Getting back up: Post-election takeaways

Six tips to finding your way, three observations on what happened, and four ideas for moving forward.

Like many of you, I was in a state of shock after November 5th, but I’ve begun piecing together thoughts on why Republicans won the election and what that means moving forward. Before we get to that (and feel free to skip ahead), I have six initial thoughts about handling this moment, a gameplan for coping: 

• First, there’s no wrong way to feel right now - mad, sad, numb, focused, motivated, scared. I know plenty of people in a state of disassociation, not ready to engage with the terrible consequences we’ll be facing in the years ahead. Others see rolling up their sleeves as a way to get through it. Right now all stages of processing are valid. 

• Second, it’s still too early for sophisticated hot takes. We still don’t know everything we’re going to know about who voted and why they voted the way they did. Yes, Democrats need to better connect with working class voters, but understanding why working class voters turned away (policies, cultural identification, information systems, political strategy, etc.) and coming up with solutions is premature. Every day I held off on writing this felt more informed than the day before, and I reserve the right to amend these opinions a few weeks from now.

  • That said, Ezra Klein, the Podcast Bros and their consultant friends have wasted no time inanely punching left, forcing me to take out of my weekend to write a rebuttal thread to Klein’s last podcast. (Full version on Substack here.) 

• Third, this is a really good time to unplug and take personal time for yourself, family, and broader community. Unless you are involved in the long shot Congressional lame duck sessions, there’s really no better time to check out. The real fights won’t begin until January when Trump is sworn in.

• Fourth, once you’re ready to dive back in, find your unique lane. We need people doing everything from direct action to deep organizing to extracting rare policy wins. Many groups will need money, and if you have it (especially if you benefited from the post-election stock market bump), donate! I’m already seeing a divide between people who want to protect vulnerable communities like undocumented immigrants and trans people, versus those focused on winning back working class voters in purple districts. Both are worthy and important projects! I’m here for any readers who are unsure of how to do that.

• Fifth, help is on the way. Many of us are so worn out already, particularly the Millennial generation that did the heaviest lifting during the first Trump administration. The good news is that new energy is coming. I’m not sure who these leaders are, just as most people couldn’t have named the dynamic leaders who emerged in 2017 and 2018. Let’s wrap new leaders in our support, because we need them. 

• Lastly, there is a fine line between concern and panic. This is Donald Trump and his worst enablers, with unfettered power. There is no ceiling as to the horrible things they may try. But those horrible things haven’t happened yet, and may go awry for any number of reasons, most obviously because Trump has a dismal history of following through, and has even fewer competent people around him than last time. Of course we should be making preparations to push back against some of the most terrifying Project 2025 proposals. So we should buckle up for the worst, but not panic that the worst is inevitable, because panic leads to paralysis. 

How do we assess this moment? 

Like I said up top, there’s still a lot that we don’t know about what transpired on November 5th. Did the country really “move right”, or did Republicans show up while Democrats didn’t? Why did Latinos swing so hard towards Trump? Did field matter? What about Harris offering no vision for the future? Also, there is no single reason any candidate wins or loses a national election, though Waleed Shahid has done us the service of compelling the most commonly cited explanations. But here are a few observations I’ve had or agreed with in the past two weeks:

First, even a win would have required reflection. I have no doubt that a shift of several tactics could have delivered the necessary vote differential to win the electoral college. But even then, we still would be left with the reality that Trump, running a chaotic, quasi-fascistic campaign would have come very close to winning. That requires reflection from EVERYONE on the left hand side of the dial: Democratic leaders, campaign operatives, nonprofit advocates, comms people, rich funders, lefties, moderates, centrists…When you lose this badly, everyone has to take some responsibility and do better. 

Second, recent history suggests that Trump’s hold on power could be shorter than the “democracy is doomed” scenario. Adam Last’s piece in Bulwark making this potential case resonated with me. After the bitterly disappointing 2004 election, Republicans controlled a trifecta and seemed even more organized & ascendant than they do now. Months later President Bush’s approval rating was in freefall, Democrats won back the House in 2006, and in 2008 Barack Obama won the presidency. These days, history moves even faster. In my advocacy work I’ve seen the public shift back and forth in their opinions with increasing rapidity, a function of 24 hours news and social media. This cuts both ways, and could cut against Trump. Finally, we are living through a rare period in American history where the parties are trading power back and forth almost every election cycle. My partner Cristina pointed out that this has been the case for a while in Puerto Rico, where a party wins running against the failures of the incumbents, only to be swept out when they fail to address those same problems. That is a piece of what is happening in America now. 

Third, It’s the Culture, Stupid! Since the election, pundits have been trumpeting the old James Carville line from 1992, “it’s the economy, stupid!” The economy is always important, but I think something else is going on here. After all, the economy is doing pretty well, and to the extent it isn’t, Republicans have no solutions to help working class people. What’s happening, in my view, is that there has been a shift in various cultural groups on the acceptability of voting Republican. 

Consider this: in some cultural groups it is socially unacceptable to support Democrats (White Evangelicals, hardcore gun owners) or unacceptable to support Republicans (older Black voters, university professors). Each side has a few groups like this, and then there are plenty of cultural groups where people vote for both, like middle class suburbanites or trade unionists. Over the last few years, the walls have started to crack around previously reliable Democratic subgroups, like young people, Latinos¹, Indian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, etc. They now have fewer groups where voting Republican is unacceptable. In contrast, Republicans have been racking up more cultural subgroups, like military and law enforcement families, gamer bros, and rural communities, where voting for a Democrat is unacceptable. After a while the math starts mathing - that’s how no matter how bad things got for him, Trump had a decent foundation of support.

This “cultural theory” is related to the information ecosystem theory. Now that there are so many massive right-wing information networks that are utterly one-sided on TV, radio, and the internet, if a cultural group adopts that information network, there’s almost no way for a liberal/Democratic message to penetrate.  This is why it only takes a few cycles for a place to go from narrowly to overwhelmingly Republican, something you don’t see often on the Democratic side. 

What’s the gameplan for where we go from here? 

First, Republicans need to be challenged everywhere. That’s our plan for organizing in Staten Island. As I mentioned above, in this cultural and media landscape, ceding any town, Congressional district or state to Republicans even briefly starts a slippery slope that makes it much harder to reclaim that place, and ultimately hurts statewide math. That means showing up in places where Democrats aren’t popular now to build relationships, defy stereotypes, and make a case for a different vision than the nihilism offered by today’s Republican party. As I’ve written before, Democrats desperately need to expand the map to ever regain the Senate or Presidency. That starts with contesting everywhere. I’ll be very interested to see how prevalent this concept is in the upcoming DNC race, the first opportunity for the national party to start finding its way forward. (I also liked this piece about how to approach political organizing in a Bowling Alone America.)

Second, neither left-wing purity nor lukewarm moderatism will revive the Democratic Party. Instead, both approaches should be marginalized, and a robust message of economic opportunity should lead in rebuilding the party and the progressive movement. There’s a lot of love on the left for Bernie Sanders and his message, but he needs a 21st century updating. His approach is great for supporting workers, but where his message falls short is that there are a lot of low to middle income Americans, particularly in our generation and younger, who see themselves as entrepreneurs (however successful or unsuccessful), not as "workers". To the extent they care about politicians at all, it's how politicians will help them succeed in their business and get ahead. Also, with so many of our generation and younger hopping from job to job, or in the gig economy, or moonlighting as "consultants", there needs to be a message of economic advancement that goes beyond 1930s labor solidarity rhetoric, where Bernie comes from. The Biden administration was actually on the right track with this when it came to the massive opportunities created by the clean energy economy, but they were terrible at messaging it. (Try selling people on “the Inflation Reduction Act” as a green jobs program.)

Third, Democrats need to govern better, way better.  New York is, along with California, Exhibit A for Republicans pointing out liberal dysfunction. If we can’t build housing, or maintain a good transit system, or provide good social services despite massive taxes, what does that say about liberalism? Because so many of the readers here are New Yorkers, I’ll remind you that we must remain focused on defeating Eric Adams in an election a mere seven months away. Progressives here are almost as unhappy with Governor Kathy Hochul as they are with Adams, so working in her administration is hardly attractive. But if we get a good mayor in 2025 and good governor in 2026, it will behoove our best and brightest to go back into government and prove that our ideas can work. 

Fourth, Democrats need to get ahead of the most important issues facing our country. I’ve previously mentioned the fentanyl crisis as something that touches every corner of the country, but that hasn’t been addressed in any serious way by either party. Meanwhile, AI could be one of the most disruptive economic forces of the rest of the decade. What is the progressive response to that, and what is the Democratic response to that, given how beholden the party’s fundraising is to Silicon Valley? Toughest of all, given how terribly the immigration conversation is going already, how are Democrats going to wrestle with the global disruption caused by climate change, which will only lead to more international migration in the years to come? We need our smartest thinkers working on these issues and feeding them to our most brilliant messengers before all of them are defined by Republicans. 

I’ve just thrown a lot at you, with the enormous caveat I want to listen and learn from a lot more people before January to hone the strategies that will get us through the Project 2025 era. Your public and private responses are welcome. As my old boss Glenn used to say, “none of us is in danger of figuring all of this out.” 

What I can tell you for sure is that I will never stop fighting for a fairer economic and justice system, and I’ll also never give up on peoples’ capacity to evolve, change, and collaborate. In organizing you learn the term, “no permanent friends, no permanent enemies.” The majority of voters in this country just chose Trump. I do not take that to mean that half the country is my enemy, but rather that we have a lot of work to do connecting with people to share a more uplifting vision for the future, and then get to work making it happen. 

Postgame: I was recently named to the Council on Criminal Justice, a national, bipartisan network of criminal justice leaders from across the country modeled off the Council on Foreign Relations. I’m honored and excited for the opportunity. 

I’ve also joined Bluesky, feel free to follow me there. 

1. As Cristina has pointed out, Latinos are not only incredibly diverse culturally, but they are far less likely to hold onto “Latino” as their core racial identity, and some can see themselves and align themselves with whiteness. This allows them to be part of the “in” group for debates around race, immigration, etc.