1st Edition
How We Win Energizing Strategies, Voters, and Agendas
This book uniquely demonstrates how a new combination of communities, progressive visions, and strategies provide a path to defeat fascist machinations and strengthen social justice movements.
Would-be change agents, be they first-time voters, freshly minted activists, impacted communities, or veteran strategists will find answers to questions of voting, organizing, and mobilization. In doing so, readers will find answers to activating their networks and communities not merely to vote, but how to build on their "Emergency Election" mobilizing and power-building efforts to win their agendas, regardless of who wins.
This theoretically and empirically-informed handbook for activists, voters, their organizations, unions, and communities provides both mobilizing tools and talking points about the elections’ most vital and contested issues.
Introduction
1. At the Crossroads, Again: Embracing Organizing, Social Movements, and Transformational Change
Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, Matt Nelson and Nancy Treviño
Part I: Voices & Visions, Communities & Key Issues
2. To Save Organized Human Society
Noam Chomsky
3. Mobilizing in Times of Emergency
Angela Lang
4. How We Win for Women
Rachel O’Leary Carmona
5. The Fascist Threat and the Progressive Agenda
Charles Derber
6. Political Violence – Old and New, Neither Acceptable
Suren Moodliar
7. The Dystopian Vision of Project 2025
Joe Guinan
8. Billionaires vs. Your Vote
Chuck Collins
9. The Human Right to Housing
Mary Traynor and Rebecca Garrard
10. Holding the Fort, Birthing a New World – or Why Labor Unions Matter
Ben Manski
11. A Union for All Workers
Mike Miller
12. Flow of Resistance: The Power of Border Communities Shaping America's Future
Matt Nelson and Nancy Treviño
13. Saving the Dead, Making the Future: Public History Against Fascism
Mark Soderstrom
Intermission (Take Action!)
14. Values, Villain, Vision: Messaging to Mobilize Our Base and Persuade the Conflicted
Anat Shenker-Osario
15. Letter to College Students
Mia McLaughlin, Erin Miller and Kyoungnak Minn
16. Nuts and Bolts: Registering, Voting, Mobilizing Your Community
Charles Derber, Suren Moodliar, Matt Nelson, and Nancy Treviño
Part II: The Power of the Electorate – Working with Voters
17. Turning Out Young Voters of Color by Focusing on Their Priority Issue: The Rising Cost of Living
Saru Jayaraman
18. Turning Out Our Peers
Maria Teresa Kumar
19. 1964’s Freedom Summer Offers a Model for the Voting Rights Work We Need to Do
Charles Derber
20. Mobilizing with Elder Voters
Akaya Windwood and Bill McKibben
21. Restoring Democracy through Our Public Schools
Helen Gym
22. Working with Labor Movement Voters
Mark Spadafore
23. All Politics is Local: Reflections from the Frontlines of a Progressive Electoral Movement
Maurice Mitchell
24. Protecting Voter Rights
Jeff Merkley
Biography
Charles Derber is professor of sociology at Boston College, USA. A lifelong social justice activist, his work focuses on the crises of capitalism, globalization, corporate power, militarism, the culture of hegemony, the climate crisis, and peace and global justice movements. His recent books include Turnout!: Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency (Routledge, 2020), Dying for Capitalism: How Big Money Fuels Extinction and What We Can About It (Routledge, 2023), and Who Owns Democracy?: The Real Deep State and the Struggle Over Class and Caste in America (Routledge, 2024)
Suren Moodliar is an organizer, writer and journal editor. He co-leads encuentro5, a Boston-based movement-building center. His most recent book is Dying for Capitalism: How Big Money Fuels Extinction and What We Can Do About It (Routledge, 2023).
Matt Nelson is executive director of Presente.org, an advocacy group which advances Latinx power and amplifies Latinx voices. Before his work at Presente.org, he was the Organizing Director at Color of Change. Matt is a seasoned campaign strategist who has won dozens of local and national campaigns, and a skilled community organizer who has trained thousands of activists. He is the co-editor of Turnout!: Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency (Routledge, 2020) and was featured in Ferguson is America: Roots of Rebellion (2015).
Nancy Treviño is director of power at Presente.org., a community organizer, trainer, and campaign strategist. Previously, Nancy worked alongside dozens of grassroots community organizations across the U.S., collaborated with national and international human rights organizations, and continues to provide strategic organizing, digital, and communications support to advance social justice movements.
