Red Wine & Blue, one of the fastest growing progressive grassroots groups, was founded by Katie Paris in 2019 to fight the right by reaching out to suburban voters. Originally organized in Ohio, the organization has since expanded to Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan. I spoke with Paris on Red Wine & Blue’s growth and its effectiveness at countering rightwing efforts to undermine public schools, restrict women’s reproductive rights, and win elections. This is an edited transcript.
Glenn Daigon: What was the impetus behind the formation of Red Wine & Blue?
Katie Paris: I live in Ohio, and following the 2018 elections, I was really disappointed in the results here in what has become my home state. I had worked in mostly national politics my whole career. Basically, the impetus, for me, was that I realized that I had become a suburban mom. [At the time] there was a lot of talk about suburban women and the role they played in the election. For the most part, this was a very hopeful narrative: suburban women had played a role in a blue wave all across the country; they had helped contribute to a multi-racial backlash to the Trump presidency.
I thought that was really hopeful, but we had not seen that happen in Ohio. And so, I wondered what is going on with suburban women and how can suburban women contribute to building that multi-racial coalition that we need to win elections and advance my values here in the state where I am now raising my children…I was interested in learning more about them, who was connecting them together, what infrastructure might exist to sustain their engagement. And while I found a lot of strength among these hyper-local groups, I wasn’t finding much in the way of infrastructure knitting them together.
I started Red Wine & Blue to both sustain and grow the engagement of suburban women in politics and our civic life. And that has quickly become, in this era, a pretty passionate fight against rightwing extremism.
Q: What policy issues are your organization’s greatest priorities?
Paris: Protecting public education and strengthening it, rather than allowing extremists to use the culture wars to fearmonger and undermine trust in public education. Also, reproductive rights. Suburban women do not like these attacks on our rights and our freedoms and have a great concern for the next generation of women. And finally, protection of our democracy. We are just concerned about extremism, and we value democracy and want to protect it.
Q: Can you describe your organization’s voter and citizen outreach tactics?
Paris: So we do what is called relational organizing or friend-to-friend organizing. Our theory is that if we can give women the confidence to use their voice to discuss issues that they care about, we can reach the broader coalition of women that we need to win. And by that, I mean suburban women along with people of color. Suburban women are not all white, despite the media’s conflation of those terms. And young people really make up the multi-racial coalition necessary for us to beat back these extremist attacks.
We can support the engagement of these newly involved women and give them the confidence to not just vote and get educated about the issues themselves, but to share their concerns, their passions with the people in their networks. We are talking to the parents at soccer games, on the sidelines of their kids’ activities, in the carpool pickup lines…If they can use their social capital to have those conversations, we can reach beyond the traditional activist choir to reach the voters we need to win.
The suburbs are really the last purple places in America, and they are quickly diversifying. And with that diversification, we are seeing social change occur whereby the suburbs are becoming the type of communities that are more inclusive and embracing of difference. So that is the change we are trying to help women bring about and recognize their power to help do that.
Q: How did Red Wine & Blue spread outside of Ohio?
Paris: I never would have imagined that we would have expanded so quickly. Red Wine & Blue did start in Ohio, because I was concerned about my state. We launched in 2019, and by the end of the 2020 election cycle, we had become a national community of women, because Donald Trump was speaking so pejoratively about suburban women, and we were having none of it. We were creating a community of women that was diverse in every way—by age, race, political background—who wanted to come together and represent who suburban women really are, which is not at all the 1950s stereotype that Donald Trump was making us out to be.
That just brought in women from all over the country who loved how we were responding and creating our own narrative about who we are. According to Facebook, [we became] one of the top ten most active groups on the entire platform among civic organizations in the 2020 elections. We were growing to over 200,000 women in our network. So we looked around and said, “Wow we have all of these women who are becoming active, and all of these other places, where the suburbs are really critical, people are asking, ‘When is Red Wine & Blue going to come here?’
We just stepped back and took the time to really carefully analyze where we had organically grown and where there were women already in our network. We reached out to women in those states, and leaders of other organizations, to understand what communications and organizing infrastructure already existed on the ground, and where there might be a need for what we do. We determined that those states with the highest priority for us to go next would be North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Q: What do you see as the organization’s greatest successes?
Paris: Our greatest success in my mind is the community of women that we have built. Women who have never previously engaged in politics see Red Wine & Blue as a non-threatening way to get involved. Many of these women live in areas that have been more traditionally conservative, and they are interested in finding other women who live in those types of areas who want to work for something better. They can come to our community and be accepted without judgment. We say it doesn’t matter where you come from; what matters is that we are all here together now.
“We are talking to the parents at soccer games, on the sidelines of their kids’ activities, in the carpool pickup lines…we can reach beyond the traditional activist choir to reach the voters we need to win.”
We just did an end-of-year survey, and something like 95 percent of our women said that more than anything else, they felt a stronger sense of community and feeling less alone. And they also said they gained a great deal of confidence in terms of talking about the election and the stakes in the 2022 election with their friends and family. And that is what we are asking of them. So that is our relational organizing program.
And we ask them not to do that just in an informal way. We have a whole tracking system in which we ask them who to match and who they are going to contact, with a voter file. We recruited close to 20,000 women to participate in our relational organizing program in 2022. The community today, if you add our different lists and Facebook groups, has about 490,000 women concentrated in our target states.
Q: What do you see as the greatest challenges for Red Wine & Blue?
Paris: I would say that it is the ongoing threat of disinformation, and how it is carried through rightwing news outlets. Many of our members have Trump supporters in their families and women who interact with QAnon in their social networks. And that has been very painful. We talk a lot about that. It has impacted husbands. We end up having women in our community sharing about that experience and what to do. I would just say that fighting disinformation is challenging at a systemic level but also at a personal and emotional one. None of this is a game. It really does impact people’s lives.
Q: What issues and political battles are on the horizon for Red Wine & Blue?
Paris: When it comes to public education, there are no signs of the right-wing letting up. . .when it comes to using LGBTQ+ kids, [social-emotional learning, and critical race theory] to fearmonger in our schools, and. . .to undermine trust in public education, and to try to defund public education. We know how foundational public education is for our democracy. Our network has now been able to push back pretty successfully against a lot of these threats, but rightwing activists are unrelenting. We see continued attempts to ban books. We can’t be dismissive of them. We have to take them on for the sake of protecting our kids and our communities. And for the sake of protecting democracy.
We are fully prepared for that. We have a campaign called “book ban busters,” which is our mainstream mom campaign against book bans. We also are planning to partner with women in multiple states to protect reproductive freedom. In Ohio, we are trying to get a reproductive freedom proposal on the ballot. In North Carolina, we helped stave off Republicans winning a super majority in the state legislature by just one seat. In every state, it is a little bit different, but we will be working hand-in-hand with women on that.
And also there are a lot of school board races this year. In Pennsylvania, there are something like 2,400 seats up. We are figuring out right now where our women need the most support.
Q: Can you explain the “book ban busters” program?
Paris: We are constantly keeping a map updated of where book ban attempts are occurring. We are helping women who are in communities where this is popping up to become prepared for what to do. We have something called the parent playbook, which is a step-by-step guide for how to prepare for this in your community or what to do once it is there. We hold troublemaker trainings. We call them that because we refer to ourselves as troublemakers who want to make “good trouble.” We hold troublemaker trainings every week. It will either be about an issue or about a skill.
And we are just constantly providing this no-judgment training for women who may have never done anything like this before to come and learn what to do. At least 71 percent of Americans don’t want book bans. Around two-thirds of Americans don’t want abortion bans. So if you speak up about these issues you are going to find more agreement than you think. There is a lot of power in that.
Q: Your organization did make a big investment in Ohio in the 2022 midterms without much to show for it. How do you account for that?
Paris: Our focus was in down-ballot races, so we see it a little bit differently. One of our huge focuses was the state school board election, for example, and we were able to flip three seats. We also really focus on long-term results and building up support in suburban areas all across the state where we are going to need it. In a state like Ohio, you need strong support in cities, urban, and rural areas. But accounting for the suburbs, all of the suburban counties except for one did move bluer in the 2022 cycle. At the House of Representative level, we picked up three seats.
Q: In your experience, what progressive policies seem to be the most effective in limiting the appeal of the conservative education movement?
Paris: Supporting public education instead of undermining it. Supporting teachers instead of undermining them. Providing support for new moms instead of making their lives more difficult. So many of us are in this sandwich generation, raising children while also caring for parents. Recognizing that reality and passing family-friendly policies that are consistent with that is something women are absolutely paying attention to. And then, proactively protecting reproductive rights. For so long, abortion was seen as one of those issues that people said, “Let’s not really talk about that.” I think that was a huge mistake. Now that Roe has been overturned, the ground has shifted. Democrats need to step up and get serious about protecting that right.
Q: Are there any new points you want to raise or old ones you want to reemphasize?
Paris: I just always like to try to emphasize that, in the mainstream media, the term suburban women is used as a euphemism for white women. And we think that so much of our strength is in what a diverse community we are. Suburban women are racially diverse. We don’t live in perfect houses with white picket fences, and we come from all political backgrounds, too. All of those things bring a lot of opportunity and power and responsibility to reach out to one another and help create the communities we actually want to live in.
Glenn Daigon
Glenn Daigon is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter. He has worked in the labor movement for over twenty-four years as an opposition researcher and is a graduate of Oberlin College. Glenn’s writings specialize in ongoing social issues.
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