Frustrated Democrats are going to have to wait for a couple more years
before they have a new presidential candidate to get behind.
In the meantime, they're starting to target state-level races
that could make a big difference in advancing the progressive agenda.
— Thank you guys for coming.
This is a Code Blue phone bank.
— A group of Democrats gathered to stick it to President Donald Trump.
— If we can start flipping those red seats to blue seats,
we're going to be able to make a difference.
— Their weapon: the phone bank.
— Greg Cava, for State Senate.
Are you aware of this upcoming election?
— Their target: a State Senate special election in Connecticut.
— Anybody know why is this a special election?
— The catch: they're on the west side of Los Angeles.
This is what democratic activism after Trump looks like.
— Hi there, I'm Greg Cava.
I'm running for State Senate.
— 2,900 miles away...
— Hi! I'm Greg Cava, a Democrat running for State Senate.
— The 32nd State Senate District is one of the most Republican places in all of Connecticut.
— Greg Cava.
— Second-time candidate Greg Cava planned on running a traditional campaign.
— Tell every friend you've got to get out and vote.
— He didn't go looking for Code Blue.
They found him.
— Because they saw this as the first opportunity,
or one of the first opportunities in the country,
to make a statement about their displeasure
with the results in November.
— M.J. Loheed started Code Blue.
— Hey, Code Blue!
— Every morning after he drops his kids off at school,
he hops on Facebook Live to talk about a special election
somewhere in America.
— This a special day, because today is...
— Cava is his current focus.
— ...the beginning of the full-court press for
getting out the vote for Greg Cava in Connecticut.
— So before you started this group,
what was your relationship to politics?
— My relationship to politics was, I read the newspaper and I voted.
That was it.
— Let me start with just the name.
Code Blue is the thing they yell in hospitals,
when someone's about to die and they need
to be revived with those crash cart paddles.
Is the Democratic Party on its deathbed?
— Well, I certainly felt like that
the morning after the presidential election.
I woke up and my Facebook feed was just blowing up with,
"Oh my God. America is dying."
— Code Blue and its allies say Democrats
need to start focusing on the hard races
if they want to begin the process of rebuilding the party.
— So this idea of just going and finding races
that are pretty cheap to put money into and try to flip them,
it's a pretty simple concept.
Why do you feel like it's not one that we see more
from the institutional Democratic Party?
— If you look at the Republicans,
they really do have, like, a top-down infrastructure
that they can rely on, and they vote as a bloc.
Down ticket Democrats get very little support from above.
And I think groups like Code Blue are filling in the gap.
— The idea has sparked a kind of mini-dot-com boom.
There's Flippable, Indivisible, Sister District and more.
None of them have any official affiliations with the Democratic Party.
— The criticism is you're amateurs,
you don't really know what you're doing, you're disorganized.
— We may seem disorganized but, you know, Code Blue,
we have 16 PhDs working on data.
We've developed our own state-by-state playbook.
— Many of us are a little bit new to this,
but this is as important as it ever was,
and probably more so right now, so...
— The extra help, even from amateurs, makes a big difference.
— ...and you can tell him we're in Los Angeles, California making calls for him.
— Code Blue says that, out of six candidates the group has helped, four have one.
— They put this out there,
and we exceeded the necessary funds,
and we did it in four days.
This is unheard of.
The last day, we were on a $4,000-a-day fundraising job.
Governors don't raise that much that fast.
So this was highly unusual.
It was exciting.
The biggest problem, when we sat around before this happened,
was, how are we going to raise this money fast enough
for a 45-day window on the election?
The answer was Code Blue.
— On Tuesday night, Cava lost.
Again.
But only barely.
On November 8th, he lost by 32 points.
This time, he lost by less than 10.
Turnout was much higher than expected.
— We fell a little bit short this time,
but we sure make a statement.
I don't know that anybody's ever come this close...
— Cava calls that a win.
The DNC agrees.
Code Blue does too.
— Yeah, if you look at the historical data in districts like that,
you can tell exactly what will happen if no one does anything.
— Making Republicans fight everywhere, even in safe districts,
is part of the Code Blue strategy.
Winning is usually everything,
but maybe not when you're talking about closing the gap
in a State Senate District Democrats haven't won since 1891.
— Wow. That's how I feel.