We are all winners!
East Penn Democratic Club played a crucial part in the victories surrounding this year’s general election. We coordinated with campaigns and candidates to assure we were not doubling efforts. We had two major staging locations – the Ziegler’s house as well as mine – to get 8500 samples ballots to County Commissioner Districts 1, 2 and 5 (Whitehall, South Whitehall, East Penn School District, Salisbury, Upper & Lower Macungie, Alburtis, Macungie, Emmaus, Upper Milford)
I am proud that the Fundraising committee raised the $2500 to meet our Get Out the Vote expenses.
Candidates, Members, and events were all apart of achieving our goal.
We were able to afford to text message 10,000 voters under 40 years of age, we made two robocalls to voters all over Lehigh County, we had a shareable mobile ballot that was used by 2,137 voters with an average time-on-page of 3mins and 3 seconds. 9,364 people saw the ballot through Facebook alone. Jeremy has plans to make this ballot better for next year and more useable to other groups.
We hosted a very exciting watch party at Louie’s Italian Restaurant and packed the house with volunteers and candidates and watched emotionally as some lost but most won. As ecstatic as I am about the Armstrong Victory, my favorite victory of the night was Joyce Moore’s. Upper Milford voted for her almost 60%-40%. Joyce leaned heavily on the volunteers in East Penn Dems. Andrea Ziegler did her design work, Aidan arranged her robocalls and everything else, we included her name on our sample ballots and it was our volunteers that hit her doors.
Even our losses we a triumph. Ellen Lewis, who was given bad advice during the primary and was only on the Democratic side of the ticket, came within 200 votes of a very long time incumbent Republican.
Shoaib Chaudhry in District 2 increased the Democratic vote by 2%. Without those new voters Phillips may not have won Executive.
Bob Elbich in District 1 had over 100 more votes than the previous Democratic Competitor in 2013.
They may be small gains but they are gains and it’s a view of where more hard work is needed, particularly in the North Whitehall area.
Last week Marissa Ziegler, Dodd Lamberton, Cheryl Johnson Watts, Dan Friedman, Amy Zanelli, and I went to an Act Local training hosted by Women’s March, Make the Road PA, SEIU, Planned Parenthood, and POWER Northeast. That was an all-day event at Muhlenberg college and was held to educate activists and organizers.
Marissa came out of a GOTV Session with ideas on how to increase our effectiveness.
I got some ideas about grassroots fundraising that I passed on to our Fundraising team. I also got more insight on the new Clean Dream Act and connected to different groups that are working for Immigrants.
We are quickly moving into next year’s elections.
The most important races for each of us will be who gets elected into precinct committee seats. Two people from each voting precinct will be voted into the decision-making body of the Democratic County Party. We need each of you to run in your precinct. More information and a workshop to come. There are over 100 vacant seats now, we need all those seats filled in order to assure that we have excellent representation in the county and in the state.
I had a sit down last week with Tom Applebach’s Campaign manager and girlfriend Lisa Bachman on what their next steps need to be. Tom is running for the 134th District State House which is currently Ryan Mackenzie’s seat. So far there isn’t a Republican competitor.
Today we are excited to meet Andy Lee! He is running for the 131st District State House, currently occupied by Justin Simmons. Simmons dropped out of the Congressional race and is running for the 131 again. The article in the Morning Call suggested he dropped out due to his trouble with raising funds and the exposure of his record of missing several hundred votes in the past few years.
We have something like eight people running for congress and a few of them are here today.
This week I got a few text messages from the John Fetterman campaign, he is running for Lieutenant Governor. We are going to host an event with him. Keep your eyes peeled to meet this exciting progressive candidate soon after Thanksgiving
Finally, we received an ask to sponsor a family for Christmas. Siobhan is going to be getting me a list of items and we will create a Sign-up Genius to purchase the items to bring to our December Meeting.