It’s personal.

Happy GOTV Weekend!

Volunteers are showing up. Doors are being knocked. And most importantly, voters are voting. We’re only four days out from the most important election of our lifetime. The use of the word “unprecedented” has become precedented this cycle.

I am genuinely excited about where we stand only days away from this critical election — which hasn’t been the case for a long time. Like many of you, 2016 was a crushing blow. A deep wound that never healed — just was patched up, cemented over, and covered in armor for the following eight years. Numb.

Today, eight years later, I can feel all of those things I felt in 2016, before and after Election Day, loud and clear. And the sense of what is right and what we need to do is clearer than ever before.

As I write this, I am 36 weeks pregnant with our first daughter (see above, unprecedented).  My and my wife’s journey in this pregnancy aligned with renewed attacks on women in this country.

We were going through the IVF process while states were ripping away a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her body and her health. We were going through an egg retrieval cycle when Alabama’s Supreme Court ruled that embryos should be treated as children — causing IVF clinics around the state to immediately halt IVF procedures for families. Any person or family who has been through IVF will be the first to tell you that eggs and embryos, as much as we wish they were, are not children.

This election is personal for me and for my family: our marriage, our children, our bodily autonomy, our health, our community, our schools — everything from the books we read to the safety of the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink.

And I know it’s personal to you all, as well.

In four days, we are going to wake up on Election Day with everything we love on the line. Make every minute count — every knock, every phone call, every conversation — and remember why we are in this fight.

LFG!

Chelsea