The East Wing of the White House is a good metaphor for American right now. It’s being torn down and torn apart, and it has been for a while. It was frustrating to lay in a hospital bed and watch the Democratic Party implode itself in 2024, and it’s been frustrating as I’ve healed to be sidelined and out of the fight. I’d venture a guess that nobody won more elections in the Lehigh Valley over the last 15 years as a campaign operative than me (there are other good ones), and probably not many won as many as me beyond the Valley’s borders, and I was basically rendered helpless, and forgotten by some. I’m a competitive person, and that plays into the frustration, but the bigger point is that when bad people of all political stripes win elections, people get hurt. Not usually powerful people, but people who can’t afford to get hurt. The shutdowns in Washington and Harrisburg, over genuinely dumb policy positions, are no way to run a society. Ripping health care from tens of millions of people is no way to run a society. Pushing junk public health policy is no way to run a society. But that’s what we’ve got.

So anyway, I joined a federal super pac this week. I’ll say more about it later, but the purpose is to push old fashioned Democratic values, supporting the hard working people who made and make this country great. We’ll take on all enemies, from any political angle, who want to plunge this country into chaos and division.

Ok, that’s enough personal news for now.

Venezuela and Bolivia are actively rejecting Marxist ideology as their nations fail. The Cuban government is turning to foreign capitalists to solve their liquidity crisis, because Socialism has failed there. Socialism is collapsing across our hemisphere. Yet, Democratic Socialism is finding at least empathizers, if not outright sympathizers, all over the Democratic Party.

Zohran Mamdani can literally take pictures with unindicted co-conspirators in an infamous terror attack in New York City, refuse to call for Hamas to end, and say and do any number of outrageous things and there are Democrats backing him anyway, Democrats he has attacked. The Shapiro Administration and Chris DeLuzio are falling all over themselves to help a guy who stiffed his mother-in-law get to Congress from here in the Lehigh Valley. Graham Platner in Maine has damn Nazi tattoos and there are people defending him, saying “he was only 37,” and “he didn’t know what he got tattooed on himself,” as though that sounds better? Martin Heinrich, a ****ing U.S. Senator from New Mexico, literally still says he’s a good candidate. In fact, he goes further, to say he “obviously” doesn’t like this, but the real lesson is “stay off Reddit.” You cannot make this shit up.

You know, when Bernie started running for President as an already old man, it was stupid and all, but there were some half baked policies being discusses. “Medicare 4 All,” “Defund the Police,” and “Green New Deal” were all somewhere between not fully thought out plans (that could have been finished plans) and poorly thought up, stupid ideas that took actual problems and created new problems from them, but there was policy here. We are now at the point where “globalize the Intifada” and “you have to accept some Nazis to win back men” are actual arguments of the American left. I guess we could see this coming when “tough guy from Braddock” got a guy elected in 2022 who was in no way ready to serve in the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania, but one would have thought that Fetterman’s utter and complete failure as a human being, let alone as a Senator, would have stopped that. It’s bad enough that he won’t fight for people’s health care, the guy has literally turned into an internet troll against the people who supported him in 2022 over Israel, an issue where I may agree with him more than not, but still find his cavalier, childish behavior disgusting.But we’re not just considering doing that again- we’re doing it on steroids.

Kamala Harris did not lose in 2024 because she moved too far right. That might make you sleep better at night, you might even be able to twist some parts of the story to make that seem plausible. Trump hasn’t gone up in every one of his three elections though, in raw votes and percentage, because the Democrats moved right. Millions of Biden voters, objectively considered the most moderate Democratic nominee in the post-Obama era, didn’t sit out the 2024 Election because the Democrats moved right. It’s a nice story that “Dearborn cost Harris Michigan,” but they voted against Biden in the primary and moved the numbers zero, they voted against Whitmer in 2022 and she won easily. Sure, in very blue enclaves it doesn’t matter if you nominate Zohran Mamdani, he’ll probably win. And then you can hope that he is able to enact some of the more popular policy stuff on housing and buses, and maybe all the “Intifada” talk goes away. At best, it’s a net neutral in competitive Congressional Districts, and my guess is it is much worse in the five or so neighboring seats to the city that might decide who wins the House. Of course, that message gets ignored. So much of the Democratic Party has decided to believe the myth that Dem-Socialist Populism is the only way to turn out the youth, who are the only way to win an election. They’re not only wrong, they’re exactly wrong.

Every vote Democrats have gained in the Trump era has come from the exact opposite of this populist brain rot. Kamala Harris became the first Democrat in my lifetime to carry college educated white men. Democratic midterm success in 2018, and to a large extent in 2022 was built off of college educated white voters and middle class Black and Latino voters. Joe Biden rode increased Black voter turnout and gains with college educated white voters to the most votes in American history. Bernie Sanders actually did worse the second time he tried to run for President. I get it, the guy has a following, he can get a crowd and a donor off the internet for you. What he can’t do is win you an election outside of a deep blue district. If you watched Sara Gideon get savaged in the closing days of the 2020 Maine Senate race with attacks that she supported “defunding the police,” and you think the answer to that is to nominate the guy with the Nazi tattoo who wants to take the party in a left populist direction, you’re a lunatic. It’s stupid, it’s not backed up in data, and it’s not backed up in facts. If you want to move on from “centering identity politics,” because “Hillary and Kamala lost,” I get that there’s a strategic argument to be had about what we talk about and how, but that’s very different from selling out the people who might vote for us for people who are loons and wackos, won’t vote for us, and will make us look even crazier than we already do. We’ve spent a decade trying to shame Republican supposed moderates into abandoning Trump, and they’ve spent a decade calling us hypocrites. In these people, we actually might prove them right.

With the brief exception of right before the election, Donald Trump has been historically unpopular for ten years now. Most Presidents have a period of time in which they are very popular with the public, at a minimum after their inauguration. Trump never got there. He’s the first and only President to win twice and lose the popular vote twice, and not hit 50% in any of three runs. Many Democratic policy positions are reasonably popular, and even now they are winning on most issue polling. Most ballot initiatives, from expanding health insurance to protecting abortion rights, to funding schools, to protecting the environment, to legalizing weed, and so on, pass even in red states. Democrats may even win in both New Jersey and Virginia, not to mention the NYC Mayoral race and Pennsylvania Supreme Court retentions this Fall. There are a lot of reasons to think that Democrats could have a very good midterm, and Republicans could have a very bad one. And yet, there’s a lot of reasons to not think that too.

Anecdotal evidence on the ground here in Pennsylvania shows GOP gains in the turnout battle for 2025. There have been weak polls and anecdotal evidence in New Jersey of similar sluggishness in the Democratic Party. Talk to most professionals and they’ll tell you online fundraising has not picked back up since the 2024 Election. The enthusiasm isn’t great. It’s not a sure sign of defeat. It’s problematic though.

Polling on the Democratic Party, rather than their positions, suggests that just about everyone reviles this party right now. Conservatives and Republicans hate the Democratic Party, obviously. Leftists and Democratic Socialists hate the party too, for not radicalizing. Centrist and moderate Democrats generally think the party has lost it’s mind and doesn’t know how to win. Most of the major national figures in the Democratic Party are at least partially controversial to the Democratic base, if not the whole country. Many of the key national policy fights right now, such as “law and order,” immigration, trans-rights, and Gaza are fights that divide Democrats and tend to poll favorably for the GOP. This is astounding given the deep cuts to health care, the environment, student loans, and education that were just carried out in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” but Trump is managing to push these issues to the forefront through over-the-top actions.

A lot of people in the Democratic tent want to take this time to argue about ideology and “the Overton Window,” and all kinds of largely academic fights that don’t mean anything and won’t change our fortunes right now. Tweaking our position on student loans or health care really isn’t going to change matters very much. Democrats have two main macro-sized problems that are going to drown out any nuance anyway.

1. Voters don’t like who they think we are. This is sort of self-explanatory. Conservatives think Democrats are a bunch of wimpy nerds who want to make them eat kale, listen to some scientist tell them every decision to make in their lives, and want them to believe that terrorists, criminals, and illegal immigrants are the good guys, but the cops in their town are the bad guys. Leftists and Democratic Socialists think Democrats are a bunch of wimps who will either roll over and play dead in any policy fight, or are bought already and will sell out, or worse yet, are just a bunch of rich privileged kids that want to stay important. Then there’s the rank and file Democratic voter, who generally thinks we’re concerned with matters that don’t matter enough to people’s lives, and are losing elections because we attach ourselves to niche cause we can.
2. Voters are unenthusiastic at best about the product we’re selling them. We have spent a lot of time fighting about whether we should have more or less identity in our politics, more or less economic ideology in our politics, or that we’re just packaging both wrong. Here’s the reality- a guy who is not popular with the overall public continues to grow his vote share in each election. We can argue about whether it was dislike directly toward Hillary and Kamala, or dislike with our policies, or something else, but voters do not like what we are offering them. I hear a lot of activists saying we can’t morally re-consider even what positions we talk about, much less moderate on them, but the reality is that what we’re doing now doesn’t work. The guy who was perceived as the most moderate candidate beat the crap out of 20 or so Democratic primary candidates and then won a majority to defeat Trump. Once he was seen as feeble and compromised to the party, we have had nothing. Clearly re-running the last decade isn’t going to work.

It is entirely possible that the Democrats can win in 2025 and 2026 without really changing anything. They almost certainly won’t win the Senate, as Democrats hold exactly zero seats right now in states Trump won all three times, and they would need to claw back seats in places like Iowa, Ohio, and Florida, which maybe they do once, but not across the board. In the House though it’s close, and most of the GOP members did take a vote to gut Medicaid. The Republicans were deeply unpopular in 2010 and won over 60 seats. Of course, they lost two years later. It wasn’t until they found a standard bearer that motivated voters and was “different” than the Bush Era GOP that they took back the whole government.

This is really unpopular with some of the most motivated Democrats, but here’s the reality- Democrats should run fairly normal (to regular people, not us), frankly successful people for office, and they should run on things that voters care about and agree with us on. No, I’m not saying you have to change your position on protecting trans kids from bullying, nor do I think you should. I am saying campaigning on broad amnesty for illegal immigrants or defunding the police is stupid and will lose us elections. Saying the War in Gaza should end is fairly easy and mostly agreeable, but don’t defend Hamas or say “Globalize the Intifada.” It’s a loser position. Raising the minimum wage, fixing the student loan system, making more people eligible for overtime, funding schools, building more affordable housing, legalizing marijuana- these are things that most people can support. If it sounds like I’m avoiding some of the bigger social fights, I’m not necessarily. I think we can win running on abortion rights and really most fights that involve protecting the rights of an individual to live how they chose. I think lecturing America about every social ailment it has though has gone piss poor for us, and has backed us into a political corner. So yes, I would try to run a product that people might relate to or even want. If that means talking a little differently to voters, I think the evidence is pretty clear we need to do that.