Agree on all fronts, and will add my strongly held belief that all politics is local. The national narrative about Zohran Mamdani’s win ignores the different results 2 weeks earlier in neighboring NJ.
Big tent, big victories, common ground, compromise.
We do tend to field high quality candidates who are qualified to run a government. That’s a unique characteristic of our party that we don’t seem to appreciate enough.
But the Democratic party is in the toilet because of the opinion of … Democrats. Oh, yes, some Independents also, but mostly us.
It’s the outcome of somehow letting a doddering candidate older than Bill Clinton (who was elected 33 years ago!) run for office.
The fix is two-part. Let’s make sure the fools around Biden at the time, and those who ran the campaign never have influence in the party again. They can make a living as talking heads on TV, writing books, or starting podcasts.
The second part is something the party has done several times. Continue to open up the nominating process to make it even more accessible and Democratic. Should we require incumbent presidents to seek a nomination for a second term? Perhaps. Should we require all nominees to take a course in How to Avoid Baited Questions? Absolutely.
Should we require all nominees to take a course in How to Avoid Baited Questions? Absolutely.
10000%, I'm stunned at how often Dems just fumble opportunities to boost themselves and attack the opposition. Pete, Newsom (whatever one may think of him as a candidate), Shapiro, and maybe a couple of others are the only ones I've seen do it consistently and meaningfully. Most just fall back to "it's racist/homophobic/islamophobic/xenophobic/patriarchal/we should be Denmark". I can't even watch, because it's so cringe.
The stress I feel during every midterm/special election bounce back is this: with two viable (meaning that they can get elected, not that they’re actually viable to govern) parties, when the persuadable voters get sick of one they elect the other. But substantive change is generally what most voters are looking for, and if there’s no sizable majority, the Democrats can’t make substantive change. So then the voters flip back to Republicans. It’s a broken system for many reasons, but until the Democrats have a serious majority that can deliver what the voters are looking for, we’re going to be stuck in this vortex.
Sad but true. Should we be able to fight the antidemocratic headwinds and regain the trifecta in 2028 (G-d willing), we cannot let the opportunity pass to create real, unmistakable change. And that must start with nationwide voting reform and Supreme Court expansion, or nothing else we do will stick.
Thank you for this broad perspective. I was enthused about the special elections going into 2024 but this really explains well why we lost the big one. But one thing to keep in mind for 2028 is that many of those disgruntled voters that aren’t highly motivated but supported Trump in 2024 are going to have a new target to blame for their predicament in 2028.
I am involved in grassroots work and I can tell you in my community people are just as fired up as the were in the first term and I think with each new administration horror they get more fired up! I believe there is a saying that all politics are local. The president and his GOP stooges can say whatever they want but people know what is true.
Thanks Dan. Will take sunshine when we can get it.
One thing about Dem enthusiasm / resistance: I would say mine is 100+%. However, with the 5-8 fundraising texts I get EVERYDAY, I delete and report them all as junk. I refuse to give money via third party platforms. Down the line, I will give money to candidates in my districts directly.
Please keep on writing about this Dem darkside of fundraising and how to bust this open. It's bad!! Keep bringing awareness to this issue.
From Dan's article on 7/30/25, Still, here are a few steps we can take:
ActBlue Reforms:
ActBlue is the central fundraising platform for Democrats. Everything—good and bad—flows through it. Last year, over 100 Democratic fundraisers signed a letter urging reforms to limit spam and crack down on sketchy tactics. Those reforms should be implemented.
Name and Shame:
Democratic leaders and progressive influencers should call out candidates and groups that spam supporters or use misleading appeals. In 2024, the Harris campaign publicly rebuked scam PACs that exploited her name. More of that, please.
Educated Giving:
It’s fine to give to long-shot candidates. Sometimes they win. Even when they don’t, investing in red districts can help build long-term infrastructure. But donors should give with their eyes wide open. Trusted groups should help voters direct their money to where it will make the biggest impact. Crooked Media’s Vote Save America does this well, identifying high-impact races based on polling and insider intel. Others should follow suit.
Just gonna keep saying this and hopefully I’m wrong but if Mikie Sherrill doesn’t start running a campaign that feels like it was strategized and poll tested to within an inch of its life by the same misguided operatives who unerringly sucked every bit of the energy and excitement out of the Harris/Walz campaign, and also running like her election is a foregone conclusion, NJ is going to elect a MAGA a-hole as our new governor in November. He’s running on a clear message of lowering property taxes and costs (obviously he’s lying) she running on a muddy message of “that guy is trump’s ally” and “I was in the military” and then, at the end, “oh yeah, I’ll do some stuff about how expensive it is to live in NJ”.
Sherrill needs to inject some energy into her campaign and, imho, needs to allude to soft succession by just saying we should keep more NJ tax dollars in NJ. She is a somewhat problematic politician in the first place and her lackluster campaign is not making her feel any better to her skeptics. Again, let’s hope I’m wrong.
Thanks for this, Dan. Curious how these signs of hope factor into calculus for potential government shutdown? I could see Senior Congressional Leadership citing the favorable Special Election results as reasons why the Democratic Message is spreading, and the government should not be shutdown. Thoughts?
I don’t know about you, but I am nervous about shutdown/no shutdown. On the one hand, I am somewhat turned off by the shutdown folks who want a fight. They can’t seem to answer if there’s any part of a fight we can win, or what we could win, before inevitably folding. On the other hand, folding without a fight would seem likely to re-ignite the “I’m a Democrat and I hate my party” self-loathers.
Now, Before the Midterms: There should be a massive effort to place a billboard on every major highway on the outskirts of every major town in every Red District in the Country identifying by name the U.S. Representative who voted for the Big Ugly Bill listing the eventual damages it will do to its citizens. The same should be done in every State with a Republican Senator up for reelection. Much of the bad stuff will not be apparent to voters until after the midterms; consequently, Democratic Party messaging between now and then is critical! We need to be in Republican Faces Every Day like they are in ours. I Think Mobile Billboards Would Also Work Well.
JUST AN EXAMPLE: " Your Representative in Congress, (first name, last name) Just Voted to slash Your Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP Benefits to Pay for Tax Cuts for the Rich! VOTE HIM (HER) OUT." Is that a slight overstatement of facts? Certainly, but that's what Republicans do all the time and we need to counterattack using the same tactics and be UBIQUITOUS about it, e.g., Billboards.
Each Billboard's message presupposes that Democrats in each District are smart enough to identity the hot button issues that will resonate with the intended Republican audience, be it Faxes, FEMA Support, Economy, Medical Coverage, infrastructure, Tariffs, etc. If Dems can't pinpoint the right issues, then billboards will have little effect.
Disengaged, ill informed voters are into fascism; highly engaged, well-informed voters are into democratic socialism (says this extremely tired and nervous New Yorker). The political spectrum is officially too broad.
Did anyone except the extreme fringe MAGA party members vote for fascism? I really don’t think so. They voted for the promise of economic change and against border chaos. And against a party that allowed a far-too-old-for-the-job president to run again.
I agree that they got the fascism Dem candidates warned about. But I can’t think it was intentional.
Thanks, Dan. I needed this small life preserver while drowning in a sea of deception and delusion. It is time to pull myself up and get back to the shore, where we will fight another day.
Do you think the republicans gerrymandering in TX and MO could cause more Independents and possibly some old school Republicans to vote for the Dems and counteract the new maps? Should I take my rose colored glasses off to think GOP Americans would be disgusted by the power grab?
Good to read this, Dan. We just had a Republican flip to Dem in our Oregon state legislature, and I hope others follow. We do already have a super majority of Dems, but his point was that the party had devolved and he didn't want to go further with it.
Thanks, Dan. Need hope, based in facts, wherever we can get it!!
Agree on all fronts, and will add my strongly held belief that all politics is local. The national narrative about Zohran Mamdani’s win ignores the different results 2 weeks earlier in neighboring NJ.
Big tent, big victories, common ground, compromise.
Lots of wisdom in just two sentences and one phrase :-).
That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me in a very long time! Thank you.
When Mikie Sherrill and Elizabeth Spanberger win their races handily, the mmomentum will get even bigger
It’s Abigail Spanberger.
We do tend to field high quality candidates who are qualified to run a government. That’s a unique characteristic of our party that we don’t seem to appreciate enough.
But the Democratic party is in the toilet because of the opinion of … Democrats. Oh, yes, some Independents also, but mostly us.
It’s the outcome of somehow letting a doddering candidate older than Bill Clinton (who was elected 33 years ago!) run for office.
The fix is two-part. Let’s make sure the fools around Biden at the time, and those who ran the campaign never have influence in the party again. They can make a living as talking heads on TV, writing books, or starting podcasts.
The second part is something the party has done several times. Continue to open up the nominating process to make it even more accessible and Democratic. Should we require incumbent presidents to seek a nomination for a second term? Perhaps. Should we require all nominees to take a course in How to Avoid Baited Questions? Absolutely.
Should we require all nominees to take a course in How to Avoid Baited Questions? Absolutely.
10000%, I'm stunned at how often Dems just fumble opportunities to boost themselves and attack the opposition. Pete, Newsom (whatever one may think of him as a candidate), Shapiro, and maybe a couple of others are the only ones I've seen do it consistently and meaningfully. Most just fall back to "it's racist/homophobic/islamophobic/xenophobic/patriarchal/we should be Denmark". I can't even watch, because it's so cringe.
The stress I feel during every midterm/special election bounce back is this: with two viable (meaning that they can get elected, not that they’re actually viable to govern) parties, when the persuadable voters get sick of one they elect the other. But substantive change is generally what most voters are looking for, and if there’s no sizable majority, the Democrats can’t make substantive change. So then the voters flip back to Republicans. It’s a broken system for many reasons, but until the Democrats have a serious majority that can deliver what the voters are looking for, we’re going to be stuck in this vortex.
Sad but true. Should we be able to fight the antidemocratic headwinds and regain the trifecta in 2028 (G-d willing), we cannot let the opportunity pass to create real, unmistakable change. And that must start with nationwide voting reform and Supreme Court expansion, or nothing else we do will stick.
Thank you for this broad perspective. I was enthused about the special elections going into 2024 but this really explains well why we lost the big one. But one thing to keep in mind for 2028 is that many of those disgruntled voters that aren’t highly motivated but supported Trump in 2024 are going to have a new target to blame for their predicament in 2028.
I am involved in grassroots work and I can tell you in my community people are just as fired up as the were in the first term and I think with each new administration horror they get more fired up! I believe there is a saying that all politics are local. The president and his GOP stooges can say whatever they want but people know what is true.
Thanks Dan. Will take sunshine when we can get it.
One thing about Dem enthusiasm / resistance: I would say mine is 100+%. However, with the 5-8 fundraising texts I get EVERYDAY, I delete and report them all as junk. I refuse to give money via third party platforms. Down the line, I will give money to candidates in my districts directly.
Please keep on writing about this Dem darkside of fundraising and how to bust this open. It's bad!! Keep bringing awareness to this issue.
https://www.messageboxnews.com/p/the-high-cost-of-spam-how-dem-fundraising:
From Dan's article on 7/30/25, Still, here are a few steps we can take:
ActBlue Reforms:
ActBlue is the central fundraising platform for Democrats. Everything—good and bad—flows through it. Last year, over 100 Democratic fundraisers signed a letter urging reforms to limit spam and crack down on sketchy tactics. Those reforms should be implemented.
Name and Shame:
Democratic leaders and progressive influencers should call out candidates and groups that spam supporters or use misleading appeals. In 2024, the Harris campaign publicly rebuked scam PACs that exploited her name. More of that, please.
Educated Giving:
It’s fine to give to long-shot candidates. Sometimes they win. Even when they don’t, investing in red districts can help build long-term infrastructure. But donors should give with their eyes wide open. Trusted groups should help voters direct their money to where it will make the biggest impact. Crooked Media’s Vote Save America does this well, identifying high-impact races based on polling and insider intel. Others should follow suit.
Just gonna keep saying this and hopefully I’m wrong but if Mikie Sherrill doesn’t start running a campaign that feels like it was strategized and poll tested to within an inch of its life by the same misguided operatives who unerringly sucked every bit of the energy and excitement out of the Harris/Walz campaign, and also running like her election is a foregone conclusion, NJ is going to elect a MAGA a-hole as our new governor in November. He’s running on a clear message of lowering property taxes and costs (obviously he’s lying) she running on a muddy message of “that guy is trump’s ally” and “I was in the military” and then, at the end, “oh yeah, I’ll do some stuff about how expensive it is to live in NJ”.
Sherrill needs to inject some energy into her campaign and, imho, needs to allude to soft succession by just saying we should keep more NJ tax dollars in NJ. She is a somewhat problematic politician in the first place and her lackluster campaign is not making her feel any better to her skeptics. Again, let’s hope I’m wrong.
Thanks for this, Dan. Curious how these signs of hope factor into calculus for potential government shutdown? I could see Senior Congressional Leadership citing the favorable Special Election results as reasons why the Democratic Message is spreading, and the government should not be shutdown. Thoughts?
I don’t know about you, but I am nervous about shutdown/no shutdown. On the one hand, I am somewhat turned off by the shutdown folks who want a fight. They can’t seem to answer if there’s any part of a fight we can win, or what we could win, before inevitably folding. On the other hand, folding without a fight would seem likely to re-ignite the “I’m a Democrat and I hate my party” self-loathers.
Now, Before the Midterms: There should be a massive effort to place a billboard on every major highway on the outskirts of every major town in every Red District in the Country identifying by name the U.S. Representative who voted for the Big Ugly Bill listing the eventual damages it will do to its citizens. The same should be done in every State with a Republican Senator up for reelection. Much of the bad stuff will not be apparent to voters until after the midterms; consequently, Democratic Party messaging between now and then is critical! We need to be in Republican Faces Every Day like they are in ours. I Think Mobile Billboards Would Also Work Well.
JUST AN EXAMPLE: " Your Representative in Congress, (first name, last name) Just Voted to slash Your Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP Benefits to Pay for Tax Cuts for the Rich! VOTE HIM (HER) OUT." Is that a slight overstatement of facts? Certainly, but that's what Republicans do all the time and we need to counterattack using the same tactics and be UBIQUITOUS about it, e.g., Billboards.
Each Billboard's message presupposes that Democrats in each District are smart enough to identity the hot button issues that will resonate with the intended Republican audience, be it Faxes, FEMA Support, Economy, Medical Coverage, infrastructure, Tariffs, etc. If Dems can't pinpoint the right issues, then billboards will have little effect.
Disengaged, ill informed voters are into fascism; highly engaged, well-informed voters are into democratic socialism (says this extremely tired and nervous New Yorker). The political spectrum is officially too broad.
Did anyone except the extreme fringe MAGA party members vote for fascism? I really don’t think so. They voted for the promise of economic change and against border chaos. And against a party that allowed a far-too-old-for-the-job president to run again.
I agree that they got the fascism Dem candidates warned about. But I can’t think it was intentional.
Thanks, Dan. I needed this small life preserver while drowning in a sea of deception and delusion. It is time to pull myself up and get back to the shore, where we will fight another day.
Maybe we should rebrand the Democratic Party to the small-d democracy party. It’s the belief in democracy that sets us apart now.
Do you think the republicans gerrymandering in TX and MO could cause more Independents and possibly some old school Republicans to vote for the Dems and counteract the new maps? Should I take my rose colored glasses off to think GOP Americans would be disgusted by the power grab?
Good to read this, Dan. We just had a Republican flip to Dem in our Oregon state legislature, and I hope others follow. We do already have a super majority of Dems, but his point was that the party had devolved and he didn't want to go further with it.