The work of wooing the “Uncommitted”

A small band of activists was ready when leaders of the “Uncommitted movement” in Wisconsin and Michigan issued a statement last week urging their followers to cast their ballots against Donald Trump. It was a step in the right direction, even if it stopped short of an outright endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. On Monday, the band of activists released a video ad aimed at those same “Uncommitted” voters. The ad was designed to complete the logic of their leaders’ announcement, making explicit to those voters how important it is to cast their ballots for Harris.  

The video’s narrative is simple. A diverse group of adults young and old are out for a pizza dinner on Election Night. The festive mood is interrupted by a breaking news alert on TV: “It’s now looking likely that Trump has beaten Harris for the White House.” 

The newscaster then recounts a few likely scenarios for  Inauguration Day – Trump saying he’ll be a dictator on Day One, terminating the Constitution, using the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies or Navy Seal Team Six to assassinate them. Woeful, a young woman at the table reacts: “I should have voted.”

Could a few activists producing a video affect an entire election by inspiring so-called Uncommitteds to rethink their hesitation to vote atop the ticket? Yes, Virginia, politically engaged individuals working together to get other people to vote might just change history.

Here’s the background. The “Uncommitted movement” organized this Spring in Michigan and Wisconsin to persuade college students, progressives, and Arab Americans to vote “uncommitted” in those states’ Democratic primaries, rather than for Biden. They did so to protest Netanyahu’s bombing of schools, hospitals and homes in Gaza and the Biden Administration’s supplying the bombs to do it.

As the Washington Post reported last month:

In Michigan, home to the nation’s largest Arab American communities, 13.3 percent of Democratic primary voters selected “uncommitted.” In Wisconsin, where Biden won in 2020 by roughly 20,000 votes, more than double that number signaled the same status. And in Pennsylvania, where the margin is expected to be just as razor-thin, about 60,000 people wrote in some version of not-Biden. All three states carry outsize importance in determining November’s winner.

Earlier this year Eva Paterson, a lifelong civil rights activist, watched the “Uncommitted” movement form and grow. With unerring foresight, she committed to producing a video for the general election aimed at these voters in key battleground states. Paterson built her “little engine that could,” a team of fellow activists that formed a tiny PAC they named “Bardo” – the Buddhist term for the transitional space between death and rebirth.  On a shoestring budget of $150,000, Bardo did polling to test issues that most affected undecided voters, hired a scriptwriter, a production company, and an animator, who collaborated with a playwright, civil rights attorneys, law professors, and a young voter of color from a swing state to create “Election Night.” They were delighted to see last week’s important announcement in which @uncommittedmvmt did three things: 

1. Urged a vote against Trump whom they said “would accelerate the killing in Gaza.” 
2. Recommended against voting for third party candidates like Jill Stein, a stalking horse for Republicans.
3. And avoided recommending AGAINST voting for Kamala Harris – even though they declined to endorse her.

They wanted the vice president to separate herself from Biden’s policy, but they simultaneously recognized that saying “Don’t vote for Harris” could well elect Trump. They recognize that as president, he will only create more chaos, death and destruction.

Enter the Bardo video with its message that squares the circle: Those who want a ceasefire and peace that preserves Gaza have but one practical choice – to vote for Harris. Not voting won’t do. Trump, by contrast, has told Netanyahu to “finish the job.”

The digital campaign is timed to reach these “Uncommitteds” – and other “undecided” young people – as early voting starts in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The same audience will receive the video in Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia. According to its developers, in the first three days after its release, the video reached 750,000 users on their mobile devices, tablets, and connected TV across thousands of websites, apps, and streaming services, where young people get their news. 

Few of us can create a PAC or a video ad. But there is always some small thing we can do — talk to neighbors, contribute or connect remotely to efforts to get out the vote, or even share the Bardo video with friends and on social media.

Individual efforts accumulate. The whole of those efforts can be far greater than the sum of its parts – a Kamala Harris presidency offers the only hope for lasting peace — a two-state solution — and for the preservation of our own rights, including the right to vote, to speak freely, and to make private family decisions without the government’s intrusion. Like the Bardo activists, may all of us who care do something, small or large, to advance the rebirth of American freedom.