When I got home from the Women’s March Saturday night, I found some online chatter about a new website called Swing Left that aims to dismantle Republican control of the House of Representatives in 2018. Here’s how it works: You give them your location, and they tell you where the nearest swing district—the congressional district where the winner squeaked by with a pretty close margin—is, and then you sign up for an eventual newsletter with information about that district.
Well, that sounds interesting, I said to myself. Turns out there’s a district out on Long Island, not too far from where I live, where the Democratic Representative won by less than 20,000 votes. Okay, I would like to keep that district Democratic. Then, it turns out, there’s a congressional district in northern New Jersey where the GOP Representative won with just 54% of the vote, by a margin of roughly 37,000 votes. Would I like to flip that district? I would! So I signed up for two newsletters and of course nothing has happened yet but I’m willing to wait and see.
Monday night, somebody on Twitter declared there was “no proof” Swing Left was “who they say they are,” sharing a link to a Daily Kos post to support the assertion. Well, since I was one of the first people to respond to the weekend’s “Hey, if you were in the march, text us at this number” messages with “Excuse me, are you nuts?”, I thought I should look into this. So, let’s see what Daily Kos has to say.
First, “TrumpResistance” claims there’s problems with the website, citing another Daily Kos blogger, Robert Cruickshank, who was unimpressed by the Swing Left site because, when he gave them a Seattle zip code, “[it] told me two nearest swing districts are in Alaska & Nevada.”
Let’s take a look at the congressional districts in Washington State. There are ten, and in nine of them the winner of the 2016 election received 56% to 64% of the vote. Democrat Suzan DelBene won the 1st District with 55.4% of the vote, by 38,000 or so votes. Now, you might call that a swing district, or you might say, well, that district has been in Democratic hands at least since 1998, so it seems pretty safe.
Now, I haven’t looked at the congressional election results for Idaho or northern Oregon yet, but I’m tentatively willing to accept Swing Left’s alleged assertion that the closest swing districts to Seattle are in Alaska and Nevada as a matter of subjective interpretation on which reasonable minds may differ. So, as far as Cruickshank’s complaint is concerned, I don’t really see a huge problem.
Anyway, “TrumpResistance” then observes that there’s no biographical information about the founders of Swing Left on the site, which is true. This is what they say about themselves:
Swing Left was started by a loosely connected group of individuals from diverse industries, including tech, media, nonprofits, and art, who came together in the wake of the Trump election.
We are not politicians or professional organizers. We have no formal affiliation with any party, union, or organization, though we are not against such affiliations. We are citizens. And like many of you, we’ve been sitting on the sidelines for too long. We don’t have all the answers, but we know it’s time to channel our anger and despair in a positive direction.
But, “TrumpResistance” adds, “the people behind the website are Ramin Hedayati and Josh Krafchin,” and s/he didn’t know who they were, so s/he messaged them on Facebook. In the meantime, s/he discovered, “Josh Krafchin recently left his marketing website, Clever Zebo, with his Russian partner, Igor Belogolovsky.” A Russian! Very spooky.
I put “Ramin Hedayati” and “Josh Krafchin” in Google and very quickly discovered that Hedayati is a supervising producer at The Daily Show, which seems like reasonably lefty street cred, and Krafchin, in addition to Clever Zebo, has a background in other online marketing projects, and also put in some time at Morgan Stanley. They both graduated from Columbia, and though Hedayati doesn’t list his graduation date, other data on his LinkedIn profile leads me to suspect that the two of them were classmates or at least had overlapping social circles in college.
“TrumpResistance” is concerned Swing Left’s “end goal…could be to continue the ongoing party polarization by running unverified ‘progressive’ candidates against registered Democratic candidates in primary races… to the benefit of conservative candidates and to the Republican Party.” Which is, to be fair, something the Russians did by propping up Jill Stein’s public candidacy and goading Bernie Sanders supporters into breaking with the Democratic Party after the convention. But while Columbia is a noted hotbed of subversive activity, and Josh Krafchin apparently does know at least one Russian, I’m not convinced there’s anything more to Swing Left than meets the eye. I’m certainly not going to be convinced by a Daily Kos blogger with seven stories to his or her name who can’t be arsed to do some fundamental research before disseminating a hot take.
Basically, Swing Left looks to me like an interesting project that’s just getting off the ground; frankly, it looks like a project I want to find out more about, and possibly get involved with if it turns out they’re in a position to do productive work and I’m in a position to help. And you should take that personal interest into account when you’re weighing my perspective, by all means. At the same time, don’t dismiss Swing Left out of hand simply because one blogger on a political commentary website has some half-assed suspicions s/he can’t even be bothered to fully investigate. Do your own research, make your own decisions—but if you don’t get involved with Swing Left, then, as Anthony Johnston suggests, get involved with somebody: “We’ve got a long struggle ahead of us… We need to get together.”
