Concerned about the future of the country and determined to wrest political power from the far right, a group of friends in the San Francisco Bay Area have been gathering once a month to talk politics over brunches, happy hours and Zoom meetings.
Their focus is some 2,300 miles away, in Lansing, Michigan, where these Californians are attempting to flip a red state legislature blue. At one time it might have been unseemly or just strange for activists to try to influence local elections far from home. But that’s changed. The loss of abortion rights nationally and former President Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine election results in key states have made it clear that control of state legislatures really matters.
On this particular day several weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the friends were getting a pep talk designed to help Democrats understand something that Republicans clued into long ago.
