Thread by @etwhitehill

Tonight marks a milestone in the history of @SwingLeft and for me, personally.

Tonight, voters will choose the Democratic nominee for #NY19—just one of our 78 Swing Districts.

But for me, it's the district that started it all.

THREAD. (1/12)

I will spare you the PTSD of Election Night, 2016, and start the next day.
I dropped off my daughter at daycare and went to the coffee shop to work on my novel.

I couldn't write, of course. I sat there burning with the need to do something.

(2/12)

Because I've always been an elections nerd, I immediately thought about the House, how all the seats are up every cycle, and how there's always some kind of wave against the new President in midterms. (3/12)

Knowing who @realDonaldTrump was, and still is, I had to imagine this wave would be bigger than we'd ever seen. But I didn't want to sit on the sidelines and just watch like so many of us did (like I did) in 2016. I needed to DO something. RIGHT THEN. (4/12)

I also knew I couldn't do anything to flip the House in deep blue MA. So I looked for a nearby district I could focus on and found #NY19 over the border. I started to write a FB post about how this was my closest Swing District, and where's yours? (5/12)

And I stopped before I posted and thought:

"This is 2016. Why did I have to do all this research? Why isn't there a tool to show me my closest Swing District?"

That was the seed of @SwingLeft. (6/12)

We launched on Inauguration Day and signed up 200k people in a week. And everyone wanted to know what we were going to do in January of 2017, because we wouldn't know our nominees until mid-2018.

And we said: "We're starting the 2018 campaign now. We're not waiting." (7/12)

Here’s what we mean: Volunteers have been building campaigns-in-waiting for these nominees in 78 Swing Districts across the country. They've been canvassing, fundraising, and most importantly ORGANIZING so nominees can hit the ground running. (8/12)

Our volunteers have reached out to millions of Swing District voters and raised over $4 MM for the eventual nominees—all so they can hit the general election running with a big check and a willing progressive army. (9/12)

So it means a lot to me that tonight, finally, we will have a nominee in #NY19. But most importantly, that we didn’t wait around. That over 10k NY-19 volunteers held nearly 100 events for the the district and raised over $130k. And that's just one district. (10/12)

So on this night, I can proudly say: NY-19 is my closest Swing District. I'm supporting @DelgadoforNY19 in his fight to beat @RepJohnFaso and #TakeBacktheHouse.

Where is your closest Swing District? Go to swingleft.org to find out and sign up.

(11/12)

JOIN ME and hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the country doing the most important work many of us will ever do.

We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change we seek. And together, we will Take Back the House! (12/12)

swingleft.org/join?source=20…