31st Street Monthly Mtng - Feb 22 2026 - Nebraska - Strategy to Flip Senate Seat [55:01-60:01]

Hello, everyone. I'm Michelle Hainback. I'm also a member of the 31st Street leadership team. As Steve just mentioned, a little bit later on this spring, we will have multiple ways for all of us volunteers to interact with voters directly through canvassing and phone banking. Right now for those of you who are eager to get your feet wet. So speak and warm up your skills from last year for direct voter contact. I encourage you to sign up for a swing left ground truth phone bank. I've done the training and the phone banking and they're very good. It's a little bit of a different approach. We're calling voters in swing districts to listen to them to hear what their concerns are. The script asks, are you likely to vote? How likely are you voting the scale from 0 to 10? And how likely are you to vote? Democrat on the scale from 0 to 10? And what issues keep you up at night? What would you, if you were able to have a conversation with your state legislature or congressperson? What would you want to say to him or her? So these conversations are for me who've done a lot of phone banking. I'm finding them a real fresh thing to be doing. I'm going to put in the link, be a way to sign up for the training and the way to sign up for a phone bank. You do have to expect that, you know, I was on for about half an hour today and I had one good conversation in 30 minutes a day. And so there are a lot of hang ups and wrong numbers. But the conversation I had was good. And it's the few times, I've done this a few times, and the few conversations I've had have been with people who don't vote regularly. This was an older man today who said he would never vote for Republican. Don't blame him for trumping an office he didn't vote for him. But actually he didn't vote for anybody. He didn't vote. So that's the type of person we need to get out to vote this fall. And I think if he votes his voice will vote, I could hear her in the background. So that information is being taken by swing left and will eventually be turned over to candidates post primaries actually, they told me. So I'm going to put those links in and I hope to see you on a phone bank soon. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much. Okay, Lynn, take it away. I'm taking it away to say we pride ourselves in ending on time and it's 501. We're pretty darn close. And Michelle's going to put those links in and I think those links are also going to be in the Sunday newsletter. Thank you, Adele. Thank you everyone. Please stick around if you are able because there were so many questions and and you know, this is our chance to just everybody can talk. You can unmute. I don't mean all at once, but we'll unmute and you know, we'll we'll field all those questions. And if everybody have a great Sunday evening. Yeah, I'm seeing the snow starting to fall. There was a really interesting question that John Medellia had in the chat. If the Virginia Supreme Court rules against the ruling will it be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court? Jim, do you have any information on that? Like could that, could that, Steve would be, I doubt it, but Steve, what do you think? I don't think so, but of course we saw it happen in California. So yeah, if someone is more lawyer-esque than me, I'll look for their input. Are you responding to that or something else? I think I think that it you know, it goes to the Virginia Supreme Court and my constitutional law class was 40 some years ago. Things have changed. And so I would say that if anybody can appeal, the question is whether they would take the appeal or whether it would go to a shadow docket and be addressed. But they they did not knock down California. And I think Virginia is on a very similar, you know, constitutional flooding. So my opinion. Okay, I'm going with Lynn. I like that answer. Peter Hayward, you have you have a hand up. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So one of the things that I'm personally freaking out about is the prospect of significant interference in the elections by the Trump administration, you know, posting ICE agents at polling places and the like. I know a lot of other people are concerned about this, but I wonder if any of the folks on this call have a view of what we can be doing to prevent that or whether, you know, 31st Street is doing anything to counter those measures. Okay, Jim. Well, I'm, I'm just going to put in the link in the chat, an article by Nicholas