These Women Mostly Ignored Politics. Now, Activism Is Their Job.
These Women Mostly Ignored Politics. Now, Activism Is Their Job, Campbell Robertson, The New York Times, 5/13/18
CONNEAUT LAKE, Pa. — The next stop on Kathy Rentz’s mission to rescue American democracy was the Pizza Hut on Route 322. In a drably lit room in the back, more than a dozen people were already gathered, huddling over cheese sticks, pitchers of Diet Pepsi and maps of state legislative districts. The subject was how to end gerrymandering. The meeting opened with a brief talk about how parties in control — Republicans, in Pennsylvania’s case — draw districts to lock in power. But it quickly turned to political tactics. Should they hand out fliers at the upcoming food festival? Better to go to a stubborn lawmaker’s office in shifts or all at once?
Ms. Rentz offered her counsel. “I think,” she said, “we’ve got to pester the life out of these people.”
For most of her 74 years, Ms. Rentz was a mildly attentive Republican; since retiring eight years ago as a high school French teacher, she was content to spend her time gardening, knitting and spoiling her grandchildren.
Now she is the kind of person who writes “Not For Trump’s Golf Trips” across her federal tax return. She leaves a plastic bin filled with canvassing paperwork outside her front door in case fellow activists are looking for something to do. At candidate forums in V.F.W. halls 45 minutes from her home, there in the back sits Ms. Rentz.
At regular intervals this past year, the scale of the grass-roots fervor on the left has been on full display. Thousands take to the streets for another national protest; another record is broken for the number of candidates running for Congress; another special election ends in a shock Democratic victory, like the one by Conor Lamb in a Pennsylvania congressional district that Donald J. Trump carried in 2016 by 20 percentage points.
“I’d really like to go down to Philadelphia for my grandkids’ piano recitals,” she said. But all this, she continued, “is now my job.”
Beneath all of this is a machine that keeps humming. In suburbs, exurbs and small towns around the country, and here in politically contested western Pennsylvania, the machine has been powered to a large degree by college-educated women in midcareer or retirement. Like Ms. Rentz, they often have no prior interest or experience in politics. But with the election of Mr. Trump, they were aghast at how they felt the political system, which most had taken for granted to the point of indifference, had allowed things to fly so far off the rails.
“I knew it was possible,” said Beverly Graham, a retired special education teacher in rural Mercer County, Pa. “But I didn’t think it was probable.”
These days they can be found in Pizza Huts, Panera Breads, living rooms and libraries, plotting political strategy to help Democrats wrest back power. They meet in small groups — dozens in western Pennsylvania alone — with names like Oil Region Rising, Slippery Rock Huddle, Progress PA, 412 Resistance, Indivisible Wexford. They have undergone a civics crash course, learning the intricacies of voter canvassing, candidate recruiting, database building and the often arcane rules of local politics.
Their goals have become both narrower and more ambitious: Yes, to achieve Democratic victories in this fall’s midterm elections, but also, more fundamentally, to rebuild the Democratic Party from the ground up, including in long-neglected places won by Mr. Trump. In party primaries in Pennsylvania next week, they will be focused not just on the congressional and governor races, but on their local Democratic committees, the county-level governing boards — an office so little celebrated that many of the seats have long sat vacant.
“It was not, ‘Oh my God, the Democratic Party is too far to the left or to the right,’” said Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has both participated in and studied the new grass-roots groups. “It was that we assumed the infrastructure was there and it’s not.”
Around Pittsburgh, the grass-roots groups have coalesced into a sprawling and potent political operation. A “super PAC” is even being formed. But farther outside the city, where the resources and activists are scarcer, the task of a political overhaul falls to anyone willing to put in the work.....More.
Read More: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/these-women-mostly-ignored-politics-now-activism-is-their-job/ar-AAx3JNj
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh
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to vote in the midterms. I wonder how the gerrymandering will effect the results? 
