We are calling fellow believers who want to make sure our communities voices are being heard this election. Our communities’ futures getting better depends on a strong volunteer program that can reach and turn out thousands of underrepresented voters to cast their ballots. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up to help us recruit volunteers!… Continue reading »
Let’s make sure our community’s voices are heard! Our lives getting better depends on US casting ballots to make sure our concerns are priorities for the people we elect. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up today by clicking here.… Continue reading »
We are calling fellow believers who want to make sure our communities voices are being heard this election. Our communities’ futures getting better depends on a strong volunteer program that can reach and turn out thousands of underrepresented voters to cast their ballots. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up to help us recruit volunteers!… Continue reading »
We are calling fellow believers who want to make sure our communities voices are being heard this election. Our communities’ futures getting better depends on a strong volunteer program that can reach and turn out thousands of underrepresented voters to cast their ballots. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up to help us recruit volunteers!… Continue reading »
Let’s make sure our community’s voices are heard! Our lives getting better depends on US casting ballots to make sure our concerns are priorities for the people we elect. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up today by clicking here.… Continue reading »
We are calling fellow believers who want to make sure our communities voices are being heard this election. Our communities’ futures getting better depends on a strong volunteer program that can reach and turn out thousands of underrepresented voters to cast their ballots. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up to help us recruit volunteers!… Continue reading »
Let’s make sure our community’s voices are heard! Our lives getting better depends on US casting ballots to make sure our concerns are priorities for the people we elect. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up today by clicking here.… Continue reading »
Let’s make sure our community’s voices are heard! The lives of people of and underrepresented communities getting better depends on US casting ballots to make sure economic justice and racial equity are priorities for the people we elect. Join us to doorknock over North.… Continue reading »
Every year, people of color and low income folks are left out of Minnesota politics disproportionately. With your help, we can move our politics permanently towards real equity and real democracy by making sure every voice is heard this election. Join TakeAction Members to talk to North Minneapolis voters to Expand the Vote!… Continue reading »
We are calling fellow believers who want to make sure our communities voices are being heard this election. Our communities’ futures getting better depends on a strong volunteer program that can reach and turn out thousands of underrepresented voters to cast their ballots. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up to help us recruit volunteers!… Continue reading »
Let’s make sure our community’s voices are heard! Our lives getting better depends on US casting ballots to make sure our concerns are priorities for the people we elect. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up today by clicking here.… Continue reading »
We are calling fellow believers who want to make sure our communities voices are being heard this election. Our communities’ futures getting better depends on a strong volunteer program that can reach and turn out thousands of underrepresented voters to cast their ballots. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up to help us recruit volunteers!… Continue reading »
We are calling fellow believers who want to make sure our communities voices are being heard this election. Our communities’ futures getting better depends on a strong volunteer program that can reach and turn out thousands of underrepresented voters to cast their ballots. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up to help us recruit volunteers!… Continue reading »
Let’s make sure our community’s voices are heard! Our lives getting better depends on US casting ballots to make sure our concerns are priorities for the people we elect. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Sign up today by clicking here.… Continue reading »
We are calling fellow believers who want to make sure our communities voices are being heard this election. Our communities’ futures getting better depends on a strong volunteer program that can reach and turn out thousands of underrepresented voters to cast their ballots. We need your help to EXPAND THE VOTE! Join us to recruit volunteers by clicking here.… Continue reading »
When Minnesotans last fall rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have required voters to present photo identification at the polls, it represented a huge victory for liberal groups that had fought to oppose it.
On the front lines of that effort was TakeAction Minnesota, which over the last decade has become a powerful advocate for liberal causes. Since then, the group has played crucial role in several state and local campaigns, including the race for mayor in Minneapolis.
Take Action Minnesota emerged from the 2006 merger of two other groups — Progressive Minnesota and the Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action.
The group’s supporters are “movement builders” — ready to spring to action during petition drives and elections, said Dan McGrath, executive director of TakeAction Minnesota.
“At any given moment we’re in the streets protesting something,” McGrath said. “We’re a people’s organization. Every day we are knocking on doors, making phone calls, talking to people in the community — people who are often low-income, people who are on the margins, people of color, the elderly, students.”
McGrath said those communities set TakeAction Minnesota’s agenda, which has a lot to do with improving conditions for minorities in Minnesota. With an annual budget of more than $3 million, 31 full-time employees and an email list of more than 40,000 supporters, the group can devote considerable energy to its work.… Continue reading »
We are working to restore voting rights to the 48,000 Minnesotans on probation or parole who are currently unable to vote. Even as they are part of our community, holding jobs and paying taxes, they are unable to participate in this fundamental act of citizenship.
Laws preventing people from voting until after their parole and probation work against the promise of democracy and excludes those Minnesotans who have the most to gain by voting: people of color, low-income Minnesotans, and people who are alienated and marginalized. By restoring voting rights to unimprisoned felons, we are working to back up our state’s history of robust and fair-minded democratic participation. Will you join us?… Continue reading »
“This campaign has lit a grassroots fire that has swept our state. We want a politics that happens by us, and not to us… Tonight I’m so happy to say we closed the chapter on no and we opened the chapter on yes – yes to a future where Minnesota unites in active grassroots democracy.”
Remember that? Election night 2012. Against all odds, an amazing grassroots movement defeated two harmful amendments and elected a progressive majority to the Capitol. We were on cloud nine. But we also knew we hadn’t won anything yet.
But what happened next? You refused to go away. The grassroots movement that started last fall got even stronger, and won a long list of populist achievements in this legislative session. A new health care exchange that puts people at the center. Ban the Box legislation that takes a step toward closing the racial jobs gap. Fairer taxation that closes corporate tax loopholes and invests in all-day kindergarten and a stronger MinnesotaCare. And those are just the issues TakeAction Minnesota focused on most. Our friends and allies led the way, passing marriage equality, the DREAM Act, the Homeowners Bill of Rights, the right to organize for personal care attendants and childcare workers…and on and on…and on.We… Continue reading »
In late October, two weeks before the election, amid the glut of attack ads, a TV commercial appeared in Minnesota that grabbed everyone’s attention. It opens on former Governor Arne Carlson, a Republican, who is a familiar and beloved figure in the state, looking into the camera. “This voter-restriction amendment is way too costly,” he tells viewers. An image of $100 bills flashes to his right. Carlson’s jowls quiver as he solemnly shakes his head. An American flag hangs behind his shoulder. Fade and cut to Mark Dayton, the state’s current governor, a Democrat, on the right half of the screen. “And it would keep thousands of seniors from voting,” Dayton continues, his Minnesota accent especially thick. As he speaks, a black-and-white photo of a forlorn elderly woman appears.
In a year when the two parties seemed to agree on little except their mutual distaste for each other, here was a split-screen commercial with a Democrat and a Republican, the only bipartisan TV spot Minnesotans would see. The two trade talking points, Carlson focusing on the financial burden, Dayton highlighting the various groups who would be disenfranchised, until the split screen vanishes, revealing the two governors side by side in front of the Minnesota Capitol*.… Continue reading »
On the night that House Republicans voted to place an amendment prohibiting gay marriage on the ballot in 2012, Sen. Scott Dibble stood outside the chamber and vowed that Minnesota would become the first state in the country to defeat such a proposal.
“We love our families and our families are strong,” said Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, who is openly gay and married his partner in California. “People will know that in the next 18 months. And you know what? Thirty-one states, there’s not going to be 32.”
The statement proved prescient. Following a historic, statewide campaign that recruited 27,000 volunteers, raised more than $13 million in contributions and seemingly covered the state in orange “Vote No” yard signs and T-shirts, Minnesota voters defeated the proposed constitutional amendment by roughly 75,000 votes. It was part of a national wave that suggests a cultural turning point on the divisive issue. Voters in Maine, Maryland and Washington all backed ballot measures legalizing same-sex marriages.
As the dust settled from last Tuesday’s election, one of the key players in the successful effort to defeat the proposed voter ID constitutional amendment reflected on how his side prevailed in the dramatic upset.
Dan McGrath, executive director of TakeAction Minnesota (not the same Dan McGrath who coincidentally managed the pro-voter ID campaign), spent months suggesting that Minnesotans would turn against the proposed photo identification requirement once they learn more about it. That seemed unlikely a year ago when public opinion polls showed overwhelming support for voter ID. But in the end, that support was just 46 percent, well below the threshold needed to amend the constitution.
On first hearing, voter ID laws sound like an obvious and innocent idea. After all, don’t you need ID for everything else these days? So it’s not surprising that 80 percent of Minnesotans polled last year said they favored a proposed state ballot measure that would have required voters to present a government-issued photo ID before voting.
But then progressive groups launched a massive education campaign, telling people what it would really mean. And despite starting 60 points behind in the polls, come Election Day they defeated the measure by a 54-to-46 margin.
Dan McGrath, executive director of TakeAction Minnesota, the citizens group that led the campaign against the measure, said his team didn’t have the luxury of trying to persuade undecided voters or improve turnout. They had to change people’s minds.
Voting amendment opponents carved out a solid victory at the polls on Tuesday that would have been nearly unthinkable just months ago.
Advocates of requiring citizens to show a photo ID to vote ended up losing a battle where they were substantially outfunded and outmanned, despite enjoying 80 percent public support for the measure in May 2011.
Now proponents — seemingly invincible for so long — have vowed to return to the Legislature to continue working on election changes like the voting amendment, but it’s unlikely they’ll get far.
Democrats took back both the House and Senate, denying the partisan Republican-backed measure a legislative route.
ST. PAUL, Minn. — Bud Johnston’s decision about whether he would support the proposed voter identification amendment on Tuesday’s ballot came down to the wire.
For weeks, Johnston, of Pipestone, waffled between his belief that voters should provide identification in one way or another and his question about whether altering the state’s constitution permanently was a good idea.
“I just thought about it quite a bit and just couldn’t really make up my mind,” Johnston said. “The very words ‘constitutional amendment’ just really turned me off.”
Ultimately, Johnston voted against the proposal, which would have required voters to show photo identification at the polls in an effort to prevent what proponents argued is widespread voter fraud.
He’s just one of many voters who helped swing public opinion against the constitutional amendment in the last days of the campaign. For months, it appeared that the voter ID amendment would pass. As late as the end of October, two polls found the proposal had a healthy lead among voters.
Voter ID opponents claimed victory early Wednesday morning with 95 percent of precincts reporting only 45.8 percent in favor of the proposed amendment that would require photographic identification for voting.
The vote ends months of campaigning from both sides of the contentious issue as Minnesota becomes the first state to reject a voter ID amendment.
“It was a hard fight, but it was a right fight, and tonight we can declare that we did it,” said Luchelle Stevens, campaign manager for Our Vote Our Future.
Dan McGrath, of Take Action MN, which opposed the amendment, attributed the success to “grassroots organizing.”
“A year and a half ago, when this polled at 80 percent, you know it was organizations with networks in communities who jumped in and who started talking to people about the facts,” McGrath said.
Across Minnesota, volunteers and politicians are dug in for the final stretch before Election Day.
From daylong bus tours to daybreak rallies, Republicans and Democrats are fanning out across Minnesota this weekend in a frenzied final push of an election season that is bound to have major consequences for the state.
Republicans spent Saturday putting miles on their cars and pleading for last-minute dollars in hopes of hardening their control of the Legislature. DFLers knocked on doors and embarked on a bus tour to try to wrestle back control and chart a new course for the state.
Meanwhile, supporters and opponents of proposed constitutional amendments that would limit marriage to heterosexuals and require voters to have an approved ID to cast a ballot were trying to break through to Minnesotans who’ve not already made up their minds.
The campaign within the state also is taking on new importance at the national level. GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney is placing a new emphasis on Minnesota. His running mate, Paul Ryan, has made recent visits to the state and plans another Sunday, while independent political groups have unleashed a blizzard of TV ads blasting President Obama. The president, meanwhile, deployed former President Bill Clinton in the state to help nail down its 10 electoral votes, which have been seen as more likely to go the president’s way and could prove crucial in a close election.… Continue reading »
Our Board Chair, Mark Schulz, is the Associate Director of Land Stewardship Project, one of TakeAction Minnesota’s organizational members. This blog is being reposted from their own blog, and can be found in it’s original format here. 
Recently, the Land Stewardship Project joined “Our Vote, Our Future,” a coalition of over 70 organizations working to oppose the voter restriction amendment to the state constitution that is to be put before Minnesota voters Nov. 6. Why is an organization whose mission is stewardship of the land and our communities speaking out on this issue?
There are several important reasons for taking this stand—as discussed by LSP’s State Policy Committee—which relate directly to the values and history of our organization, as well as simple common sense.
A good deal of LSP’s work as an organization has centered around the basic issue of democracy — that people directly affected need to have a say in the decisions related to their lives. It’s a foundation of LSP’s approach that people, not major corporations or lobbyist insiders, need to have the most say in how public policy is shaped and executed. It is through democratic action that we will create a food and farming system that is answerable to people, not corporations.… Continue reading »
