The Next Conversations

So, that sucked.

I’m seeing a lot of “now is not the time for arguing over what went wrong,” and while this may be true in the sense that we’re all terribly exhausted this very morning, it is in fact the case that we’re going to have to have some difficult conversations about what went wrong. A lot of people are going to try to put guardrails on this conversation (“well, it clearly wasn’t X, so we can exclude that from consideration”) but we need to be careful about that. This was a high turnout, high salience election and we lost by a significant margin (I don’t know what the popular vote will look like after California finally submits but it doesn’t look like it’s going to cover a 5 million vote gap). It’s obvious but it sometimes needs to be restated; political parties need to figure out how to win elections in order to put policy into place. That’s going to mean engaging with voters who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, at the very least.

What we don’t have yet is concrete demographic data on where specifically we lost, but that won’t be a long time in coming. Everyone is going to have a part in this conversation (including people in places like LGM, which are representative in their own way of slices of the Democratic coalition) and its critical that we get at least some of the right answers by 2026.

It’s gonna suck, though. The only bright spot here in Kentucky is that a measure that would have gutted public school in favor of private schools went down to resounding defeat. That’s something to build on, along with the initiative results in places like Florida and Missouri.