Third Way, the center-left think tank, is urging fellow Democrats to respond to the Capitol riot with "the size, scope, and seriousness of a presidential campaign," co-founder Matt Bennett tells me.
Driving the news: "For the first time in U.S. history, a party must mount two parallel presidential campaigns: one to win the election, and the other to prevent its theft," Bennett said, calling this "a Paul Revere moment."
Why it matters: Democrats are offering "democracy protection candidates" in this year's midterms as a counterpoint to the GOP's "election integrity" push.
In a blueprint shared first with Axios, Third Way calls on Dems to "do all we can to find and defend nonpartisan election workers."
- "We must provide them with physical protection (from law enforcement and others) if they are threatened or harassed," the group says. "We must offer legal representation."
Go deeper: "There have been a lot of long-form magazine and academic pieces on the threat to our democracy," Bennett adds. "We wanted to lay out a cohesive story in an easy-to-follow format. Our model was Al Gore’s 'Inconvenient Truth,' albeit without the subsequent Nobel Prize or Oscar."
