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- Only Six Weeks Until The Election
Only Six Weeks Until The Election
But who's counting?
Welcome to the LDS Democracy Network’s Newsletter. (Sent to you by a friend? Subscribe here!)
We appreciate your patience with a very sporadic newsletter. We’ve been busy!
📆 This Thursday is the next Latter-day Saints for Harris-Walz national organizing call. Speakers include Evan McMullin, former Mesa, Arizona mayor Claudia Reeder Walters, and Tamu Smith of Sistas in Zion. It will be from 8-9 PM EDT (6 PM Mountain; 5 PM Arizona/Pacific). Register here.
Of good report: the interfaith champion hired by the Harris-Walz campaign
The Rev. Jen Butler speaks outside the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on July 13, 2017. (RNS/Madeleine Buckley)
The Harris-Walz campaign has hired Reverend Jennifer Butler to be their national “Faith Engagement Director.” Reverend Butler has a long career of interfaith bridge-building, including mobilizing people of faith to protect the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Earlier this year she joined Faith Forward as its executive director, helping launch this ad as a response to the “God Made Trump” video:
We also note that the article about her hire, despite being in The National Catholic Reporter, includes this paragraph:
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are likely to be an important constituency in the critical swing state of Arizona, where they make up a small but influential piece of the electorate, Butler pointed out. Historically the single most reliably Republican voters of any religious group, the tradition has shown unusual divisions over former President Donald Trump."They’re concerned about religious freedom, and I think we can engage them, because we are the party of freedom," Butler said
Context matters: What is our duty this election cycle?
We’re in the middle of a presidential election, so there are many policy debates on many issues. It would be impossible to address them all. Instead, it’s a good time to revisit what the First Presidency wrote back in 2023 about our duty as citizens:
Out of the best books: Better information about immigration
Zeke Hernandez, The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers
It’s hard to get less political than a Wharton Business School professor digging into the data about an issue, and that’s part of what makes Zeke Hernandez’s book The Truth About Immigration so valuable. As he explains early in the book:
Most books about immigration perpetuate either the victim argument or the villain argument. They either tell heroic stories about individual immigrants’ success or spin arguments about how that success comes at the expense of the host nation. Both types of books are obsessed with how immigrants enter our country—for economic, family, or humanitarian reasons, legally or illegally. But they’re short on what immigrants do for the rest of us once they’re here.
This book, in contrast, is all about how immigrants actually affect you and your community. And no matter how conservative or progressive your views tend to be, I’ll bet the results will surprise you.
Ward newsletter: Speaking up and getting involved
We’ve been involved in politics for a while and find few things shocking, but the brazen ugliness of the lies about Haitian migrants promoted by former President Trump and Senator JD Vance have been terrible. That’s why we appreciate Steve Pierce’s reflections in the Deseret News about the Haitian families he got to know as a missionary in south Florida.
Arizona Latter-day Saints have formed a new state-level Latter-day Saints for Harris group sponsored by the presidential campaign.
Even CNN is getting in on the coverage of the Latter-day Saint vote:
Of our own free will
It is unusual to have a presidential campaign where one of the two major parties has nominated the same person for the third time in a row. Pollsters keep telling us that American voters all know our own take on Trump.
That got us thinking, what are we most looking forward to about a Harris-Walz administration? Economic policy focused on the middle class, of course, and protecting healthcare access, pursuing a balanced approach on immigration policy, the list goes on, but one of the strongest motivations is this:
We’ll have the mental space to be neighbors and colleagues again.
Trump is extremely good at hijacking attention and dialing up emotions, either for or against him. He is the first president ever to have won without having first serving in either a lower political office or the US military.
Harris and Walz, by contrast, are career public servants, Harris as a prosecutor and then District Attorney and state Attorney General; Walz as a teacher, National Guardsman, Congressman, and Governor. They have cultivated their abilities to respect others, appreciate difference, and listen to voices other than their own.
There’s a strength in that.
We know that many of our Republican friends feel anguish about what the party they’ve spent their lives building has become. The future is uncertain. But having a president who can model respect, appreciation, listening, and yes, even joy will give us the space to work together to build a better future for everyone.
Take, for instance, last week’s event with the Vice President and Oprah. Look past the celebrity cameos and the glitz and what do we see? The Vice President talking with regular people about challenges we face and doing so with warmth and empathy.
One more praiseworthy thing
When we’re taking a break from politics, we’re listening to The Lazy Genius podcast. Host Kendra Adachi leads honestly refreshing conversations about managing life when it feels incredibly chaotic.
The episode that made us laugh in knowing recognition the hardest? This one, that introduced us to the term “Maycember” for all of the end-of-school-year chaos.
(Ed- this podcast episode is over four months old. What to do you want? This is a weekly newsletter that just came out for the second time this year.)