‘The Message We Want to Send’ Is…: The Young Turks‘s Cenk Uygur Talks to Mediaite About Organizing Volunteers in Local Elections

Did you know there was a special election in Connecticut last night that could have shifted control of the state’s Senate back to Democrats? You probably didn’t because, well, that’s the nature of local politics…or rather, it was. This year, people are getting involved in their local elections at an astonishing rate, meaning the days of disinterested constituents are nearing their end.

The days of a lot of old ways of thinking are coming to an end, actually. Just ask Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks. In tandem with Wolf PAC, a political action committee he founded to support candidates who want to get money out of politics, TYT mobilized about 500 volunteers from around the country to get involved in Connecticut’s special election race. The goal was to beat Republican candidate Eric Berthel, who voted against a constitutional convention to amend the U.S. Constitution to address the influence of outside money in politics in 2015, for District 32 seat. They were able to marshal those volunteers because long ago, TYT shirked the idea that those in the news industry should be dispassionate and unaffected. They and their fans are engaged and fired up.

“We think if you care about the news, you should be involved. CNN can’t get volunteers to sign up to be neutral,” Uygur explained to Mediaite yesterday before the election results came in. “We get people to sign up to fight for a cause they believe in and I think we are in a whole new world. If we can show that a media organization can affect change — not tangentially, not intangibly, but actually tangibly shift power — wow, that’s a whole new dynamic.”

So can a media organization affect change? That’s the real question and it’s one Uygur and the rest of the TYT staff, Wolf PAC team, and volunteers were all waiting to find out. Greg Cava, the Democrat running for the seat, was up against a candidate with a 36-point advantage. One team of 150 volunteers went door-to-door, while another team of 400 made calls on Cava’s behalf.  The efforts of these teams could conceivably have pushed Cava to a win, but even if they didn’t Uygur says that’s not the whole point.

“Here it’s an incredible long shot,” he admitted. “To overturn a 36-point advantage is almost unheard of, so people of course think we’re a little crazy for even trying in this situation but at least it’s a good test case for how much we can move the needle. We are talking here before we know the results; I’m not doing selective editing. We’re all going to find out if it worked or not [tonight], if we moved the needle.”

They did move that needle:

Dem Greg Cava lost the 32nd district race by 10%, per @RA_Laraine. (In November, Cava lost by 32%, while DJT carried district 57% to 39%.)

— Taniel (@Taniel) March 1, 2017

They brought Cava closer to winning than he could have hoped to on his own, fulfilling Uygur’s goal of proving to individuals that they can make a difference in politics.

He pointed out that it isn’t “normal politics” to talk about efforts like this before the results are in, but in the case of The Young Turks, who are “tired of seeing Democrats lose race after race,” they “aren’t afraid of a damn thing.”

“The message we want to send to Democrats is that if you try, you might actually win,” Uygur laughed. 

Ultimately, he summed it up like this:

If we win tonight, it’s an earthquake. And then I suspect the next election we won’t have 500 volunteers, we will have several thousand. What I want to show people is you’ll be amazed what can happen if you try … I think we are going to close that lead that they had in the district substantially and when we do we can show them, “Listen, if we can make up that ground, imagine what we can do in a tight race.” If you’re in a tight race and you decide to vote against Wolf PAC, it’s not like we didn’t warn you.

So, no, Cava didn’t win, but in a sense, TYT and Wolf PAC did. They “moved the needle” and proved that organizing works. Now it’s up to their followers to stay the course, but since Uygur indicated he has no plans of slowing down or stopping, it already looks like they will.

[image via screengrab]

——

Lindsey: Twitter. Facebook.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!