In this Issue –
Events:
- DA Austria Election Night Party
- Global Programming for Nov 3 & 4
- "First Vote" Documentary Viewing
- Solidarity Sundays #38
Issues & Actions:
- Getting Out the Vote in Vorarlberg
- DA Austria in the News
-
Gearing up for 2020
- Voter Protection Survey
- Democrats Abroad's 2020 Impact
Reviews:
- Innsbruck Meet-up
- Solidarity Sundays #37
Member's Corner:
- Art & Music Fridays
- Lockdown: Vienna Nights in the time of Corona
Our Executive Committee meetings are held on the second Wednesday of the month. Our next meeting will be held online on: Wednesday, November 11, 2020, at 7 p.m. Members are welcome to join us at the meetings. Please contact Jennifer at [email protected] to join.
DAA is making a strong effort to include in our monthly newsletter all the information you need to stay up to date in order to avoid the flood of emails that occurs in an election year. By sending you fewer emails, we hope you will read those you receive. Thanks for reading!
EVENTS:
 Election Night Party with a Twist! November 3, 9:30 PM – Online |
November 3, 8:00 PM (CST) |
|
View the Documentary "First Vote" Until November 10 |
Solidarity Sundays 38: Democracy - Let‘s Fix It! November 29, 4:00 PM |
ISSUES & ACTIONS:
Getting Out the Vote in Vorarlberg
Democrats Abroad in Vorarlberg, Austria made themselves not only heard last week (through phone-banking and calling out from mountain tops) but also seen, with a 90 foot abroad banner exhorting compatriots in all lands to vote and vote right for Biden-Harris with Vengence! Have a look.
Election Night with a Twist! Schedule
We’ll watch the news and so much more! Join us online for the DA Austria election night party. We’ve got a lot planned to keep us entertained and informed throughout the night. Here’s the full schedule–
Gearing up for 2020
This is the spot where we answer your frequently asked questions and make sure you, your family, friends, and colleagues have the voter information you need to be an enfranchised voter and make your vote count. Please share!
Democrats Abroad Impact in 2020
2020 has been a record breaking year for Democrats Abroad, as we have nearly tripled our outreach to Americans abroad and are on track to double the vote from abroad. The unique challenges presented by the global COVID pandemic and international mail disruption make these achievements particularly significant.
Our nonpartisan voter support tool - VoteFromAbroad.org - has seen more than 766,680 unique visitors visit the site more than 1 million times - nearly 3x 2016 traffic.
We estimate that in 2020 approximately 1.8 million eligible American Voters living abroad have received ballots (compared to 930,156 ballots received in 2016).
50% of ballots from American Voters Abroad will be returned to battleground states in this year’s election!
We are on target to DOUBLE 2016 voter turnout abroad. That means an additional 500,000 votes—and possibly 1 million!—sent from abroad.
This success was made possible through the 18,000 volunteers who generously provide their support, as well as the donations of over 4000 donors, who donated over $650k this year to Democrats Abroad (an all volunteer run organization with no external funding).
— Aaron Fishbone, DA Global Communications Director
Voter Protection Survey
Tell us about your voting experience so we can help make voting better for every American abroad. Let us know in this short survey. Your feedback and stories are vital for pushing election reform in Congress and in state legislatures.
This election cycle Individual leaders and volunteers testified in two Federal cases on behalf of voters abroad this fall. The first case was resolved with a successful judgement against Postmaster DeJoy. DA currently runs a voter protection division that includes a director, 9 lawyer volunteers, and voter protection volunteers tasked with organizing and managing the escalation of cases from our country committees and voter help communications.
DA Austria in the News
DA Austria has been in the news a lot recently in the run up to the election on Tuesday. Be sure to watch or tune in! Young DA Austria members will be asked about their feelings about the election on Ö3. Other spokespeople will appear early in the morning on Wednesday on Servus TV and Puls 4 and later in the afternoon on ORF 2 Vorabend, Ö1 Radio Journal Panorama, Puls 4 Pro & Contra will take place at 8:30pm and finally Runder Tisch at 10:25pm on ORF.
REVIEWS:
Innsbruck Meet-up
A group of DA members living in Innsbruck get together at Glorious Bastards restaurant on Friday, October 9. Tyler reported, "It was a great success! Everyone had turned in their ballots already and we'll meet up again in December."
Solidarity Sundays #37: Can We Trust the Polls?
The 2016 election shocked most of us. How could Trump win the presidency when he was behind in the polls? On the eve of the most important election in our lifetime, this Solidarity Sundays webinar explored what went wrong in 2016 and asked — was the same thing happening again?
Tanya Lolonis ran through how polls are made. Building them is partly art — figuring out what the electorate will look like, then selecting a sample of respondents who look like that. The other part — calculating the sampling error, the ± 3 or so attached to a poll’s results — is the science.
In 2016, national polls got it right, correctly predicting Clinton’s popular vote win. Battleground state polls, though, were way off. Why? The samples they selected (the art part) were wrong. State polls underrepresented white non-college educated voters — a fatal error. That year, education was the best predictor of white voter preferences — those with college degrees went for Clinton, those without degrees preferred Trump. Pollsters build models based on how the electorate looked in the past. It’s why they miss tectonic shifts, like blue collar voters moving from Democrat to Republican under Reagan. In 2016, they missed the educational achievement shift.
By the time you read this, we’ll know if pollsters got it right in 2020. We have great confidence they won’t make the same mistake twice. Still, a “pandemic election“ won’t make predictions easier. We are on the edge of our seat to learn what new error they make.
What to do when polls menace your sleep? Two things help. First, don‘t trust individual polls. Be guided by a good meta-pollster, like Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com. They average polls to flatten the error fluctuations, and weight the most reliable polls so you don’t have to.
Second, do something within your control. Michael Wagner, DA Austria’s Phonebanking Coordinator, shared the impact volunteers have had in turning out the expat vote. In October alone, 18 phonebankers made 4,800 calls out of Austria to the world. Two weeks before election day, nearly 60,000 members globally told 700 phonebankers they had voted.
Forecasting the future is difficult; helping to shape it is potent.
MEMBER'S CORNER
Art & Music Fridays
An exhibit and concert series by DA Austria member Kathleen Amos Eichorn in Sulz im Wienerwald. Individual, hour-long seatings available from 7-10pm following Covid regulations. Please email [email protected] to confirm upcoming dates and make a reservation.
Lockdown: Vienna Nights in the Time of Corona
Dear all, I'm producing a coffee table book of the photographs I took in Vienna at night during LOCKDOWN, and I am hosting a crowdfunding site with REWARDS for contributions. You can view the site at wemakeit.com and search Danny LoCascio.
Or click this link LOCKDOWN: Vienna Nights in the time of Corona
– Danny LoCasio
Thanks for reading the November newsletter!
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