Emotions are running high nationwide as Americans vote in the midterm elections. Just ask 77-year-old Pamela Aguirre, who teared up as she cast her ballot for Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke. Wheeling her oxygen tank behind her, Aguirre came dressed to vote in an orange beanie and a BETO FOR SENATE T-shirt, determined to elect the El Paso representative over incumbent (and Republican) Senator Ted Cruz.
O’Rourke has amassed an A-list fanbase—from LeBron James to Connie Britton—but Aguirre, who spoke to a reporter after she spotted O’Rourke himself at the polls in her district, offered one the most heartwarming endorsements of him to date.
Her voice breaking at times, Aguirre told MSNBC’s Garrett Haake what a message it would send to see O’Rourke win tonight. “We think he’s pretty important and we’re honored that he was here,” she said. When Haake asked her to elaborate, Aguirre didn’t mince words, telling him that O’Rourke “represents everything Donald Trump isn’t.”
“I give him a lot of credit for standing up and saying what he thinks and for being willing to represent so many people who are like-minded,” Aguirre continued. “It means a lot. We’re just so proud.” She choked up once more as she explained to Haake what triumph for O’Rourke would mean to her. “Everything. Just everything. We want him to win. And we’ll be watching the TV tonight, with him—he’ll be someplace in the city. But it will just mean so much. It will mean that, by gosh, we all still have a chance to have a decent country, with decent values, with decent relationships with other people.”
Polls still have O’Rourke a hair behind Cruz, and Texas remains solid red, but O’Rourke has a better chance than most pundits expected when he launched his campaign, and Aguirre, at least, believes.
Rashida Jones is no newcomer to social justice. She attended her first-ever protest as a teenager and, to this day, remembers what she was opposing (the Gulf War), what she felt (a sense of unity with other demonstrators), and even what she wore (her cheerleading uniform, having come straight from practice). Since then, she’s directed a Time’s Up-related video on sexual harassment in the workplace, launched a line of eyeglasses to raise money for the ACLU, and worked with the International Rescue Committee to help Syrian refugees.
Now, the actress, 42, is putting her skills to familiar use in front of (and behind) the camera with “The Last Weekend” project, a progressive coalition’s push to get people to the polls in the November midterms—and she’s doing it in a way that pokes fun at traditional celebrity PSAs that demand viewers take action.
“Hopefully we created something that people will share with each other,” Jones told Glamour in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s national “Last Weekend” kickoff. “People are fatigued. And I’m certainly fatigued of celebrity PSAs, so the joke was sort of [that] we ourselves are fatigued with our own PSA-ness.”
A still from “The Last Weekend” promo featuring Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Rashida Jones.
“The Last Weekend” is exactly what it sounds like: In the days before the November 6 midterms, it’s an attempt to mobilize a volunteer army to hit the phones—and the pavement—to make sure people actually show up to vote that Tuesday.
Jones, known for comic turns on Parks and Recreation, The Office, and I Love You, Man, is part of a team that’s using humor to send a message about a dead-serious subject: An election that will determine who controls Congress and what happens to women’s rights.
Working with the organization Swing Left, which wants Democrats to wrest control of the House from the GOP, Jones helped write and direct a lighthearted call to action video co-starring Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda—two women with their own history of both funny film roles and serious political engagement.
“They’ve managed to take things that can be heavy and super political and difficult to understand and create levity around it so that people can really digest it and see it,” she said in praise of Fonda and Tomlin, whose teamwork spans projects from the 1980 hit 9 to 5 to the modern-day series Grace and Frankie.
The video features the three women urging viewers to avoid becoming complacent and to not only vote, but get others to do the same by volunteering in the run-up to the election. But, there’s a comic twist.
A promo video for “The Last Weekend” project.
“I just think [that’s] how you really get people—you make them laugh… You make them see themselves in something you’re talking about. You don’t treat it with a heavy hand. You don’t make it a chore.”
That’s a point worth remembering: Non-presidential election years don’t typically get Americans voters fired up; 2014 was particularly bad when it came to turnout. Despite the marches and the hashtags, some early analyses suggested a significant percentage of voters, including the young, might not show up.
Jones knows the history of underwhelming midterm turnout, but says this year could be different: “We’ve never lived in a time like this before, where we’ve all been kind of forced into civic engagement in a really kind of new and visceral way, where every single day, [we’re] seeing the kind of deconstruction of our democracy,” she said.
“I think people now understand more about how American democracy has been set up to function — because it’s not functioning in that way.”
Rashida Jones promotes “The Last Weekend” drive.
“The Last Weekend” coalition includes groups ranging from MoveOn, Indivisible, and the Democratic Attorneys General Association to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Latino Victory, and Resistbot. Depending on who you ask, their work might fall into the category of making “good trouble,” a phrase Jones borrows from Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis.
“The first thing with making ‘good trouble’ is exercising your right to vote,” Jones said.
“Listen, there’s a lot of reasons to be disillusioned. The country’s divided. There’s evidence of interference in our voting process. There’s so much voter suppression. There’s a lot of reasons to feel like you can’t be heard,” she said. “But there’s not enough reasons not to encourage people to push through.”
