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Anthony Thigpenn: “When I think about whether SCOPE could achieve its mission and its long-term goals without doing the voter participation piece, it’s very difficult to envision for a couple of reasons. Like I said, the heart and soul of what we do is base-building, and probably sixty or seventy percent of the time that we’re doing work, it’s organizing, it’s public policy education and public policy campaigns.  Probably thirty percent of the time, sometimes twenty percent of the time, depending on the year, is really directly voter participation work. But it’s a fundamental part. One, because of the defensive nature of it. Just having – if we didn’t be involved in it, then attacks on education, attacks on health care, all the public policy gains we’re trying to do in the public policy arena are preempted by rightwing initiatives that take the power to do the things that we want to do in a public policy arena.”