Aloha Reader,

Hurricane Lala devastated Kaʻū last weekend, and recovery there will take months, not days. While some of us on the Indivisible Hawaiʻi Statewide Network (IHSN) leadership team lost power for days, our neighbors in Kaʻū lost homes, water, and access to food, their hospital, and their school. Two kupuna lost their lives. If you want to donate or volunteer, Vibrant Hawaiʻi has been providing assistance and updates on points of distribution.

Here in the Pacific, it's been quite a year, with the Kona lows and Hurricane Lala. To make things worse, it looks like additional storms may hit us while we're down. It's a reminder of how much we depend on each other. That's aloha: showing up for your family and neighbors.

It's just as clear that we depend on good, clean government. We're thankful for the emergency response locally, and federal emergency support matters just as much. That's one of many reasons we care who's in Congress making decisions about disaster funding and infrastructure. We're grateful to Representative Jill Tokuda for visiting Kaʻū immediately to work on the federal response.

Last Sunday — right after Lala hit the Big Island, while it was still barreling toward the rest of the islands — we sent our regular newsletter. We got two very different reactions. One reader told us it was well done. Another told us, in no uncertain terms, that sending political content while Kaʻū was still reeling felt tone-deaf. Thank you for the candid, critical feedback. Keep sending it.

That message lands with us. But we don't get to pick between grief and urgency — not with 72 days until the midterms. Caring for Kaʻū and building toward November aren't competing priorities. They're both how we take care of each other right now.

In this issue

• Fighting apathy
• Seizing this moment
• Building a blue wave
• General election kickoff webinar with Representative Jill Tokuda
• On the radar

Fighting apathy

After the Hawaiʻi primary, our team sat down and asked ourselves hard questions: What could we have done differently for our endorsed candidates? What should we have done? Turnout was disappointing, and the honest answer is that what we did simply wasn't enough.

Part of the problem is a knowledge gap. Many voters think the general election is the one that counts. But Hawaiʻi has been governed by one party for decades — so the Democratic primary is our real chance to replace lawmakers who aren't working for us. We need the best Democrat to come out of the primary for the November election. We're building long-term plans to help close that gap, not just pushing for more turnout during election season.

Closing it is only half the fix. The other half is who's doing the informing. Hawaiʻi relies heavily on a small number of established media outlets, and part of our long-term plan is building something of our own — a way to reach people directly, without waiting for someone else's newsroom to cover what matters to us.

Seizing this moment

Now we turn to the national midterm general election, and this is where the bigger opportunity lies. We have a real chance to check Trump and hand Congress back to Democrats — that's the Blue Wave we're building toward, race by race, state by state.

It's not wishful thinking. Vox correspondent Zack Beauchamp spent months studying how authoritarian leaders like Trump lose power, and found the answer is surprisingly simple: when voters in Brazil, South Korea, Poland, and Hungary recognized the threat to their democracy and showed up in overwhelming numbers, they won it back. We're in that window right now. Over the next three months, we face one of the most profound civic obligations of our lifetimes — nobody wants to be looking at election night results wondering if they could have done more.

Building a blue wave

WIN: Mary Peltola came out on top in Alaska's nonpartisan U.S. Senate primary, taking 48% of the vote to incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan's roughly 43%. Peltola, a former U.S. Representative, was the first Alaska Native elected to Congress. Our postcarding teams have sent about 1,000 postcards to Alaska voters this cycle under Younghee and Paula's leadership — congratulations to them both for the persistent effort.

Under Alaska's system, the top 4 candidates from the primary now face each other in a ranked-choice election in November. That system gives Peltola a better chance, since she has the potential to pick up second-choice votes from moderate Republicans. She's one of our best shots at flipping a Senate seat blue — and here, like every swing state, turnout will decide it. We're now focusing postcard efforts on getting out the vote there for November.

It's one of six states where our Blue Wave initiative is targeting flippable races: Alaska, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio each have a flippable Senate seat; Iowa has two flippable House seats plus a Senate race trending more competitive; and Nebraska has a flippable House seat and rising voter frustration over fertilizer and fuel costs that's putting even its Senate race in play.

November is coming: vote, vote, vote, and make it too big to rig.

Take action: Pick one National race to focus on this week — Find an event through Mobilize — and decide how you'll show up: postcarding, phone banking, textbanking, donating, or just calling the people you know in that state. No one needs to do everything, but everyone needs to do something.

General election kickoff webinar with Rep. Jill Tokuda

We're excited to co-host an informational Zoom webinar with our Congressional District 2 (CD2) Representative, Jill Tokuda. We're fortunate to have a representative in Washington, D.C., who responds to the urgency of this moment.

This event marks the kickoff of our intensified campaign for the November midterms and our efforts to flip Congress blue.

On the agenda:

• Restoring democracy and voting rights, with Representative Tokuda and a guest from the U.S. House of Representatives
• Flipping the U.S. Congress blue, with Younghee (IHSN)
• Getting Hawaiʻi voters to the polls, with Jill's campaign manager

Take action: Wednesday, August 26, 2026, 5:30–6:30 pm HST — Register here to receive your unique Zoom link

On the radar

• We're still waiting for Hawaiʻi National Guard troops to return home and help with disaster cleanup.
• Our website remains down after a hack last week. More news soon.
• This week's big story: when a security threat forced Trump to secretly swap planes leaving a NATO summit in Turkey, several cabinet officials — including Secretary of State Marco Rubio — were left behind on what's now known as the "decoy plane." Senator Jon Ossoff drew national attention to who did make the cut, spotlighting the kind of access-driven corruption where unelected aides carry more weight than the officials Americans actually confirmed. "We are all on the decoy plane" banners have since popped up nationwide, including this one from the Visibility Brigade. It's exactly this kind of cronyism we're voting out in November.

Your donation will be matched in August

Until August 31, Indivisible National will match your donation to IHSN. For every dollar you give, National will add a dollar, up to $500 per donor. We are all volunteers, so 100% of your donations support our work and literally 0% is siphoned off for fundraising and administrative expenses. So if you’ve been considering a donation, but have been sitting on the fence, the matching funds are a good reason to jump. Donate here.

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We'll be at our local postcard parties. See you there!

Warmest Aloha

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