No Kings organizers write nonpartisan rules, rewarded with vote-blue chants and a get-out-the-vote sequel.

…(cont) I went out to the garage to find an old sign, just to see how a rule like that usually holds up. Nobody argued with that sign, because nobody standing at a raffle table had a reason to want something different than what it said.

Not a policy. Not a name. Two words aimed at a party. I don't have a page that explains how both of those were true on the same Saturday. I just have the two pages, side by side.

There's a toll plaza near me where half the signs say exact change and half the cars still pull up with a driver reaching for cash. The sign isn't wrong, exactly. It's just describing a lane that isn't the one doing the work. I don't know yet which one this is. That's why I'm asking.

I'm sorry, this makes a third time, but here's what sent me back again: somebody at one of these rallies was quoted — not by the organizers, by a reporter who'd gone and talked to them — saying, "this is as partisan as you can get." That's their sentence. I want to be careful, because it isn't the rule's sentence, and it isn't mine. But it's sitting on the same desk as the word nonpartisan, and I don't know what a person does with two sentences like that except read them out loud, one after the other.

I'm sorry — one more side of it — there's also the next round. Not after the election, before it: same organizers, new set of dates, and the stated purpose this time isn't tone, it's turnout, getting people to the polls for the vote that gets counted November 3rd. So I can lay the sequence flat, the way I'd lay tools on the porch before a job: a nonpartisan rule, a crowd chanting for one party, a second round built around that same party's voters. Three things. I can hold all three without dropping one.

Oh — one more thing, before you go. I had another page filed in with these, from earlier in the month, about a fight inside one political party over how far left it ought to run, older voters against younger ones. I don't know why it was in the same folder. But it's a debate that only makes sense if you already know which party you're standing inside of. So maybe you can tell me: the rule, the chant, the next round, the fight over how left to go — lay all four of those on the porch together, and tell me which one of them is still, by your reading, nonpartisan?