Indivisible Mohawk Valley Holds “Thank You, Voters!” Rally
Last event at the site of nearly 100 #OneTermTenney Friday Pickets is scheduled for Friday afternoon, Nov. 30, 2018, at 3:30 p.m.
Local citizen activists will gather at Rep. Claudia Tenney’s French Road, New Hartford, office for a final Friday rally after nearly two years of weekly pickets and thousands of volunteer hours to increase awareness of public policy issues and encourage participation in electoral politics. The rally will have a simple message: “Thank you, voters!” Mohawk Valley voters turned out in record numbers Nov. 6 to elect a new Congressional representative.
Indivisible Mohawk Valley was part of a wave of grassroots activism that swept New York’s 22nd Congressional District from Lake Ontario to the Pennsylvania border following the 2016 election. In 2018, Democrat challenger Anthony Brindisi, who did not take a single dollar from a corporate PAC, defeated Republican incumbent Claudia Tenney, whose campaign was well-funded by corporate donors.
“While millionaire Donald Trump, Jr., was stumping for Claudia Tenney in Rome just 12 hours before the polls opened, I was just a couple miles away, volunteering at Anthony Brindisi’s Rome campaign office and sending out volunteers, some of them registered Republicans, one after the other, to knock on doors–right across the street from the Tenney event,” said IMV member Jennifer Geiger of Rome. “Rome ended up going for Brindisi by fewer than 20 votes on election night. So individual voters won out over big money and big names. It just shows that every single vote matters.”
The Brindisi campaign knocked on 300,000 doors total, 170,000 of those before Nov. 3, and the other 130,000 in the final four days of the campaign. In terms of number of volunteers, it was the largest Get Out the Vote operation in the northeast. The election was also decided by one of the smallest vote margins in the country.
According to IMV member Mona Perrotti of Clinton, who personally registered dozens of voters in the lead-up to the election, “We’re thanking voters, because very vote counts.”
For more information, visit Facebook @IndivisibleMV or indivisiblemv.com/.