My number one election message to my Democratic and progressive friends won’t surprise anyone: sprint hard through the tape. Do anything you can possibly do in these final few days. Knock on doors until your knuckles are bleeding. Make phone calls until your voice is frog-like. Text people until your fingers can’t move anymore. Post to your social media accounts about Donald Trump’s bragging about how higher gas prices don’t matter because the oil companies are making so much money, and RFK, Jr talking about how the answer to higher meat prices is to buy more liver. Give contributions to candidates and groups until you are broke.
Make damn sure and talk to all your friends about voting.
And for goodness sake, go out and talk to your neighbors and coworkers and fellow parishioners about why we need a Democratic Congress, just like the young people in Serbia and Brazil did. We win by organizing and talking to people we don’t usually talk to, not just by talking to all the people we already know agree with us.
Let’s do everything we can to fight the good fight. There are 11 Senate races and at least 15 congressional races still too close to call, along with scores of Governor, AG, and other statewide races; and probably hundreds of state legislative races.
Don’t forget that after Election Day is over, Republicans will probably try all kinds of bullshit to steal our votes, so be ready to do whatever it takes to make sure the results of this election are honored.
But with Election Day this close, while driving to your door-knocking assignment or in between your call times, we need to start thinking about what’s next. And that will require thinking about what has been happening these last couple of years.
Grand pronouncements and the real lessons of the 2026 election
Once the results are in next Tuesday night and Wednesday, and very likely even before, everyone in the political world will be making grand pronouncements about what it all means. Most of those pronouncements are being written already, but mine won’t be published until after the results come in. Most people will go to their respective corners to tell a completely predictable story based on their pre-existing view of the world.
I will be a part of these discussions, have been every post-election period since leaving the Clinton White House way back when. I will come into the discussion with my usual strongly held biases — that a populist, anti-establishment message works better than mushy establishment centrism; that working-class voters who live outside of big metro areas are at least as important swing voters as upper income suburbanites; that base and swing voters both respond strongly to an economic focused message; that strong field and social media organizing is more effective than spending all your money on TV, etc. Expect to hear all that post-election.
Hopefully, though, we can get everyone to look honestly at the important things that happened in the election, even while they spin the story however they were planning to spin it before. We have to be honest with each other if we are going to win in 2028. Whether this is the blue tsunami all of us are hoping for, or some good victories but something disappointingly more modest, we need to take a hard look at what worked and what didn’t.
Just as importantly, Democrats need to acknowledge that our best messenger, our best independent expenditure project, our best strategy, was Donald Trump out on the campaign trail. Our wins this year were because of the perfect storm of Donald Trump’s idiot policies and Donald Trump’s idiot messaging, like the ‘don’t worry about gas prices, the big oil companies are raking it in’ line.
What we have already learned
Without knowing the results yet, there are a couple of things 2026 has already shown us.
First, Democrats can compete even with all the billionaire, big corporate money going against them. Forty-six of the top 50 donors to politics have given exclusively or overwhelmingly to Republicans. The biggest donor by far, easily the biggest donor of all time in one political cycle, Elon Musk, is throwing literally hundreds of millions of dollars and all his social media company’s might against us.
Yet somehow, Democrats are hanging in there. We are being badly outspent yet are still in the game, are right now favored, to win a majority in both the House and the Senate.
A side note here: for my entire 40-year career in national politics, I have heard from some Democrats that we can’t afford to be too tough in terms of taking on big money and corporate power, because we wouldn’t be able to raise the money we needed to raise to win. In this election, Democrats are showing that even with all the big money going against them, they can be competitive.
Second, we have learned that Democrats (and progressive populist Independents) can still compete with working-class voters and in rural America. We are currently competitive, running well enough with working-class voters in rural and midsize towns to have a solid chance in Senate and/or governor races in 10 red states: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas. We are strongly competing in House races with far more rural turf than we ever thought possible. Nationwide, we are far more competitive with non-college White voters and with men than we have been in many years.
Third, we learned that a message tying rising prices to political and corporate corruption had the power to bring voters to the table- both base and swing voters. More and more Democrats figured this out as the campaign went on, and by the end I felt like I was seeing it in almost every ad and debate clip I was seeing. Long before politicians figured it out, voters have figured out the deep corruption that big money donors have poisoned our system with, and they were looking for us to speak to that corruption. Now it’s time to do something about it.
But aren’t Democratic gains just because Trump is so unpopular?
The answer is certainly partly yes. Democrats shouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back for our strategic brilliance. Voters who used to be thought of as part of the Democratic base — Hispanics and young people, for example — should be considered swing voters, not solid base voters. Working-class Whites and non-urban voters came toward us, but still are highly skeptical of Democrats. The double haters who moved toward the Democrats are still double hating. And Donald Trump’s terrible policy decisions and horrendous messaging choices were far bigger factors than anything national Democrats did to win this election.
Nonetheless, going forward, Democrats have a very big opportunity. Trump has broken his electoral coalition, and it won’t be easy to put back together. For many years, pundits have been sure that America is too polarized a country to have states and districts vote one way for a president and the other party for someone of the opposite. This election will likely prove them wrong.
Democrats need to build on the economically populist, anti-corruption, paychecks and prices message they won elections with this cycle. They need to continue to do organizing and social media with young people and Hispanics. They need to build on the rural and working-class outreach work outside of the usual suspect states and districts they did this time. And when we win a trifecta in 2028, we need to deliver major structural reform to Americans desperately looking for it.
We have the chance to make 2026 and 2028 realigning elections if we build on what we did this year, and then deliver — really deliver — big change in 2029.