Yesterday at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump chose Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who gained notoriety from his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, as his running mate. From his right wing populist ideology to his allegiance with venture capitalists, Vance is a chilling addition to the GOP ticket.
Throughout his career, Vance has left a wake of destruction in the white working class region he claims to care about– from association with the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma– billionaire architects of the overdose crisis in Appalachia– to the failed $700 million sham business AppHarvest in Kentucky.
Since his election to the US Senate in 2022, he has become a national leader in neoconservative political ideology, opposing marriage equality and gender-affirming care, and supporting an anti-democratic, white nationalist vision for our country.
Our opposition is clearly making a play for the white working class, and we’re ready to fight back. Vance speaks to the suffering of poor white people and offers white supremacy, misogyny, and Christian nationalism as solutions.
SURJ is an antidote to this racist strategy. We organize in majority white communities and give our people a better offer: solidarity. Through our Southern base building projects, our electoral work, and our roots and leadership, SURJ has a long history of successfully organizing white working class communities.
We’re continuing to grow and deepen our long-haul base building work in the South. And this year in the general election, we have a plan to engage 12 million white voters in key swing states through our tried and true shared interest organizing model: meeting people in their suffering, disarming racist and transphobic propaganda, and inviting them into a vision of multiracial solidarity that goes beyond parties or election cycles.
We are well-positioned to make a crucial contribution to this election– to out-organize Vance’s authoritarianism and racism in the communities he’s going after– but we need to grow our programs to make sure we can scale to pull it off. Can you give a gift today to help us out-organize Vance and Trump in white working class communities?
We’re giving our people a better offer than white nationalism.
