Mike GravelVerifizierter Account

We’ll eventually follow up with an article about what the Gravel campaign accomplished, and we’ll be thanking a few of our supporters individually over the next few weeks. Thank you all for what you accomplished. We are eternally grateful.

This account will transition into the account for the Gravel Institute. Of course, the character of the account will thus change. (We’re not sure we’ll be running it!) Details for that will come later, after August.

So with that, the Gravel 2020 campaign is over. We want to thank our wonderful staff and supporters. We’re going on vacation and won’t be tweeting for a while. Henry is abroad right now; David will be traveling around New England. You can follow us at @humford and @davideoks.

Our favorite quote of Mike’s is from 2008, when he was asked about prayer: “What I believe in is love. And love implements courage.” Our politics, and Mike’s, is based in love, in the duty “to do justly and to love mercy.” As Dorothy Day said: “The final word is love.” That’s it.

Irony and humor are important because they're tools to skewer the powerful, and we use them because they attract support. (It worked!) But beware of irony lapsed into fatalism. Be a happy warrior, be joyful—but be earnest. If you give into cynicism, you become useless.

We do not enjoy politics; it is an ignoble craft, and we have more respect for those who entered it out of a resigned sense of duty than those who think they have the mandate of heaven. We did this for Mike, a great man dishonored in his time, and for the principles we hold.

We sought to make explicit themes whispered by larger campaigns—a revolt against the soullessness of contemporary politics, a forthright egalitarian populism reminiscent of Bryan, Long, and Yarborough, a desire to restore fun and camaraderie to politics.

This campaign, really, is about crafting a new society—a kind and gentle society, based on dignity and equality, solidarity and love. A good life for all, regardless of inborn traits or one’s station at birth. A world of peace and real freedom, democracy and fraternity.

Mike isn’t perfect. We often differ with him. But he has that great virtue—rare among our political class—of being human. There is no artifice. As Rorty said: “If we look to people who make no mistakes, who were always on the right side...we shall have few heroes and heroines.”

A campaign for an 89-year-old, managed by teenagers, got several times more donations than five congressmen, two governors, a senator, and the mayor of America’s most populous city. And we frequently outpolled them, too! I mean—we qualified for the Democratic debates!

But the most enduring legacy of any campaign—think McGovern ‘72 or Sanders ’16—is its influence on young people. And we reached them: one Iowa Gravis poll showed us with 5.9 percent support (ahead of Harris and Warren) among people aged 18 to 29. That's a success.

And the list of 67,000 active donors we compiled will be invaluable in helping Democrats like @MeetMckayla and @JDScholten—we hope to use it to aid progressive candidates as they wrest power from the establishment.

We did a lot of good. We aired anti-Biden ads in Iowa and nationwide, and created and pushed the most detailed, radical platform of any candidate. We’ll be donating the funds, which we expect to come to $100,000, to Flint and a few other charities once we’re done with merch.

Of course, this was not a “campaign” in the strict sense: we never wanted to win, and always made that clear. The campaign wasn’t about Mike as much as it was in his honor—it was a crowdsourced and intimately democratic project, about ideas rather than individuals.

Today we’ll be ending the Gravel 2020 campaign, as we have been planning from the start. It was an incredible honor to work for Mike, one of the greatest men of our time—someone of boundless courage and incredible tenacity.

After we qualified, we stopped checking polls. But we're proud to say that recent polls have us higher than Gillibrand, Delaney, Inslee, Moulton, Hickenlooper, Tulsi, Tim Ryan, Bullock, Bennet, Sestak, de Blasio, Julián Castro, Steyer, and others. Hope their polling improves!

Neera you suck at your jobhttps://twitter.com/neeratanden/status/1158348366365040640 …