In the last couple of posts, I talked about the Democrats’ failing strategy and how they could – potentially – win over disaffected working-class voters. We looked at a couple of brief examples: AOC’s continued success in the House of Representatives and her outreach to voters who split their ballots and; An out trans city councilor in deep-red Kentucky who won a close race. That second bit, I now think, deserves a little more explanation about why it’s so important. So, bear with me while I go on a little digression before talking about the apathetic vote and the only hope the Democrats have to re-engage people.

If you saw any ads about campaigns running up to the 2024 election, you likely saw an unending stream of hate from the Trump campaign (and nearly all GOP candidates) directed toward trans people. I, luckily, was spared this because of a relentless approach to ad blocking that, often, cripples my own web functionality. (I do not consider this a loss.) With that amount of vitriol, you’d bank on a trans candidate in Lexington, Kentucky being obliterated in any vote. And yet, Emma Curtis won – narrowly, but she won. And yes, we must acknowledge that it is a city council vote and those, typically, are not high-engagement races. Consider, though, that high-engagement voters tend toward the conservative side. So, what does this show? To me, it shows that gender issues, trans issues, and the draw of hate is not as gnarly as I’d feared. This is, in my mind, one of the bright spots to cling to. This tells me that you can still get local progressives elected through showing up – authentically – to events.

And this, I think, is a good segue into how to get the apathetic vote. How to re-engage Americans. How to start cutting through the incredible cynicism people feel toward the political process.

Throughout my life, I’ve heard “both parties are the same.” For a chunk of time, that was not completely incorrect. Both parties were hawkish in the fallout of 9/11. Both parties turned sharp corporatist in their approaches after Reagan. The Obama years were different, but the problem faced there, centrally, was the staggering backlash toward his policies. What good the administration did (and there was a lot) was overshadowed by economic uncertainty courtesy of a neverending Great Recession as well as intentional sabotage by the GOP. The problem, there, is that over the years, America has defaulted to really only paying attention to the Presidency. For most people, keeping tabs on the skulduggery of Mitch McConnell, Boehner, Paul Ryan, and all the rest was simply not feasible. They saw the price of groceries and their rent go up and they blame the one guy they keep hearing about: Obama. It goes without saying that this is a deeply flawed perspective and needs to change, but that is the reality of the situation. By the time the GOP settled into their new strategy of crippling the government while claiming that it could never do anything right, the Obama camp had swung toward trying to appeal to independents and moderates while limiting direct outreach to working folks as a class – an incredibly ineffectual strategy as we’ve already seen.

The candidate approach

Obama’s greatest strength at the outset was tapping into FDR-style populism. He was able to talk to people in the same “fireside chat” way that FDR did and that did more to cement his wins than anything else. Even while he was being stymied by Congress, he retained that ability and could still approach people on a regular basis.

That is, ultimately, what the Democrats are lacking. You could not, in 2024, have had two more-different parties. The Trump campaign – and the GOP – ran on hate, nebulous promises, targeting minorities and at-risk demographics, and promising economic ruin in the name of repairing the economy. (???) By contrast, the Harris campaign and the Democrats attempted to approach the campaign like a church sermon, talking about greatness, unity, promise, and all of that stuff. It was as if they took a page from Marianne Williamson’s book and then, too late, realized that no one really liked Williamson. They chose Tim Walz, a progressive hunter from the midwest, as the running mate. They, in doing so, fronted a guy who showed up for his constituents and fought for peoples’ rights. And then, in a stunning own goal, took the spotlight away from him and then put it on endorsements from the most-ghoulish Americans alive. The Harris campaign, in other words, pivoted so much that you cannot blame anyone not addicted to political feeds for not knowing what they stood for.

What it came down to was, ultimately, that. The Harris campaign had principles and had plans, but it was lost in the noise of everything else they were doing. This was, of course, not helped by the fact that the national media is owned by the billionaire class who do not – absolutely do not – want anyone except Trump in office.

And so, here we are. You had a huge number of Americans who were not on board with what Trump stood for, but who were also not on board with what Harris stood for, sitting out. In what is rapidly becoming the narrowest popular vote victory since 2020, Trump is claiming that he has a deafening mandate to enact horrors on the country. And the country has two paths forward:

The first is to allow these horrors to go forth and hope that enough people wake up fast enough to put a stop to it.

The second is that the Democrats can stop stepping on rakes and listen to the people in their party who are winning. There are people in the Democratic party who manage to get voters to turn out, but they’re not the people that get support from the party. They’re the people who, rather, listen to constituents. They’re the people who, like AOC, have a campaign office that’s open year-round to work with their constituents, hear them out, and develop a plan for how to react to what’s going on around them. That is what must happen on the candidate level: The Democrats in charge of funding must start listening to their grass roots and stop listening to the consultants squirming out of the Ivy Leagues and top-ranked universities.

Community building

But that won’t get Democrats a long-term base. That will only get them spikes in engagement like we saw with Obama or the 2020 Biden win. The only thing that will get the Democrats a long-term base is consistent, honest engagement with people. They must, at a local level (county and maybe state at the highest), develop a plan for recreating community. That could look like regular events at parks, free movies for families, open access to Democrat headquarters, stocked with books, grub, coffee, and people to pass along feedback to reps. It could also look completely different. The reason that this cannot be directed from any level higher than county is that it will look very different for every area. The needs of Multnomah County in Oregon, for example, are very different from neighboring Washington County. From my brief time at the Multnomah County Democrat organization, there’s some promise there. You have a group that’s not fully made up of rich, older people from the West Hills, people who are engaged with their communities. They have a better sense of what’s going on than the politico class: They must have the funding and the imagination to create community, or the Republicans will do it in their stead.

What do I mean by that? I’ll give you a vague, but real, example. The online left, at some point, has determined that the correct approach to ignorance is to completely shun people and ostracize them. To be sure, there are a substantial amount of people out there who feign ignorance in order to troll, and determining who is actually trying to find answers and who is not is damn near impossible. But what this has wound up doing is alienating a lot of people who then get snapped up by the right. There are many, many accounts of right wingers swooping in when someone is alienating and offering a sympathetic ear. That, then, establishes a bond with the person and sets them on a path toward, say, voting for Trump when, four years ago, they may have voted for Biden. It’s not that they were yelled at, it’s that the people who talked to them were of a certain political persuasion. That, at its base, is community building.

(I want to say, at the outset, that there is absolutely a time where you are justified in cutting ties with people because of their beliefs. I’ve done that multiple times in the last few years because, at a certain point, some people are just too far gone. But that should not be our first recourse. What that decision looks like is different for everyone, but in my opinion, it’s pretty clear when someone is a misled-but-good person and when someone is too far-gone to be worth your time.)

My friends, I come to you, ultimately, to tell you a message you’ve heard before: We need community. We need the dumb, cheesy joy of hanging out at bowling alleys. Public spaces with chess boards. Big, publicly-owned centers that have daycare facilities, community classes, workshops. You know, the sorts of things that featured heavily in 80s comedies where the villains were, universally, the Donald Trumps of the world. If the Democrats want to make inroads with the working class, the lower-middle class, and, indeed, anyone who is not a college professor, they must start taking this sort of thing seriously. They must begin to draw people in by making these sorts of improvements. They have to, in other words, actually show up and help people.

Throughout the last several months, every email I received from the national Democrats was a shrill screech for fundraising. Prior to that, the only content that I received from the Multnomah County Democrats was either fundraising or notifications about upcoming fundraising. These people have my email – they send me leaflets in the mail. They know who their voting base is – why do they not do anything to directly reach out to people? Ed Koch was a deeply problematic politician, but at least he showed up in public and looked people in the eye. That’s something that more in-office politicians must do.*

I don’t know, what do you want from me?

America is in a deeply terrifying place right now. The Trump administration will have complete control of the US government with an incredibly slight mandate, propped up by an all-too-eager media owned by kowtowing billionaires. The only solace, right now, is that by choosing loyalists to run his government, Trump is choosing the dumbest, most vicious people alive to enact his policies. This will, I think, cause more chaos in his government than we saw before and, hopefully mitigate the worst of the damage he can do.

Beyond that, I don’t know what to expect. No one does. We, once more, will have a horse in the hospital.

I’ve had deeply worrying conversations with friends (both in and out of the country) in the last week – the sort of stuff that really, literally, keeps me up at night. We’ve talked worst-case scenarios and what to do if the worst happens. I’ve strengthened connections with friends abroad in the hopes that that will help ground me. I don’t know if it will, and I don’t know if that will be a rescue. The thing is: Nothing about that matters. Regardless of what happens to me, there are huge swaths of people in the US who did not ask for this. Who did not want this to happen. The only thing that will help them is community. I know this is very much in the zeitgeist right now, and I hope it continues to grow. And I hope that, in the next couple of years, I’m proven to be wrong about what I think will happen to elections and politics in this country and that the Democrats do get a chance to salvage things. But the only way they will is if they get off their asses and start building community and, in doing so, winning people over.

The future is going to be perilous and anxiety-filled, but, ultimately, that’s the only way authoritarian regimes win. The way to combat it is to find a niche within a larger organization with enough clout to stand a storm and work within it. There will be challenges and they will feel insurmountable, but, short of fleeing the country, this is all you can do. I’ve spent way too much time over the last week feeling helpless and frightened, and I’ve had enough of that. It is, in the immortal words of the IWW, time to organize.

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* CAVEAT: I am ALSO not someone who goes to the usual Portland meccas – farmer’s markets, Saturday markets, etc. It may very well be that the Democrats do show up to those, but from the limited exposure I’ve had at those, that has not been the case.