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Elon Musk is turning people Democrat with his mass firings as they rush to join a progressive political group, the organization’s founder has revealed.
Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, said she anticipates that many of those joining the organization, which supports and recruits Democrats under 40 to run for office, will be federal workers fired by Musk and the Trump administration. Litman said that the organization has seen 20,000 new sign-ups since Election Day and 10 percent of those were in the last week.
“Can confirm: @runforsomething.net has seen a *huge* spike in people signing up to run for office since Trump & Elon started illegally firing public servants,” Litman said in a post on BlueSky.
The spike in sign-ups comes as more than 20 Department of Government Efficiency staffers have resigned after refusing to use their technical expertise to “dismantle critical public services.”
“I expect we will see some candidates this year and next year who will talk about how Donald Trump and Elon Musk fired them while they were working for the American people,” Litman told Politico.
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Democrats are pinning their hopes that widespread anger over Musk’s DOGE could give them some momentum as they prepare to recruit for the midterms.
Former federal workers could be a key target given they are “already inclined toward public service,” Liman added, but are now “liberated from that constraint” of being nonpartisan. They are “furious and looking for action,” she added.
Republicans have faced pushback from their constituents at town halls recently over Musk’s brutal dismantling of the federal government. Representative Rich McCormick was among those greeted with a hostile reception during a town hall in Georgia last Thursday. The Republican faced boos and angry questions over his support for the Trump administration and Musk.
One constituent asked McCormick what he was going to do to “rein in the megalomaniac in the White House,” prompting the attendees in Roswell, Georgia, to stand and applaud.
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Another accused the congressman, who was elected in 2022, of “doing us a disservice” by supporting DOGE, which has targeted the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention among other agencies for sweeping job cuts, with as many as 1 in 10 CDC staff on the chopping block.
Protesters also gathered in cities across America last week and chanted “no kings on Presidents Day” to rally against the power grab by Trump and the billionaire.
Activists, largely organized by the 50501 Movement and various branches of Indivisible, were honoring “Not my Presidents Day.”
“The town halls, the tele-town halls, the activism from protests over the holiday weekend, it speaks for itself,” Ben Ray, vice president for federal and gubernatorial campaigns at liberal group EMILY’s List, told Politico.
“It’s early days, still, and it’s not going to be a 2017-level reaction, but I think folks are getting fired up for the fight.”
Trump has defended DOGE and Musk after the backlash to an email send to federal employees asking them to disclose what they accomplished in the last week or be fired.
“What he’s doing is saying, ‘Are you actually working?’” Trump said Tuesday in the Oval Office. “And then, if you don’t answer, like, you’re sort of semi-fired or you’re fired, because a lot of people aren’t answering because they don’t even exist.”
