrote about the 2018 midterms, you don't get 155 million door knocks nationwide from individual "rejection of Trump" alone. You get them from new infrastructure, locally built and locally enmeshed rther than astroturfed in from afar washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/0…
@hahriehan It's the same point I tried to capture here: The local social & organizational terrain is critical to how candidates reach voters & how voters perceive campaigns. Sometimes the pace of change of that terrain is so slow you can treat it as a constant & ignore. But not now!
@hahriehan That's especially true in America's suburban swing districts—which exist in significant numbers in every single "tipping point" state where the electoral college may be decided. Let's take, I don't know, Pennsylvania? americancommunities.org/in-pennsylvani…
@hahriehan In this piece I use the # of groups posted to Indivisible's "find your local group" portal as an indicator of the relative intensity of post 2016 organizing. Turns out, that is not concentrated in blue bubbles, blue cities or blue suburbs. It's nearly all across PA's 67 counties
@hahriehan Using @AmCommPro's invaluable county categories, we see it's especially concentrated in PA's Urban Suburbs & Exurbs, w/Big Cities & College Towns also well represented
Those four county categories hold fully half of the state's population. A surge in grassroots engagement across the broad center-left spectrum, one that transforms Democratic infrastructure & electoral ecosystems in those places, really matters
Okay but has that kind of transformation really happened on the ground? I dunno, let's take a look at Chester county... dailylocal.com/news/national/…
... and more Chester County
And let's look at top-of-ticket vote swings, 2012-16 vs 2014-18. It was not foreordained that PA's prosperous, non-diverse exurbs would reject the Trump-era GOP. In 2016 they were Trump-curious. But by 2018 they were running hard in the opposite direction
Again, none of this happened automatically. It happened because 1000s of people statewide—mostly women, most w/ long experience raising families/building careers—decided remaking politics was the single most important need before them. And poured everything into meeting that need
Of course, new grassroots aren't the only ones doing electoral work on the ground. In PA we've seen again & again since 2017 how new grassroots & old labor networks can complement each other, reaching different constituencies to make a "big tent" real
That grassroots+labor 1-2 punch has been particularly important in elections centered on PA's once-industrial, now-changing counties, those classed as "Middle Suburbs" in the @AmCommPro taxonomy americancommunities.org/community-type…
Both in PA (see link) and nationwide (chart below), indicators suggest new grassroots are significantly less dense on the ground in the Middle Suburbs than in Urban Suburbs & College Towns etc. Their role is distinct there, but also really important. americancommunities.org/in-pennsylvani…
If I could stop tweeting long enough I'd write a whole article about Dem infrastructr & new grassroots in the Mid Suburbs. For now I'll leave you with this. Before you start opining about what needs to be done in local political life, maybe check and see if it's already underway?
