On Indivisible’s website, the first words you’ll find—in large font and all caps—are “Defeat MAGA. Save democracy.” The progressive organizing group, formed shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 win, sees the stakes of this fall’s presidential election as enormous, even existential. Yet when it deploys more than 2,000 volunteers to canvass neighborhoods in Arizona over the next seven months, the presidential race is the last topic it plans to bring up.
“We’re not going to be knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Joe Biden,” Indivisible’s co-founder Ezra Levin told me. Instead, its volunteers will be trying to turn out voters for just about every other Democrat on the ballot—including the party’s nominees for U.S. Senate and House seats and its candidates for the Republican-controlled state legislature—as well as a referendum that could restore abortion rights in Arizona.
The message isn’t meant as a snub of Biden, whom Indivisible desperately wants to win—it’s an acknowledgment that the president may be too unpopular to spur enough turnout by himself. Groups like Indivisible believe that although many Democrats are unenthusiastic about Biden, they’ll vote for him if they can just be persuaded to go to the polls. “If you get people out for the reproductive-rights amendment,” Levin said, “they’re not going to vote for the guy who overturned Roe.”
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