A few weeks ago, Rollie Marcovitch wanted to find a way to be involved in the 2024 election. But she wasn’t comfortable door knocking to connect with voters.
“Then my sister-in-law reminded me about Vote Forward,” Marcovitch said.
Vote Forward is a volunteer letter writing campaign that, over a number of randomized studies, showed a real effect on increasing voter turnout.
“I went online and registered and signed up for letters, and asked some of my neighbors and family if they wanted to come over,” Marcovitch said.
In all, Marcovitch organized 144 letters to voters in Ohio. “It felt good – it felt like I’m at least doing something,” she said.
The evening of Oct. 21, Marcovitch was back at it, this time with roughly 17 other Jewish women at a Vote Forward event organized by the Minnesota chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women.
The group had about 150 letters to write to voters in Arizona. The letters will be mailed on Oct. 27 so they reach voters only a few days before the election on Nov. 5.
While the letter writers have their election preferences (all in favor of the Harris-Walz ticket, it seemed) the letters are simply about encouraging people to vote.
“We are a nonprofit, we are nonpartisan,” said Judith Kahn, interim executive director at NCJW MN. “It’s not about who to vote for, but just to exercise your right to vote.”
Some of the women who came to write letters as part of the Vote Forward campaign on Monday night (Lev Gringauz/TC Jewfolk)
This was the second letter writing event NCJW MN held, the first being in September. Chapters across the country are participating in the Vote Forward campaign.
“We have a lot of women who want to be advocates,” Kahn said. “They don’t always want to go to the Capitol or City Hall…but this gives them a chance to participate in something that they know will have an impact.”
Writing these letters was the first time in a long while that Joni Sussman was able to give her time to an election. Before, she mostly contributed through donations.
“It feels great to be physically doing something, not just making contributions, but actually doing something positive that hopefully will help, rather than just crossing your fingers [about voter turnout],” Sussman said.
For Sussman, who is not an NCJW member but came to this event with a friend, voting is a core value she inherited from her Holocaust survivor parents.
“They took us, as small children, into the voting booths for every library board and dog catcher,” Sussman said. “They were astonished that there were people who didn’t vote [by choice], when they came from a world where you couldn’t vote. So for them, that was just anathema.”
Sussman has carried on her parents’ tradition, bringing her baby granddaughter and three-year-old grandson with her to vote.
“We want to model voting behavior from the time they’re very young, and make them realize how important it is,” she said.
She is sending a similar message in her letters to voters.
“What I’m writing in my letters is: How important it is for everybody to vote, that our democracy depends on people speaking their truth and going to the voting booth,” Sussman said. “And if you don’t vote, you’re opting out of a democracy.”
In personal election outlooks, worried for the U.S.
For the Jewish women gathered, there was a deep sense of anxiety about the upcoming election.
They recalled the confidence felt by many Democrats in the 2016 election, when there was a widespread assumption Hillary Clinton was going to defeat Donald Trump for the presidency – only to be crushed by Trump’s win.
Clinton might have been the first female president of the United States, an expectation now shifted to Vice President Kamala Harris. (While Clinton lost the electoral college to Trump, she did win the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.)
There is none of that overwhelming confidence now. Instead, there’s a fear that this year may, with Harris running against former President Trump, be a repeat of 2016. Various polls show an extremely tight race.
Marcovitch is “worried and trying not to try not to watch the news too much,” she said. “But it’s impossible not to see it, and try not to listen to what they say about polls.”
Abortion, reproductive, and women’s rights are top of mind for why these women are voting for Harris. In recent years Republicans have waged a successful war against reproductive health, including by overturning the federal right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade.
There’s also a deep belief that American democracy itself is at risk if Trump wins the presidency. Trump is widely accused of wanting to be an authoritarian leader, and has professed admiration for strongmen like Nazi head Adolf Hitler.
“I really, really believe that our democracy needs help,” said Judith Brin Ingber. “I’ve lived long enough to know that there are many places that don’t allow people to vote, and that’s very scary to me – that we might end up with somebody who says you don’t need to vote anymore, once I’m in.”
That’s a sentiment Trump did say to a group of Christians in Florida in July.
“Christians, get out and vote, just this time…you won’t have to do it anymore,” Trump said. “Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Trump later denied the implication that, if he won the presidency, there would no longer be elections in the United States.
For Brin Ingber, voting is a hard-fought right that is all too easy to lose. She is the granddaughter of two suffragists, Fanny Fligelman Brin and Irma Firestone, who became activists while students at the University of Minnesota in the first decade of the 1900s.
“We were told by family lore that the safest place for the suffragists…was to meet in the graveyard, because nobody would think to look for young women in the dark there,” Brin Ingber said. “It wasn’t all a great time. You just didn’t wear white dresses and smile. If you were caught, you could be beaten or force fed in jail.”
Fanny Fligelman Brin was also the first national president of NCJW who was not from the East Coast. That legacy prompted Brin Ingber to take part in the Vote Forward letter writing campaign.
“Both my grandmothers were very active, so I felt I better live up to their ideals and do something for this election,” she said.
Immigration is another issue important to many Jews, including Joni Sussman. She is extremely alarmed by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“I trust Harris on this particular thing,” Sussman said. “My parents were immigrants. I know how important immigrants are to building democracy and building the United States.”
She echoed a core dilemma many Jews are feeling: A deep faith in American democracy – which has helped the community thrive in ways not often seen in Jewish history – but also an existential anxiety about what may be left of that democracy if Trump wins.
“It’s really scary,” Sussman said. “I will support whoever is the president, because they’re the president – I’m not sure that’s true for everybody. Coming into this, when I hear Mr. Trump say that if he loses the election, it’s going to be because of the Jews, that makes me very, very nervous.”
But votes for Harris aren’t just driven by voting against Trump. There’s a real excitement about Harris, and what these women see as her smart and capable leadership.
“She knows what’s going on,” said Marcovitch. “They’re all still politicians, I get it, and they all sometimes misspeak, or they lie, or whatever you want to say, but I’m just going with the person I think is the best.”
Despite the stress of this election, the women appreciated getting to come together with NCJW, not just to encourage voting, but also as a way to uplift each other.
“The reason I’m happy to be in a room full of people doing something positive is, it is hard to maintain a sense of hope – and we all do need hope,” said Brin Ingber.
“We need a hope that the hostages in Gaza will be freed, even if it looks very impossible,” she said. “We need hope to think that America can come into its own in a healthy way, and not be cowed into thinking that we don’t have real people that could really be our leaders, except for Trump.”
