Spearman reignited and redefined the fight for the Equal Rights Amendment when she successfully led efforts to ratify the federal ERA in Nevada—and add a radically inclusive ERA to the state constitution as well.

Pat Spearman had a habit of making history during her three terms in the Nevada Senate.

Spearman became the first openly lesbian member of the Nevada Legislature when she was first elected in 2012. In her second term, she was the chief sponsor of legislation ratifying the ERA in the Silver State in 2017—35 years after the deadline imposed by Congress on ERA ratification had expired—reigniting the movement for constitutional equality and leading a three-state wave that pushed the ERA over the finish line for addition to the U.S. Constitution. And in her third term, Spearman also drove the successful effort to add the most inclusive and expansive ERA on record to Nevada’s own state constitution in 2022, “guaranteeing rights regardless of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, ancestry or national origin.”

Spearman, who is also a cleric and veteran, was regarded as one of the most progressive members of the state Senate—and ERAs were just one part of her feminist agenda in office. She also led fights in the Legislature to reform criminal justice practices, expand equal pay protections and address gender-based violence and human trafficking.

As part of the fifth and final episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward, I talked to Spearman about navigating this new chapter in the movement for constitutional equality, what the ERA means to the modern feminist movement—and what fights she’s looking forward to waging next, when the ERA is in its rightful place in the U.S. Constitution.

Spearman is joined in this episode by Feminist Majority Foundation president and ERA movement leader Ellie Smeal, trailblazing politician and diplomat Carol Moseley Braun, Ms. executive editor Katherine Spillar, and ERA Project Director Ting Ting Cheng. 

Together, we reflected on more than 50 years of activism to ratify the ERA—and the power that would come from women’s constitutional equality to redefine our democracy, protect our fundamental rights and change the stories of women’s lives.

This interview has been edited and re-organized for clarity and length.

Carmen Rios: You are such a champion of the ERA, of constitutional equality—and so, I’m curious, where does your ERA story begin?

Pat Spearman: I was born in a filthy freight elevator at a hospital. I was born in the freight elevator because, at the time that I was born, ‘coloreds’ couldn’t go through the front door of the hospital. My dad ran in and said, ‘My wife is in labor, can I get a wheelchair?’ And the receptionist looked up and politely said, ‘So, “coloreds” don’t come through the front door. Go around to the back to the elevator there.’

He ran back down, got in the car, drove my mother around to the back. The elevator in the back was a freight elevator, where they took all the garbage down. He took her in the elevator, and while they were on their way up to labor and delivery, my mom started to pass out. My dad put his hands under her head so she wouldn’t fall into the trash, and her feet were facing the elevator door. When the doors opened up, the nurses said, ‘Oh my god, the baby’s here, the baby’s here, the head and shoulders are already out.’ They took my mom into labor and delivery and finished getting me into the world. 

I often say to people, that was a precursor to what my life was supposed to be, fighting those kinds of injustices. No baby should ever, ever be born in trash. Never. Never. When my mom and dad told me the story—when I was much older, my dad was talking about it because of my activism with the movement, after 1968, when Dr. King was murdered, to get recognition and for equality—he said, ‘Well, I guess this is going to be your life, because you were born in a very unconventional way.’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ 

My mom used to call me Speedy Gonzales. She said, ‘You were so anxious to get into the world and make everything right, you couldn’t wait to get into the labor room. You had to come out in the elevator.’ I’m a Black woman, I am a same-gender-loving woman, and that’s three strikes, especially in the age of Frumpism—and so, my whole life, I’ve been fighting for equality for myself and everybody else. The ERA was a natural progression. 

The people who don’t want to see equality, they must know this … there ain’t no quit in us, and there ain’t enough bad in them.

Pat Spearman

When I was asked to work on it, quite frankly, I didn’t even know that we had a chance to still pass it. I thought it was done and over, and they said, ‘No, we can still get this done, Senator, and we’d like you to do it because we know you won’t back down.’ I said, ‘Who told you that?’ And so, I started the process. 

Some of my colleagues said, ‘Oh, this is just a stunt. Why are you doing this? It’s over and done with, and it won’t mean anything.’ I said, ‘Unless the Constitution’s changed, yes, it will mean something’ We got 35 states. We only need three more.’ And they said, ‘Well, there’s a time limit.’ I said, ‘There’s not a time limit in the initial legislation. The time limit’s tacked on, and that addendum doesn’t count, unless you want it to—and if you want it to, then you have to go back and change the Constitution.’ 

And let me tell you, some of the things that I heard—I mean, oh my god. There were women who came to the table and testified and said, ‘If the ERA passes, then that means that I won’t get my husband’s social security.’ And I’m like, ‘Who told you all that?’ There was another lady who came to the table, and she said, in a rather dignified aura, ‘I was researching the other night, and I saw that there are at least 400 different sexes.’ And I’m looking like, ‘What? Where are you going with this?’ And she said, ‘If the ERA passes, that will mean that, if women want to marry the Eiffel Tower, they can do it.’ I didn’t realize the camera was on my face. I’m like, ‘Did she really say that?’ She said it twice. I thought to myself, ‘Your kids do not know that you’re out here talking like this embarrassing them. Please don’t say that again.’

It’s surprising how dedicated some women were not to make it pass—and it was rather disheartening, as well, and I say disheartening because you would think that something that’s going to bring equality to you and your family, you would want it to pass.

But be that as it may, we struggled through it. We got it. It went to committee in 2015, and they wouldn’t bring it out of committee in 2015. The folks on the other side of the aisle, the Republicans, decided this was not something they wanted to put stock in, so they wouldn’t bring it out of committee. I remember walking out of the committee room and walking down to the then-Majority Leader’s office, and I said, ‘What’s up with this? You’re not going to bring it out of committee?’ He said, ‘I think it’s just a stunt.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s not a stunt. And if it is a stunt, humor me. Bring it out of committee, and let’s see who votes for it.’ He didn’t want to do that because he knew that it was going to pass—so they left it in committee. 

I promised the women that were out there in the hallway, I said, ‘Get me back in here next session in 2016’—I was up for reelection. ‘Get me back here,’ and I said, ‘in the next session, this will be the first bill that we work on,’ and it was, with the exception of the bill that organized the legislation for the session. The second bill was SCR2. We got it back in.

Some of the same women came back and said that nonsense again, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘You all have no idea. Your kids are at the courthouse changing their name.’ They don’t want people to know that—’Oh my god, did your mom really say that?’ ‘Yes, she did.’ But we got it done. Senator Aaron Ford was the majority leader, and he announced on the floor the very first day of session that ‘We will ratify the ERA, and we will get a pay equity bill passed. We will do that this session.’ Those are the two things that I was gunning for, and those are the two things that we did get passed. I was really heartened by the fact that we got it done. 

Then, I went to Illinois and talked to them and worked with them and testified there in Illinois to make sure it got passed there.When they ratified in Illinois, then I went to Virginia and talked to them, and Jen McClellan—who is now Congresswoman McClellan representing Richmond, Virginia—Jen and I hooked up, and she was telling me how long she had carried the bill in the state legislature as a senator. And we got it done in Virginia. 

Now we’re facing the whole thing about: Is it legal? And I’m thinking, ‘Constitutional law 101, it is legal. The Constitution only says 38 states, okay? 38 states. We’ve got 38 states. What’s wrong with you all? Can’t you count? 35, 36, 37, 38. We got 38 states. It’s just beside me, why we’re still fighting this, except for the fact that people—and I can’t say just men—there are people who have not studied, have not done the hard work of preparation, and they have been used to walking into a room, and just because of their gender, their ethnicity, their race, which are a social construct, that they can just get anything that they want. 

We’re not going to quit until done o’clock. You can throw at us whatever you want to throw at us. We’re coming in waves. The first wave, they may get tired, and they may have to stop for a rest—but there’s another wave coming.

Pat Spearman

I believe that the people who are trying to make sure that this doesn’t happen, because it already has, they’re afraid—because now they will actually have to compete with us, and they’re not ready. They’re not ready. If they stop fighting and recognize the 24 words of the Equal Rights Amendment, then they also have to recognize that, because of the ways in which we’ve been put down and had to fight our ways back, and because of the ways that we have had to prepare ourselves and do extra, extra, extra—as a woman, you have to do twice as much; as a Black woman, you got to do six times as much—they are afraid that once equality is recognized as the law of the land, that they will actually have to compete, and they’re not ready to compete.

I can think of no other reason why they would still be fighting it when, constitutionally, it’s already done.

Rios: You talked about not knowing that the ERA fight could be re-litigated, be continued, before you introduced that bill. Were you active in the ERA movement during the ‘70s and the ‘80s?

Spearman: I was just starting in high school, and I do remember it. The part that I remember about the movement was how the news showed women burning their bras. I was like, ‘My mom gave us too much. We can’t do that. There’s no way in the world I can do that, but if you let me in to fight with you, I’ll fight with you in my bra.’

I also remember when they said that they didn’t get the necessary 38 states and that it was done. A few years later, in high school, my history teacher, Donna P. Johnson—I will never forget her name, she was a very strict teacher, a very hard teacher, but I loved her because she made sure that if you didn’t do it right, you were going to do it over—I remember her talking about it in history, about what a shame it was that we couldn’t get an Equal Rights Amendment so that women would be protected under the Constitution, and I remember other women talking about it. But everyone that I heard talking about it, talked about it from the standpoint of: It’s over. It’s done. There’s nothing we can do. 

When they brought it to me, I’m thinking, ‘Okay, if this is a possibility, let’s get it done. Let’s get it done.’ 

I was in the service. I was in the military. For however many years it was being worked on before I knew about it, I was fighting those battles as a Black woman in the military—and branched to a combat support unit, military police. They didn’t want women, and they certainly didn’t want Black women, and heaven forbid, if they had known that I was same-gender-loving…they would’ve kicked me out then, no questions asked. 

This has been a no-brainer. Quite frankly, I want us to hurry up and get this done, get it recognized, because it’s already got to get recognized—because I’m ready to pick another fight.

Rios: After you ratified the national ERA, you were also a leader in the fight for the state ERA in Nevada, which was the most comprehensive ERA ever passed. It explicitly enshrined sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression. What do you believe the promise of the ERA is? 

Spearman: The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves—and many of my foreparents did not know that immediately—but what it also did was it, by extension, freed the slaveholders, so that they could be free to recognize and to live in the fact that God made all of us, and we are all God’s children. The Equal Rights Amendment is for not just women, but it is also for men—and especially for our sons and our grandsons and our nephews, because the next generation behind me and the generation behind them, they’re already growing up in a world that is dominated by women. 

In the last election cycle, when Kamala was running, I had people say, ‘I don’t know if a woman can really handle the job,’ I said, ‘What do you mean if a woman can really handle the job?’ I said, ‘Was your mama an orangutan?’ ‘No.’ ‘Your mama was a woman?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, she raised you. What do you mean a woman’s not strong enough?’ In every other developed country in the world, they’ve already had this. We’re the last ones to come to this party.

When we were working on the federal ERA, one of my colleagues stood up and said, ‘I don’t know why we’re working on a federal ERA when we don’t even have a state ERA,’ and I was sitting next to the now-Majority Leader, and we said, ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ and we started then. I sent a text to our legal department, and she sent a text as well. We didn’t know that each of us were doing it, saying that we’re going to work on a state ERA—and so, that’s what we did for the next year and a half. In 2019, we came back, and we were the first female majority legislature in the country. It’s like I say: When women are in charge, relax. Or, let me put it like this: When smart women are in charge…

I’m a Black woman. I am a same-gender-loving woman… My whole life, I’ve been fighting for equality for myself and every body else. The ERA was a natural progression.

Pat Spearman

In the state ERA, we wanted to make sure that it was always and forever. We included everybody that had been marginalized and that could be marginalized. We didn’t want to come back and say, well, now let’s get it for transgender people, now let’s get it for the—no, no, we put in everybody that had been marginalized, everybody that the other side of the aisle hated. They qualified for our state ERA.

I was told by someone in another state, which I will not mention, that they used our ERA to get rid of DEI. I said to the person who said that to me, ‘You think that’s cute? You think it’s cute? That ain’t cute.’

Here’s what people don’t realize: Your resumé is what you write while you’re living. Your eulogy is what people say about you after you die, and all of the people that are trying to be cute with this, their words will live on. And just like we study the words of different people in history, they’ll be studying the words of people in history. Not only that, they will leave a legacy that will be a weight around their children and grandchildren’s neck that they will then have to wear and will have to say, ‘Why did your grandfather say this,’ or ‘Why did your grandmother say that.’ They should really think about that. 

Rios: What are the tangible ways in which you already see the impacts of the Equal Rights Amendment at that state level—in a state where they are clearly not misappropriating it to benefit white men?

Spearman: Pay equity is one, and that’s the other bill that I carried in ’17. We didn’t get it all the way over the finish line in ’17, but we came back with a new governor in ’19, and got it across the finish line, and he signed it. Our pay equity bill is probably also one of the most expansive in the country, because a lot of times, when people don’t have justice, companies, before we had our bill passed, could wait them out. You got two years. You file it, and if nothing happens in the two years, then too bad. It’s over. Statute of limitations.

We started off with the fines being $10,000 for the first offense, $15,000 for the next offense, and then $30,000. It was thousands of dollars if you did this three times. The Chamber of Commerce came in, and they were adamant, ‘We will not support this with this kind of tiered fine approach,’ and I said, ‘All you have to do is do the right thing and you never have to worry about this.’ How many people do you see on Jeopardy arguing about whether or not Santa Claus’ suit is red or blue? Doesn’t matter. He doesn’t exist. It can be red and blue polka dots. 

I said, ‘Okay, all right, we’ll bring it down.’ It’s $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 if you did it within a three-year period. But what I didn’t change, and what they didn’t focus on, was that every time someone in that company gets a paycheck, the clock starts again. 

Guess what that means? It’s never over. You can’t wait them out. If it takes 10 years to figure it out, that’s 10 years—but the clock keeps starting over every time somebody gets a paycheck. I don’t know that there’s another state that has that clause in there, and by me talking about it publicly, they probably will never be able to get it in there, but it’s in ours. 

We were also able to collaborate, bicameral and bipartisan, on a bill that eliminated the statute of limitations for people who were sexually assaulted, raped, when DNA proved who the perpetrator was. 

I collaborated with one of my colleagues. She was in the Assembly then; she’s in the Senate now—happened to be Republican, but it made sense. Fortunately, in 2019, we were working with some Republicans who had not checked intelligence at the door with their coat and hat. We got that done.

The other thing that we were able to get done was some matters with incarcerations and solitary confinement. Before 2019, people were just thrown into solitary confinement for whatever. I had a bill that said, before someone goes into solitary confinement, you have to define or explain, very specifically, why they’re being put in the hole; and they have to have a mental evaluation before they go in; and you have to have a counselor, a psychiatrist, somebody, to be checking on them while they’re there; and you can only keep them in for a certain amount of time. You just couldn’t throw them in and forget about it. 

We were able to get that done, and the other part of that is part of what I call my criminal justice sweep, because there is a whole lot more in the system that we’re fighting today. There’s a whole lot more criminal than there is justice, because everybody that goes into the system is not a criminal.

For human trafficking, Las Vegas is a destination city, and people come here, especially when we have sports games. The Super Bowl, it’s a hotbed for human trafficking. So, what we did was, everybody who is a part of getting that person to the John—if you bought a sandwich, if you did the Uber, if you set up the plane ride, the train ride, the whatever, if you provided the house—anybody who touched anything associated with that victim of sex trafficking, the bill says to treat like the primary perpetrator. 

Let that sit for a minute. 

You know why I did that? Because it’s too easy for people to say, ‘I didn’t know.’ You knew. You bought the ticket. They used your credit card. You’re the one that called the Uber driver, and the Uber driver knew it. There was a recent trial of a celebrity that I will not name, but there were some people who weren’t the primary person, but they contributed to that nonsense. Had that been in Nevada, there would’ve been no place to hide. 

Those are things you can get done with women—because we think about these things in a very common sense way. As I said, unless they’ve been co-opted by some disease that makes you allergic to intelligence, we can usually work together.

The Equal Rights Amendment is for not just women, but it is also for men—and especially for our sons and our grandsons and our nephews, because the next generation behind me and the generation behind them, they’re already growing up in a world that is dominated by women.

Pat Spearman

Rios: These are incredible advancements. These are all so important. In terms of a federal ERA, what do you hope it would empower us to address as well? What would the work be that would remain, that would come next?

Spearman: Plain and simple, pay equity would be the law of the land. Period. In human trafficking cases, you have a constitutional right not to be treated like that, which is a higher level of scrutiny. What it would mean is that jobs that you qualified for and you don’t get, you can go back to your constitutional right. 

But beyond that, for the second and third generations after us, it validates what they already feel.

Your generation looks at this inequity stuff and says, ‘What the hell’? It’s kind of like we look back like, ‘What do you mean they just grabbed somebody and strung them up in a tree?’ ;What do you mean they lynched him?’ It doesn’t make sense to us. This inequity stuff, your generation and beyond, you really don’t understand it—and for the most part, you’re not accepting it, which is good. Keep on not accepting it. As soon as we get this in the Constitution, people are going to look at this the same way my generation looks at, ‘You couldn’t sit where on the bus? What do you mean you couldn’t go in through the front door in Dairy Queen? What do you mean that you had to have a court order to integrate schools?’ We look at that, and say, ‘That’s dumb.’ 

My words of wisdom to the folks who keep fighting this, is you’re either going to be on the right side of history, or you’re going to be on the sidelines watching us make history. Because we ain’t going to stop. We are not going to stop. 

I was invited to go someplace, and sometimes, elected officials, you got four or five events on the same day, and three of them happen at the same time, so I was early and on time to two of them—and the last one, I knew I was going to be late, and I told them I’d be late coming in. When I walked in, there was a guy at the back door, and he’s looking at me, and he says, ‘Are you…?’ and I said Yeah, yeah, I am.’ He follows me to my seat, and I say, ‘Yes? Can I help you?’ And he says, ‘Your presence here just makes some people uncomfortable.’ I said, ‘Really?’ What do you mean? One of us should leave?’ He said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ I said, ‘One of us should leave,’ and I just sat down. ‘Bye, Bubba.’

And for the people that keep saying, ‘When are you all going to quit?’ I told them in New York in Seneca Falls, we’re not going to quit until done o’clock. And you can throw at us whatever you want to throw at us—we’re coming in waves. The first wave, they may get tired, and they may have to stop for a rest, but there’s another wave coming. For the people who don’t want to see equality, they must know this: There ain’t no quit in us, and there ain’t enough bad in them. Make that a hashtag.

Rios: We’re having this conversation at a moment when there is a lot of chaos and a lot of regressive politics happening at that national level with the Trump administration and all his friends in Congress. People want to do everything they can to protect their communities, and that fight is taking shape at the state level.

What would your advice be to feminists who want to advance a state ERA in a state that doesn’t have one right now as a form of protection, to folks who have state ERAs and want to make their lawmakers harness them the right way? How do you feel that fight has to move forward now at the state level?

Spearman: There is a verse in the Christian Bible that says, ‘Don’t get tired when you’re doing the right thing, because if you keep working at it, what you’re planting will come up, and the harvest will be plentiful.’ 

We all get tired. I’m going to get tired, but I’m going to hand the baton to you, and I’m going to sit down. I’m going to get me some water. I’m going to put it in my mouth, throw it on my head, and all that kind of carrying on. I’m going to do all of that—but then I’m going to get up and get back in the race. Let’s make sure we have some powerful, motivated justice warriors at every level of the political spectrum, and I’m not just talking about elected office. We have to have some who are committed to funding and fundraising, some who are committed to teaching and training and mentoring, and some who are willing to put it all on the line and say, ‘I’ll risk my reputation, my name, and everything else,’—and in this day and age, you could even be risking your life.

Let’s do that and keep moving forward, because this is a battle that has already been won, and our fight is not to win it. Our fight is to expose people to the fact that it’s already here. It’s 12 o’clock. The sun done already risen. As much as they fight against it, the harder we will fight to make sure that it is revealed. The truth will be revealed more and more and more. Don’t get tired. Keep fighting. We’re not fighting to win the race. We have already won. We are fighting so that other people will know: ‘Hey, already won. Already won.’

I didn’t even know that we had a chance to still pass it. I thought it was done and over, and they said, ‘No, we can still get this done, Senator, and we’d like you to do it because we know you won’t back down.’

Pat Spearman

In 2026, there are some race—and I’ve heard this from people—where people aren’t necessarily pleased with the person who’s representing them. People want to jump in and say, ‘Let’s challenge them.’ This is going to be controversial, but let me say this: Democrats don’t have any money, or at least we don’t give a lot of money, and for every race that you make a primary race, that’s less money that we have for the general race. From a strategic standpoint, I say get yourself ready and be able to run a race that cannot be beaten.

Becase those other guys got a gazillion dollars. One of them’s got 24 billion dollars. And they’re going to throw it at every race. We don’t have that kind of money, so conserve our resources. 

Rios: This podcast is all about the last 50-plus years of feminist activism, and how it’s all unfolded in the pages of Ms. If we were to have this conversation and it’s 50 years from now, what do you hope, like you said before, we would be looking back and thinking, ‘Oh my god, they didn’t have that?’

Spearman: My hope and my belief is coming soon to a city, town, hamlet, county in your neighborhood: freedom and equality. It’s on the way, and in many places, it’s already there. In the next 50 years, I hope people in your generation and the generations below you will be saying, ‘I don’t understand what the big deal was,’ and they will be saying, about the people who fought against us: ‘What’s wrong with you? I don’t understand it.’

The more your generation says that, and makes sure that history does not forget the foolishness that we had to put up with, the idiocy that we were subjected to, and just the downright ignorance, all of that—keep saying that. Keep telling people, ‘You are fighting a battle that you cannot win, because we have already won.’ What you’re doing right now is leaving the legacy for your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren.

There are some people in history that, we remember their names, and we know who their children are. We know who their grandchildren are. But then there are others that we have no idea what happened to them. John Kennedy, we know his kids. But there are some other presidents that don’t nobody talk about, ever—e-v-a, eva. 

I can’t speak for their kids and grandkids, but if that was my last name, I wouldn’t want nobody to know it, either. I’d change it. I was in Kentucky not long ago, and I was listening to some people talk about Mitch McConnell, and I thought to myself: ‘Now, this is his last hurrah, and when he leaves, everything that he’s done in the last 20 years is what people are going to talk about, and ain’t none of that good.’ He’s going to go to his grave with people talking about him, and his legacy will not be good.

Some of the same people, even in this current administration, people are looking and saying, ‘Money means that much to you? Money means enough to you to sell out your people?’ I used to see and hear about Tim Scott on the campaign trail all the time. I kept looking to see his appointment to a cabinet position. No. So what’d you do that for, dude? What’d you do it for? 

Zora Neale Hurston had a saying, ‘All my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk.’ Let’s fight an integrated fight—and as I said before, it’s not to win, but it’s to expose the truth. When I say integrated, I mean we have to have people of various religions, people from various neighborhoods, even people from different places on the political spectrum. Now, I make it clear to people, I’m willing to talk to people on the other side of the aisle. I just don’t do crazy,. You come at me cockeyed and I don’t do that. Come to me correct and talk about some things that really mean something—then we can do that. 

But let’s have an integrated fight, integrated battle, and let’s do that smartly, because the reason we are in the situation that we’re in right now is because the people on the other side of the aisle, if you look back over the last six or seven election cycles—everybody knows John Kerry should’ve won in 2004. But there were people that got caught up in whether or not boys are kissing boys. They’re concerned about boys kissing boys, but they’re not concerned about the boys getting blown up in Iraq. Really? Something’s wrong with that picture.

We have to look at things strategically, and say: How bad do we want to win? When I was out on the campaign trail for Hillary, I kept telling them, ‘I don’t care you don’t like her laugh. Her laugh ain’t got nothing to do with it. We’re talking about two Supreme Court justices.’ That’s not strategic, going by your feelings. That is not strategic. And what happened? She didn’t win, and we got three more Supreme Court justices that are as equally unprepared as the other three that that party appointed. And when you look at the Supreme Court, you can look at the first Black woman who was appointed, and she’s staying true, but the person that took Thurgood Marshall’s seat—all my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk. 

Let’s be smart. Let’s be strategic. Don’t get caught up and fall for the okey-doke. We know what we’re going for. In this election, we’ve got to keep seats, and we’ve got to turn seats. There’s not going to be any one person that’s going to do everything that you think they should do. But if they got 80 percent of it, vote for them, and then push them into the next 20. If voting didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep us from voting. If voting didn’t matter, why did they gut the ’64 Voting Rights Act. Why did they end pre-clearance if voting didn’t matter? It does matter. Don’t let anybody tell you that. 

When somebody tells you that, tell them ‘Knock-knock.’ Who’s there? The man on the moon. Voting is not important? File that under ‘Once Upon a Time.’