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Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gailan. Today, I'm once again joined by Devon Murphy Anderson and Alex Barriens, the co-founders of Meeva Scene,

a voting rights organization in Florida that's on a mission to register, educate and empower black brown and first time voters who've been historically and systematically marginalized, silenced or ignored.

Their organization is also a brand new member of the union and get out there and sign up. Join the union dot us. We need you. We need you today.

Devon and Alex, thanks for coming back and welcome back to the show. Reed, thank you so much for having us. We're so excited to be here.

Well, you know, guys, I don't know if I ever told you this, but I just want you to know that of the hundred or so episodes we recorded last year, the first episode y'all joined us on.

We don't have the luxury to walk away. It was I think one of the top five most downloaded episodes of the year. So I was really humbled by that.

I thought it was a real indication of both the message y'all have and the kind of work you're doing. So you guys just had your one year anniversary, which as we were talking about just before we turned the mic's on, it's a long year.

So Alex, why don't you start us off. Remind everybody how y'all got to where you are and how me Vesino came to be. Yeah, it has been a long year.

It feels crazy that it's only been one. It seems like we talked to you a decade ago. I'm really excited to hear that people enjoyed the episode previously.

Previously, you know, where we are now, just to refresh people's memory, you know, we came into this work because after years of working for the state party, seeing how candidates campaigns, national organizations and partners continue to miss the obvious conclusions in front of their face and take communities for granted.

They seem to have this sense that demographics are destiny and black and brown voters are their voters. They don't need to try and that's been proven false year after year in Florida and we got tired of it. We said that you know, we can do better better needs to be done. The people of Florida deserve better and so we'll just do it ourselves.

Well, and just as a reminder, Alex's background is as a boxer and Devon grew up on a lobster boat in Maine. And I'm not sure there's two professions that you could have had that would probably better prepare you for the toughness of politics or the day and day out grind of doing it like y'all are doing it in which you started something Devon because you said we've been here.

We've been basically been part of the matrix, but we're unplugging ourselves that has an incredibly liberating feeling as we know too, but it also comes with a sort of working without a net, so to speak perspective to absolutely. I mean, I think Alex and I's journeys are very different, but there are two similarities that I think have helped us in our success with me, but you know, I think number one.

Both of us for this path that we're on didn't have a role model or a guide in our lives to show us how to get to where we wanted to be and that matters because when you don't have a road map.

You have to be open minded to using every single tool at your disposal to get to where you want to be and we've carried that into me, Vesino, because every time that we get data back from the ground or we see new voter trends that perhaps challenge the headlines that we're reading.

We are open minded in understanding that maybe our preconceived notions or assumptions about communities are off and we have no problem pivoting we have no problem innovating.

And I think the second thing that's important is that both of us have had to take really extreme risks in order to build the careers that we've had in this political space and to be very clear, you know, me, Vesino was one of those risks.

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