Poking Holes in Potatoes

An excerpt from my #1 New York Times bestseller, SHAMELESS

CHAPTER EIGHT: POKING HOLES IN POTATOES

“I fight because I am trying to buy time for democracy,” Marc Elias said. “I’m not trying to fix it. People who think I am fixing it are giving me and my litigation way too much credit. We are buying time because as soon as we strike down a law in court, they can go ahead and pass a new one. So I’m trying to buy time for democracy without an end goal of how that time will fix things—barring, say, a voting rights act.

“The other reason that I fight is much more personal. I come from a background of people who have always faced the possibility of the end of liberalism or democracy, depending on the era. It’s hard to say that tsarist Russia was liberal or democratic, or that prewar Germany was. So let’s say I come from a background of people who have always had to worry about whether or not the fate of government would turn against them, or whether the space that they had achieved in civil society would contract.”

Elias studied for his bar mitzvah in 1982, engaging with middle-aged Holocaust survivors who had been in the camps when they were in their twenties, and with American war veterans. Of his mentors, the person “with the greatest impact on me,” said Elias, “was not a Holocaust survivor. He was actually a guy who was a Jewish American who had fought in World War II for the United States. This was just a regular guy who was eighteen or nineteen years old and was drafted. . . . But then he found himself captured by the Nazis. So he was terrified, of course, because he was sent to a German stalag (POW camp). . . . He talked to us about what that experience was like. Despite the laws of war, the Germans identified the Jewish prisoners and gave them work detail. This guy was put onto doing agricultural work.

“He and a bunch of the other Jewish prisoners got this idea to take little pieces of barbed wire, which they could find around the camp. They decided they would use those little pieces of wire to poke holes in the produce before they delivered it, with the idea that it would spoil the potatoes. So they all went out there, picked and processed the potatoes, then would take barbed wire and surreptitiously poke holes, in the hopes that the potatoes would rot. Their rationale was that in doing so, they would starve the Nazi army. The produce would get sent to the army, and then the German soldiers would have nothing but rotten potatoes to eat, and they would starve.

“That image has always stayed in my head. Some nineteen-year-old American who had ended up in a Nazi stalag, segregated with other Jews, and they all took razor wire with their bare hands . . . and there he was, just repetitively poking holes in potatoes all day with bloody fingers, thinking that the net effect of that was going to be that the Nazis would starve in the war effort.

“I feel like I owe that to our democracy. I’m going to poke holes in the potatoes. Maybe it won’t matter at all. Maybe none of these cases I’m taking, in the end, will be the thing that keeps Donald Trump from getting back in office. Maybe it’ll be a landslide election one way or the other, but—while I’m here, while I can—I’m just going to keep poking holes until there are no more potatoes to poke.”

It’s difficult not to feel helpless as far as politics is concerned. How could we not? Just look at the forces we’re contending with: a right-wing disinformation machine, a Republican Party that is fundamentally opposed to democracy, conservative lawyers content to abuse the judicial system, and far-right legislators unwilling or unable to feel shame. The fact that Mitch McConnell—Mitch McConnell—is right now considered not sufficiently conservative is a testament to just how far and how fast the Overton window is shifting. McConnell, whose swan song we are witnessing in 2024, is unquestionably the individual most responsible for the hard right Supreme Court majority that revoked the constitutional right to abortion, gutted affirmative action, and generally tried to return the country to the nineteenth century. That his politics and methods seem moderate relative to his colleagues’ politics and methods underscores the extremism at work and the danger that poses for the country.

So if you’re feeling a sense of helplessness in the system, take comfort in knowing that all of this was designed to foster and cultivate that instinct. But also . . . get horrified with the knowledge that it was designed to foster and cultivate that instinct.

As we have seen, the strategy is as deliberate as it is insidious. Losing faith and abandoning the system altogether redounds to Republicans’ electoral benefit. That’s how they want you to respond. The way to counter their cynical tactics is to recognize that your participation is not only necessary but majorly impactful. The antidote to helplessness is the recognition of your own agency—and a willingness to use it. Nothing could hurt the Republicans more profoundly than a public demonstrating a restored faith in our numbers, our leaders, and our government.

In both the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, Wisconsin is believed by many to have been the tipping point state whose votes were responsible for resolving the election. In both of those elections, Wisconsin’s winner—Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020—was decided by about two votes per precinct. Not thousands, not hundreds, not even tens; per precinct, you and the first person you see when you look up from this page would have been enough to change the outcomes of the presidential election if you voted in Wisconsin.

In fact, margins that small have swung elections for decades. In 2000, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore by 537 votes in Florida, tipping the state in that election (and saddling us with an agenda that prioritized the Iraq War over climate action).

In 2020, Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks defeated Democrat Rita Hart by only 6 votes in Iowa’s Second Congressional District, helping further narrow the Democrats’ razor-thin 222–213 House majority.

In 2022, Democrat Kris Mayes defeated Abraham Hamadeh, a Republican election denier, by 280 votes to become attorney general of Arizona. The state is in many ways the epicenter of Republican attacks against elections. As such, it benefits greatly from having someone who accepts the core tenets of democracy in the AG’s office.

In 2018, Republican David Yancey tied with Democrat Shelly Simonds, 11,607–11,607, in the race for House District Ninety-Four in the Virginia House of Delegates. Per Virginia law, the winner would be selected by a random drawing. On January 4, 2018, an official of the Virginia State Board of Elections pulled Yancey’s name from a ceramic bowl—and withit handed Republicans control of the state House of Delegates by a margin of 51 to 49. A single vote could have changed control of one entire chamber of the Virginia state legislature.

Further underscoring the importance of every vote: Because we’re living in an era of hyper-polarization, the number of competitive races has been dropping every cycle. In 2018, forty-four House races were decided within a 5 percent margin. That number dropped to thirty-nine races in 2020 and thirty-six races in 2022. Meanwhile, the number of victories by a margin of 20 percent or more jumped from 265 in 2018 to 291 in 2022. According to Pew Research, “After a long run of comfortably large Democratic House majorities from the late 1950s through the early 1990s, narrow majorities—defined for this analysis as margins of control of fewer than 5 percentage points—have prevailed in a third of the 15 most recent Houses.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has already made history by casting the greatest number of tie-breaking votes in U.S. history, surpassing John C. Calhoun, John Adams, George M. Dallas, Schuyler Colfax, George Clinton, and Richard Mentor Johnson—none of whom served after the nineteenth century.

Outcomes like these, with presidential elections and other consequential elections won by just a couple of votes per precinct or a few hundred votes statewide or even by drawing a name out of a bowl, point to the fact that our participation matters. And as the number of truly competitive races falls, our participation has never mattered more.

Granted, there are plenty of people who are skeptical of this.

My mom was never interested in politics. For my entire life, she never voted. Even when I was a doe-eyed teenager demanding that she explain to me her indifference about climate change or raising wages or fixing immigration, I always got the same answer. It went something like, “They’re all corrupt! They’re all on the same team! They don’t care about us, they care about themselves. I don’t have time for any of this shit. I have to wake up at five o’clock in the morning to go to work.”

And indeed, at five o’clock in the morning, she would drive to the labor and delivery unit of the hospital for her thirteen-hour shift.

My attempts to proselytize grew fewer and further between, as every time I suggested that perhaps we might have some agency in our country’s future, I was met with the same script: “They’re all crooks. They don’t give a shit about us. I gotta go to work in the morning.”

When I started my YouTube channel, my mom would watch my videos—solely, I thought, so that she could complain that I was cutting my hair too short. I eventually grew busy warning my viewers about the clear and present danger of the modern GOP—so busy that I no longer had time to continue trying to persuade my obstinate mother of the same thing.

A few days before the 2020 election, I got a text from my mom, which I assumed would be some iteration of a reminder that I consume food and perhaps even sleep. I opened the text to a photo of her standing at a ballot drop box outside of the local post office in my Jersey hometown, ballot in hand. After refusing to vote for over sixty years, she had cast her vote for Joe Biden and Democrats straight down the ballot.

I know—I convinced my own mother to vote; what an accomplishment. But the thing about a Jewish mother from Brooklyn is that I would have more luck convincing the sun to rise at night than urging her to do anything against her will. You think you know what stubborn is; I assure you, you do not.

Of course, seeing the numbers of people watching my videos is rewarding, but it pales in comparison to moments like that one. Knowing that I had influenced the actual vote of one person who otherwise wouldn’t have bothered casting her ballot—made that much sweeter because it was the world’s most emphatic skeptic—meant so much more to me than the usual rewards of social media, like a viral video.

You don’t need a big social media following to make an impact; you don’t need any social media following. It’s not about reaching everyone; it’s about reaching someone. If I could get a woman obstinate enough to categorically shun a restaurant for life because she didn’t like their food that one time in 1997 to renounce her lifelong abstention from voting, then anyone can be persuaded. We all have that family member, that friend, that coworker, that neighbor who just doesn’t care or who thinks that voting doesn’t matter. Be responsible for that person. The margins on which these elections are won or lost are composed of them.

For me, the point of having a following on social media is not to create some closed-loop ecosystem. My videos aren’t the end of the pipeline; they’re the beginning. Only a small fraction of my job is persuading the people who actively choose to watch my videos. Those viewers ended up there for a reason; they sought out the content or clicked on the link ostensibly because their opinion already aligns with mine. The real significance of my work is to arm viewers with the tools necessary to persuade their circles. That’s where the real difference is made: when my viewers take the message to people in their lives who wouldn’t have sought out my work otherwise—perhaps because they don’t use YouTube or they disagree with my perspective or they think politics is a hopeless endeavor.

Word of mouth has always been essential to the electoral process, and in an era when the share of voters who are truly up for grabs is shrinking every year, those personal connections are becoming that much more valuable. It’s how we reach the folks who don’t vote or who haven’t formed their opinions yet. As Dan Pfeiffer states, “We’re only going to reach voters through a whole bunch of people who act as sort of tribunes for our message.”

That strategy is so potent that it was the entire basis for Jen Psaki’s famous sparring matches with Fox’s Peter Doocy. “Was I going to win over all of the Fox audience? No,” she laughed. “Many of them think I’m the devil incarnate. But it was more about equipping people who might be having similar arguments with what they could say. So thinking about how to explain things in a clear, fact-based way, where people can say, ‘I heard that, Uncle Joe, and actually that’s not true because of X, Y, and Z.’ That’s how I always thought about it.

“I also think, and this is tricky, but when I was at the White House, it was during a stage when we were following Trump, and having a daily ‘we’re going to ignore Fox’ battle. I didn’t think that was going to be constructive. Neither did the president. We don’t need that to be what people are focused on. I did Fox News Sunday more than any other Sunday show because you don’t want that to be the storyline. And frankly, a lot of what they’d ask about was predictable, because they have a rotation of stuff. So it’s just about being equipped and trying to equip people who are watching with the best pushback.”

It wasn’t about the entertainment value (although it was entertaining), and it wasn’t about schooling Peter Doocy (although he was schooled); it was about empowering tribunes to know how to deal with their own Peter Doocys. It was about arming people with the right answers so that when everyone’s conservative uncle shows up at Thanksgiving dinner, one can speak with some confidence and clarity. And maybe even change some minds.

I believe my job to be important, just as Jen views her jobs (past and present) as important; both of us know that they’re not nearly as important as that of the tribunes.

After Obama’s victories as well as Biden’s, there was a sense of mass relief, followed by a period of complacency, as though we had reached some stage of we’ve won, we can take our stuff and go home. That’s a dangerous perspective—one that provides yet another kind of vacuum that Republicans can seize and distort. And they did. After Obama’s triumphs, particularly in 2010, the galvanized Party of No got to work, and the left was bled dry in terms of House, Senate, and State legislative seats. Conservatives set fire to the norms governing the judiciary, and weaponized redistricting, both of which contributed to the disillusionment that ushered in Donald Trump. His term, culminating in an attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol, brought democracy to the precipice, just after much of the country had breathed a massive sigh of relief. That reality was difficult to face not just for the obvious reason but also because there was an overwhelming sense that we’d already done so much work . . . only to end up here. It brought on the despair that those who incited the insurrection were hoping for.

There will always be those seeking to suppress the votes of young people and people of color, to restrict ballot access, to take away drop boxes, to limit early voting and mail-in voting, to facilitate longer lines in minority-majority communities. There will always be those campaigning to strip women of their reproductive rights, or refusing to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ Americans. There will always be those leading efforts to ban books but promote AR-15s. There will always be those waging disinformation campaigns and exploiting a mainstream media apparatus too easily duped by bad actors. There will always be those seeking to break the very government that the country depends upon to function. Those people will always be there.

We are never going to outright win the fight for democracy; there should always be a fight. That’s what democracy is. There’s power in coming to terms with that. That we’ll never be able to unfurl our Mission Accomplished banner is not a capitulation to those seeking to tear democracy down; it’s proof that democracy still exists. Because democracy is in the fight for democracy, always evolving and never guaranteed. Which is why Benjamin Franklin, when asked whether we had a republic or a monarchy, responded, “a republic . . . if you can keep it.”

There is an entire system put in place to make you feel hopeless, exhausted, disillusioned. It’s the result of years of planning and executing. It is on our television sets and our cell phones, in the courts and the polling place, the Caucus Room and the halls of Congress. And it’s promulgated by a Republican Party that operates uninhibited by any sense of shame. It might feel impossible to overcome these seemingly insurmountable obstacles. But it’s not; you just have to show up with the understanding that the fight will continue, and a willingness to do your part: support independent progressive media, spread the message as a tribune, be responsible for your circle, and don’t let despair overwhelm hope.

You don’t have to do it all. You just have to poke holes in the potatoes.

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Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy was published by HarperCollins. Copyright ©️ 2024 by Brian Tyler Cohen.

Thanks to Marc Elias of

Democracy Docket

,

Dan Pfeiffer

, and Jen Psaki for their invaluable contributions to this chapter, to the book, and to the ongoing fight for democracy.

We have four days left. If you haven’t already, please be sure to vote—and, ideally, encourage at least one person who might be feeling complacent or who can’t be bothered to get off the couch to go and cast his or her ballot as well. When we fight, and when we vote, we win.

We’re not going back.