Turnout!: Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency

Turnout! offers strategies for "emergency elections," like the 2020 races, and addresses the nuts-and-bolts for civic groups and individuals to effectively turn out the vote. Indeed, few elections in recent history represent the kind of apocalyptic turning point for our planet and democracy as the present one. Turnout! is both a creative work of political vision combined with a detailed manual for turning out millions of new voters.

Participation at local, state, and federal levels will have an outsized impact on the future of democracy and life itself. The elections also provide an opportunity to power-up social movements that can re-frame and re-define civic participation in an age of extreme inequality, climate change, and pandemics.

Contributors include powerful movement leaders Maria Teresa Kumar (Voto Latino), Aimee Allison (She the People), Winona LaDuke (Honor the Earth), and Matt Nelson (Presente.org); leading public officials advocating greater voter engagement like Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley and Wisconsin Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes, and councilors Helen Gym and Nikki Fortunato Bas. Turnout! reveals strategies and real-world tactics to mobilize millions of discouraged, apathetic, or suppressed voters, including women, low-income, Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian, LGBTQIA+, student and youth, and working-class voters.

Charles Derber is Professor of Sociology at Boston College and a noted public intellectual. Professor Derber has written twenty-three books, including several best-sellers reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and other leading media. His most books include Welcome to the Revolution, Moving Beyond Fear, and Glorious Causes. He is a c-editor of the Routledge book series, Universalizing Resistance, and is a life-long activist for peace and justice.

Suren Moodliar is editor of the journal Socialism and Democracy and coordinator of encuentro5, a movement-building space in downtown Boston. He is a co-author of A People's Guide to Greater Boston (UC Press, 2020).

Matt Nelson is Executive Director of Presente.org―the nation’s largest online Latinx organizing group, advancing social justice with technology, media, and culture. Matt also served as the Organizing Director at ColorOfChange.org and has co-founded several cooperative enterprises in multiple midwestern cities. He was recently featured in the first major book on the Ferguson Uprising, Ferguson is America: Roots of Rebellion. He is finishing a new book on how Latinx organizing and cultural power is reshaping US politics (Routledge 2020).